May 2015 No. 516 Volume Lix, Number 5

Letters 2 Mike Fogarty, Frank Long, Matthew Arkapaw, Shan Stevens, Derek Allan, L. Peter Ryan Chronicle 5 John O’Sullivan guest column 7 Barry Maley law 9 Losing Faith in Democracy Jeffrey Goldsworthy society 18 Must We Blame Sociology? Christie Davies politics 24 Budgets, BoreCons and the Doctrine of Dullness Rebecca Weisser 27 Malcolm Fraser: Errors and Misconceptions Philip Ayres the middle east 32 Wiser Men on the Iranian Deal Daryl McCann economics 35 The Undone Tasks of Deregulation Chris Berg bioethics 41 Eugenics, Ready or Not Frank K. Salter history 52 The “Boat People” and the 1977 Election (Part II) Hal G.P. Colebatch defence 60 A Well-Aimed Shot That Fell Short Ross Babbage first person 64 How I Became a Political Conservative John Carroll art 70 Brian Sewell and the Rise of State-Approved Art Giles Auty music 74 Sculthorpe Remembered R.J. Stove theatre 78 Humpbacks in Love and Other Plays Michael Connor literature 82 The World a New Leaf: D.H. Lawrence on Australia Daniel O’Neil film 85 Tudor Film Noir by Candlelight Neil McDonald stories 88 Somebody Sean O’Leary 94 Wellington Valley Bob Wright books 98 One of Us by Åsne Seierstad; Utøya by Laurent Obertone Anthony Daniels 102 The Children Act by Ian McEwan Alan Gould 104 Anzac’s Long Shadow by James Brown Robert Murray 106 Ludwig Wittgenstein edited by Michael Nedo Iain Bamforth 108 This Tattooed Land by Derek Parker; The Digital Apocalypse by David Groves George Thomas guest column 111 Jenny Stewart Poetry 23: Waiting for the Woodman; Five Fine Frogs Rod Usher; 31: Service Records Elisabeth Wentworth; Grace Rod Usher; 40: Third Party Selfie Peter Jeffrey; 51: Reflection Ken Stone; 59: IX Haiku Gary Hotham; Hog; It Got Lost Saxby Pridmore; 63: So If You Know My Inmost Alan Gould; 68: Among the Leaves Paul Williamson; 69: On Bravery Elisabeth Wentworth; Kranky Peter Jeffrey; 73: Instructions Myra Schneider; 76: A Satisfying Answer Immanuel Suttner; 77: At the Sheridan Food Pub; Wind Knute Skinner; The Dawning of Sadness C.R. McArthur; 87: The Swede Myra Schneider; 110: The Close Distance Paul Williamson Let ters for and of the department. In doing so, he stifled initiative and his dead hand alienated many of his officers. Hasluck monitored Editor Sir Paul Hasluck public opinion and interfered with John O’Sullivan his department’s ability to shape [email protected] SIR: Philip Ayres has written a and influence diplomacy. Yet para- Liter ary Editor perceptive review of Geoffrey doxically, he could be a warm and Les Murray Bolton’s biography of Sir Paul kindly fatherly figure. One senior

Deput y Editor Hasluck (April 2015). Having diplomat remembers him with George Thomas attended the Canberra book launch affection, for his benign side, find- in December, and on reading the ing him considerate, appreciative Contributing Editors book thoroughly, I concur with of briefings and effective. In con- Books: Peter Coleman your reviewer. The launch had a trast, another officer who worked Film: Neil McDonald certain piquancy as it was distin- for Hasluck found the experience Theatre: Michael Connor guished by the presence of the diminishing. Columnist Governor-General, General Sir His official gate-keeper, the Peter Ryan Peter Cosgrove, who gave more late Ellestan Dusting, assumed a

Editor, Qua dr ant Online than official authority to the pro- conduit role in any communica- Roger Franklin ceedings. Sir Peter served as a tions. She was appointed for her [email protected] junior aide-de-camp to Sir Paul in personal loyalty to Hasluck, rather 1972. than supporting the wider interests Editor-in-Chief As a former diplomat, I have of External Affairs. Tange resented Keith Windschuttle kept a keen interest in the history this off-hand treatment because it of Australian diplomacy. The demeaned his authority and status Subscriptions National Archives have surrendered as a senior mandarin. For his impla- Phone: (03) 8317 8147 many official documents on cable defence of this remit, he soon Fax: (03) 9320 9065 Hasluck which explain his political fell out. Tange earned his passage Post: Quadrant Magazine, psychology and his relationships to India for a five-year exile. His Locked Bag 1235, (personal and official) with replacement, Sir James Plimsoll North Melbourne VIC 3051 some key players in the nascent (Jim the likeable), was an oblig- E-mail: quadrantmagazine@ Department of External Affairs. ing and charming spirit who is still data.com.au Arthur Tange served with remembered for his consummate Paul Hasluck in the period. diplomacy. Yet he turned out to be Publisher Hasluck betrayed Tange over the antithesis of Tange, in that he a trivial function of diplomatic was an unreflective administrator. Quadrant (ISSN 0033-5002) is representation. Tange trumped Paul Hasluck was captive to published ten times a year by Quadrant Magazine Limited, Hasluck when he was appointed his odd personality. At times he Suite 2/5 Rosebery Place, as the secretary of the department could be over-sensitive, aloof, Balmain NSW 2041, Australia in 1954. Sir Arthur, as he soon arrogant, petty, vengeful, hyper- ACN 133 708 424 became, probably stayed too long at critical and inflated with a sense of the helm. Having been a diplomat self-importance that a more con- Production in a formative period of Australia’s fident man or woman might have political history, Hasluck then subdued. Self-conscious to a fault, Design Consultant: Reno Design asserted his authority over his new he was obsessed with his place in Art Director: Graham Rendoth department. His animosity towards history and did his best to whittle Printer: Ligare Pty Ltd Tange had not abated. Both proved down his putative parliamentary 138–152 Bonds Road, obdurate. Hasluck’s weakness colleagues who did not equal his Riverwood NSW 2210 was in governance, for he resisted perceived intellectual command. team-building which might have His churlish pen portraits, pub- Cover: Colours of Australia “Eucalypt” advanced his claims for real lead- lished posthumously in 1997, The ership. He neglected to foster any Chance of Politics, demonstrated www.quadrant.org.au workable relationship with Tange. inherent character flaws—he could Hasluck controlled External be uncharitable and small-minded Affairs from a distance and arro- when he was on the cusp of being gated the sole authority to speak a statesman.

2 Quadrant May 2015 Letters

He lacked an ability to engen- because they are hopeful that they rare in such discussions. His warn- der affection and felt that merit was may turn out better than the father. ings to both, about the way a desire its own reward. Fellow party mem- For Mr Jackel it shows an inability to eradicate the other will actually bers could only agree with him for to express himself except by that compromise the essence of each, his perceived lack of it, and did very third-rate means. are prescient. As a clergyman in the not regard him as an appropriate The review by Philip Ayres of conservative Protestant tradition successor on Harold Holt’s death. the book Paul Hasluck by Geoffrey I felt respected, and respectfully Colleagues had to be courted and Bolton is also a disappointment. challenged, by Professor O’Hear’s obliged, whereas Hasluck felt that It is not difficult to see the angle superb article. I thank you. this was an unseemly activity to from which Mr Ayres is viewing Matthew Arkapaw be avoided. John Gorton presided, the book. Early on he states: “His Riverwood, NSW winning the leadership. Australians parents were in the Salvation can be thankful that Hasluck, Army, an unpromising background along with not a few other politi- …” which would seem to express The Quadrant Line-Up cians, was denied the prime min- Mr Ayres’s views rather than istership which, for his insecurities those of the thousands of people, SIR: Are you aware of the male- and diffidence, he would have been including servicemen during the dominated top-down layout of poorly equipped. war, who have been cared for by your read? From the Editor, Remember him as one of the the Salvation Army. Literary Editor, Deputy Editor, finest to assume the titular and He quotes Hasluck’s views Contributing Editors, Columnists functional position at Yarralumla, on Molotov: “He is easily the to the Editor-in-Chief—all are where he could enjoy the pomp outstanding person of the male. Of the forty-six authors who and circumstance it afforded. He conference, in fact the most contributed to the March 2015 edi- had a refined sense of protocol and impressive figure I have met— tion, only six are female, and a cou- assumed and exemplified the dig- Churchill or the King or anyone ple have names that do not label a nity which is expected in any vice- else included.” A little later in the gender. And astonishingly, all let- regal role. paragraph Ayres says, “but why did ters to the editor are from men. Does this critique seem too Hasluck put ‘the King’ in there? A What does this tell us about critical? Geoffrey Bolton has gifted nice guy, but ...” Whatever one may Quadrant and its perceptions of us a measured testimony of a sto- think of kings, and it is not hard to the world around it? Catharine ried and influential figure. Hasluck imagine what Philip Ayres thinks A. MacKinnon, in her analysis has bequeathed an enduring legacy of them, they are still impressive by of the Universal Declaration of which rises above my ungenerous their rank if by nothing else. Human Rights, titled “Are Women tribute. His assured stature, if not In regard to Mr Ayres’s Human?”, notes that Article 1 of statue, dwarfs us. Sir Paul, this is contribution it is just a matter the Declaration encourages us to another pen portrait of yourself. of making sure not to read any “act towards one another in a spirit History would demand no less. further writings of his in Quadrant. of brotherhood” and questions However, in regard to Mr Jackel, I whether or not women must be Mike Fogarty feel that another article by him or men before its spirit includes them. Weston, ACT anyone else using such objectionable To this day, women enter human language will result in my not society assigned roles that have On Two Writers renewing my subscription. already been drafted. As we grow, women have to learn the intricacies Frank Long SIR: I have been taking Quadrant of these roles in order to be able to Mawson, ACT for a number of years and have fre- understand how others respond to quently distributed articles therein us and how our response to them to my family and friends. The issue Religion in Public Life will be construed. And so, women of April 2015 is very disappoint- become a product of their sur- ing. The story titled “Love” by SIR: I write regarding Anthony roundings. Many women put their Brad Jackel ends with an excellent O’Hear’s article “Religion in Public dreams and aspirations on the back last paragraph about fatherly love. Life” (March 2015). I don’t know burner in order to birth and nurture However, one has to wade through what the professor’s own religious children, and to allow their male pages of foul language for which it convictions are, but his treatment partner to continue his patriarchal is impossible to see any good rea- of Christianity, and its relationship role in the family unit. Certainly son. In most cases, fathers do not to the state, had a wisdom, histori- there are women happy with this speak to their sons in that way cal awareness and sympathy that is role, but what of the women who

Quadrant May 2015 3 Letters are not? Society needs fully func- arship. Daniels claims that Leys the prudish “Aunty knows best” tioning and autonomous women in provides a “reasoned, informed and attitude it exhibited when its pre- order to create a future generation. irrefutable destruction of Malraux’s senters were rigorously schooled in Many women’s dreams and aspira- reputation”. Nothing could be far- correct grammar and pronuncia- tions lie unfulfilled because they ther from the truth. tion, as were those of its Australian choose not to have a voice, strug- Malraux led an amazing life counterpart, which inherited the gle to find their way back into their which included active involvement nickname. dreams and aspirations, but most in the anti-Fascist Popular Front When freedom of expression importantly, their structural social in the 1930s, combat on the side supplanted elitist pedantry it put surroundings do not allow them of the Republicans in the Spanish an end to all that and modern to do so. Women need full human Civil War, service with the French presenters have lowered their sights. status in social reality. army in the Second World War, Now errors rooted in inherited Is Quadrant fostering such a participation in the Resistance, and ignorance abound as described by structural social surrounding? Or a very active period as France’s first Dr Solomon. So pervasive is it that is it living in ignorant bliss? Or Minister for Cultural Affairs in the in this very journal “begs” instead of are women really that absent from post-war years. His literary output “raises the question” can be found. this part of life? It is hard to see in was extraordinary and included La Many a young television Quadrant the vision of humanity in Condition Humaine, which won presenter tends to mumble and a woman’s face. the Prix Goncourt, and a series of bumble through ungrammatical brilliant writings on the theory of items in a patois in which many Shan Stevens art such as The Voices of Silence. He viewers, particularly in the older Hong Kong continues to be regarded as one of cohort, are not fluent. Older and the outstanding figures of French well-trained readers meanwhile André Malraux twentieth-century literature and art have been transferred to radio theory. If Malraux was “phoney”, where their diction stands in stark SIR: I refer to the article in your let’s have many more like him! contrast to callers and untrained April issue on Simon Leys by presenters alike. Derek Allan Anthony Daniels. Daniels repeats, As Dr Solomon notes, the Canberra, ACT apparently with approval, Leys’s American siren song can muddle claim that Malraux was a “phoney”. our once distinctive lingo. An I am very familiar with Malraux’s Language Standards old favourite is a good example. life and work and, in my view, When a visiting GI inquired at a Leys’s assessment is nonsense. SIR: Dr Robert Solomon’s hotel reception desk, “Are you the Daniels’s comments are, as far “Lang uage: Evolution or manager?” to be answered, “No, I as I can tell, based on the essay Revolution” (January-February am just a clerk,” he rejoined, “You on Malraux in Leys’s recent book 2015) shows a keen ear for “English a clahk? Ah don’t hear you go tick The Hall of Uselessness. Leys’s essay as she is spoke”. It is a truism that tahk.” includes no discussion whatsoever “as she is spoke” is not synonymous L. Peter Ryan of Malraux’s works but relies instead with “as she is writ”, as the now Clayfield, Qld on cherry-picked comments from a notorious pronunciation of hyper- small number of selected second- bole as hyperbowl hilariously attests. ary sources—all of which, predict- Such howlers should not be too ably, are hostile (and, I should add, harshly judged, since correct pro- Quadrant welcomes letters mostly out of date). Despite the nunciation stems from hearing the to the editor. Letters are subject reputation for reliable scholarship word correctly pronounced in the to editing unless writers that Leys seems to have attracted first instance, and times were when stipulate otherwise. in some quarters, his essay is in fact one such arbiter was “Aunty”. The an excellent example of poor schol- BBC acquired this nickname from

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4 Quadrant May 2015 C h r o n i cl e

John O’Sullivan

e imagine we know everything that Churchill’s prescience was, as always, remark- Winston Churchill thought. He wrote able: what followed was the Second World War. volumes of history, reminiscence and Whether or not the children of Churchill’s hostess Wcurrent controversy. Quotations from him fill book- were among its victims, Mussolini ended up hang- cases of books. Some of them are justly titled “The ing upside down in a Milan piazza. Wit and Wisdom of ...” And both his bon mots and Like Churchill, however, Professor Cohen is solemn geopolitical warnings are littered through- less concerned with the thing than with the kind of out the writings of others. So it is a pleasant surprise thing—in his case not so much Putin’s de facto inva- to come across a Churchill quotation that is fresh, sion of Ukraine as its impact upon the post-Cold memorable, and seemingly directed to our current War structure of international order. Whatever the concerns. rights and wrongs, or risks and gains, of NATO Such a quotation appears in the Winter issue expansion, the Soviet-era transfer of Crimea to of the American Interest in an article by Professor Ukraine, and the Maidan revolution, the rules of Eliot Cohen, himself a distinguished historian, international life clearly prohibit subverting, invad- whose works include an important study of political ing, occupying and ultimately either conquering or leadership in war. It is taken from an account of a dismembering a sovereign state. Such actions are 1935 luncheon-party discussion by the then famous “the kind of thing” that signal a wider breakdown in American foreign correspondent Vincent Sheean. It civilised international conduct and increased inse- shows Churchill, relaxed but combative, responding curity for all states. across the table to clever people who thought he was Ukraine is a particularly instructive example of attaching too much weight to Mussolini’s invasion this kind of thing because its sovereignty and bor- of Ethiopia. He demurred: the problem was neither ders were guaranteed in the Budapest Treaty by Italy nor Ethiopia. Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom “It’s not the thing we object to,” he said, “it’s the in return for its handover of nuclear weapons. In kind of thing.” effect Ukraine decided to entrust its security to When asked by his shrewd hostess if the British international law rather than to its own mili- had not committed the kind of thing many times tary resources. But international law is in the end before, Churchill responded that Britain had done dependent upon the decisions of sovereign states so in “an unregenerate past”. But since the Great to observe, support and even implement it. Even if War a large fabric of international law had been Russia had legitimate claims to Crimea or in some established to restrain nations from infringing on wider “sphere of influence”—which is highly dubi- each other’s rights. That was now at risk: ous—it had accepted a duty to settle such claims by peaceful means. As we know, however, Russia used In trying to upset the empire of Ethiopia, its sovereign power to override such law by invading Mussolini is making a most dangerous and Ukraine. What of other states? foolhardy attack upon the whole established structure, and the results of such an attack are n the last two decades, especially since the US quite incalculable. Who is to say what will invasion of Iraq, there has supposedly been a become of it in a year, or two, or three? With Isemi-philosophical division in the West on atti- Germany arming at breakneck speed, England tudes to international order. Americans were said lost in a pacifist dream, France corrupt and torn to be Hobbesians from Mars, Europeans Kantians by dissension, America remote and indifferent— from Venus; the former relied on military force to Madame, my dear lady, do you not tremble for protect both their interests and international order; your children? the latter placed their trust in law and ultimately in

Quadrant May 2015 5 chronicle non-military sanctions. tant to do so than others. Sanctions disrupt trade, This contrast was drawn too simply and too as they are intended to do, and make the nations harshly—Kant should not be blamed for European imposing them poorer too, which is not intentional foreign policy, and the eminent Hobbes scholar but happens to be their inevitable consequence. Noel Malcolm points out that Hobbes was not especially tough-minded in his remarks on foreign emocratic republics from Ireland to Romania relations—but it was not entirely false. In the writ- have a free press, open debate and disagree- ings of the two principal theorists, Robert Kagan Dments about every issue; authoritarian states con- (for the Hobbesians) and Robert Cooper (for the trol their media and, in the case of Russia, whip Kantians), it was presented clearly and its implica- up their populace to a hyper-nationalist frenzy in tions worked out persuasively. My own sympathies which their nation plays the role of eternal victim. are largely with the Hobbesians. But a common- Commercial republics such as modern Germany (or sense reconciliation of the two attitudes might be pre-1940 Britain) are risk-averse, driven by economic that the Kantians are the first line of defence against imperatives, and have a tendency towards pacifism; aggression, subversion and other international vio- despotic states are driven by imperatives of power lations and the Hobbesians are the fall-back team and regime stability, over-arm themselves, and take that takes over against recalcitrant violators. calculated risks. It is not hard to understand why Neither team has covered itself with glory in despotic regimes might sometimes attack vulner- the Ukraine crisis. The Hobbesian United States, able states and outlast democracies over sanctions. though committed by its Budapest signature to Here is the great Kantian self-contradiction: defend Ukrainian sovereignty, has yet to decide the risk-aversion that prompts European states to on something as elementary as whether to provide prefer lawfare over warfare also prompts them to Ukrainian forces with lethal weaponry. That may ignore or paper over violations of law if it seems be attributable to the fact that the Obama admin- likely to lead to conflict or economic downturns. istration is a largely Kantian one, as its policy on When Russia occupied Georgia—which was a kind Iran among other issues demonstrates. If so, it of low-budget trailer for the same kind of thing in would reveal a serious fissure in the theory: if the Ukraine—President Sarkozy of France rushed to Hobbesians can’t be relied upon to save the Kantians’ the Kremlin and, on behalf of the European Union, bacon, then the latter must show that their non- agreed on a compromise that left Russian troops lethal weaponry alone is effective against formida- occupying large parts of the country. Somehow ble opponents whether Hobbesian or Kantian. Kantian respect for a peace based on law didn’t fig- Their record so far is more than disappoint- ure in his calculations. ing—but in an unexpected way. Economic sanc- This no more means that Putin can sweep all tions, which have been imposed by both the US and before him than that Hitler could do so. For action European Union governments, are proving more prompts reaction, threats invite resistance—at effective than observers thought likely from earlier least eventually. Twenty-two political leaders crises. In part that is because the formal sanctions from Central and Eastern Europe, channelling have been augmented by a fortuitous collapse in the Churchill, responded to the Russian occupation price of oil—together they are inflicting real pain of Georgia with a letter to President Obama seek- on the Russian economy. But it is also because the ing America’s re-commitment to their region in US government, international banks and interna- 2009. That letter was attacked by former German tional agencies have developed sophisticated finan- Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and ignored by a cial sanctions that impose heavy costs on both the US administration then naively entranced with a violator-state and on “targeted” individuals and “Russian Re-Set” foreign policy. Ukrainians are companies within it. Given time such sanctions fighting today for their country, and though resist- might well work; they are a serious disincentive to ing superior force with inferior weaponry, they any ruler contemplating aggression; and in the case show no sign of enduring either surrender or final of Iran, they are overwhelmingly the reason why defeat. And in this week’s diplomatic news there the Iranian government has come to the negotiat- is an announcement by a coalition of Nordic and ing table. Baltic foreign ministers, some in NATO, some out- If sanctions can be effective, then, why are they side it, that they are forming a defensive regional disappointing and even fragile? The answer is that alliance. We can only guess how Putin’s gambit will very few nations want to impose them, to main- turn out. tain them once imposed, or to return to them once As Churchill could have told us, however, we lifted—and Kantian-minded nations (which should should never wait too long before responding to the be the most willing to impose them) are more reluc- kind of thing.

6 Quadrant May 2015 g u e s t c o l u m n

Barry Maley

t is said that within hours of birth a baby will with other persons and, in so doing, to express and respond to a human face. Adults can instantly expand our common humanity. And he adds: recognise hundreds of faces. As we move among Iother people we constantly study faces and react Each human object is also a subject, addressing to them. In any social interaction our gaze rarely us in looks, gestures and words ... Our moves away from the face or faces in front of us. responses to others aim towards that horizon, And we are equally self-conscious of the effect our passing on beyond the body to the being that it own face may be having on others. Our faces are the incarnates. door to our identity, the first road to the person and mind behind that mobile and flexible mask of skin The ordinary human impulse in a meeting is that may be the instrument of both revelation and “face to face”, as the essential preliminary to any concealment. It is the screen on which our emotions deeper engagement. The “exchange of faces”, so to may be read and our motives guessed. It is canvas speak, is the essential precursor and vehicle of inter- and billboard communicating an infinite variety action with other human beings, with persons, and is of messages to others. We never cease to wonder thus the foundation of civil interaction. what others are making of us. The idea of a faceless Curiosity about faces and reacting to them is human society is unthinkable. routine behaviour in an open, democratic and lib- So the face may be used for all sorts of intentions; eral country. In Australia, social life is accompanied such as attracting attention, or admiration, or curi- by an enviable public egalitarianism of manners osity, or friendship, or displaying enmity or disgust, and ease of engagement with others that proclaims and for a thousand other purposes. It is the silent mutual respect, irrespective of status. It is a kind of companion of the voice in every human transaction. public and private openness and fellow-feeling that At the same time, we may make alterations to the we rightly cherish because it oils the wheels of deal- face, or conceal it, in the service of a variety of inter- ings with each other. We value it as a moral eleva- personal transactions and performances. We adorn tion of our way of life. the face with cosmetics, or tattoos, or moustaches, to be thought attractive or noticeable in our dealings t is not surprising, therefore, that a great many with others. Or we may place a mask upon the face Australians seem to be profoundly disconcerted to provoke fear or respect or mystery or admiration, Iby the burka and the concealment of the faces of or to conceal an identity for nefarious reasons. The those women who wear it in public. For most masked ball is a festival of teasing and curiosity. The Australians, I suspect, the practice is seen as a grotesque masks of the “Mud Men” of New Guinea direct denial and criticism of the openness and face- may provoke fear or demand attention. The robes to-face engagement we expect as appropriate and and masks of the Ku Klux Klan are designed to ter- established conduct. The black cloth that obliterates rorise and achieve criminal anonymity. the space where the face should be sends a message But in almost all cases, the elaboration, alteration of denial, separation and rejection. In effect, the or concealment of the face and individual identity person behind the mask declares (or is obliged to occurs in a social setting and to achieve a social declare) that she is unavailable as a normal public end—whether for entertainment and amusement, entity; that she is a social neuter with womanhood or for trivial or serious or good or bad purposes, or blacked out, suppressed and demeaned. The burka is to announce various pieties, beliefs and customs. thus an implicit “slap in the face” from one culture In his recent book The Soul of the World, the to another. philosopher Roger Scruton draws attention to the This practice is not an individual eccentricity. It is importance of the human face in making contact founded in long-standing custom which, consciously

Quadrant May 2015 7 guest column sought or not, achieves certain public and cultural Nor should we shrink in the face of seemingly effects, as well as affecting the lives of the women implacable opposition, but persist if we believe the who subscribe, whether they do so willingly or not. case is justified. If I am correct that disconcertment, and even This means, so far as the public burka is con- revulsion, are common Australian reactions, should cerned, that one is obliged to marshal the argu- they be dismissed as irrational and intolerant? ments favouring its disappearance from the public Should we grit our teeth, “get over it” and opt for space and, above all, to remain civil in doing so. I toleration? That seems to be the political response. have suggested some directions that such an argu- But should the issue rest there? Is the question so ment might take. important that it should be pursued, and if so, why Yet problems remain in doing so. We are in the and how? The fact is that it confronts us with a test middle of a crucial argument about the scope of free of multiculturalism and how far it should be taken. speech in this country, and the call from many cor- The impulse to tolerate, to “take it easy” and calm ners is to limit it by avoiding “offence” to others—in down is a strong instinct amongst us and in most this case, offence to Muslims. Perhaps there could cases a valuable support of stability, public order be a legal argument that to criticise the public burka and common sense. But there are occasions when is to cause offence under the terms of section 18C to “tolerate” may be to acquiesce in of the Racial Discrimination Act. the steady erosion of a valued way Although religion is not an issue of life and the appropriate response he burka is a under the Act, it might be argu- is to resist it. T able that the burka could be cov- significant challenge, ered under the heading of “ethnic” n established polity has a just and it is a justifiable or “national” origin within the Act claim to protect its way of life. and that criticism of it is offensive AGender equality and face-to-face objective, within and unlawful. On the other hand, exchanges are integral and vital the law, to seek to the course being suggested here is elements in our civil life. It is not one of “reasonableness and good unreasonable to expect newcomers “restore the face” and faith”; measures that would appear who have chosen to join us to forgo to reveal the citizen to be welcomed within the terms of practices and customs, especially and the person by the Act, and be a sufficient defence those of a retrograde and public to a charge under the Act. But one kind, that significantly challenge urging the removal can never be sure. established conduct and seek to of the mask from What is blindingly obvious, undercut our way of life. The however, is that to have to muse question is whether the public burka public interaction and wonder in this fashion about represents such a challenge and, if it in this country. freedom of speech in this country does, what should be done about it. is unconscionable. We should be The burka is a significant ashamed of ourselves and the poli- challenge, and it is a justifiable objective, within ticians that have placed us in this position through the law, to seek to “restore the face” and to reveal the laws they have made. The course of events is the citizen and the person by urging the removal making mockery of the common view that we have of the mask from public interaction in this country. been extremely clever in this country in the way in This is not a call for banning the burka. That would which government has handled immigration and the be severe, authoritarian and disproportionate. It creation of a hugely successful multicultural country is a task not for formal law but for civil society; free of friction, liberal and harmoniously cohesive. for reasoned criticism but not for harassment; for peaceful expressions of dismay and disapproval; Barry Maley is a former academic who has published for open discussion and debate. In short, for non- widely on issues of social policy. violence and steady argument and discourse within our tradition of free speech. To retreat, to stay silent, is to acquiesce. To discuss Peter Coleman regrets that he is unable to continue is to take the wide and civilised road to thrashing out mutual accommodations and compromises that his Quodlibet column for the time being. We thank may promote public order and a common culture. him for his contributions, and trust that he will Discussion may be revelatory to all parties and open write for Quadrant again before too long. up discoveries, truths and opportunities for forms of agreement that might otherwise lie hidden.

8 Quadrant May 2015 Jeffrey Goldsworthy

Losing Faith in Democracy Why Judicial Supremacy is Rising, and What to Do about It

or a considerable time, judicial power in community, including the rights and freedoms of Britain has been expanding at the expense of the people. For centuries it was commonly said that legislative and executive powers, and promises only in Parliament could all the diverse and con- Fto continue to do so. But if this is to continue—and flicting opinions and interests within the commu- there are powerful reasons why it should not—it nity be properly heard and brought to bear upon should be brought about not just by changes in public decision-making. It was often said, starting the thinking of legal elites such as academics and in the early thirteenth century, that Parliament judges, but with the understanding and assent of represented and spoke for “the community of the the public, or at least of those elected to represent kingdom”—“the body of all the realm”. It was the public. Furthermore, they must possess the described in the sixteenth century as “the mouth of knowledge needed to decide whether to assent to or all England”. oppose the change. This lecture is intended to pro- This long-standing rationale for Parliament’s vide some of that knowledge, by describing recent sovereignty pre-dated, but was fortified by, the developments, and setting them within a broader establishment of democracy in the modern sense philosophical and comparative context. This should in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It be of interest elsewhere in the Anglosphere, wher- was also frequently said to follow that Parliament ever parliamentary government and the common embodied the combined wisdom of the commu- law have grown from the same British stock. nity, which was necessarily superior to that of any While I will sometimes be critical of judges other human authority. Parliament was the princi- expanding their own powers, I do not intend to pal guardian of the liberties of the community— impugn their motives. Decisions that have expanded the “storehouse of our liberties” and “the bulwark” judicial power have always been motivated by between rights and “all designs of oppression”. the laudable goal of promoting justice or the rule In a recent paper Dinah Rose QC claims that Sir of law, and often with success. The philosophical William Blackstone “clearly spelt out” the concept and political issues I will discuss are difficult ones, of “absolute”, “fundamental common law rights” of about which well-informed and reasonable minds which the courts were “the supreme arbiters”. With can and do disagree. On the other hand, it is this respect, I believe that this is a misreading. The very fact—the existence of reasonable disagree- “absolute rights” that Blackstone discussed were ment—that underpins the case for substantial con- rights given “by the immutable laws of nature”, stitutional change being brought about only through although he added that they were “coeval with our democratic reforms, and not by unilateral judicial form of government”, in which Parliament was innovation. sovereign. As he said, “[t]o preserve these [rights] from violation, it is necessary that the constitu- tion of parliament be supported in its full vigour”. Parliament’s traditional role He listed many petitions, statutes and declarations he British constitution—which is uncodi- in which Parliament had reasserted the rights of fied and fundamentally customary—rests on Englishmen when they had been threatened. It is Tthe principle of parliamentary sovereignty. After true that he regarded these rights as embodied in sometimes violent political conflicts, and for many “the ancient doctrine of the common law”, which reasons, by the end of the seventeenth century the courts played a crucial role in enforcing, but Parliament had come to be entrusted with ultimate his understanding of the common law as immemo- responsibility for safeguarding the welfare of the rial custom was quite different from our modern

Quadrant May 2015 9 Losing Faith in Democracy notion of judge-made law. He also acknowledged judges are not limited to the original meaning of Parliament’s supreme power to declare what the a constitutional or rights provision, but can give it common law was, and to reform the law to accom- a new, more expansive meaning that they believe modate changes in circumstances or to correct “the is more consistent with evolving social values. In mistakes ... of unlearned judges”. Parliament was, this way the judges, in effect, amend the provision after all, regarded for centuries as the highest court to keep it “up to date”, although the only author- in the kingdom from which no appeal was possible. ity they have to do so is a self-conferred one. Lord Sumption recently criticised the European Court of Human Rights for following this approach. The expansion of judicial review These developments amount to a constitutional he principle of legislative supremacy was not experiment on a global scale. They raise the dan- unique to Britain. Until after the Second ger of democratic decision-making being subject to TWorld War, judicial enforcement of written con- override not only by local judges, but by reference to stitutions was relatively unknown in most of the a global judicial consensus about rights. world. But we now live in a very different world Judicial power, including power to protect rights, in which, to quote an eminent constitutional com- has expanded massively in British law, as a result of parativist, “From France to South Africa to Israel, both judicial creativity and legislative reform. Since parliamentary sovereignty has faded away.” In 1939 the 1960s, the judiciary has continuously expanded only a handful of countries had judicial review the availability and grounds of judicial review of under a written constitution; in 1951, 38 per cent administrative acts. A distinction was tradition- had adopted it; by 2011 that number had grown ally drawn between enforcing the legal boundaries to 83 per cent. This extraordinary transformation within which the administration exercises discre- of methods of governance around the globe is now tionary powers, and interfering with the merits of being studied by constitutional comparativists the administration’s decisions inside those bound- and political scientists. It is the subject of books aries. The role of the judiciary was to hold firm with titles such as The Global Expansion of Judicial the legal boundaries, but not to intrude into the Power, The Judicialization of Politics, and Towards merits of a decision: the executive was responsible Juristocracy. only to Parliament and the electorate for decisions This phenomenon is often called the “rights that were lawful but arguably unfair or unwise. revolution”. As one leading scholar puts it: “In However, judges were able to shift the legal bound- today’s world, the ideology of rights has, arguably, aries within which decisions could be made, and achieved the status of a civic religion.” The ancient they did so regularly and usually so as to expand idea that the legitimacy of government depends on their own powers of review. Eventually, the ortho- conformity to a “higher law” remains, but for those dox theory that they were merely enforcing legal who no longer believe in the law of nature or of limits imposed (expressly or impliedly) by statute God, this higher law is the law of human rights. came to be seen as implausible, and was replaced Moreover, we are witnessing a global conversa- by the theory that they were in fact enforcing limits tion about rights among judges of apex courts, who imposed by the common law—or, in other words, increasingly meet at conferences, share ideas, and by the judges themselves, since they make the com- cite and sometimes follow one another’s judgments. mon law. Some scholars envisage the eventual emergence of A very limited form of merits review was allowed a homogenised global constitutional law. It is also on the ground that an administrative decision was suggested that this is being propelled by a constant so unreasonable that no reasonable person could “ratcheting up” process, in which courts outdo one possibly have made it. Increased judicial concern another in discovering new rights and expanding about human rights led to the relaxation of this existing ones. The decision of the United Kingdom standard: it eventually came to be accepted that if Supreme Court in the recent case of R (Nicklinson) a decision impacted on a right, it should be given v Secretary of State, on assisted suicide, may be a first more “anxious scrutiny”, whereby a less extreme step in that direction. The Court held that it has the degree of unreasonableness would justify overturn- power to adopt a more expansive interpretation of a ing the decision. By this and other means judicial protected right than that adopted by the European interference with administrative decision-making Court in Strasbourg. continued to expand, well beyond what is permis- One common method of “upping the ante” in sible in Australia, where review of the merits of rights protection is to adopt a theory of interpre- administrative decisions is still regarded as contrary tation commonly called “living constitutionalism”. to the separation of judicial and executive powers. The most extreme version of this theory holds that Judicial review was further expanded in the

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United Kingdom by the enactment in 1998 of the follows that those opposed to this power should Human Rights Act (HRA), which requires all public not hold the judges to be solely, or even mainly, to bodies to act consistently with protected rights and blame. If Parliament did intend to confer such a authorises the courts to invalidate decisions that wide power on them, they have merely done their they believe are not consistent. Judicial review on duty. If it did not intend to do so, it should have this ground seems clearly to concern the merits of made its intentions much clearer. a decision. Thomas Poole of the London School of The power to issue declarations of incompatibility Economics is of the opinion that the HRA may is also a cause for concern. It was plainly intended be “the catalyst for ... a reformation of English to preserve parliamentary sovereignty by giving administrative law”, which “could mean that courts Parliament the final word as to whether or not a in effect remake—and do so quite openly—agency statute should be amended or repealed in response decisions”. Whether or not this occurs will depend to such a declaration. The courts were to enter into on the outcome of a debate as to whether or not a helpful “dialogue” with Parliament by providing the judges should sometimes choose to “defer” to it with a dispassionate analysis of compatibility, administrative decision-makers, and if so on what without being able to impose their opinions by force grounds. Some legal academics of law. On this view, Parliament are resolutely opposed to that should feel free to disagree with possibility when human rights are ourts focus on the the courts, after carefully and at stake. C conscientiously reconsidering the There is much to admire predicaments of the matter. Yet I understand that so in modern administrative law, individual parties far, on only one occasion has a although the continuing expansion declaration not been followed of judicial review may now be going appearing before them, by remedial legislation. This has too far. As Professor Timothy but they are less well inspired the claim that judicial Endicott at the University of equipped to take into review under the HRA is almost Oxford concludes, the expansion equivalent to strong constitutional of judicial review of administrative account the interests review in countries with entrenched action has improved the fairness of other people who constitutions, because in practice, and openness of administrative British courts exercise much the decision-making, and emboldened may be affected by the same sway over legislation they the judges to stand up to abuses of laws in question. regard as incompatible with rights. power. But on the other hand, it has If this is so, and if it is problematic, generated a “massively expensive then once again this is the fault of litigation industry” and “occasionally” inspired “a the politicians rather than the judges. form of judicial imperialism as the judges succumb The other major concern about the expansion to the temptation constantly offered to them ... to of judicial power concerns the European Court of replace administrative decisions with decisions that Human Rights in Strasbourg. Here, too, if blame [they] think would have been better”. is to be laid, it is mainly at the feet of the British The HRA also greatly expanded judicial power government that ratified the treaty conferring over Parliament’s statutes, by requiring that the power on that court—no doubt thinking that it courts interpret statutes as far as possible so as to would be directed at other less enlightened coun- be consistent with protected rights, and to issue a tries and not its own—although the Court itself is declaration of incompatibility if this is impossible. widely regarded as having consistently adopted an The courts adopted a very expansive view of their overly creative and self-aggrandising interpretation power of interpretation, holding that they may of its own powers. Neither the treaty nor the deci- in effect add words to or subtract them from a sions of the European Court under it form part of provision, or otherwise change their meanings, to British law: they are binding and enforceable only make the provision consistent with protected rights, as a matter of international law, although the incen- even if the result is inconsistent with the meaning tives to comply are very powerful. The HRA, which Parliament intended. In Australia, the High Court incorporates the rights protected by the treaty into has expressly rejected this British approach on British law, requires British judges to take decisions the ground that it would violate the separation of the European Court into consideration. It does of powers by authorising judges (within limits) to not expressly require them to follow those deci- amend statutes. In Britain the courts can, with sions, although there is lively debate regarding the some plausibility, argue that Parliament intended extent to which they should feel free to take a dif- the HRA to confer such a power upon them. It ferent view.

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The global expansion of judicial power than 35 per cent of the voters, while the formation of a multi-party government is based not on a direct or many people these developments, here and expression of majority preference, but on post-elec- globally, are merely the next inevitable advance tion wheeling and dealing. Fin the progressive evolution of constitutionalism— • Conversely, politicians are sometimes criti- a term referring to the subjection of governmental cised for being too subservient to public opinion. power at the highest level to the rule of law. On They are sometimes regarded as self-serving career- their view, just as democracy came to be widely ists and populists who put winning and retaining adopted because it was an indisputable improvement power before respect for human rights. In Australia, on autocracy, so too has the judicial enforcement of for example, very harsh treatment of asylum seekers constitutional rights spread because it is innately who arrive, unauthorised, by boat—a paradigm case superior to unchecked majoritarian democracy, of a vulnerable and unpopular minority—is widely which is thought to endanger the rights of unpopu- condemned for being driven mainly by a desire to lar and vulnerable minorities. pander to popular hysteria. As an empirical hypothesis, this idealistic expla- My impression is that in countries such as nation of the rights revolution is highly question- Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, a able. Social scientists who have examined the global substantial proportion of the tertiary-educated, pro- expansion of judicial power have come to a less fessional class has lost faith in the ability of their flattering conclusion: the development has been fellow citizens to form opinions about public policy driven much more by domestic electoral competi- in a sufficiently intelligent, well-informed, dispas- tion than by genuine idealism, when political elites sionate and carefully reasoned manner. They may whose influence is waning vest power in independ- be attracted to the judicial enforcement of rights ent courts, hoping to load the dice in favour of their partly because it shifts power to people (judges) who policies over those of their political rivals. are representative members of their own class, and Be that as it may, I believe that in most Western whose educational attainments, intelligence, habits democracies the impetus towards the adoption of of thought and professional ethos are thought more bills of rights has been motivated largely by a gen- likely to produce enlightened decisions. uine commitment to protecting individual rights The obvious rejoinder is that the attraction of from violations resulting from thoughtlessness, or judicially enforceable rights is due much more to the pandering to popular prejudice or hysteria. Respect procedures that judges follow than to the personal for politicians and the business of politics seems to qualities of the judges. These procedures are said have declined. As a South African lawyer once said, to promote more thorough, impartial and carefully “the moral authority of the judiciary is expanding reasoned inquiries into the actual effects of laws on into the space vacated by the contraction of the the flesh-and-blood individuals who come before moral authority of the executive and the legislature”. the courts. The global rights revolution has had an enormous Of course there is something to this rejoinder, influence on lawyers in particular. but I do not find it completely convincing. Courts The democratic process is alleged to suffer from do focus on the predicaments of the individual par- a variety of defects: ties appearing before them, but for that very rea- • Westminster parliaments are widely regarded son, they are less well equipped to take into account (rightly or wrongly) as too subservient to the execu- relevant interests of other people or groups who tive governments that dominate their lower houses. may be affected by the laws in question. Also, if Lord Hailsham’s famous description of “elective the main problem is deficiencies in the deliberative dictatorship” is still often quoted. procedures of elected legislatures, the most obvious • There are said to be “agency problems”: failures remedy is to improve those procedures to promote of elected representatives to faithfully represent the more careful and well-informed decision-making. interests of their constituents. They are sometimes Judicial enforcement of rights would then become suspected of being unduly influenced by powerful a fall-back position, to be resorted to only if such interest groups, lobbying behind the scenes after reforms are unsuccessful. purchasing privileged access to ministers. • In Britain, the democratic credentials of gov- ernments and Parliament are questioned. Vernon The impact of judicial rights review on Bogdanor argues that “the first past the post sys- democracy tem no longer yields majority rule either at national udicial review of constitutionality may be highly nor at constituency level”. This is because no single- desirable, or even essential, to preserve democracy, party elected government is likely to represent more theJ rule of law, and human rights in many countries,

12 Quadrant May 2015 Losing Faith in Democracy in which corruption, populism, authoritarianism or including the occasional enactment of unjust laws. bitter religious, ethnic or class conflicts are rife. But But just as the considered choice of a majority may in mature, stable and tolerant democracies, it is not be wrong, so too may the opinions of a minority. so obviously desirable. The main argument against And in the absence of any independent, objective it is based on the following premises. method of determining who is right, it is better that First, any enumeration of rights must be couched the majority should prevail. in terms of abstract rights to free speech, due process At this point, an advocate of judicial supremacy of law, equality before the law, and so on. Second, might say: but judges do now have an independent, no abstractly stated right can be absolute. Even the objective method of determining who is right—the most fundamental right of all—the right to life— method of proportionality analysis developed by can be over-ridden, as in self-defence. The abstract rights-enforcing courts throughout the world. right to free speech is subject to many exceptions, to To those who are unfamiliar with the term, pro- protect reputation, privacy, confidentiality, national portionality analysis (ignoring different variants) security and so on. Third, it is impossible to decide involves: first, identifying both the right claimed to in advance how, in particular cases, abstractly stated be infringed by some legislative or executive act, and rights should be weighed against competing rights the objective of that act (fostering some competing and interests. It follows that the interest or right); and then deter- power of judges to interpret and mining whether or not the objective enforce these rights is the power to is legitimate, infringing the right decide a vast number of controver- Genuine and lasting was necessary to achieve it, and the sial questions of public policy, and respect for one benefits of doing so outweigh the in a system of strong judicial review, losses. to substitute their decisions for another’s rights cannot This is typically how courts now those reached by lawmakers elected be imposed by judicial decide disputes about rights. The to represent the public. These ques- fiat; it can only emerge problem is that rather than being an tions include virtually all serious objective mode of analysis peculiar moral and political issues likely to from the dialogue to dispassionate legal reasoning, at arise in societies such as ours. and compromise that best proportionality analysis just When a community must decide formalises how any thoughtful per- important questions—including characterise politics son, including a politician, might questions of principle involving in a democracy. think about such issues. Political rights—but its members are in disa- judgment is all about trade-offs: greement, the fairest way of settling whether some controversial meas- the disagreement is for unfettered debate in which ure adversely affecting one group of people is justi- every person’s opinion can, in principle, have an fied by the benefits it provides to other groups or the equal influence on the final decision—which must public as a whole. Balancing benefits and costs and therefore be by majority vote. (Judges decide disa- deciding whether the benefits make the costs worth- greements among themselves in the same way.) One while is the very stuff of politics. Adding impacts of the most fundamental of all rights is therefore on individual rights to either side of the scales does the right of ordinary people to participate, on equal not change the subjective, value-laden nature of the terms, in the political decision-making that affects choice that must be made. their lives as much as anyone else’s. This right was Democratic participation is also thought to hard won, through centuries of political struggle, have beneficial consequences. Since prejudice and and should not readily be surrendered. intolerance tend to diminish when people engage As Jeremy Waldron has argued, the large size of in genuine dialogue with one another, democracy legislatures enables all significant interests and opin- is thought to promote mutual respect, moderation ions within the community to contribute to debate, and compromise. Moreover, legislators must build ensuring that none are overlooked. All participants coalitions to be effective: all majorities are groupings are treated with equal respect, rather than ignored of minorities that have joined forces in a political or shouted down for being ignorant, prejudiced or party, a coalition, or a temporary alliance. Political dishonest. Decision-making by majority vote is the power is impermanent, and opponents defeated only way of giving each individual’s view the great- today might turn the tables tomorrow. The impe- est possible weight compatible with an equal weight tus towards moderation is propelled partly by the being given to the views of everyone else. need to build the necessary coalitions, and the fear Politicians, like the people they represent, are of backlash should adversaries defeated today gain imperfect. They sometimes do the wrong thing, the upper hand tomorrow.

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“Democratic debilitation” is a label used for danger of judicially enforced negative rights being ways that rights litigation may damage the health invoked to obstruct it—that judicial supremacy has of representative democracy. Some fear that legisla- often been most staunchly opposed by people on tors might devote less attention to the compatibil- the Left of politics. And it is notable that the coun- ity of proposed legislation with protected rights, if tries that have best protected the welfare rights of it is likely to be litigated in the courts. They might the most vulnerable members of society—such as become reckless as to compatibility or, worse still, in Scandinavia—have historically not had constitu- “pass the buck” to the courts, and shirk responsibil- tions protecting negative rights against the exercise ity for unpopular decisions. Frequent resort to litiga- of governmental power. tion to advance rights claims might also divert vital funds and energies from grass-roots political mobi- lisation. In addition, if political debate is subsumed Danger of judicial transformation of the by legal debate, couched in legalistic jargon and for- British constitution mulae, the general public (including legislators) may his powerful democratic case against judicial feel excluded and become politically enervated and review of legislation becomes even stronger apathetic. whenT judges take it upon themselves to transform On the other hand, active participants in politi- a constitution, by expanding their own powers to cal disputes who are defeated in the courtroom enforce rights. Lord Neuberger rightly observed that may become embittered or enraged. Two Canadian “it is a feature of all constitutional courts that that scholars have argued that: they generously interpret the constitution and tend to bestow power on themselves”. But in doing so the Rights-based judicial policymaking ... [leads courts sometimes usurp the most fundamental right to] issues that should be subject to ... ongoing of the people: the right to change the constitution ... discussion [being] presented as beyond under which they live. legitimate debate, with the [winners] claiming There are various methods by which judges in the right to permanent victory. As the moralism common law countries can expand their powers of rights displaces the morality of consent, to amend or partially invalidate statutes. Gradual the politics of coercion replaces the politics of expansion of these methods could lead to the death persuasion. The result is to embitter politics and of parliamentary sovereignty by a thousand cuts, or decrease the inclination of political opponents to by gradual, incremental steps that lay the ground- treat each other as fellow citizens ... work for a large-scale transformation in the future. For centuries, the most fundamental principle of Genuine and lasting respect for one another’s statutory interpretation has been that courts should rights cannot be imposed by judicial fiat; it can only seek out and give effect to what Parliament intended emerge from the dialogue and compromise that to communicate. Common-law principles, rights characterise politics in a democracy. and freedoms have been protected mainly through It might be argued that some groups will never be presumptions that Parliament did not intend to adequately represented in politics because they lack interfere with them. These presumptions have now the necessary numbers, resources or organisational been bundled together under the label “the princi- ability. Indigenous peoples, the aged, the poor, the ple of legality”. The traditional justification for these chronically ill, and some migrant groups are of con- presumptions was entirely consistent with parlia- cern. Judicial review has been defended as a way of mentary sovereignty, given that they depended on redressing their inability to get a “fair go” in the intentions that could reasonably be attributed to political arena, by providing them with an alterna- Parliament but which it is able to disavow. But this tive forum in which decisions are made that cannot justification is increasingly regarded as an artificial be ignored. But these groups are typically not signif- rationalisation or polite fiction. Some now claim icantly assisted by judicial enforcement of constitu- that the common law presumptions “no longer have tional rights: they usually need positive government anything to do with the intent of the Legislature; assistance—land rights, education, employment or they are a means of controlling that intent”. financial or other forms of assistance—which courts For others, the very idea of legislative intention is cannot effectively provide. Enforceable “positive” a fiction: they consider it implausible that a legislature rights to government assistance or empowerment incorporating two different houses with hundreds of might require judicial power to amend the budget members can have any meaningful intention other and possibly rates of taxation. Indeed, it is partly than merely to enact a statutory text. All this has because of the need for the democratic process to led some observers to conclude that the presump- provide such assistance or empowerment—and the tions “can be viewed as the courts’ efforts to provide,

14 Quadrant May 2015 Losing Faith in Democracy in effect, a common law bill of rights”. Judges have tutional” is a long-standing feature of British claimed that, by relying on such presumptions, “the constitutional discourse, and in itself is entirely con- courts of the United Kingdom, though acknowledg- sistent with parliamentary sovereignty. Sir Robert ing the sovereignty of Parliament, apply principles Chambers, Blackstone’s successor at the University of of constitutionality little different from those which Oxford, embraced parliamentary sovereignty whole- exist in countries” with a written constitution, and heartedly, but condemned a particular statute on the that “we already have constitutional guarantees ... ground that “though not illegal, for the enaction of given by the common law”. the supreme power is the definition of legality, [it] There are two reasons for concern about these was yet unconstitutional”, because it was “contrary developments. The first is that if judges inter- to the principles of the English government”. This pret legislation according to common law rights distinction between law and constitutional principle that they themselves have developed, regardless of was perpetuated by other writers in the eighteenth Parliament’s intentions, they become co-authors of and nineteenth centuries, and survives today in the the law that results from their interpretations. This distinction between law and constitutional conven- is to subordinate Parliament’s chosen means of com- tion. Dicey, for example, referred to “the fundamen- municating its intentions and pur- tal principles of the constitution poses to moral values chosen by the and the conventions in which these judges. Parliament is no longer the arliament will principles are expressed”. He also sole author of the statute it enacts; P described as “constitutional” certain no matter what words it uses, their only be able to retain principles that were extrapolated meaning will be determined partly its sovereignty over from judicial decisions, including by values preferred by the judges. principles that protected personal This is applauded by opponents of the long term if it liberty. But of course all these prin- legislative supremacy, who say that continues to be widely ciples were subject to Parliament’s the meaning of any statute is “the legislative authority. joint responsibility of Parliament regarded as deserving The problem is that today, the and the courts” and is therefore a to be entrusted with subtle distinctions encoded in this collaborative enterprise. it. Members of traditional terminology are increas- To a limited extent courts neces- ingly liable to be misunderstood sarily do contribute to the meanings Parliament must be or obfuscated. It is already being of statutes. If, for example, a stat- sensitive to the root claimed that “the incremental ute is ambiguous or vague on some development by the courts of a body crucial point, judges may be forced causes of the expansion of ‘constitutional rights’ ... ha[s] ren- to fill in the gap in order to decide of judicial power. dered our traditional understand- a case before them. But in doing ings of the subordinate role of courts so, they should act as Parliament’s in relation to Parliament obsolete”. faithful agents, seeking to implement its objectives. This may be aimed at eventually enabling the judici- If they do not then, as Richard Ekins has argued, ary to claim the power to protect rights from legis- it is difficult to see how their interpretations can lative interference. Having laid the foundation for be reconciled with the fundamental notion that it doing so, judges may eventually feel emboldened to is Parliament that has the authority to make stat- declare that “of course, if these principles are con- ute law. If making statute law were a collaborative stitutional, they must by definition control even the enterprise, Parliament would merely provide raw power of Parliament”. material, in the form of a text, which the judges Critics of parliamentary sovereignty, including would then combine with their own material to some judges, openly talk about the courts “chipping make the law. This, incidentally, is an objection to away at the rock of parliamentary supremacy”, “inch- section 3 of the HRA which, as construed by the ing forwards with ever stronger expressions when courts, authorises them to act as co-authors who can treating some common law rights as constitutional”, (within limits) rewrite statutory provisions to ensure and as “[s]tep by step, gradually but surely” qualify- compatibility with protected rights. ing the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. One The second reason for concern about this increas- senior judge has said that “the common law has ing judicial tendency to describe common law rights come to recognise and endorse the notion of con- as “constitutional” is that it may in the near future stitutional, or fundamental, rights”, and although pose a more fundamental challenge to the doctrine Parliament at the present time remains sovereign, of parliamentary sovereignty. this may change through “the tranquil development Describing important principles as “consti- of the common law”.

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ll of this raises the question of whether statute allows the expression of judicial opinions that are law or common law is ultimately more funda- false, through sheer repetition, to come to appear Amental. The orthodox view is that Parliament can true. Indeed, sufficient repetition can eventually override any part of the common law, because stat- clothe them with authority. Common-law constitu- ute law is superior to common law. But according tionalism could in this way pull itself up by its own to an alternative theory, Britain’s uncodified con- bootstraps. stitution rests ultimately on fundamental common There are powerful reasons of democratic princi- law principles, from which Parliament derives its ple for not accepting that the courts have authority authority to make statutes. According to Professor to unilaterally modify or repudiate the doctrine of Trevor Allan, of the University of Cambridge, this parliamentary sovereignty. If they did, they could entails that “the common law is prior to legislative impose all kinds of limits on Parliament’s author- supremacy, which it defines and regulates”. This the- ity with no democratic input or warrant. As Lord ory is called “common law constitutionalism”. Millett said in Ghaidan v Godin-Mendoza: “any For some time, common law constitutional- change in a fundamental constitutional principle ists have been advocating a peaceful constitutional should be the consequence of deliberate legisla- revolution, by incremental steps aimed at replacing tive action and not judicial activism, however well the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty with a meaning”. new constitutional framework in which Parliament Constitutional change in contemporary democ- either shares ultimate authority with the courts or— racies requires appealing to the principles of political if push comes to shove—is subordinate to them. morality that are the source of modern constitu- In Jackson v Attorney-General, the famous “fox tional legitimacy, in particular the sovereignty of hunting case”, Lord Steyn embraced this theory, the people. Such changes require democratic delib- declaring that the doctrine of the supremacy of eration and decision-making. Officials who favour Parliament: constitutional change must persuade other officials, and the public at large, that it is desirable. is a construct of the common law. The judges Any attempt by the judiciary to unilaterally created this principle. If that is so, it is not change the most fundamental rules of the system unthinkable that circumstances could arise is also hazardous. Parliament might resist a judicial where the courts may have to qualify a principle attempt to change the rules that were previously gen- established on a different hypothesis of erally accepted, and take strong action to defeat it. If constitutionalism. the judges were to tear up the consensus that consti- tutes the basic rules of the constitution, they would Two other judges in Jackson made similar or sup- be poorly placed to complain if it were replaced by porting observations, and like-minded dicta have a power struggle that they are ill-equipped to win. appeared in other cases. It can be argued that too much should not be made of the expression of unorthodox opinions in What to do about it? the obiter dicta of a few senior judges. After all, they his brings me to the question of reform. I will may not persuade a majority of their peers, some of say only a little about this, for several reasons. whom have already responded by reaffirming the ThereT are too many possibilities, and too many doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Moreover, complexities, to be sensibly canvassed even in a these dicta are either based on demonstrable false- lengthy lecture. As an Australian lawyer I lack hoods or are implausible. I have argued at length in the detailed knowledge that is required. And since my two books on the subject that the central claim the purpose of this lecture is to launch a project to of “common law constitutionalism” is false, partly develop and propose practical reforms, there is little because, as a matter of historical fact, the doctrine point in making specific recommendations before of parliamentary sovereignty was not created by the that process has even begun. judiciary. Rather, it is the outcome of sometimes I would, however, offer the following advice. violent struggles for constitutional supremacy in First, by all means consider possible changes to which judges mainly sat on the sidelines, or were on the European Convention on Human Rights and the losing side and had no alternative but to accept the HRA, but do not neglect more fundamental the outcome. trends such as the labelling of common law prin- But we should not be too complacent. No matter ciples as “constitutional”, possibly with a view to how often the common law constitutionalists’ cen- their elevation at some future time to constitutional tral claim is refuted, it continues to be asserted. The status in the American, rather than the traditional process by which the common law gradually evolves British, sense of the term.

16 Quadrant May 2015 Losing Faith in Democracy

Second, if Parliament is to retain its capacity argued, judging by statutes passed over the last fifty to control constitutional developments, and not be years or so it has done very well indeed. Legislation outflanked by judicial development of a common has abolished the death penalty, decriminalised law constitution, then its members must robustly homosexual conduct and legalised same-sex mar- assert and defend its legislative sovereignty from riage, outlawed various kinds of invidious discrimi- critics and sceptics. I do not mean that Parliament nation, and legalised abortion within limits—the should necessarily seek to maintain its sovereignty list could go on and on. forever. If public opinion came to strongly sup- It is no coincidence that in rankings of nations port the adoption of a written constitution limiting according to the freedoms of their residents, the Parliament’s powers, there would be good reasons United Kingdom consistently falls within the top for Parliament to act accordingly. Rather, I mean ten-to-twenty, and considering the company it is in, that such a profound transformation of the constitu- this is nothing to be worried about. Nor is its failure tion should not be brought about solely by changes to rank higher due to its not having a written consti- in the jurisprudential theories favoured by legal tution with a bill of rights. For example, in a repu- elites. It is vital that members of the legislative and table index of world freedom published by Canada’s executive branches of government keep abreast of Fraser Institute in 2012, New Zealand ranked first these changes, and develop the intellectual self- out of 123 countries, despite having no written con- confidence needed to respond. In saying this, I do stitution and only a statutory bill of rights, and not mean to encourage intemperate attacks on the Australia ranked fourth, despite having no national judiciary. It is essential that the debate be conducted bill of rights at all. The Netherlands ranked second, on terms of mutual respect. and as usual the Scandinavian countries also ranked Third, a successful defence of parliamentary sov- highly, even though none of them have had a long ereignty over the long term will require considerable attachment to rights-protecting judicial review. bipartisan (or multi-partisan) support. If criticisms These are reasons not for complacency, but rather, of expanding judicial power come from only one for refusing to agree that the HRA opened a new side of politics, they may not have a sufficiently era of enlightenment after a long dark age in which broad influence on public opinion. That is partly rights were suppressed. why I have emphasised that resistance to the expan- Robert Dahl, the pre-eminent modern theorist sion of judicial power has historically, in Britain and of democracy, once said: “The democratic process is elsewhere, been even more popular on the Left than a gamble on the possibilities that a people, in act- on the Right. ing autonomously, will learn how to act rightly.” To Fourth, Parliament will only be able to retain its adopt full judicial review of constitutional rights sovereignty over the long term if it continues to be would amount to a verdict that the British people widely regarded as deserving to be entrusted with have failed. It would indicate a lack of confidence in it. Members of Parliament must be sensitive to the their ability to maintain a tolerant and fair society root causes of the expansion of judicial power. In without the supervision of judicial chaperons, over- particular, they must persuade not only the general seeing their decisions and correcting their mistakes. public but influential elites that they are sensitive to It would impose on the British people a kind of rights issues and give them careful consideration. political guardianship. I do not believe that Britain’s If Members of Parliament believe it is untrue that enviable reputation as a world leader in the develop- they have been supine and ineffective in holding the ment of democracy and liberty warrants such pes- executive to account, due to its dominance in the simism. Indeed, I believe the opposite. House of Commons, then they must demonstrate this. In other words, if Parliament has a public rela- Jeffrey Goldsworthy is Professor of Law at Monash tions problem, it must be effectively addressed. But University. He delivered this lecture on March 9 at if there is more than just a public relations prob- Policy Exchange, Westminster, to launch the Policy lem—if the electoral system or parliamentary proc- Exchange Project on Judicial Power. It is published esses need improvement—then those problems here with the permission of Policy Exchange. Professor should also be tackled. Goldsworthy thanks Richard Ekins and Graham Gee How has Parliament discharged its historical for very helpful comments on an earlier version of responsibility to protect the rights and freedoms of the lecture, which they should not be assumed to agree the community? Its track record over the centuries is with. A footnoted version of this article appears on far from perfect. But as Christopher Forsyth recently Quadrant Online.

Quadrant May 2015 17 Christie Davies

Must We Blame Sociology?

ociology is an honourable discipline founded funding from the awarders of research grants, who over a century ago by Emile Durkheim, were also ideologically (indeed to use their own Vilfredo Pareto, Herbert Spencer and Max cant phrase “hegemonically”) of the Left. Religious WeberS and with roots that go back much further, and military institutions were seriously neglected perhaps even to Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth because they were seen as unimportant in relation century. Sociology does not deserve to be maligned to the workings of capitalism. The “bourgeois because of the distortions of its left wing and the family” was important but only because it was the fantasies imposed on it by “critical” thinkers unable transmission belt for property and privilege and thus to question propositions impartially. To be sceptical one of the props of capitalism. Otherwise families is a virtue in sociology; to be critical is a vice. were just the way the labour force got reproduced. The roots of their “infantile disorder” (Lenin’s For the Marxists in particular economic forces phrase, not mine) lie in their obsession with ineq­ drove everything, and the other leftists were always uality and hence their ideology of “underdoggery”, willing to meet them halfway. The manual workers which asserts that particular, selected groups of los- were bound to come to power either through revo- ers are the blameless victims of social injustice and lution or through inevitable and inexorable social that all analyses must be governed by the drive to forces such as the squeezing out of small business redress this, even if it leads to falsehoods. At first and of course the peasants, the greater radicalism of it was the heroic working class whose cause they workers in ever larger enterprise, who were alienated took up with a fervour that was often, though by from a distant management and formed militant no means necessarily, Marxist. The proletariat later labour unions, the expansion of state employment, fell out of favour with the radicals. The workers had even the higher birth-rate of socialist voters, whose not only refused to be revolutionary but proved to children would vote the same way. Such was the be socially conservative and stubbornly patriotic message of Left-optimistic sociology. Anyone who and so the radicals dumped them in favour of the at that time mentioned the growth of the service “excluded”—racial minorities, criminals and those sector or the importance of knowledge in the crea- with unorthodox sexual preferences. Capitalism tion of wealth was dismissed as a reactionary. remained the villain but for different reasons. The sociologists of the Left had a nasty shock The rise of the class-obsessed leftists within in 1979 when the Shah of Iran was overthrown not sociology meant that class differences and the by those radicalised by economic deprivation but by supposed lack of upward social mobility between reactionary Muslim fundamentalists. They had also classes through the education system were made tried to explain away or minimise the profound but the very core of sociology. The leftists rarely studied slow and peaceful social changes brought about by downward mobility, which is the true mark of the conversion of the dispossessed to Pentecostalism how open a society is, nor the personal suffering in South America instead of the revolution they experienced by those moving down and their had predicted and the role of Catholicism in the families; they concentrated only on the discontents of destruction of the Australian Labor Party by B.A. those trying to rise or who have moved up. Likewise Santamaria and the Groupers. Now they were faced they failed to study those without education who with the first violent revolutionary change in peace- rose through business entrepreneurship, for that time in decades, not a mere political coup but a rev- would have made capitalism look legitimate. Work olution that utterly transformed an entire society, on class, education and mobility was the high road and it was rooted in religion, not in clashes between to citations and promotions, to prestige and to economic classes. The leftists had failed to predict it

18 Quadrant May 2015 Must We Blame Sociology? and now could not explain it. It “ought not to have risked being drummed out of the profession. The happened”. psychologists whose work proved conclusively They are still trapped in their old prejudices in that intelligence is inherited remained unread by the twenty-first century when many societies are the Left-sociologists or were subjected to ad hom- plagued by Islamic terrorism and when Muslim inem attacks. When an East German psychologist gangs in Australia, Britain and Scandinavia alike showed how very strongly intelligence is inherited, have committed a disproportionate proportion of the English leftists asked the Stasi to suppress his sex crimes against women and girls. The mantra work lest it embarrass their ideological claims. of the sociologists of the Left in either case is that Psychologists, like economists, were always suspect the perpetrators are “marginalised” and “deprived” because they challenged left-wing fantasies of creat- individuals. Religion does not come into it. Never ing a totally equal society by bringing up harsh facts mind that many Muslim terrorists from the West about the constraints imposed by scarcity and biol- have university degrees. For the Left-sociologists ogy. Ironically the inheritance of intelligence is the it is still all about inequality under capitalism, an great driver of social mobility because of the regres- explanation that conveniently meshes with the sion effect. The offspring of intelligent parents tend politically correct view that a group defined as a to be more able than average but less intelligent “minority” and even its leaders must than their parents, and the converse not be blamed for the wickedness of is true of the stupid, some of whose their members. n the 1960s even descendants will be bright and will I move to a higher class. When the he leftists’ dismissal of religion muggers, burglars libertarian Australian sociologist and the military as important and car thieves, Peter Saunders pointed this out in forcesT was brought home to me his masterly book Unequal but Fair? in a strange way. In the 1980s I vandals, drug dealers the Left-sociologists reacted with a published several articles and later and brawlers became characteristic mixture of rage and book chapters to try and explain heroes and victims wilful incomprehension. why homosexual men were or had In fairness to the sociologists of been so viciously hated and their for some sociologists the Left, most of them did not hold activities rendered criminal. I could of the Left. the Soviet Union in high regard, but see no sense or justice in this. It was nonetheless they were far less will- a puzzle that had to be explained. ing systematically to criticise this I concluded on the basis of an extensive compara- socialist “civilisation” than the free and democratic tive study of different societies and institutions that societies in which they lived. This is one more illus- it was a product of religious beliefs in the main- tration of how the “critical thinking” of the Left is a tenance of strong boundaries and of the organisa- complete sham. In particular they laid stress on the tional demands of all-male, celibate hierarchical supposedly more equal distribution of incomes and organisations such as churches and armies. Since for higher rates of social mobility in socialist societies, once I was being a good liberal, my work was pub- where there was affirmative action for the children lished in the leading journals and I got promoted of the proles and central control over wage levels. to full professor. But the Left-sociologists contin- They failed to understand that even if the Soviet sta- ued to assert without any evidence whatsoever that tistics were truthful—which the Left-sociologists the phenomenon was the product of a “crisis in the always assumed they were—they did not reveal how bourgeois family”. Such a view neither meshes with privilege worked in a socialist society. history nor with differences between societies. But If I know how much an Australian earns and never mind the facts, our special insight tells us that what assets he or she owns, I will have a good idea the persecution of the gays is a product of the need of what they are able to purchase and where they to preserve the inheritance of property within the can afford to live. In the Soviet Union what you bourgeoisie. Yes, capitalism is to blame as usual. could afford depended equally on access to the More tauromerdine sociology of the Left. power of the state, selective access to the special Many of the sociologists of the Left were par- shops where high-quality, often imported, goods ticularly obsessed with equality of opportunity and were cheaply available, goods available nowhere wasted enormous sums of taxpayers’ money build- else. Ordinary people could not shop there; they ing detailed input-output tables of social mobil- were not allowed in. Those who lived in Moscow or ity to show that the educational system had failed Leningrad had a much better life, better education, the working class. Any sociologist who suggested better health care, better facilities than those stuck that intellectual ability was innate and inherited in some down-at-heel provincial town because these

Quadrant May 2015 19 Must We Blame Sociology? cities were showpieces and the places where the crimes in nearly all the wealthier industrial coun- elite lived. But you needed a residence permit and tries, in marked contrast to the Victorian era when work permit to live there and getting them required crime fell, or the inter-war period when despite high political influence. Crime rates in these cities were unemployment and a much less well-developed wel- low and life was safer because the penalty for being fare state, crime rates had stayed low. Not surpris- convicted of a crime within the city limits was to ingly there was considerable public concern among lose your residence permit. Criminals were exiled the ordinary folk who were experiencing the new to ghastly provincial towns with poor housing and waves of theft and assault, burglary and robbery. facilities, which in consequence had a very high The nice pink liberals were horrified. The welfare incidence of crime. But the top people did not live state was producing unwelcome, unexpected con- there and foreigners including Left-sociologists did sequences. It should not be happening. It could not not visit, so it did not matter, did it? be happening. Among the even lefter sociologists, The sociologists of the Left, so keen to uncover there were two responses. One was to deny that the seamier side of capitalist societies, showed crime was rising and to explain it away by “improved no interest in the widespread bribery, corruption, reporting and recording”. This could not be matched black-marketing and money-laundering of a social- with the falling or static crime rates of the late nine- ist society and no understanding of why these teenth and earlier twentieth centuries when report- deviant activities were utterly necessary to the ing and recording were also improving, but why let functioning of a planned economy without prices facts get in the way? I sometimes wonder how the determined by supply and demand. Nonetheless the adherents of the reporting and recording thesis have Left-sociologists were shocked and surprised when coped with the general fall in crime since the mid- the communist societies of Europe all collapsed, a 1990s. When victim surveys of the general public peaceful but complete revolutionary destruction not were done (which leaves out crimes against stores, just of a government but of an entire type of society. warehouses, banks and so on) they showed what any They had no idea that such a thing could happen, sensible person knew. Crime had risen substantially no idea that communist societies were an unreform- but not as fast as the police figures. able mass of internal contradictions, based entirely The Left-sociologists’ motives in denying the on the arbitrary and repressive use of force. What obvious were partly that the justifiable high coverage they had asserted was solid melted into air. Shortly of crime in the press was distracting attention from before, they had denounced the exiled Lithuanian what they saw as the “real” problem of class injus- sociologist Alexander Shtromas for so accurately tice, and partly that the alarm over crime might lead predicting the collapse. governments to be more punitive towards a group with whom they increasingly identified—the young, t is in relation to crime that we can best see how male, lower-class criminal. He, like themselves, was the Left-sociologists began to split, with many an opponent of bourgeois society and under attack. abandoningI the old emphasis on material produc- Perhaps the silliest essay on the subject, one still tion and social classes. The old-style Marxist soci- adored and reverently cited by Left-sociologists, was ologists had been a disciplined lot who admired Stuart Hall’s “Mugging as a Moral Panic” (1978). the working class, the proletariat, for its capacity There had been a spate of robberies against the for organising itself, leading in time to revolution person in streets and parks and other public places or at the very least to the capture of the power of and the worst cases involving serious injuries were the state. They had nothing but contempt for the extensively reported in the press in vivid detail. Hall lumpenproletariat, those below the working class, argued, by an incompetent use of statistics and with that disorganised rabble of criminals, drifters and a complete ignorance of calculus, that the incidence dealers in dubious commodities who had chosen of mugging was no longer rising, and more to the idleness rather than work. Bandits and bushrangers point he suggested that many of the robberies might be turned into class heroes, but not the urban were mere bag-snatching, frightening but without flotsam. But in the 1960s even muggers, burglars much violence. Thus the heavy press coverage and car thieves, vandals, drug dealers and brawlers and the outrage expressed by those in high places became heroes and victims for some sociologists of were not justified and constituted a “moral panic”, the Left. They were victims not just because they meaning an exaggerated alarmed response in the had been pushed into crime by deprivation, the face of deviant behaviour. But who is to say what is a older view, but because they were unfairly vilified disproportionate and what is a reasonable response? by the popular press. Hall’s supporters were absolutely horrified when Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s there those not on the Left applied the concept and the was an inexorable rise in both violent and property method behind it to “racial attacks”, most of which

20 Quadrant May 2015 Must We Blame Sociology? are merely verbal abuse or a bit of scuffling, and to Council. They believed in cause and effect in a domestic violence, which in general does not result deterministic way. They measured the easily meas- in serious injury. urable with great precision to the neglect of vari- Later what was equally shocking to the ables that were difficult to measure and then they “watermelons”—a red Left turning green—in what drew lines on a graph and projected them into the they called “the new risk society” was an exten- future, ignoring such imponderables as the impos- sion of the concept, the “techno-moral panic”. This sible-to-predict inventions of the future and they was used to analyse the absurd and alarmist fears used their findings to agitate for social planning. drummed up by the greenists who have menda- Accurately measured nonsense. ciously demonised food irradiation and GM crops Nonetheless as quantitative techniques and stirred up the press, which far from being con- improved, censuses and surveys have produced a trolled by the big capitalists simply wants to sell lot of good data, some of it embarrassing to the exciting copy. The Left-sociologists invent concepts leftists. How else would we have known that gay that are not analytical but tendentious and then get men are less than 2 per cent of the male population, indignant when someone uses them in a perfectly or that other things being equal the short-sighted honest way to make a point that are more likely to succeed in life? goes against their ideology. In consequence many of the What seriously split the Left- any of the leftists have gone off science. It was sociologists was when one of their M not producing the answers they own number showed on the basis leftists have gone off wanted. Now many sociologists of of an accurate area survey that poor science. It was not the Left study not social “reality” people were the ones who suffered but the way people talk about that most at the hands of young male producing the answers reality, not crime but press reports criminals. The poor tended to be in they wanted. Now of crime, not conflicts but images the wrong place at the wrong time many sociologists of of the conflicting parties, not and got attacked, were unable to documents in the files of institu- defend themselves and their homes the Left study not tions but chat on the internet. They and could not afford insurance. social “reality” but have taken up “discourse analysis” There was now a split between the which consists of recording long oddly named “Left-realists” who the way people talk “depth” interviews with ordinary acknowledged honestly the havoc about that reality. people about tendentious mat- wrought by criminals in poor areas, ters, arbitrarily editing the record, and the remnant of the macho- and then producing shock-horror Left, many of them criminals-manqué, who went claims about how bigoted and reactionary the pop- on championing the muggers. The macho-Left soci- ulace are. Discourse analysis is the long-winded ologists’ position was further undermined by the descendant of the dishonest F-scale questionnaires rise of the feminists, angry that domestic violence produced by Adorno in the 1940s and 1950s. “F” in and sex crimes against women were being under- this case does not mean what most people would rated by the tough-minded men of the Left. They expect but refers to Fascism. It was a slick trick succeeded to such an extent that today the incidence to prove that all “authoritarian personalities” were of crimes against women is being talked up as vigor- on the Right. Today’s discourse analysis reduces ously and dishonestly as violent crime in general had sociology to a sort of third-rate radio documentary been talked down thirty years before. The work- that is all talk and no reality. The flesh has become ing class is now often stereotyped on the Left as word. a horde of wife-beaters, xenophobic brawlers who Now instead of mimicking the scientists, the harass immigrants, and vicious “poofter bashers”. Left-sociologists, like many teachers of literature, They are now only one person in the holy trinity of have embraced the wilder and foggier branches race, gender and class, the three holies of sociology, of Continental philosophy, the “higher Froggy the three sets of inequalities that must be exposed nonsense”—structuralism, post-structuralism, and denounced by all true-red and even true-pink Lacanian psychoanalytic thought, postmodernism sociologists. and so on. The nonsense called literary theory, much of which has built-in biases from the start—post- he left-wing sociologists of an earlier genera- colonial theory, feminist theory, queer theory— tion often deceived themselves into thinking owes as much to Left-sociology as it does to the theirT work was scientific. Russia had “scientific students of literature and they merge in that vague Marxism” and Britain a Social Science Research aggregate called cultural studies which means you

Quadrant May 2015 21 Must We Blame Sociology? do not need to do any hard thinking about social they peddle. The proposition that there is progress or economic structures. Yet more of that “cultural in the natural sciences, whereas changes in Left- Marxism” which Lenin would have denounced as sociology are mere shifts of fashion driven by bourgeois idealism. Poor Lenin, the man who even political factions, is anathema to them. They once got upset when physicists began undermining his believed that they had progress on their side. Now crude view of what was “material”, must be turning they are determined that no one shall, not even the in his mausoleum. In the twenty-first century the scientists. Their mantra is “You can’t be certain”, Left-sociologists waffle about “liquid capitalism” but no one claims that our ever-changing physical or even “weightless capitalism” in a vain attempt sciences provide complete certainty. It is enough to to come belatedly to terms with a society in which say that for all practical purposes we can be sure the key commodities are services and information, that, say, the chemistry of today is vastly superior while still not understanding the spontaneous order to that of 1900 or 1950 or even 2000. No such claim produced by markets or the role of the entrepreneur can be made about social theory. as innovator. Some of the more obscurantist Left-sociologists espite the way sociology was disfigured by seem to regard society as a kind of text to be sub- the Left, who also monopolise the textbook jected to exegesis. The new theories have the great market,D the last half of the twentieth century was advantage of being untestable, unfalsifiable and a time of great achievement in sociology by those often incomprehensible. Some lengthy works of who, whatever their politics, retained free minds. sociological theory are entirely self-referential and The great comparative sociologists such as Stanislav contain hardly any factual data. Those, like myself, Andreski, Ernest Gellner, Seymour Martin Lipset, who know that a scientific sociology is a mirage David Martin and Edward Shils flourished and but argue that there are advantages to the scientific there were the wonderful insights too of Raymond approach and that even though we cannot attain Aron, Mary Douglas, Norbert Elias, Erving truth we ought to try to approach it and that it Goffman, Louise Shelley and Helmut Schoeck. To is possible to show that certain propositions are read them or to listen to them was to realise with almost certainly false, are denounced as “privileg- pleasure that you now had a better understanding ing science”. of the social order than you had before. What a Those on the Left who once claimed that they pity the leftists had to stain a great discipline. had access to the truth because of where they were The Left-sociologists tried to change the world, placed in the social order now assert that there is no but the calling of the sociologist is to interpret it in way of showing that one statement is more accurate various ways. The sociologists of the Left betrayed than another. They do not ask of data “Is it reason- that calling. It is time to restore and insist on it. ably correct?” but only “Who produced the data?” and “Who would benefit if we decide to accept it?” Dr Christie Davies is the author of The Strange Their favourite author is Thomas Kuhn because Death of Moral Britain. He began his teaching they falsely believe that he has shown science in all career as a tutor in the University of Adelaide. He its neutrality to be as fallible as the value-laden and was for many years Professor of Sociology at Reading untestable theses about the nature of society that University in England and head of department.

22 Quadrant May 2015

Waiting for the Woodman

A mudpack of pigs on devastated ground Seven dark grey sows, two red males pound-for-pound His truck is here, but the woodman’s not around. Greed hasn’t left here a single speck of green In one corner, the pond wears a greasy sheen The man who sells firewood, nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he fell, they ate him? I look about Every last inch of him snuffled past flat snout? Bacon-makers scoff humans, oh have no doubt. The seven sows doze, their skin suncreamed with mud Like beached seals they lie, fat ladies in a pod Bristly boys keep nudging, try to stir their blood. If a sow stands, a male tries to get the jump Pushes, nuzzles, slurps between those hams so plump Putting on the hard word to climb aboard and hump. Sow shrieks or grunts, turns heavy breather away Makes it clear she’d prefer a meal any day Five Fine Frogs Big-balled boys could use some lessons in foreplay. Five fine frogs in the swimming pool Waiting for the woodman, feeling a voyeur webbed flippers on broad back feet The sunbaking swine stare back, and I defer: they tire on the surface, autumn-cool “Vegetarian! No pork, no chops, no sir!” having plopped in after insects to eat. The machos stand apart, froth-mouthed, rejected Five prisoners caught on taught green Now one mounts the other’s back, ill-directed the overhang offers them no way out A few futile thrusts, he flops off, dejected. among the ablest amphibians seen but no abseilers, can’t leap like trout. Dumb anthropomorphism, to myself I say But think I understand the red males’ dismay One-by-one lifted out with the net (Certain lobby would claim proof Nature’s gay). water-drunk, bulge-eyes running tears throats apulse, not recovered yet Ah, woodman’s arrived, is at his back door “Frog off!” I say. Don’t frogs have ears? Leave the sows to dream of stale loaves by the score And yes, I now know why a boar is called boar! Touch on the smallest one’s slimy spine and he, or she, arcs through dry air With a trailer-load of logs for winter’s stove the others loop off as though at a sign I head more slowly along the road I drove burping about chlorine, treacherous stair. Think: Well, at least pigs are not confused by love. Tonight by the creek, a loud jamboree high-jumps, wooings, in Mud they trust the five will be blithely joining the glee songs about water, no mention of dust. Rod Usher

Quadrant May 2015 23 Rebecca Weisser

Budgets, BoreCons and the Doctrine of Dullness

udgets are rarely make-or-break affairs. Yet months later, Newspoll, the most authoritative this year’s federal budget, to be delivered on opinion poll in Australia, has Abbott improving May 12, is a critical test for Tony Abbott and his net satisfaction with voters from minus 44 to hisB government. After Abbott’s near political death minus 26 points and the government opening up in February, when he faced a vote in his own party a five-point lead over Labor in the primary vote of room on whether to allow a spill motion, the Prime 41 per cent to 36 per cent. Although Labor is still Minister declared that this year’s upcoming budget ahead of the government by 51 per cent to 49 per would be boring: “It’ll be prudent, it’ll be frugal, it’ll cent once preferences are distributed, the trend, if it be responsible, but I think when it comes to savings, continues, favours Abbott and has put him back in people will find it pretty dull and pretty routine.” the game. What was seen as a unique calamity now The declaration of a doctrine of dullness repre- looks much more like a standard mid-term slump. sents a critical turning point for his centre-Right Central to this turnaround has been what Times government. It comes as a direct response to the columnist Tim Montgomerie called in June 2014 the soap opera in the Senate, a drama played out over rise of “Boringsville Conservatism” or “BoreCons”. the last twelve months by independent and minor Montgomerie, a British Conservative Party activist, party senators who turned the rejection of the gov- says that while ideological conservatives in think- ernment’s structural reforms into a Punch-and-Judy tanks and newspapers hunger for the bold conserva- pantomime. tism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, It was an extraordinary reversal of fortune. calling for regulations and bureaucracy to be rolled When Abbott won government in September 2013 back and government spending to be slashed, what with 53.49 per cent of the two-party preferred vote, voters want in these troubled times is not radical he raised the hopes of many on the centre-Right, rhetoric but reassurance, not hairy-chested stand- not just in Australia but elsewhere in the English- offs but sound economic management and not big- speaking world. His muscular conservatism leav- bang reforms but improvements by stealth. ened with classical liberalism and antipodean In September 2013 Montgomerie claimed pragmatism inspired admiration on the Right even Abbott’s election victory as a triumph for the as the Left damned him as a Tea Party extremist. BoreCons partly because he wasn’t promising to Here was a leader who was not afraid to take on slash spending. By February 2015, however, Parris the shibboleths of the progressives—he campaigned labelled Abbott the kind of right-wing populist that on the abolition of a carbon tax and a mining tax Tory toddlers could “paint by numbers, a politician and did not mince words in promising to defend that No Turning Back focus-groupers could have Australian sovereignty and its borders, turning back stitched together with canvass returns, polling data unauthorised boats of asylum seekers and running and steel wire”, and warned that if British conserva- instead an orderly, offshore refugee program. tives followed his example they would be punished Yet in February, Abbott’s leadership crisis in the polls. prompted former British Conservative MP and The truth is that Abbott is a complex politician Times columnist Matthew Parris to write the Prime with contradictory tendencies. Montgomerie is right Minister’s political obituary, assuming that his lead- that “nearly every time he finds a way of cutting ership had already begun its “ill-tempered walk to Australia’s budget deficit, he finds a way to spend the gallows”. Parris was not alone. The Left-leaning it”. But Abbott is also a great admirer of Thatcher commentariat also wrote off the Prime Minister and Reagan and despite the fact that $20 billion they had earlier claimed was unelectable. Yet, two worth of government savings have been blocked by

24 Quadrant May 2015 Budgets, BoreCons and the Doctrine of Dullness the Senate, he has still been able to chalk up signifi- by the Productivity Commission in 2012-13 to cost cant savings or measures to strengthen the economy. approximately $9.4 billion per annum. Since approx- For example, apart from repealing the carbon tax imately 30 per cent of this corporate welfare goes to and the mining tax and stopping the boats, Abbott the manufacturing industry, it is a safe bet that the ended subsidies for the car industry, refused to Australian Industry Group, a signatory to the letter bail out Qantas or to give a handout to Coca-Cola calling for reform but whose members include many Amatil, is privatising Medicare Private, has abol- who receive industry assistance, might resist such a ished the Department of Climate Change and has savings measure. been waging a war on red tape. One of the government’s chief errors with its It was not these bold measures that led to plung- first budget was to make almost every reform con- ing opinion polls but the combination of the usual tingent on legislation, which it was unable to get first-term errors added to a toxic air of chaos cre- through the Senate. This year it needs to uncouple ated by inexperienced, populist crossbenchers and reform from the budget process and work on it else- an imploding minor party in the Senate. It forced a where. The government should have done this last resolution of Abbott’s conflicting political impulses year, for example with the Medicare co-payment, and led to the triumph of tedium. sending it and a broader health-care reform agenda to the Productivity his manifesto of the mundane ohn Key, the poster Commission to allow stakehold- was no doubt inspired by New J ers to wage war over the policy ZealandT Prime Minister John Key, boy for the BoreCons, and only deciding what measures the poster boy for the BoreCons, was re-elected in it would adopt once it was clear re-elected in September for a third what the community—and the term with an increased majority, September for a Senate—were likely to support. The promising nothing more exciting third term with an government has done this with the than “a strong and stable govern- Productivity Commission inquiry ment” and “a brighter future for increased majority, into workplace relations, which is all New Zealanders”. What could promising nothing looking at contentious but poten- the country look forward to? “I can more exciting than tially vital reforms in areas like assure New Zealanders,” Key told penalty rates, youth wages and indi- journalists, “that everything will “a strong and stable vidual bargaining agreements that continue ticking over as usual.” government” and “a could make a big difference to levels Labor’s shadow Treasury spokes- of employment. man, Chris Bowen, noted Abbott’s brighter future for all Stripped of the task of economic new strategy of not frightening the New Zealanders”. reform, the budget can be returned horses and set about sabotaging it. to a more traditional accounting In a preview of Labor’s attack strat- exercise. Yet already the govern- egy, Bowen painted the forthcoming budget as scary ment has signalled that reform to childcare pay- and unfair, saying, “the Prime Minister [is] reassur- ments is likely to be announced in the budget, using ing people, reassuring his party room, that every- the money the government planned to spend on paid thing will be all right, we’ll still get back to balance, parental leave to provide greater assistance. While that can only mean more deep cuts in the budget”. this was studied by the Productivity Commission The business community, on the other hand, there is still considerable uncertainty about what the fears that in committing to a dull budget, the gov- government will announce, how much it will add to ernment won’t make the necessary cuts. In early the budget bottom line and whether it will win the April nine industry lobby groups went so far as to support of families and of the Senate. issue a joint statement calling on the government not to shy away from major economic reform with- ut is it really possible, or even desirable, to out which the country would be on a “path to eco- make budgets boring? John Maynard Keynes nomic despair”. Bhoped so. He thought it would be splendid if Steering a course between these conflicting “economists could manage to get themselves demands was never going to be easy, particularly as thought of as humble, competent people, on a level those who want reform do not have a united posi- with dentists”. The idea was presumably to make tion on what they would like the government to budgets as boring as dentistry even if they were as do. For example, the classical liberal think-tank the painful as root canal therapy. The Swedish political Centre for Independent Studies has called for an scientist Herbert Tingsten thought the rise of end to financial assistance for industry, estimated technocratic government would turn politics into

Quadrant May 2015 25 Budgets, BoreCons and the Doctrine of Dullness

“a kind of applied statistics”. before raising taxes. Properly done, it should save Certainly, few people get as excited as former more money than a modest co-payment. prime minister and treasurer Paul Keating at seeing Of course, even when it comes to eliminating the a “beautiful set of numbers”, but budgets nonethe- abuse of Medicare, an area in which the government less are about who gets what and how much, and indisputably holds the moral high ground, doctors because such decisions always leads to a clash of val- and allied health professionals will still make the ues and conflicting interests, controversy is inevita- case against change. Yet by harnessing the knowl- ble. In an era without windfalls to throw around, edge and critiques of insiders, such as Dr Webber, budgets must create winners and losers, and the los- the government gives itself a fighting chance of ers will protest. winning the argument. When it comes to reducing expenditure, the strat- The government should not make the mistake egy of the government will be to rely on innovation however of assuming that public service mandarins and on eliminating waste and fraud. This flows from will be an ally in this task. Some will no doubt find the recognition that there is no easy path to cutting it easier to ask for additional revenue rather than go expenditure. With the government already in debt, through the hard work of making savings the way a there are no “rivers of gold” flooding in with which private sector company would in search of increased to buy off the losers from any reform. Nor does the profitability. government have much political capital on which to draw which might help convince the electorate that he holy grail of reining in government spend- it’s a matter of hard bread today for jam tomorrow. ing is to improve services while reducing costs. With no obvious easy targets or politically painless TUsually this can only be achieved by finding whole cuts, what is required is what Max Weber referred new ways of doing things, much as Uber has revolu- to as “strong and slow boring through hard wood”, tionised taxi services. The government could facili- which will be genuinely dull. tate this by making public sector data available to In health, for example, there is no silver bullet or the general public and inviting the private sector to prospect that a big-bang reform could be introduced come up with innovative ways to improve services to rein in expenditure. So it will require line-by-line and reduce costs, while increasing transparency, reviews of individual expenditure items to cut fraud, accountability and efficiency. better target services and eliminate waste. But there Is it possible to have boring budgets when spend- is much work that has been done identifying prob- ing already exceeds revenue? The recent state elec- lems in this area. For example, Dr Tony Webber, tions in the eastern states provide grounds for both the former head of the Professional Service Review, optimism and pessimism. While the Queensland the watchdog in charge of policing the abuse of government narrowly lost an election fought on the Medicare, wrote in the Medical Journal of Australia leasing of state assets to pay down debt and fund in 2012 that the creation in 2005 of Medicare rebates new infrastructure, the New South Wales govern- for General Practice Management Plans (GPMPs) ment showed that it was possible to take the same and Team Care Arrangements generated a bonanza unpopular policy to the electorate and comfortably for unscrupulous practitioners and corporate owners win an election. to claim for clinically unnecessary GPMPs. It also Perhaps the easiest way to take the excitement created a whole industry of allied health practition- out of a budget is to have nothing new in it. The ers and dentists who were able, for the first time, to whole tradition of a budget lock-up has become shift the cost of podiatry, physiotherapy, psychology increasingly artificial. Paul Keating may have liked and dental care onto the taxpayer. throwing the switch to vaudeville, but with no bread Jeremy Sammut, a research fellow at the Centre and circuses to give away perhaps the government for Independent Studies, calculated that between should leak absolutely everything beforehand. What 2005 and 2013, the total real cost of these expendi- could be more boring than that? ture items increased by 327 per cent and by 2012- The true test of the success of the budget should 13 the total expenditure on these items was at least perhaps be that on the second Tuesday in May most $720 million. Three years on, Sammut says nothing people choose to watch My Kitchen Rules. Then has been done to eliminate the abuse in this area. again, they probably always have. Voters know that this sort of waste exists throughout the health sector and the public sector Rebecca Weisser is the former Opinion Page Editor for and expects the government to crack down on it the Australian.

26 Quadrant May 2015 Philip Ayres

Malcolm Fraser: Errors and Misconceptions

dmiration for Ayn Rand’s autonomous channels”, and so on. Even in his increasingly soft- heroes, support for multiculturalism, belief hearted days, Fraser was more individualist than in smaller government, a disliking for big statist, and had always been more federalist than Abanks, defence of illegal immigrants, distrust of centralist (he offered to hand the income-taxing United States global policy, a non-Marxist anti- power back to the states, whose it originally was imperialism (compare Ron and Rand Paul or Dennis until the Second World War, but they declined Kucinich), advocacy of a protectionist national the offer: too hard, let Canberra keep that). Along industry policy. Any consistency in all that? with his individualism went a social conscience. His Many of Malcolm Fraser’s attitudes were based social individualism was similar to that of Menzies. on his perception of institutional threats to indi- Fraser grew up in an isolated place, on the vast viduals, cultures, even nations. Ayn Rand, whom wooded flatlands of the Riverina, by the banks he went out of his way to meet because he admired of the Edward River, forty miles from the near- much of her philosophy (though not her contempt est sociable neighbour. “There were no strangers for the weak—her heart never bled), pits her fic- about,” his mother told me. “If there were strangers tional heroes against encroaching bureaucracy, the he would disappear straight away. Very, very few state, and the rule of bad law, which they defiantly people ever came.” There was a manager, some sta- break or disregard. That resonated with Fraser. Each tion hands, a series of nurses. He’d ride into the of the apparent incompatibles listed above relates in eucalypt forests alone, each time venturing deeper, some way to the encroachment of institutionalised up to twenty-five miles at a stretch, where oth- power. ers had been lost and never found, or he’d wander Take illegal immigrants (and accept for argu- among the river red gums hunting for rabbits, with ment’s sake that most aren’t refugees). Put the fol- a pet dog and devoted galah. There was freedom lowing: “These individuals have managed to save and lack of constraints, which, together with the or scrape together ten or fifteen thousand to pay isolation, promoted a self-sufficient, interiorised some potentially double-crossing boat-owner to personality, immune, in his case, to the collective get them here, with all the financial and physical mentality of a Melbourne Grammar School where risks involved in that, breaking the rules. Weed out he had few friends. The interests he developed were any who are dangerous or criminal by all means, those of individuals, not groups: sporting cars and but don’t we need more and not less of that spirit? motorcycles, shooting, photography and fly-fishing. They’d be better for our economy than most of the When we occasionally met we talked sports cars legals because they’ve shown they have the guts and and motorcycles as often as international politics determination to work and save money and make (he seemed less interested in the local variety). their own way, like entrepreneurs, who break rules In intellectual terms it was probably a mistake too. They’ve done more than wade across the Rio for his parents to send him to Oxford straight after Grande.” Fraser could think such thoughts, though school. He would have done better to complete a he overplayed the “refugee” bit, like his allies on local degree first, but it was traditional to go directly the Left, with whom he had more and more in to Oxbridge, his father had done the same, all their common as social justice increasingly figured in his friends did that. He studied Philosophy, Politics and statements. The other thing he liked to point out Economics, a revelation and challenge. He kept all was that most “illegals” arrive unnoticed, by air, of his seventy-odd essays, which I have analysed in and simply overstay their visas. By contrast, a sta- detail, and which I suspect no one else will bother tist would say the law must be obeyed, “the proper to read. They’re worth looking at because they show

Quadrant May 2015 27 Malcolm Fraser: Errors and Misconceptions precisely where he’s going: towards an idealistic, all-out chemical (they’d gone geo-chemical). No, socially-focused individualism. Those who think of course not—but I never got it clear in my head, he changed a lot should read them, they’re in the that “hands behind their backs” thing. Was that his, Fraser archive. He thought the best conservative or something free-floating I’d missed? Or he’d talk would be “like Churchill—a radical determined to about America’s home-front rebellion against the destroy evil, and wherever he found it, by construc- war and LBJ’s weakening of will. I decided this was tive legislation”, and he retained this reforming and pure self-defence on his part—until the late 1980s idealistic vision until the end. he was still backing positions he’d taken during his Later (1973–75) he’d define the relation between tenure of the Army and Defence portfolios in the the apparent incompatibles of individualism and 1960s. He ceased doing that in the 1990s. However, social policy in terms of enablement of freedom he’d never trusted the Americans, witness his nego- (government-provided family allowances, for tiations in Washington over the F111 purchases— instance). But views of Fraser are fixed now: in 1975, he found Melvin Laird and his associates in the so it goes, he was a radical rightist (almost a fascist, Defense Department full of deceit and played them some think), and then he degenerated into an ide- at their own cheating game. alistic dreamer, moving from far Right to wimpy Later on he was close to Kissinger, with whom Left. Post-mortem the journalists re-hash the same he never disguised his distrustful view of United old themes. “To think is to think States policy; he liked Kissinger and again”? admired how he had turned policy This is one of the funniest ones: n general Fraser around on China. Kissinger thought an Australian legend has it that I outside the square, within a creative Fraser at Oxford was close friends saw the Americans as geopolitics, not reflexively like most with a black student from Africa, being for themselves; conservatives. In general Fraser saw and hence took up the cause. I asked the Americans as being for them- him about that and he laughed, we they would never selves; they would never defend us both laughed to think that support defend us out of out of altruism. Hadn’t they backed for anti-colonialism and sympathy altruism. Hadn’t they Indonesia, not us, on West Irian? for national liberation struggles has Where were they on Konfrontasi? to be explained in such a way … backed Indonesia, not Nor was he at any time pro-Brit- Only in Australia. us, on West Irian? ish. At Melbourne Grammar he’d never bought the empire stuff, any raser’s choice of a life in poli- Nor was he at any more than Rupert Murdoch bought tics was the direct result of his time pro-British. it at Geelong Grammar, was never studiesF at Oxford and was made part of a school-inculcated mental- before he ever returned here. The ity, thought for himself and viscer- same idealism, the same social individualism, ally disliked the Britain he found in 1949. He told runs through all his early speeches. Following the me his dentist there said he’d never seen such good 1960 Sharpeville massacre he made the strongest teeth. speech of any in the parliament against apartheid, As Prime Minister, the first country he visited “a crime” he said, a doomed system. “The spirit and was not Britain or the United States but China, the emotion of our times are represented in the where he was shown around sensitive defence emancipation, freedom and self-government of col- facilities Whitlam had never seen, for instance, oured people. Anything that flies in the face of this the nuclear missile sites out from Urumqi. He spirit cannot stand and will be pushed aside in this developed and maintained close personal relations present age.” with top Chinese leaders over subsequent decades But didn’t Fraser go from pro-American and and admired the successes of their market social- pro-British to seeing the United States and Britain ism (or “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, in as dangerous allies? Actually, he never trusted the tradition of Bukharin’s anti-Stalinist “Enrich either. Yes, he believed the Vietnam War was some- yourselves” line on the Russian peasantry in the how winnable, and for a long time clung to the late 1920s). Like Gerald Ford and other Republican notion that America was forced to fight “with one presidents, he immensely admired Deng Xiaoping. hand tied behind their backs”, as he put it to me. The striking economic success of market socialism, “Tied behind their backs?” I asked. “With 550,000 with the government in control of the commanding men committed there, and dropping more bombs heights but where individuals were encouraged to than they’d dropped on Europe in World War II?” become rich, enriching the economy in the proc- Should they have gone nuclear, I wondered, or ess, impressed him all along, it was not something

28 Quadrant May 2015 Malcolm Fraser: Errors and Misconceptions on which he “moved to the left”. He saw China as historical lie in any case. Australians have never a logical ally for Australia because their economies been an “assimilated” people; those of Catholic were so mutually dependent, whereas (for example) Irish or Italian or Greek background have always the United States had never treated our agricultural kept hold of their culture, autonomously, without exports favourably. It would be foolish, he thought, any bureaucratic pressure or incentives to do so. for Australia to allow itself to be pressured into any The taxpayer doesn’t have to support that. It was military alliance against China. His opposition to bad policy, unnecessary. Fraser would probably have the establishment of an American base of opera- replied that it was another policy of enablement, in tions in Darwin is consistent with his attitudes to this case of individual and cultural distinctiveness. China and the United States over forty years. Ayn Rand would have despised that notion—let The reason Fraser did not ruthlessly overturn individuals help themselves. I mention her again the Whitlam legacy was because, having come to because I can’t get it out of my head that as Prime power by ruthless means, via a man whom he read Minister he had his staff call her up and brought to like a book, Sir John Kerr, he understood that the his hotel in New York for a talk. What she made of nation required stabilisation, not revenge. It’s fair that seems to have gone unrecorded. to say that after his second sweeping election vic- The most impressive thing about him, to my tory, of 1977, he had the chance to move further, way of thinking, was his strong interiority and self- faster, on economic and fiscal reform, although he sufficiency, though there was an emotional vulner- did wind back the proportion of government spend- ability, as with anyone. He didn’t need other people ing to GDP. Moreover, context has to be taken into much, except politically, and within the family. This account: a conservative Treasury under John Stone offended the press, who had no possibility of pluck- (at least in the view of Fraser, Keating and Hawke; ing out the heart of the mystery—they just couldn’t Stone would later become a harsh critic of Fraser get in there. Nor could I, but then I didn’t want to. on this very issue, and fight all three on the histori- I was worried about something or other once, and cal facts), a nation that had never heard of “smaller said so, and he told me, “Don’t fret”, which made government”, a fourth estate shocked and alarmed me despise myself, because he’d never do that. by the scale of the Razor Gang’s cuts (we look back now and wonder how they could describe them as he following is by way of a close-up on the force “swingeing”)—that was the context, so that when, of such a personality. Try envisaging any other a few years later, Hawke and Keating proceeded formerT Australian prime minister in the following to reform the Australian economy in a really bold situation—it won’t compute. I observed him closely way, the ground had been prepared. It also has to be in South Africa in 1986 as he confronted the apart- said that Fraser’s caution on economic reform, for heid police, with their riot guns and rhino-hide instance his setting-up of the Campbell Committee sjamboks, out in one of the “homelands”, and again and then his reluctance to go full-speed on its rec- in Somalia in 1992 when, as president of CARE ommendations, was due in part to his agrarian International, he confronted General Aidid—an background, his distrust of the banks including the interesting day, with two strong men at a stand-off, Reserve Bank, generally what Jack Lang used to in a situation of total chaos. I didn’t dislike Aidid, call the money power; and there was always an ele- what little I saw of him. He was on our side, more ment of agrarian socialism in his thinking, which or less. There was nothing instinctively to dislike, was and remained moderately protectionist. But and of course the character who goes under his here again there is consistency. name in the film Blackhawk Down is a figment of Following preliminary moves in that direction Hollywood’s imagination. Yes, he became an enemy under Whitlam, Fraser introduced his policy of of America. multiculturalism. The problem was that he created After four days’ warning in which to fortify an industry around it, with professional organisers it, General Aidid’s south-western stronghold of and bureaucrats feeding off the public purse. In any Bardera, a major aid centre for CARE and other case the policy itself was unnecessary and divisive, agencies, had succumbed to a dawn attack by but here again he was acting, as he saw it, in defence armed units aligned with the Somali National of individual and cultural difference against a Front (SNF) and led by the cultivated “General” dominant Anglo power structure he’d never had Morgan—Mohammed Said Hersi Morgan, son-in- much time for, in a country that had always been law to the ousted dictator Siad Barre, and reputedly a settler state, unlike, say, France, Germany or the worst war criminal in the country. If one had to Italy. But it was unnecessary to have a policy built choose between a city’s fate being in the hands of on “multiculturalism”. All that was needed was to Morgan or Aidid, any well-disposed person would cease using the term “assimilation”, which was an choose Aidid. Fraser needed his help to move the

Quadrant May 2015 29 Malcolm Fraser: Errors and Misconceptions aid convoys but the man’s power was slipping. closed because of clan fighting.” It was just three hours after the fall of this town The General squinted through all this in obvious that Fraser met with him. I took detailed notes. agitation. “Please, sir! Please! If you would permit Aidid’s compound in south Mogadishu was me to respond? First, it is true that we have been heavily guarded. You climbed to an upstairs landing forced out of Bardera. I am sending reinforcements and entered his private rooms, but first you removed and we will retake that town, I assure you …” your shoes, and once inside you sat on cushions, “But, General, you had four days’ warning of the not chairs. This was the Islamic aspect of Aidid’s attack and still you lost it.” United Somali Congress (USC). The rival USC led “And we will retake it, I promise you. Then your by the smooth Ali Mahdi Muhammad, self-styled point about security in Mogadishu—I am giving “Interim President”, who held north Mogadishu orders that all the armed gangs are to be forced off and not much else, made no attempt to create any the streets and disarmed …” such effect (his furniture was plush). In 1991 they “When, General? When will you do all this?” had fought a civil war through Mogadishu, leaving “Within one week!” this white and once-elegant Italian One week in his dreams. colonial city looted and in ruins. Although he would have the neces- A “green line” separated its north sary forces at his disposal to repel from its south. You could see how He thrived on the US incursion some months attractive it had been in Mussolini’s confrontation. In the later, he would not be around for time, for the built environment of long, dying in July 1996 of a heart that period was entirely intact, month-long blocking attack, either during or immedi- including an arch of victory. of Supply in October- ately after an operation on wounds Aidid couldn’t have guessed November 1975, when sustained in a clash with rivals. I that Fraser already knew about the have a Kodachrome slide I took of fall of Bardera, from where one of it was only his will him and Fraser conversing. CARE’s aid workers had radioed that held a fraying that he and two journalists were hat confrontation tells you a lot hostages of the SNF. After hand- Opposition together, about Fraser, how he handled shakes all round, we received a his- he was at his best. Thimself, his power of control. He tory lesson designed to show that thrived on confrontation. In the the chaos was everyone’s fault but month-long blocking of Supply in Aidid’s. He told us he would never sit down with October-November 1975, when it was only his will the man he had overthrown, the evil Siad Barre that held a fraying Opposition together, he was at and his gang. Nor would he talk to Ali Mahdi and his best. His Oxford essays, even, are confronta- his clique until he ceased calling himself “Interim tional. He was happiest fighting in what he saw as President”. Aidid assured us he controlled eleven of a good cause and if he brought the house down on the eighteen regions of Somalia. If only that had top of him, as he seemed to be doing in 1975, so be been true, the country would have been the better it. There were the odd contradictions, but generally for it, for then more of the aid would have been get- his political outlook over the years was philosophi- ting through to the people who needed it, instead of cally consistent. into the hands of independent gangs. He made major mistakes in the latter years, such “I’m sorry, General,” Fraser interrupted, “but I as unsuccessfully seeking the Liberal Party’s federal have to contradict you.” presidency, a post no former prime minister should Aidid was visibly put out. “If you would permit probably hold, and his resignation from the party me to continue?” that had done so much for him was arguably as self- “Look, General, you don’t even control your ish as it was (in his view) principled. The party had own centres. Two and a half hours ago your forces abandoned him, he said, not he the party. In fact were pushed out of Bardera. Now we hear that both things were true. The party had moved to the Morgan’s men, victorious there, are closing on right, ditching some of the social elements that had Saccouen. CARE thought it was safe in Bardera always been there in his philosophy, while he had because it was your town, General, but our confi- gradually magnified them. Things change. dence was misplaced. As for your ‘control’ here, it’s obviously not you who controls the streets of south Malcolm Fraser: A Biography by Philip Ayres was Mogadishu but undisciplined gangs. Just listen to published in 1987. A shorter version of this article the random gunfire—it’s totally insecure here. You appeared on Quadrant Online after Malcolm Fraser’s don’t even control the airport—right now the strip’s death in March.

30 Quadrant May 2015 Service Records

Complexion: dark, colour of eyes: grey, Oath taken: January 1915, so help him God, Discharged out the other side: October 1918. To piece together the rest, I have to learn Army. Gassed in Action. Taken On Strength. Grace Gun Shot Wounds. The sequence repeats— Allowed from the millions just one, the word to save might be grace. Like a malevolent scratch in the record. Not the Amazing kind He brought his final wound home nor Hemingway’s pressure And grandfathered me. I try to line up on the matador’s face The dates with a history of his Battalion as bull passes pelvis. I’ve cobbled together, from anything within reach Neither dinner table mumble Of a holiday laptop on a Bass Coast deck or the Memphis land of Elvis Overlooking a peacetime beach. but that reductive grace A pair of blue wrens awaits the result. which, with the gravity of one g, takes all the heat from race. When the records align I see: Gallipoli, The Somme, No headlong Fall-From Passchendaele. Grace-and-Favour’s condescend Dear God, no wonder he hated parades. but a morning’s absolving smile, at twilight, a life nearing end. His first charge was insolence to a British NCO— Drought-breaking rain upon roof A lifetime of insubordination explained? circles dancing out on a pond But the timelines tell me he’d been love that demands no proof … Three months on Turkish beaches by then Certain graces which abide And my self-congratulation falls away. without reaching for beyond. I have to search Navy/Disgrace to understand His last charge, of smoking between decks. Rod Usher A terrible crime, it seems, for a much-wounded private On a depleted troopship, almost home. I see a young dark-haired boy with grey eyes The gas and the gunfire behind him The small victory of holding his own cigarette Pausing to contemplate the possibilities Of an entire hand—a man might still marry If only he can forget the mud and the madness And learn the veteran’s prayer— Lest we remember.

Elisabeth Wentworth

Quadrant May 2015 31 Daryl McCann

Wiser Men on the Iranian Deal

ack in December 2013, former US secretar- vided the Islamic Republic with an estimated $8 bil- ies of state Henry Kissinger (who served lion in sanctions relief in exchange for a temporary from 1973 to 1977) and George Shultz (1982 halt to some aspects of its nuclear program. Tehran Bto 1989) wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal was not being asked to dismantle or wind back its titled “What a Final Iran Deal Must Do”. This mis- vast nuclear infrastructure, let alone lengthen the sive appeared a week after President Obama signed breakout time necessary to acquire nuclear weapons the 2013 interim nuclear agreement with the Islamic capability. Thus, the 2013 interim agreement effec- Republic of Iran, one that purported to temporarily tively “recognised as baseline” past Iranian miscon- freeze Tehran’s decade-long advance towards mili- duct including uranium enrichment and plutonium tary nuclear capability. Kissinger and Shultz warned production, all previously condemned by the United that the Islamic Republic’s quest for the nuclear States and the international community as illegal bomb would be enhanced by the 2013 interim agree- and illegitimate. ment. On April 12, 2015, a week after Obama cel- In short, Kissinger and Shultz’s warning in 2013 ebrated his latest “breakthrough” with the Mullahs was that sitting down at the table with the Islamic of Iran, the so-called framework for a preliminary Republic had not made the world safer but quite the nuclear agreement, Kissinger and Shultz published opposite. The 2013 agreement resulted in “a subtle a sequel in the Wall Street Journal, this time titled but fundamental change in the conceptual basis of “The Iran Deal and Its Consequences”. The worst the nuclear standoff”. Formerly, the USA (and the fears of the former secretaries of state appeared to UN) had insisted that the Islamic Republic remain be confirmed by the latest turn of events: “in the cold” until its nuclear weapons ambition was irrevocably ended. Some kind of nuclear program negotiations that began 12 years ago as an with an “exclusively civilian purpose” was not out international effort to prevent an Iranian of the question but the idea of “an Iranian military capability to develop a nuclear arsenal are nuclear capability” and Iran as “a nuclear threshold ending with an agreement that concedes this power” had previously come under the category of very capability, albeit short of its full capacity in non-negotiable. After November 2013, however, the the first ten years. rules of engagement changed or, to put it the other way around, engagement had changed the rules. The problem, in the opinion of Kissinger and Ever since, regrettably, the United States (along Shultz, is that the P5+1 (UN Security Council with the other P5+1 nations) has been prepared to members plus Germany) negotiations have progres- negotiate about “breakout times”, implicitly accept- sively legitimised Tehran’s thirteen-year-old quest ing the Islamic Republic’s status as “a nuclear for nuclear weapons capability. Between 2003 and threshold power”. 2013 Tehran “defied unambiguous UN and IAEA This explains why Kissinger and Shultz, in their demands and proceeded with a major nuclear effort, April op-ed, assert that the Islamic Republic has incompatible with an exclusively civilian purpose”. turned the original—we might say actual—pur- During this time Iran “periodically engaged in talks pose of the P5+1 deliberations “on its head”. The so- but never dismantled any aspect of its enrichment called framework appears to give Tehran virtually infrastructure or growing stockpile of fissile mate- everything it wants: the possibility of progressing rial”, notwithstanding six Security Council resolu- towards nuclear weapons capability and the lifting tions passed between 2006 and 2010. The interim of crippling sanctions. Kissinger and Shultz argue agreement reached on November 24, 2013, had pro- that although President Obama and Secretary of

32 Quadrant May 2015 Wiser Men on the Iranian Deal

State John Kerry deserve “respect” for attempting points in the framework for a preliminary nuclear “to impose significant constraints on Iran’s nuclear agreement. Without the release of an official program”, including confining the enrichment of detailed text we cannot be sure about the specifics. uranium to one facility, the 2015 framework has gap- Obama and Kerry insist that economic sanctions ing holes. For instance, two weeks after announcing will be relaxed in a piecemeal fashion concomitant their diplomatic “breakthrough”, Obama and Kerry to Iran’s verified compliance with an official 2015 were still to release an official text of the agreement, preliminary nuclear agreement, but already the allowing Iran’s principal negotiator to dismiss Iranians are engaged in pushback. Various Iranian America’s interpretation of the agreement as “spin”. spokesmen call American pronouncements a “mis- And even if the Islamic Republic dutifully signs up interpretation” of the framework for the agreement, to a detailed preliminary nuclear agreement by the while Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei end of June, it is not required to dismantle the vast now insists he cannot countenance a June deal nuclear program, merely put it on hold—a “strate- containing anything short of an immediate and gic pause” we might call it. total cessation of sanctions, and that the so-called Moreover, if Tehran decides to pursue the goal framework his negotiators accepted on April 2 was of nuclear weapons capability over the next ten “unfinished and non-binding”. Here is “the shrewd years, history tells us that the International Atomic diplomacy” that Kissinger and Shultz note in “The Energy Agency (IAEA) will not Iran Deal and Its Consequences”. be up to the job of detecting such We can imagine a flannelling John a development. And once those ten merica’s diplomatic Kerry on the line to a flummoxed years are up, the “scope and sophis- A Barack Obama, talking about tication” of Iran’s nuclear, military outreach can end up how to break the impasse with yet and industrial power almost cer- not only legitimising another concession, this time on tainly guarantee the very outcome sanctions relief. all the P5+1 talks were meant to a wayward regime Team Obama has spoken about prevent. President Obama’s pre- but also emboldening “snap-back” sanctions in the case of liminary nuclear agreement, in the it, usually at the Iranian non-compliance. Kissinger opinion of Kissinger and Shultz, and Shultz are sceptical, suggesting does not diminish the threat of a expense of America’s that any restoration of sanctions is nuclear-armed Iran but instead traditional allies unlikely to be as automatic as the gives Tehran the “latent capacity to expression snap-back implies: “In weaponise at a time of its choosing”. and the civilised countries that had reluctantly joined world in general. in previous rounds, the demands of hy has all this come to pass? public and commercial opinion will The premise of Michael militate against automatic or even Rubin’sW Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of prompt ‘snap-back’.” Some future attempt “to reim- Engaging Rogue Regimes (2014) is that government- pose sanctions risks primarily isolating America, sanctioned negotiations with rogue regimes, from not Iran”. Besides, Khamenei and the twelve-mem- the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea to the ber Guardian Council can—in the course of the Islamic Republic of Iran, are not necessarily a posi- next ten years—invalidate a nuclear deal authorised tive thing. Unless a rogue entity is ready and willing by President Hassan Rouhani whenever they deem to be “brought in from the cold”, as was the case the moment providential. in 2003 with Gaddafi’s WMD program, would- Kissinger and Shultz are not convinced America be peacemakers are likely to do more harm than should be giving the Iranians the benefit of the good. US diplomatic outreach, according to Rubin, doubt, because co-operation is not “an exercise in can end up not only legitimising a wayward regime good feeling”, and for past thirty-five years the but also emboldening it, usually at the expense of Islamic Republic has professed an existentialist hos- America’s traditional allies and the civilised world tility towards the United States (“the Great Satan”). in general. Enter the Peacemaker-in-Chief and his Kissinger and Shultz put it this way: attempted rapprochement with Iran. It is the rogue state, Kissinger and Shultz contend, that always Iran’s representatives (including its Supreme has the upper hand in negotiations: “While Iran Leader) continue to profess a revolutionary treated the mere fact of its willingness to negotiate anti-Western concept of international order; as a concession, the West felt compelled to break domestically, some senior Iranians describe every deadlock with a new proposal.” nuclear negotiations as a form of jihad by Sanctions remain one of the obvious sticking other means.

Quadrant May 2015 33 Wiser Men on the Iranian Deal

As recently as March, Khamenei vented his explained the situation at his March rally: feelings with an hour-long anti-American diatribe “America’s objectives on regional matters are the in front of a crowd of frenzied activists, climax- opposite to our objectives.” ing with this Orwellian chant: “Death to America! Death to Israel!” ere the Islamic Republic to attain nuclear The lifting of sanctions against the Islamic weapons capability—or even seem to be in Republic, in whatever form that might take, theW process of doing so—the United States would could give the ruling clique in Tehran the breath- be left with two options. One involves watching ing space it requires to achieve nuclear weapons on as Saudi Arabia and Egypt get the bomb, a capability before their religion-infused kleptocracy process that in all likelihood would be facilitated becomes even less tenable. Even the current Iranian by Pakistan. Here is the stuff of nightmares. The president, the “pragmatic” Hassan Rouhani, has only alternative to this means America provid- boasted of misleading the international commu- ing a “nuclear umbrella” to its Middle East allies, nity throughout the first decade of the twenty-first from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Jordan and the century to buy time for Iran’s attainment of nuclear Gulf sheikhdoms. Such a scenario, as Kissinger weapons capability. During Rouhani’s tenure as and Shultz make clear, would result in the US the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear envoy”, Iran built being forever ensnared in the machinations of the its top secret Fordow site and also a heavy-water Middle East. So much for the Obama Doctrine plant in Arak capable of turning out plutonium. and the promise of American disengagement. In With “moderates” such as Rouhani what need does either case, we are taking about the evisceration Iran have of “hard-liners”? The idea of a nuclear of the whole anti-proliferation structure as it cur- deal serving as “a way station towards the eventual rently exists. domestication of Iran” is dismissed by Kissinger The consequences of the Islamic Republic and Shultz as a dangerous delusion. obtaining nuclear weapons capability are dire, Not the least damning element of the Kissinger– something that President Obama himself has Shultz critique of President Obama’s nuclear repeatedly acknowledged over the years. It would, agreement “triumph” relates to Realpolitik or, as as Kissinger and Shultz say, inflame a region that is our wily former secretaries of state term it, “tra- already trending towards “sectarian upheaval” and ditional balance of power theory”. Washington’s involve Iran actively intensifying “efforts to expand attempted rapprochement with Tehran makes no and entrench its power in neighbouring states”. strategic sense, according to Kissinger and Shultz, The irresponsible conduct of the P5+1 negotia- since it involves aiding and abetting the “the rising tors, as the wise men make clear, has already done or expanding power” rather than bolstering “the great damage well in advance of any final agree- weaker side” in the sectarian conflagration rag- ment. For the June preliminary nuclear agreement ing throughout the Middle East. One enemy of to have a positive impact on the region, Iran must the civilised world in the region, Islamic State, is give up its nuclear weapons ambition and its neigh- the also the enemy of the Islamic Republic but, bours must believe that to be true. The real folly of as Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu pointed out in his P5+1 is to have allowed the Islamic Republic over March 3 address to Congress, that does not turn the years to subvert their original mission by rede- the Islamic Republic into America’s friend. The fining the debate or discussion in terms of limiting Islamic Republic, on account of its military and Iran’s “breakout time”. It should never have come industrial capacity, has the potential to create far to this. The peacemakers, as is so often the case in more mayhem in the Middle East than the Khmer history, have made war of every imaginable kind Rouge-like Islamic State. Besides, the idea that the more likely, and that includes military intervention USA and the Iran might co-ordinate their respec- in Iran. tive resources to thwart Sunni militants (from the Taliban in Afghanistan to Al Qaeda in Iraq)—“the Daryl McCann reviewed Robert G. Rabil’s Salafism Grand Bargain”, as it was once tagged—lost all in Lebanon in the April issue. He has a blog at http:// credibility long ago. Supreme Leader Khamenei darylmccann.blogspot.com.au.

34 Quadrant May 2015 Chris Berg

The Undone Tasks of Deregulation

ack in 2007, Kevin Rudd thought he could coastal shipping, and of course the environment. make a big political statement by outflanking These increased the regulatory burden on indi- John Howard as a free marketeer. He claimed vidual sectors, but also the economy in general. Bto be the true “economic conservative”, and attacked For instance, the cost of regulation imposed on the the Howard government’s “reckless spending”. But mining and energy sectors flow through to raise the that was just half of Rudd’s pitch. A headline in costs of downstream products. Just as taxes—like the the Australian Financial Review in October that carbon and mining taxes—reduce economic growth year screamed, “Labor blasts PM over red tape bur- and living standards, so can regulation imposed on den”. Readers learned that Rudd had “savaged” the these vital sectors. Coalition for the regulation that was “strangling” Some of the most egregious new regulations were business. “Stand by for the Regulation Revolution,” not successfully implemented. Communications said the Sydney Morning Herald; “cutting back the Minister Stephen Conroy was unable to pass his maze of business regulation and red tape” would be large-scale attempt to regulate fairness in the press. one of Rudd’s “top policy priorities”. Attorney-General Nicola Roxon was unable to pass They say the past is another country. Campaigns her attempt to create a right not to be offended on are another planet. Once handed power by the everything from race to politics in the workplace. Australian voters, the practice of the Rudd govern- Roxon did however manage to pass that manifestly ment was light years away from its soaring cam- absurd and deeply symbolic instance of regulatory paign rhetoric. Yes, true to Rudd’s promise, Lindsay over-reach—plain packaging on tobacco products. Tanner was appointed Australia’s Minister for These new regulations became a source of pride Finance and Deregulation. Yet one of Tanner’s first for the Labor government. Trying to combat the acts as minister was to preside over a vast increase in sense that parliament under Julia Gillard’s minority regulatory control over the finance sector, adopting government was chaotic, Anthony Albanese used new federal anti-money-laundering and counter- to brag about just how many pages of legislation terrorism-financing laws that had been prepared by Gillard had ushered through parliament. As the the Howard government. months ticked by the number grew ever larger. In This was just a taste of things to come. Tanner six years, Labor passed a whopping 975 acts, adding was our first deregulation minister and the experi- up to 38,874 pages of legislation. ment was a failure. Just as he was unable, as Minister It’s true that the volume of legislation is an for Finance, to prevent the massive splurge of gov- imperfect measure of the growth in regulation, for a ernment spending instigated by Rudd, Wayne Swan number of important reasons. It is indicative rather and Treasury Secretary Ken Henry, he was unable than demonstrative. It does not take into account to hold back the tidal wave of new regulation that the effect that each new piece of legislation will came with an interventionist government. By the have, nor does it take into account the fact that twilight of the Labor government, this wave of reg- some legislation might repeal existing law, thereby ulatory interventionism had become a flood. Rudd’s reducing the regulatory burden. On the other side professed disdain for the red tape burden strangling of the ledger these figures do not include subor- business was forgotten. Vast new regulatory frame- dinate legislation nor any state laws and council works were being imposed on labour markets, finan- bylaws. But it is extremely suggestive. And con- cial markets, employment conditions, child care, stant legislative change imposes its own costs, as we hospitals and health, aged care, competition law, shall discuss below. In 2012 the Institute of Public health and safety laws, higher education, charities, Affairs calculated that there were 103,908 pages of

Quadrant May 2015 35 The Undone Tasks of Deregulation

Commonwealth legislation on the books. implemented by regulation. In a surprise upset the Rudd’s deregulation push may have been brazen, Future of Financial Advice reforms were reversed by but every government comes to power promising to the Senate at the end of the year. Other deregulatory cut red tape. The Howard government had its own proposals—such as the deregulation of higher edu- promise to reduce the regulation which was “envel- cation—have floundered as well. oping small business” but the fruits of that labour are Every regulation, even the most absurd, has hard to see. Australia was more regulated after the a unique justification, and its own constituency. Howard years rather than less, as I pointed out in the Gender-equality reporting is “not an issue of red 2009 book The Howard Era. For all the stability and tape”, according to Claire Braund, the head of an good governance that the Coalition offered between organisation called Women on Boards Australia. 1996 and 2007 it did little to stem the growing tide of But it is the epitome of red tape—it imposes no regulation. Rudd wasn’t wrong when he diagnosed other compliance requirements on firms except the red tape problem in 2007. It’s just that he wasn’t paperwork, and paperwork that has no other pur- the person—and his party wasn’t game—to fix it. pose except informing government. It should be the low-hanging fruit of regulatory reduction. There is o how does the Abbott government shape up? not a single person in the country, except perhaps There are positive early signs. On the headline the bureaucrats that administer the program, who figureS of legislative activity, 2014 was a good year. would be materially worse off if this requirement There were just 135 acts constituting 4607 pages of was abandoned. Yet gender reporting could not be legislation passed through the Commonwealth par- repealed. liament last year. This is a drop from the more than In some areas the government seems intent on 5000 pages passed in 2013, and happily well below going backwards. The Abbott government started the 8150 passed in 2012. No doubt this is in part due 2015 with a stalled budget and by talking up a range to the trouble that the government has had pass- of regulatory increases. It’s clamping down on foreign ing its bills through a hostile, unpredictable Senate. ownership in property. It’s introducing new country- But it is also due to the efforts of the Coalition’s of-origin labels to food products. It’s talking about own deregulation minister, Josh Frydenberg, and lowering the GST threshold on imports and digital the emphasis that the Abbott government has placed products, which would require enormous new regu- on its deregulation agenda. Abbott and Frydenberg latory infrastructure for retailers and importers alike. made deregulation one of the central features of It has passed legislation to impose new controls on its economic message in the Gillard years, lean- social media websites to clamp down on cyberbully- ing heavily on reducing the regulatory burden as ing and to require internet service providers to keep part of its plan to revive the economy after years of vast amounts of information on every Australian’s sluggishness. online activities just in case they are in the future And yet. While the Abbott government repealed suspected of a crime or regulatory violation. 57,000 pages of legislation in 2014—and claims to have saved the economy a whopping $2.1 billion a e can bat the pros and cons of these proposals year—much of that which was repealed was already around. They ought to be debated earnestly. defunct. The real work of deregulation, if it is to ButW they illustrate that even a government as appar- occur, hasn’t started. ently dedicated to deregulation as the Coalition Indeed, the Abbott government’s deregulation under Tony Abbott is nevertheless unable to resist experience shows why this agenda is so hard to pur- the steady creep of new economic controls. There’s sue. In 2013, the much-publicised “Repeal Days”—a something much deeper going on here than tradi- single parliamentary day every six months dedi- tional party ideology. While it is clear that Labor’s cated solely to repealing law rather than introduc- approach to regulation was worse than what we saw ing it—were important but, as they came around, under the Howard government and what we have their agenda items kept disappearing. For instance, seen so far under Abbott, we’re talking about dif- the proposal to eliminate the entirely unnecessary ferences in degree, not kind. There is a deep and gender-equality reporting requirements imposed seemingly inexorable logic of modern democratic on businesses with more than 100 employees had government that pushes it towards regulatory excess. to be dropped, apparently for political reasons. Recognising we have a problem is the first step to The reforms to the Labor government’s Future of solving it. Financial Advice program, which would have taken And it is a problem. Each year the World Econ­ the edge off some of the most extreme regulatory omic Forum publishes a Global Competitiveness controls but nevertheless left the previous govern- Report which rates world economies according to ment’s regulatory framework largely in place, were a large range of indicators that would help facilitate

36 Quadrant May 2015 The Undone Tasks of Deregulation business. Australia does relatively well overall. We their ways of doing things, even their entire busi- rate well on things like education, the soundness of ness models sometimes just to stay afloat. Economic our banks, the health of our population, the depth change does not just occur in boom-bust cycles, nor of our financial markets, the professionalism of in the long-term technological revolutions that have management and so on. But we are catastrophically characterised the last two centuries. Tiny changes to bad when it comes to “burden of government supply lines, seemingly minor legislative changes in regulation”—a terrible 124th in the world, sharing a distant countries, and modest but constant adjust- spot with such economic powerhouses as Iran, Spain ments to consumer goods mean that the economic and Zimbabwe. Our competitors rate much higher. ground is constantly shifting under the feet of the The United States is at eighty-second, while Canada business sector. is twenty-ninth. Contrast this unstable economic dynamism The Australian Industry Group surveyed 241 with the political system that proposes to regulate CEOs in Australian businesses. The number of it. Statutes reflect the nature of the world only at executives who nominated government regulation as the moment of their passage through parliament. one of their top three impediments to growth has Legislation is static—black words in leather books grown from 9 per cent in 2011 to 11 per cent in 2014. that can only be altered through fraught and com- This figure may seem relatively plex political negotiation. Even small in isolation, but given that it minor, uncontroversial legislative competes against other factors like irms facing amendments can take months. the global economic and invest- F Serious change can take years, ment climate, it is strikingly high. economic headwinds from green papers to white papers Fully 83 per cent of CEOs believe find that their ability to exposure drafts to committee they face a medium to high level of inquiries to law of the land. Each regulatory burden—particularly in to adjust is limited of those legislative changes that the areas of industrial relations and by the legislative the Gillard government was so health and safety. environment they pleased to have overseen was a long The Minerals Council of time in the making—the fruit of Australia commissioned a review operate in: legal months and years of bureaucratic of legislative controls on the min- constraints are busywork. As a consequence the ing industry. It found that the economic environment depicted in number of primary pieces of legis- constraints on statute is almost always long out of lation overseeing project approvals business flexibility. date. Embedded in each statute are nation-wide increased from ninety- assumptions—about the shape of four to 144 between 2006 and 2013. industry, technological ability, the Subordinate legislation increased even more: from force of competition—which do not last. sixty-six in 2006 to 119 in 2013. As they told the In other words, no matter how active the govern- Productivity Commission’s 2013 review into min- ment is, the law is a static instrument. The economy eral and energy resource exploration, the largest it governs is dynamic. This creates serious problems. mining states, Western Australia and Queensland, As rock beats scissors, law trumps business needs. have some of the most onerous regulatory burdens. Firms facing economic headwinds find that their Hancock Prospecting’s Roy Hill iron ore project in ability to adjust is limited by the legislative envi- the Pilbara has required a staggering 4000 licences, ronment they operate in: legal constraints are con- approvals and permits—much of them imposed by straints on business flexibility. In an Institute of the state government. Public Affairs paper published in December 2014, Dom Talimanidis demonstrated the perilous decline he cost burden of regulation is well known. in entrepreneurism in Australia. Where new busi- But more important—and harder to test—is nesses constituted 17 per cent of total businesses in howT regulations shape and constrain the economy 2003-04, in 2012-13 new businesses were just 11 per itself. A modern economy is subject to constant cent of total businesses. Unsurprisingly, the relative shocks. Technologies change. Preferences change. decline in business entry is greatest in those states New business models supplant old business mod- that are the least economically free. els. Political events in distant countries can have The burden of regulation is most obvious when unpredictable ricochet effects for Australian firms. we look at individual firms—the time spent on Foreign price changes suddenly render existing ways paperwork, the business opportunities not pursued. of work unprofitable, or open up new opportuni- But all these little disincentives and distractions ties. Firms have to constantly shift their operations, add up. Regulatory excess can have serious macro-

Quadrant May 2015 37 The Undone Tasks of Deregulation economic consequences. In an important paper pub- of the executive and those that are intended to bind lished by the Swedish think-tank Research Institute society more generally. The former form of pro- of Industrial Economics in January 2015, the econo- nouncement is obviously necessary for government mist Christian Bjørnskov looked at the relationship to function. Bosses need some way of instructing between standard measures of economic freedom their employees. But pronouncements that affect the and economic crises. As Bjørnskov finds, a high public more generally ought to be the purview of degree of economic freedom does little to prevent the legislature, not the executive. These are more countries from suffering an economic crisis. But the akin to the exercise of the royal prerogative than degree to which an economy is free is a very impor- democratic law. tant factor in how quickly a country recovers from a We often imagine that our modern concerns crisis. The things that matter here are not whether are distinct from those of the past. But how much taxes are low, government spending is modest, or legislative power the executive could exercise with- whether the rule of law is strong, but how efficient out parliamentary approval was one of the great the regulatory environment is. contests in the lead-up to the English Civil War. Economic crises necessitate a large-scale reallo- The seventeenth-century English historian Roger cation of resources, away from troubled sectors and Twysden declared that “the basis or ground of all into more stable ones. At the individual level, a per- the liberty and franchise of the subject” was “this son who has lost a job in an economic crisis needs maxim, that the king cannot alone alter the law”. to move rapidly into new employment—perhaps Yet through executive pronouncement and delega- even new employment in a new industry—before tion governments have vested vast legislative power the harm of unemployment becomes too manifest. in what scholars call “non-majoritarian” regulatory Regulations like occupational licensing and indus- and bureaucratic agencies. trial relations laws that raise the cost of employ- ment act as a handbrake on the necessary economic e are yet to work out the long-term democratic adjustment. All regulation in some way prevents significance of this approach to governance. resources from being used alternatively—even if it ButW the economic consequences are dire. Friedrich is just the opportunity cost of time spent filling out Hayek argued that the rule of law had three require- gender-reporting forms. Even when regulation is ments. Laws had to be general, that is, they applied desirable, we have to recognise that all regulation not to specific circumstances and individuals but makes for a less flexible economy, and one less able to society as a whole. They had to be equal—they to adapt to change. had to apply to all people in society equally, without One possible answer to the problem of legisla- discrimination. And finally they had to be certain. tive immobility is for parliament to grant a certain Certainty is a strange word to be used in connection amount of discretion to adjust and interpret regula- with economic life, of course: there is nothing cer- tions according to changing circumstances. This is tain about the future. But the challenge of economic what we do when we hand decision-making power uncertainty is exacerbated by political uncertainty. over to regulatory agencies. Yet vesting unelected Hayek wrote: regulators with discretionary power does more harm than good. It exacerbates regulatory uncertainty, I doubt whether the significance which the with serious consequences for the private plans of certainty of the law has for the smooth and individuals and firms. It facilitates regulatory “cap- efficient working of economic life can be ture”. And of course it has a democratic legitimacy exaggerated, and there is probably no single problem—under whose authority do regulators factor which has contributed more to the greater make what are effectively public-policy decisions? prosperity of the Western World, compared with Nevertheless, policy-makers today lean heavily the Orient, than the relative certainty of the law on delegation to regulatory agencies, handing them which in the West had early been achieved. quasi-legislative power. In an important book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (2014), the Columbia So laws ought to be clearly spelled out. They Law School professor Philip Hamburger traces the need to be “known”. Their consequences and sig- origins of such delegated legislative power back past nificance ought to be discernible to all those who the creation of regulatory agencies at the beginning are expected to follow them. We ought to limit the of the twentieth century—where most scholars’ discretion that administrators and bureaucrats have history stops—all the way to the pronouncements in applying the law. of medieval kings. Hamburger draws a distinction But does this black-letter approach to law really between administrative pronouncements by execu- create certainty? What is certain about black-letter tive governments that are intended to bind officers law that is subject to constant revision? Or black-

38 Quadrant May 2015 The Undone Tasks of Deregulation letter law that is constantly being supplemented, little appetite to actually argue the case for needed complemented and expanded? The volume of legis- reform. When each side has committed itself to lation currently being pushed through parliaments, deregulation, all that remains is a rule-in, rule-out state and Commonwealth, Labor or Coalition, and game. Unfortunately, in the nature of politics, rule- invented by regulatory agencies, is itself a challenge outs are more common than rule-ins. The populist to the certainty of the law. As Bruno Leoni wrote in pressure for new law is far greater than the intellec- his classic study Freedom and the Law: tual pressure for less. Thus the deregulation stalemate, a stalemate The more intense and accelerated is the process more pernicious as we move towards an unpre- of law-making, the more uncertain will it be dictable economic future and hyper-innovations that present legislation will last for any length in technology. The issue is not how many “repeal of time. Moreover, there is nothing to prevent a days” are scheduled in a year. The issue is how the law, certain in the above-mentioned sense, from government sees its relationship with the economy. being unpredictably changed by another law no We do not lack alternatives to the over-regulation less “certain” than the previous one. path we have taken. Leoni was an advocate of the Thus, the certainty of the law, in this sense, common law—the system of private, particular and could be called the short-run certainty of the law. iterative law-making vastly superior to the statutory law which now dominates our legal systems. Rather For anybody who had a time horizon longer than than expecting politicians to play constant catch- that short run, the law was anything but certain. up with economic and technological changes, the Leoni’s book was published in 1961. His lifetime common law would allow legal issues to be solved (Leoni was born in 1913) had seen enormous eco- when they arise. Law can be discovered, rather than nomic and technological change, but the scale of imposed. those changes pales in comparison to the shifts in Hayek spoke of “generality” as an ideal of the technology and business that we are seeing today. rule of law. In modern regulatory parlance this is In just a few years entire industries have shifted akin to “neutrality”. Four decades ago the Fraser out of the terrestrial world into online. Ubiquitous government’s Campbell Committee into financial communications have made older traditions of work regulation spoke of “competitive neutrality”, just as obsolete. It is absurd that we have shop trading- the Rudd government’s Convergence Review into hour regulations, as still exist in Western Australia, media and communications regulation spoke of co-existing alongside always-on mobile inter- “technological neutrality”. The idea is that products net shopping. While firms like Uber and Airbnb or services that compete with each other should face are revolutionising transport and accommodation the same regulatory burden. Deposits in building respectively, they present a competitive threat to the societies should be regulated the same way as those taxi and hotel industries that have been lumbered in banks. Video broadcast over television channels with long-standing and costly regulation. Stretching should be regulated the same way as video served our view slightly further into the future, today’s reg- over the internet. ulatory assumptions are going to be challenged by Neutrality has proven to be more of a catch- new technologies like 3D printers, consumer drones phrase than a policy program. This is because and digital cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. No matter genuine regulatory neutrality undermines some of how manic is the legislative activity that character- the most fundamental assumptions of government ises our political system, it is nevertheless unable to economic management. To regulate is to control. keep up with social and technological change. Every advocate of new regulation has an idea of the world that their proposal would create. Regulation espite the small but important successes of the is always purposeful—it has a goal, a vision of a Abbott government in reducing some regula- fixed future. For all the valuable discussion of tech- Dtion and clearing the statute books of anachronisms, nological neutrality, Labor’s Convergence Review it is obvious that the deregulation movement has collapsed into absurdity when it was unable to stalled. Deregulation is now more a political slogan shed a fundamental belief in the ability of govern- than a serious public-policy project. Politicians have ments and regulators to shape the world around ceased trying to justify the purposes of deregula- them. Rather than reducing the burden on highly tion and now treat deregulation as a good in-and- regulated television services, it proposed to expand of-itself. This is a testament to the intellectual those regulations onto the ungovernable internet. success of the deregulators of the past—who made Neutral, yes. But also absurd. the case for lower regulation a virtual self-evident The Convergence Review offers a microcosm of proposition—but it has left the political class with the broader regulation problem. Regulatory excess

Quadrant May 2015 39 The Undone Tasks of Deregulation is the result of governments trying to impose their government, then the “deregulation agenda” is not values on the economy—using law to shape the enough. It needs to start a serious rethink of the economy according to their own preferences rather relationship between the dynamic, entrepreneurial than allowing the economy to flow unpredictably economy and the static but over-energetic regula- according to consumer demand and entrepreneur- tory state. ial experimentation. In that sense, it is a reflection of the political system from which it emanates. Chris Berg is a Senior Fellow with the Institute of If the Abbott government wants to go down in Public Affairs. His new book, Liberty, Democracy & Australian history as a significant reform-driven Equality, was published by Connor Court last month.

Third Party Selfie

If you happened to meet him in ALDI, You’d probably be unimpressed, With his hair so white and his smile so tight, And his Ralph Lauren Fair Isle vest. He’ll talk about poems and past glories And if you’re around him for long, He’ll tell you some dubious stories And he might even burst into song. In his youth he was much better looking And considered himself quite the rascal But now he’s become old and cranky He just sits and thinks, like Blaise Pascal. His poems have been praised by Les Murray And he likes to think he can paint. He does everything in a hurry And thinks he can sing, but he caint. In his closet are racks full of glad rags Bought in Op shops for just a few dollars They’re old but they have the right name tags From Saint James and Milan in their collars. His three sons and two daughters are handsome; Their mothers all think them hot stuff. Their trajectories are zigzag and then some But they seem to get by well enough. He drinks claret and whisky and gin and champagne; His old friends are treasured like gold. He hopes that one day he’ll smoke seegars again But not ’til he’s grown very old. For some time his neurones have been tiring But while the connections are strong And a few last synapses still firing Let’s bring an end to his song.

Peter Jeffrey

40 Quadrant May 2015 Fr ank K. Salter

Eugenics, Ready or Not (Part I)

legal, social and biological revolution is tak- denied civil liberties in the name of eugenics. But as ing place worldwide without much serious we shall see, both the definition and the reputation thinking about the consequences. Consider of eugenics have been overtaken by advances in Athis: in Britain the House of Commons recently science, medicine and marketing. Eugenics has approved the use of “three-parent IVF” to remove since reappeared in many countries in the form of defective mitochondrial DNA from babies. Each voluntary genetics counselling—a medical service year in Britain about 100 children are born with provided to help parents avoid genetic disorders mutated mitochondrial DNA, resulting in about in their children; and IVF has become a sizeable ten cases of fatal disease to the liver, nerves or heart. industry that offers parents the genetic screening of A new in vitro fertilisation (IVF) technique devel- embryos and other eugenic choices. oped at the University of Newcastle allows doctors Genetic improvement is becoming a market to replace a mother’s defective mitochondrial DNA phenomenon—a situation discernible as long ago as with that of a healthy donor, presumably using pre- the 1980s when Daniel Kevles, the leading historian implantation sequencing and microscopic opera- of eugenics in the USA, quoted a biotechnology tion on the zygote. Mitochondrial DNA does not expert thus: “‘Human improvement’ is a fact of life, affect appearance, personality or intelligence, and not because of the state ... but because of consumer it reduces kinship—genetic similarity—by only demand.” about 1 per cent. Still, the resulting child, though The underlying reason why we can expect mas- its nuclear DNA would come from its main par- sive demand for eugenics services is the human ents, would have three parents. misery caused by deleterious mutations as reported Critics warned that this would set society off in stories about health and lifestyle. Beneficial down a slippery slope to eugenics and “designer mutations do occur, though rarely. When they do babies”. A government official, the “British Fertility they enable adaptive mutations to spread through- Regulator”, replied to this warning with the obser- out the population. But most evolution involves the vation that most people support the therapy. This sifting out of harmful mutations which occur in was intended to assuage the concerns expressed. In every generation. Most natural selection is like the fact it would seem to confirm them, since wide- Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking spread support for a product or service indicates a Glass, always running in order to stay in the same readiness to adopt it. Sure enough, though there place. The resulting balance was upset by the scien- had been little public discussion in advance of the tific and industrial revolutions. Prosperity, modern Commons debate, the new techniques were none- medicine and the welfare state caused the mutation theless approved by a large parliamentary major- load in humans to rapidly increase by relaxing the ity. Australian scientists have since called for the relentless winnowing of large families that made British policy to be emulated. life “nasty, brutish and short”. Despite half a century of warnings by moral In the past, individuals could suffer death or dis- conservatives, advances in genetics and reproductive ability due to small genetic defects, for example in technology have created the conditions for a their immune systems, for which modern medicine consumer-driven mass eugenics industry. Here is now routinely substitutes and which welfare cush- the Oxford Dictionary definition of eugenics: “the ions. But even modern medicine and welfare have science of improving a population by controlled their limits. W.D. Hamilton stated that when the breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable misery resulting from mutations grows too great heritable characteristics”. It has a bad historical to bear—for medical, economic or humanitarian reputation because authoritarian governments have reasons—the load will be reduced, either naturally

Quadrant May 2015 41 Eugenics, Ready or Not or artificially—painfully through elevated rates of does result it has genetic disorders, such as Down mortality, or painlessly through eugenics. and Turner syndromes. In the case being reported, thirteen eggs from the thirty-six-year-old woman were fertilised in vitro, allowed to grow for five days, Eugenics themes in the media then some cells were screened to count the number he public is reading and viewing a steady of chromosomes. Only three embryos had the right stream of information bearing on genetic number. Just one of these was implanted, resulting Timprovement, priming a mass market for eugenics in a baby. The procedure—pre-implantation services. What follows is a small random sample of screening—doubles the pregnancy rate and halves press clippings from the last two years. It indicates the miscarriage rate. The monetary cost of next- great advances in eugenics science and not much generation IVF is reduced by the falling cost of thinking about its social implications. genome sequencing combined with the greater Any survey of eugenics themes in the media reliability of implantation, allowing more patients must discuss reports of animal breeding. One to afford the procedure. The article noted that in newspaper article in the Weekend Australian in Britain doctors are permitted to screen embryos August 2012 described how farmers breed animals, only for the most serious genetic defects. However, using the latest DNA assay techniques as well as in principle the technique, when expanded to screen traditional folk genetics. The arti- genes as well as chromosomes, cle, “Breeders split on the best way would allow much greater scope for to pick a champ”, reported the new edia coverage eugenics. Parents could avoid many computerised DNA method for M genetic predispositions in their choosing Merino studs for fineness and medical advice children, such as that to cancer. and length of wool, worm resist- are driving up the In January 2014 the Guardian ance and fertility. Another report Online reported that IVF babies of animal breeding was an ABC demand for genetic suffer much higher rates of compli- television report of how Sydney’s tests faster than the cations—born pre-term, stillborn, Taronga Zoo imported a male medical establishment’s or dying within four weeks of birth. gorilla, Kibali, from a French zoo. Doctors were unsure whether the He was needed to replace the age- capacity to cause was the IVF procedure or ing silverback male and continue provide them. was related to the infertility that the breeding program. The zoo led women to seek IVF. Another needed a western lowland gorilla, finding indicates that the extra a subspecies or race facing extinction in its native risk of pre-term birth does not arise with embryos Africa. The zoo aims to conserve population char- kept frozen for some time before being thawed and acteristics, a dimension of biodiversity. Kibali was implanted. Researchers speculate that this is due chosen partly based on consideration of eugenics. to the mother’s hormones having a chance to set- His genetic profile showed that he had a low degree tle down following treatment to produce multiple of genetic similarity to the females at Taronga, eggs. reducing the risk of inbreeding depression. Also Further research in China supports this find- he came from a good family, because his mother ing and adds a eugenics twist. Children resulting showed excellent maternal behaviour. In addition from frozen embryos were more socially adept than he showed low aggression—dominant but not those implanted fresh after eggs were fertilised. vicious. The children also moved better, had superior com- A news report headed “Next-generation IVF munication skills and showed more independence. makes perfect delivery” was published in July Allan Pacey, a fertility expert at the University of 2013. A baby was born in the USA using a new Sheffield, suggested that this was caused in part by IVF technique that greatly improves the chances the rigours of the thawing process. Not all embryos of successful implantation while substantially survive thawing, and perhaps those that do are lowering the cost. Previously, IVF procedures “stronger”, he said. Perhaps freezing and thawing suffered high rates of failure due to embryos embryos is an inadvertent eugenics process, most having the wrong number of chromosomes. Only successful with embryos having a low mutation 30 per cent of implanted embryos result in full- load. This example reminds us that genes affect term pregnancies. To compensate, doctors would many characteristics including personality and implant several embryos, often leading to multiple social behaviour, not just physique and intelligence. conceptions. Chromosomal defects usually lead to An August 2013 article, “Take the test or hope an embryo spontaneously aborting, but when a baby for the best?”, told the story of an Australian family

42 Quadrant May 2015 Eugenics, Ready or Not carrying a rare mutation, CDH1, that bestows an 83 and other diseases. The trend for men to delay mar- per cent risk of developing stomach cancer by mid- riage is contributing to the overall mutation load. life. Modern sequencing techniques allow the faulty Theoretically a greater mutation load degrades all gene to be identified. So affected individuals could adaptations including immune resistance and gen- take what is a heroic preventive measure, namely eral intelligence. removing the stomach. What was not discussed in All the reports reviewed above discussed genet- the article was that screening of embryos would ics because eugenics relies heavily on knowledge allow affected individuals to avoid passing the about heredity. Genetics often evokes ideas about mutation on to their children (who otherwise have how to reduce disease or improve some character- a 50 per cent chance of inheriting it). The article istic. Genetics themes are ubiquitous in the media, did note that thousands of medical genetic tests in relation to family history, medicine and more. are now available in Australia, though in 2013 only fifteen such tests were covered by Medicare. In 2011 almost 580,000 medical genetic tests Eugenics market takes off were performed in Australia, 280 per cent higher aken together, these reports indicate that “slip- than in 2006. Media coverage and medical advice pery slope” is an inadequate metaphor for the are driving up the demand for genetic tests faster Tcombustible mix of genomics and reproductive than the medical establishment’s capacity to pro- technology. A better metaphor would be “launch- vide them. Mass awareness was boosted by actress ing pad”. We have ignition. Angelina Jolie’s decision to have a double mastec- Consider what is already happening in the large tomy following the discovery that she carried a IVF market. Monash IVF, an Australian company mutant gene that causes breast cancer. with sales of $114 million, is positioning itself to Another Australian report in January 2014, compete with larger rivals by offering the latest tech- headed “DNA sequencing to be commonplace”, nology for genetically screening embryos. The initial described the HiSeq X Ten sequencing system, benefit is better pregnancy outcomes but as custom- purchased by the Garvan Institute of Medical ers learn more of the science, they will inevitably Research in Sydney. This new machine is manufac- wish to avoid deleterious mutations. Market-based tured by US company Illumina, and can sequence eugenics will have taken off when the screening up to 18,000 genomes per year at a cost of US$1000 add-on becomes a major draw in its own right. There each. That is one millionth the cost of sequencing the are early signs of this: for example a US firm, New first genome. If this pace of development continues, Jersey Fertility Center, advertises pre-implantation the cost will continue to plummet. Professor John genetic testing of embryos in conjunction with IVF. Mattick, head of the Garvan Institute, explained Such screening “allows for the selection of geneti- that whole-genome sequencing helps doctors pre- cally normal embryos that can increase the chance scribe drugs most compatible with the individual of a successful pregnancy, decrease the risk of a mis- patient. It also allows identification of deleterious carriage, minimise the risk of passing certain genetic mutations. “Roughly 1 per cent of children suffer diseases to your children and provide gender selection a significant genetic disease, but individually [the for family balancing”. (Emphasis added.) diseases are] rare and many are new mutations.” The Center has six offices in the USA and caters to Already some parents of children with early onset international patients. Eugenics services are becom- diseases are having their genomes sequenced. ing commonplace, for those who can afford them. Identifying a mutation contributing to the disease In California, Stanford Fertility and Reproductive not only aids diagnosis but “gives the parents the Medicine Center (SFRMC) freezes the eggs of opportunity to avoid having further affected chil- women who expect to delay bearing children. This dren”. Mattick stated that to take that step requires is associated with IVF because if a client should the parents’ genomes to be sequenced, to deter- seek to have her eggs thawed and fertilised, that is mine whether the mutation originated from them done in a test tube (using sperm injection). When or occurred during reproduction. embryos are available, pre-implantation screening Research reported in March 2014 found higher would be an option. Freezing eggs is becoming so rates of gene defects in sperm as men age. Women popular that women in their twenties are beginning pass on about fifteen new mutations to their chil- to use the procedure to insure themselves against dren, but already by the age of twenty men typically infertility. The practice is also becoming popular in pass on twenty mutations, by the age of forty this Britain. A poll of British and Danish women in 2014 has risen to sixty-five, and by fifty-six the number found the following results: 20 per cent would freeze has reached about 130. Children conceived by older their eggs if the need arose, 90 per cent approve of fathers are at greater risk of autism, schizophrenia others doing so for social reasons, and 99 per cent

Quadrant May 2015 43 Eugenics, Ready or Not extend the same approval for medical purposes, such drugs from the 1960s, and with prostitution since as preserving fertility in case of cancer. time immemorial, it is difficult to prevent wealthy Half of SFRMC clients work in the tech indus- consumers of goods or services from getting what try. Some women believe that the procedure gives they seek from willing providers. them the option of a male-type career by slow- The particular difficulty in regulating this new ing down the ticking clock. Savvy employers offer eugenics market was illustrated by a 2006 court free egg freezing to attract or keep valuable female case. The Italian Constitutional Court ruled that employees—a service that can cost US$20,000, a couple using IVF could not use pre-implantation which makes it unaffordable for many Americans. screening to eliminate the (high) risk that their SFRMC also offers IVF and eugenics add-ons, such children would suffer from thalassaemia, a blood as a service for families with inherited cardiovascular disorder that greatly increases the risk of anaemia, disease. They offer genetic counselling to help con- loss of vigour, and in severe cases organ damage, struct a pedigree and thus identify risks. Clients can stunted growth, liver disease, heart failure and even also purchase IVF with pre-implantation screening death. What the parents wanted was to implant to choose only those embryos without the predispo- those of their embryos that lacked the mutation sition to heart problems. that causes thalassaemia. The woman had already In Australia, Monash IVF is looking to expand had two abortions after her foetuses were diag- into Asian markets powered by its new screening nosed with the condition and she wanted to avoid technology. IVF has become big a repeat by using pre-implantation business, largely due to demand screening. After the court ruling, from women who find it diffi- e see a new social the couple considered travelling cult to conceive after postponing W abroad to have IVF with genetic childbearing. In 2013 9 per cent of reality emerging: the screening. Australian women had difficulty rich travel to countries Their gynaecologist meanwhile conceiving naturally. However, reported strong demand for eugen- many had eggs of insufficient qual- that allow IVF with ics services. Between 1977 and 2004 ity for use in IVF, with the result pre-implantation his clinic in Sardinia had con- that demand is growing for egg screening or what ducted prenatal screening of over donors. In the USA donors receive 35,000 foetuses. When a significant up to $10,000. In Australia donors the gynaecologist genetic or chromosomal defect was are not paid, which contributes to called “procreative found, 98 to 99 per cent of the cou- a shortage of supply. Even so the ples involved chose abortion. What lucrative Australian fertility serv- tourism”; the poor we see in this episode is a new social ices market was worth over $500 choose abortion. reality emerging: the rich travel to million in 2013. Demand contin- countries that allow IVF with pre- ues to grow. The world market for implantation screening or what the IVF was US$9.3 billion in 2012, projected to grow gynaecologist called “procreative tourism”; the poor to US$21.6 billion in 2020. And it has grown this choose abortion. large even though it has not provided many options A note on terminology: Let me concede at once for genetic improvement as yet. that from the standpoint of the Catholic Church, Until the new British law, this market had most evangelical Christians, and other moral grown largely under the radar of politics. But evi- conservatives, all of these couples are aborting their dence has been mounting that demand for eugen- babies because they are discarding and destroying ics is putting pressure on legislators. A noteworthy embryos some of which might otherwise be born article in 2003 by Tania Simoncelli, then a policy and live lives. That is a moral stance deserving of analyst at the International Center for Technology respect which, as will become clear later, it will Assessment in Washington, decried the use of IVF receive from me throughout this article. But I don’t with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (screening) share their view that an embryo at the earliest to select the sex of babies for non-medical purposes stages of pregnancy—a blastocyte of 100 cells—has (as offered by the New Jersey Fertility Center). One the same personhood and human rights as a foetus, reason is that unlike the old state-sponsored eugen- from about eight weeks. Indeed, I think one of the ics, the new type is “individual, market-based”. advantages of pre-implantation screening is that it Consumer demand can be difficult to regulate— reduces the frequency of pregnancy terminations and the stronger the demand, the more difficult the at a stage when the foetus has clearly human regulation. As shown with prohibition of alcohol in characteristics, can feel pain, and might even the USA in the inter-war period, with recreational survive outside the womb. On that basis I reserve

44 Quadrant May 2015 Eugenics, Ready or Not the word abortion for terminations of foetuses, as one disorder or another. Many more people carry in the above paragraph. I believe most people in but do not express single copies of these mutations. Western societies share that view. It is true that Genetic diseases found around the world include majority opinion cannot settle a moral debate of this cystic fibrosis, fabry disease, fragile X syndrome, kind, and as the science of embryology develops we Prader-Willi syndrome, spinal muscular atrophy will all learn more and perhaps change our views. and WHIM syndrome. Majority opinion does determine market The situation is different in some small popula- demand, and the prospects and risks of consumer- tions whose histories have resulted in much higher driven eugenics are large and growing. In rates of some genetic diseases. For example, non- particular, procreative tourism could combine with classical CAH, a type of congenital adrenal hyper- the growing accessibility of IVF technology to plasia, causes developmental problems. It is suffered make designer babies a reality. Bob Lanza, chief by one in 1000 people of European descent, which scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology, is considered a relatively high frequency for a seri- an American biotechnology company, pioneered a ous disorder. However, its prevalence is much cloning technique that can be copied by scientists higher in certain populations—one in twenty-seven with conventional IVF training. He warned that Ashkenazis, one in forty Hispanics, one in fifty experimental eugenics is most likely in countries Yugoslavs, and one in 300 Italians. Some ethnic where cloning is not closely regulated. groups at risk of genetic disorders are served by vol- untary genetic screening programs that identify car- riers and educate parents about preventive measures. Upside and downside Some disorders are more common worldwide, ow will consumer demand drive this market such as schizophrenia, a devastating condition that for eugenics services? What types of gov- is highly heritable. It afflicts about one in 300 peo- ernmentH regulation might be needed? How effec- ple. About 80 per cent of the risk of contracting the tive would they be? Can it ever be appropriate for disorder is due to mutated genes. Recent research governments to initiate eugenics programs, as in indicates that schizophrenia consists of eight dif- Huxley’s Brave New World? And if they do, how do ferent disorders, each caused by a specific cluster we protect civil liberties? of genes, which can be detected using screening The first and most obvious benefit of genetic technology. screening is the prevention of disease. The new Negative eugenics—or genetic intervention to genomics-based eugenics represents a significant ward off disease—can also keep down the muta- advance on traditional methods. Consider the tion load in general. Mutations can reduce vigour hypothetical case of a mutation that is only dan- and adaptiveness even when the effect is insufficient gerous when inherited from both parents and is to be categorised as disease. As already mentioned, present in 1 per cent of the population. (In fact in all species the clock-like accumulation of muta- that is a high frequency for a deleterious mutation.) tions is cut down by the scythe of natural selection, With random mating, only one in 10,000 people but this process has been blunted in recent centu- will inherit the mutation from both parents and ries by medical and welfare services. At the same only they will show ill effects. Even if all of these time the supply of mutations has increased due to cases were prevented from reproducing, that would the increasing age of parents. On average fathers eliminate only one out of every 10,000 mutations pass on seventy new mutations to their children, each generation, which would be quite insufficient mothers fifteen. But the effect is greatest in parents to counteract the accumulation of new mutations. who delay childbearing, in today’s world typically That is why traditional eugenics aimed at reduc- professionals. ing disease has little impact on the population as Leading geneticists have supported the need to a whole. A small number of children are spared hold down the mutation load by artificial interven- disease but the mutation itself remains at large, its tion. R.A. Fisher, a pioneer evolutionary theorist damage almost undiminished. But the new IVF in the inter-war period, concluded that techni- procedure can screen out selected mutations before cally advanced civilisation is unsustainable without they do harm. And it does so without abortion by eugenics. W.D. Hamilton, another leading theorist terminating pregnancy at a very early stage. The of social genetics, argued that a rising mutation procedure has room for improvement but is devel- load means that humanity must choose between oping in the direction of a measured, targeted artificial and natural selection, the first relatively method that minimises collateral harm. humane, the second not so at all. Supporting these About 4000 genetic diseases affect humans. views is a recent analysis of the data on mutation That results in 1 per cent of us being affected by load and general intelligence by Michael Woodley.

Quadrant May 2015 45 Eugenics, Ready or Not

This analysis finds that increases in mutation load actually declining, as measured by reaction time, a are driven by a combination of relaxed natural measure of processing speed, and thus intelligence selection—the blunted scythe if you will—with at the neurophysiological level. the genetic errors originating largely in males. If this is indeed a problem, it might be reduced Woodley estimates that the growing mutation load by pre-implantation screening in the IVF market. is costing developed economies such as the UK and As evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller has USA an average of 0.84 IQ points per decade, con- stated, this could lead to substantial increases of sistent with his estimate of the decline in general intelligence within families that adopt it. That, intelligence since the Victorian period. however, would require the expansion of IVF Even if these dire predictions are true, there services beyond the treatment of infertility. Initial seems to be no pressing need to tackle the mutation expansion is being driven by demand for negative load. Individuals and governments might someday eugenics, in which parents choose an embryo with be forced to make difficult decisions to counter the the lowest risk of genetic disease. Shortly before he rising number of mutations. But that is no reason died, Carl Djerassi, who developed the contracep- to sacrifice liberty or other values—at least for the tive pill, opined that improvements in IVF would, present and perhaps never—if improvements in sci- in time, induce most women to separate conception ence and technology enable us to solve these prob- from sex. It will become normal, he thought, to lems in more acceptable ways. As the geneticist use IVF to conceive because that allows screening John Maynard Smith suggested in of mutations; sex will be reserved the 1980s, germline engineering— for fun. technology that corrects mutations ttempting to select So when significant numbers in sperm, eggs or embryos, thus A of fertile women begin using IVF, preventing them being passed onto intelligence or any we will know that market-based children—would be the ultimate other trait among eugenics has left the launch pad. negative eugenics tool, allowing This could easily expand into posi- parents to wipe out their children’s healthy embryos is tive eugenics where parents choose mutation load in one fell swoop. what we mean by the best among healthy embryos in That would be an escape from the positive eugenics—and an attempt to give their children logic of social Darwinism more a better start in life. Most parents permanent than medicine. It would also what we mean want their children to be not only no longer be true, as Shakespeare by the slippery slope. healthy, but happy and successful. suggested in his twelfth son- The surmise by James D. Watson, net, that “[N]othing ’gainst time’s co-discoverer of the structure of scythe can make defence, save breed”, and that DNA, is plausible: “Once you have a way in which again would be without relying on abortion or the you can improve our children, no one can stop it.” sacrifice of liberties, Watson wants parents to have access to genetic The second main purpose of eugenics—or screening. That would aid negative eugenics but certainly of eugenicists—has traditionally been it would make the slope to positive eugenics more increasing human abilities. And that brings us slippery. onto the rocky territory of IQ. Francis Galton Consider intelligence and our measurement of was spurred to invent eugenics by his view that it. With whatever flaws it still has after refinement in Britain those with the most productive char- to deal with cultural biases and other factors, IQ acteristics of intelligence and personality were remains the single best predictor of educational out- having fewer children than the least productive. comes and is associated with several pro-social ori- Subsequent research confirmed part of this view entations including impulse restraint, reduced rates by showing that in meritocratic societies wealth is of criminality, and employment. Add that recent correlated with ability. In his review of the evidence research indicates that children with a particular for dysgenics, psychologist Richard Lynn shows gene variant, together with lower thyroid hormone that IQ has been negatively correlated with fertility levels, are four times more likely to have an IQ in the USA and Europe since the beginning of the under 85. An IQ at that level is not a disease or a twentieth century when data were first collected. defect. It is still in the normal range, but low and This coincides with the well-known “demographic disadvantageous for the individual. It is more or transition”, which started about 1850 in Europe less assumed by researchers that raising low IQ is a when the wealthy ceased having the largest fami- good thing. Parents are likely to agree. If a genetic lies. Although IQ test results continue to rise, there test can predict this effect, and if hormone treat- is evidence that general intelligence in Europe is ment in early childhood can improve it, what then?

46 Quadrant May 2015 Eugenics, Ready or Not

Other research is beginning to identify the many citizens do the same. How might the four scenarios genes that contribute to intelligence. work out? Parents and their medical advisers might therefore not wish to rely on hormone treatment Negative Positive alone to avert a low IQ for their child. Effective hormone treatment is prone to error, needing Minority A: minority- B: minority- accurate genetic diagnosis followed by delivery of negative positive the hormone on time at the right dose. On the other hand, imagine parents who opt for IVF as a means Majority C: majority- D: majority- of avoiding the gene variant that lowers IQ. Ten negative positive eggs from the woman are fertilised in vitro by her husband. Seven of the resulting embryos are free Table 1. Four scenarios of future eugenics. of the variant. Of these, one has a 70 per cent risk of contracting schizophrenia. The parents decide The four scenarios promise different social benefits to choose from the remaining six. How to choose and costs. among them? Should they just guess or should they make an attempt to actually improve their future A. A minority of citizens adopts negative eugenics. child’s ability? In this imaginary case, the genetic Let us imagine that two types of negative eugenics tests are conducted overseas to circumvent anti- have been identified: first, eliminating one or more eugenics laws at home, which also frees the couple of the 4000 mutations that cause genetic disease in to exercise other preferences. If tests show that two about 1 per cent of the population; second, reduc- embryos have the genes likely to result in ten extra ing the backlog of mutations which, though not IQ points compared to the others, the same goal that amounting to a disease, together reduce physiologi- motivated treatment in the first place would point to cal or psychological efficiency among a majority of these embryos as the obvious choice. Attempting to the population. select intelligence or any other trait among healthy (i) Eliminating genetic disease in families has an embryos is what we mean by positive eugenics—and equalising effect, not a privileging one. An excep- also what we mean by the slippery slope. tion could arise if only a minority of families fac- It should be said at once that the effects would ing genetic disease availed themselves of eugenics not be as magical as they sometimes are in science services. In that situation inequality would increase fiction. Quantitative traits such as intelligence and between those families and similarly afflicted fami- personality cannot be increased forever. There are lies that did not. That might cause resentment and limits defined by the species architecture, if we be called unfair. However, as it would affect less assume (as we should) that limits to technology than 1 per cent of the population, and as the privi- or parental choice prevent eugenics from produc- leged families would not gain an advantage over ing non-human children. Initial gains are likely to the other 99 per cent, the inequality would not be be rapid but will then slow down as traits approach socially destabilising. their upper limits. Nonetheless the great differences (ii) Reducing the mutation load would potentially between individuals in the world today show that benefit a much greater proportion of the popula- considerable room exists for changing bodies and tion, perhaps all of it. If only a small minority could brains. afford the procedure needed to reduce the overall number of mutations in their children, that would provide some benefit, though one hard to quantify. The consequences of negative and But the benefit would be broad for affected individ- positive eugenics uals, improving immune resistance, vigour, intelli- o far we have been examining eugenics from gence, mental health and more. This effect is likely the standpoint of how it might affect individu- to be small in each generation. If so, it would be Sals and families. But what about their social ben- a modest exaggeration of existing socio-economic efits and costs? What would be the consequences inequality, insufficient to be socially destabilising. to society of market-driven eugenics? That will In both types of minority-negative eugenics, depend on which types of eugenics—negative and moreover, any negative impact could be remedied positive—are adopted, and how widely. by broadening access. The following table shows four scenarios of how eugenics could spread. In scenarios A and B a small B. A minority of citizens adopts positive eugenics. minority of citizens adopts negative or positive This would be less benign. If a small minority of the eugenics; in scenarios C and D a large majority of population begins choosing embryos not only for

Quadrant May 2015 47 Eugenics, Ready or Not health but for desired characteristics such as intel- argues, because the rich will always have first access ligence, creativity and vigour, there would be costs to the latest genetic or mechanical enhancements. as well as benefits. Bad choices are possible. With A more basic objection to Church’s vision is nature no longer at the tiller, parents could take a its over-confidence. Manipulating the germline to course with evil consequences for their children, remove defective mutations would be beneficial; perhaps due to scientific error, fads, gender bias or but adding new gene variants—invented or taken perverse motives. Government regulation might from other species—would be reckless. The sim- prevent some of these outcomes, or outlaw positive plest downside would be ill health; the most com- eugenics altogether. But if the perceived benefits plex would affect social behaviour two or three were large enough—and they would be—wealthy decades later, for example by disrupting social clients would probably be able to find the necessary bonds. Significant changes to appearance or behav- services overseas. Should that happen, the main iour could reduce the sense of kinship between cost of minority-positive eugenics is likely to arise designed children and their parents and fellow citi- from its success, children who are not quite “demi- zens. Human ties could fray due to ethno-centrism gods” but strikingly intelligent, athletic, vigorous and species-centrism. If government regulation can or attractive. The development of a eugenic caste achieve anything in this area, it should concentrate is likely to degrade social cohesion on preventing scientific arrogance and democracy. being made flesh. Positive eugenics is nonethe- Harari’s concern about class dif- less proposed by some of the most A minority eugenic ferences in the uptake of positive influential contemporary advo- caste would be a eugenics is based only on differ- cates for gene improvement. Julian dagger in the heart of ences in wealth. Behavioural differ- Savulescu, professor of bioethics ences could add to the disruption. at Oxford University, argues that something Westerners Initially and perhaps for several parents should be free to choose take for granted—a generations, eugenics technology embryos that will not only give the will be adopted by those parents children the best possible health unified democratic who already invest most intensely but the most fulfilling life. It is community with in their children, in arranging morally wrong, he thinks, to limit a large degree of the best education and medical reproductive choices. He explicitly care they can afford, who are far- approves positive eugenics, main- social mobility. sighted, ambitious and self-sacrifi- taining that parents should choose cial for their offspring beyond the the “best children”. (Savulescu and ken of most parents. In behavioural his doctoral supervisor Peter Singer do not perceive biology this corresponds to a slower “life history the danger of a eugenic caste because, like many strategy”, meaning that parental investment and its mainstream sociologists, they deny biological influ- results are more intense and produce reproductive ences on class differences.) payoffs over longer time periods. Slow life strate- Another enthusiast for positive eugenics who gists are typically better educated, have their first overlooks social consequences is George Church, a child later than usual, have greater impulse con- geneticist at Harvard and MIT and a biotech entre- trol, lower rates of violence and crime, low rates of preneur. Church maintains that “We’re well beyond divorce and single parenthood. Except for those Darwinian limitations to evolution. Evolution right whose religion forbids it, these parents are likely now is in the marketplace.” His projections of germ- to be the first to adopt proven eugenics technolo- line engineering—adding or deleting genetic code gies, negative and positive. As socio-economic as if editing computer code and then reproducing class is correlated with a slow life history, eugen- those changes in children—have aroused concerns ics can be expected to accentuate class differences. about inequality. Israeli historian Noah Harari, in Ethnic differences could also be exaggerated. If his book Sapiens, draws on Church’s ideas to warn so, the costs and tensions of diversity already evi- about the ossification of class differences. Harari dent in multicultural societies will grow. Popular suggests, “In the 21st century, there is a real possi- demand to redistribute resources from rich to poor bility of creating biological castes, with real biologi- could intensify as inequalities of wealth rise; at the cal differences between rich and poor ... The end same time resistance to redistribution could stiffen result could be speciation.” (Speciation occurs when because welfare is most generous within relatively populations become so different that they can no homogeneous societies with low social barriers, not longer breed together to produce fertile offspring.) those fractured by competing castes. Class differences will become exaggerated, Harari Those willing and able to adopt positive eugenics

48 Quadrant May 2015 Eugenics, Ready or Not could minimise “regression to the mean”, which effect, reproduce strictly within its class, either normally causes children to be more average than by choosing mates who were also the result their parents. Brilliant captains of industry and of eugenics or by using embryo selection. As finance who amass fortunes have not been able to Herrnstein and Murray showed in The Bell Curve, prevent descendants losing some competitive edge the effect of assortative marriage alone, without of intellect and character. It is not for lack of trying. eugenic selection, can be significant when it Since about 1880 wealthy families have, on average, involves heritable characteristics such as height reduced family size the better to invest heavily and IQ. The anthropologist Henry Harpending in each child’s education and status. At the same recently modelled the Herrnstein–Murray time they have delayed childbearing to promote scenario, showing that assortment can have a professional careers, increasing resources and status dramatic effect in just one generation. The model but greatly increasing the number of mutations passed shows that heritable group averages diverge when onto children. The likely effect has been to accelerate a minority class constituting the top 10 per cent of regression to the mean. Economist Geoffrey Clark, the population assorts (marries others who share who studies evolutionary effects on class structure, a characteristic). The model predicts an average argues that regression “exercise[s] a death grip on IQ difference of 30 points, sufficient to allow the dynastic ambitions”. Negative eugenics might slow eugenic class to dominate the professions and this regression but it would not prevent it. Positive practise long-term dynastic strategies of wealth eugenics would give the kiss of immortality to accumulation and influence. wealthy lineages because it would allow parents The result would be wealth and status almost to choose offspring whose talents are greater than set in concrete, an inflexibility likely to result in chance would allow. social conflict because class lines would harden Extreme inequality among individuals lowers as the rich got ever richer. Dynasties would no social cohesion. This effect is multiplied when dif- longer spontaneously dissolve but persist down ferences in wealth or status affect whole groups, the generations unless their reproductive strategy such as religions or ethnicities. With regard to was curtailed by government edict or revolution. caste inequality, the best-known example is slav- Because the dynasties would depend on careful ery, a group hierarchy imposed by conquest and breeding, there would be an extra payoff from discriminatory laws. A different example, one that choosing mates who shared the eugenic culture and approximates the scenario of voluntary castes, has inheritance. From the perspective of democratic been middleman ethnic trading communities, in values, exclusive elite eugenics would be especially which traders belong to a minority ethnic group liv- objectionable because it would add the insult ing outside its homeland. Their shared group identi- of actual superiority to the injury of aristocratic ties establish greater trust and therefore allow for privilege. Such an elite would have a vital interest efficient market exchanges with minimal cheating. in suppressing democracy to avoid redistributive In-group identity is maintained by erecting barriers policies. Their efforts to do so would be aided by to marrying outside the ethnic group, an exclusiv- their feelings of alienation from the masses with ity that also helps retain an advantage in business which they would have little social contact. They skills over many generations. Examples are Jews would find it adaptive to view the majority coldly, in Medieval Europe, Chinese in South-East Asia, instrumentally and defensively. Armenians in the Ottoman empire until the First A minority eugenic caste would be a dagger World War, Indians in West Africa until the 1970s, in the heart of something Westerners take for and Germans in Eastern Europe until the Second granted —a unified democratic community with World War. Because of their economic efficiencies, a large degree of social mobility. For that reason these trading networks have repeatedly increased it would be wise to outlaw or strictly regulate inequality. minority-positive eugenics. As already stated, that To take just one example, ethnic Chinese in could prove difficult. Technically there is no great Indonesia and the Philippines, though just 1 per divide between negative and positive eugenics, and cent of the population, own about 70 per cent of the there is nothing inherently perverse about wanting corporate economy and have been the objects of ill one’s children to have a touch of the demi-god. feeling on the part of the ethnic Malay majorities. If prevention proves impracticable, an alternative Competition for resources by ethnic groups and to defeating the resulting exclusivity might be the resulting stratification have been responsible to universalise it. If the lower orders cannot beat for some of the bitterest conflicts associated with a eugenic upper caste, they might vote to join it ethno-religious heterogeneity around the world. by demanding that government provide eugenics A eugenic elite would marry in. It would, in services as an essential component of the welfare

Quadrant May 2015 49 Eugenics, Ready or Not state. (I speculate on the social consequences of as increasing intelligence or creativity.73 Without “majority-positive” eugenics presently.) sufficient knowledge of human genetics, a society- wide eugenics program could, by reducing human C. A majority of citizens adopts negative eugen- biodiversity, dull a vital spark. That possibility is ics. This scenario is the surest way to a beneficial unlikely to prevent parents putting the welfare of outcome, with only moderate risk. Negative eugen- their children first, even if they know the larger ics that prevented genetic disease would greatly consequences. improve the lives of the 1 per cent of the popula- tion affected. A wider though slighter benefit would D. A majority of citizens adopts positive eugenics. accrue if most families had their mutation loads In Eugenics: A Reassessment Richard Lynn argues reduced. that enhancing children is good and foresees devel- Though affecting only a small minority, genetic opments in genetics and IVF making functional disease exerts a financial strain on society. As long traits available for genetic manipulation. In his view ago as 2002 just one condition, schizophrenia, cost positive eugenics will be adopted by the great major- the USA $63 billion a year in medical expenses and ity of parents. The gains would be sufficient to give welfare, equivalent to $77 billion based on 2014 designer babies a tremendous head start, not only in GDP. This can be used to roughly cost genetic dis- cognition but also in personality and vigour. Lynn ease for the US economy at $308 billion, which is not does not envisage a small elite caste using eugen- large compared to the gross domestic product of a ics to lord it over the unselected masses, because $16 trillion economy but is large compared to gov- he sees eugenics becoming the norm. Nevertheless, ernment outlays of about $1 trillion. To the extent even if most adopt embryo selection, there will still that it would alleviate burdens on the economy and be a growing social divide with those who do not. on taxation, negative eugenics con- An average IQ gap of 55 points stitutes a public good, a service that with attendant personality changes benefits society as a whole. would be more than sufficient to Eliminating some genetic dis- L ynn does not cause dramatic cultural differences eases might carry costs. This is envisage a small elite and polarisation. indicated by the fact that some con- caste using eugenics George Church thinks that IVF ditions occur at levels much too high using germline engineering will to be explained by chance muta- to lord it over the result in differences so great that tion. This is sometimes explained unselected masses, the two populations constitute dif- by a gene variant having beneficial ferent species. Lynn does not go so as well as harmful effects. There are because he sees eugenics far but expects that naturally-repro- some well-known examples of genes becoming the norm. ducing people in majority-positive with multiple effects, or pleiotropy. eugenic societies would occupy To take one example, sickle cell the lower socio-economic niches, anaemia causes premature death and afflicts 2 per often unemployed and unemployable. The resulting cent of Nigerian newborns, with similar rates affect- welfare burden would come to be seen as a genetic ing other sub-Saharan African populations. Some problem. But Lynn does not consider the effect of parts of India are also affected. Experts maintain differences in birth rates. If present trends continue, that the mutation responsible for the condition has parents of the eugenic class will have fewer children been naturally selected because an individual carry- than the non-eugenic, threatening to reduce their ing just one copy can better resist malaria. Anaemia proportion of the population and perhaps leading to affects only those who inherit the mutation from populist reaction and defensive counter-measures. both parents. When both parents are healthy car- Again, this indicates social division and perhaps riers, on average half their children will receive conflict. one copy and therefore benefit from immunity, a Admittedly the benefits from majority-positive quarter will be unprotected, and a quarter will suf- eugenics would be greater than those from majority- fer from anaemia. Without modern anti-malaria negative. This would stand to improve employment drugs, a eugenics program that eliminated the sickle rates and thus reduce welfare, boost creativity both cell mutation would result in greater contagion by technical and cultural, and reduce inequality within malaria. the eugenic population, thereby raising political An analogous situation might exist with some stability. mental conditions, such as schizophrenia and One benefit from widespread positive eugenics autism, which could be outlier expressions of gene would be a greater prevalence of geniuses. Genius variants with beneficial single-copy effects, such of intellect or character benefits the whole society,

50 Quadrant May 2015 Eugenics, Ready or Not whether through scientific, technical, cultural or bent of many gifted individuals. Historical research political innovation. That makes ultra-high intel- indicates that the ultra-intelligent often have had ligence a public good. Turning points in civilisation few or no children, even in earlier centuries when were based on macro-innovations—ideas and inven- ability normally correlated with fertility. At the tions of great novelty and far-reaching impact— same time they enriched industry and culture and produced by very clever individuals. These include increased the fitness of their nations. the plough, writing, astronomical navigation, the There might be other benefits of a general rise steam engine and the semi-conductor. Creativity of in cognitive ability. Evidence assembled by Finnish this magnitude stimulates the economy, improves sociologist Tatu Vanhanen indicates that rising life and helps society adapt to challenges. average intelligence promotes socio-economic Positive eugenics would increase the number equality and thus democracy. This effect is not of geniuses because abilities of cognition and per- certain. China is a rather large exception to the sonality are distributed in a bell curve. A slight rule because it has the highest IQ of any large increase in the average greatly increases the propor- population but has never been democratic. But even tion of gifted individuals. For example, increasing a limited effect as Vanhanen suggests could mean the average IQ from 100 to 105 would increase the that eugenic societies would trend towards relative number of individuals with IQ over 160 almost four- egalitarianism and democracy. fold. (Recall that Woodley estimates a loss of 8.4 IQ points per century due to rising mutation load he second part of this essay will examine the alone.) Increasing the average to 120, well within sometimes imprudent visions of gene improve- what Lynn sees as feasible within two generations, mentT being disseminated by academic experts and would increase the number of 160-plus individuals discuss the possibilities and ethical and political about 125-fold. dangers of government-led eugenics. As the innovations produced by highly intelligent people are public goods, it would seem Frank K. Salter is an urban anthropologist and prudent for representative governments to allow the ethologist who studies organisations and society using reproductive choices that produce more of them. the methods and concepts of behavioural biology. His If most citizens adopted eugenic reproduction, books include On Genetic Interests and Emotions in the benefits of accelerated innovation could be Command. A footnoted version of this article appears gained without allowing an upper caste to develop. on Quadrant Online. The second part will appear in Further reducing the political risk is the altruistic the magazine shortly.

Reflection

He leads a pied stallion across a paddock where sheep dock brittle grass and bleat into summer’s smudge. Others jostle water’s brink, and rinse reflections before bounding free. The horse steadies for drinking— patchwork perfected in the dam, until a muzzle creases water and reflection quivers. Arriving cloud disturbs the surface. Does it foreshadow rain, or drought electric? Only the horse is certain as it drinks dapple from the dam.

Ken Stone

Quadrant May 2015 51 Hal G.P. Colebatch

The “Boat People” and the 1977 Election (Part II)

he radical-progressive journal Retrieval, conditions enjoyed by inmates in prison camps which had church links and was available at in North Korea. In fact the death-rate there was Australian Council of Churches offices and about the same as in Japanese camps in the Second readingT rooms, published various pieces during the World War—about 40 per cent—and over a shorter Vietnamese boat-refugee crisis on the refugees and period. on the benevolent nature of the Hanoi government. After the fall of Saigon, an estimated 1 mil- The issue of October/November 1977 claimed lion to 2.5 million people were imprisoned with no protests about “re-education camps” in Liberated formal charges or trials. According to published Vietnam were based on “inaccurate information”. academic studies in the United States and Europe, It said most of those named in a letter of protest 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of to the Hanoi authorities as being detained in the Vietnam’s re-education camps. Thousands were camps had been “intimately involved in maintain- tortured or abused. Prisoners were incarcerated for ing the system of repression of the Saigon regime as long as seventeen years, with most terms rang- and favoured continued US war in Vietnam”. It ing from three to ten years. was as if they deserved it, a claim few on the Left Retrieval claimed a “Human Rights Protest had dared to make openly. It continued: Letter” complaining about the conditions in re- education camps had been promoted by individuals 90 to 95% of the 1.5 million of Thieu’s army associated with the US government and “a right- have returned to civilian life. There have wing Vietnamese refugee journal”. The article was been no allegations of torture in the camps. signed “V.N.”, presumably for Val Noone, a former Prisoners get the same austere rations as the Catholic priest who was to continue to be associ- rest of the population. And releases are taking ated with defences of the Vietnamese regime and place all the time. attacks on right-wing refugees. In the same issue Noone published a feature article attacking and The Retrieval article did not state the source generally tending to discredit refugees under the of its statistical information nor the source of its heading: “Refugees—Some Bring Gold, Others information regarding the absence of torture. Are Their Servants”. A number of its themes were Repatriated US prisoners from the North to occur again in the future. Vietnamese prison “Hanoi Hilton”, including As with previous attacks along the same lines, future US Republican presidential candidate John this article ignored the fact that, given the regime McCain, would testify that torture and ill-treat- in Liberated Vietnam was a revolutionary com- ment had been general there, as had been the case munist one, “rich” people, professionals, senior with the French soldiers captured after Dien Bien military and civilian officials and what Stalin had Phu in the first Vietnam War, and there seemed no exterminated as the kulak class, were more, not less, reason to suppose that officers of the defeated army likely to be genuine refugees. It seemed to presume should have been treated differently. (McCain was an unusual extremity of ignorance or stupidity on hung up by his arms after they had been broken, the part of its readers. The article claimed: resulting in permanent disability.) Wilfred Burchett and others had, during the Some of the 47 Vietnamese refugees who Korean War, published accounts in the Communist landed at Broome in July brought gold Party of Australia newspaper Tribune of the idyllic bars, says the WA regional director of the

52 Quadrant May 2015 The “Boat People” and the 1977 Election

immigration department, Mr J. N. Mackay but one recent arrival, Miss Sweenie Wong, … it is not up to me to divulge their personal gave a different account. Asked why she and finances … [the] manager of the Graylands her friends had decided to escape to Australia, Hostel in Perth where the 47 refugees stayed, Miss Wong said: “We had heard on the radio said, “We had one family here for only a news that people on boats from Vietnam will week and then they went out and bought a get very good treatment from the Australian $50,000 house. Some of them have their own government …” servants …” Nothing was made of the fact that Wong is a This allegation, repeated in attacks on refu- Chinese, not a Vietnamese, name. There was then gees, that some had their own servants, makes no a cross-head: “How Spontaneous is the Refugee didactic sense. How could refugees escaping by Movement?” boat at the peril of their lives—criminals, “pirates” and outlaws from the point of view of the Hanoi Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh regime—bring servants with them, pay those serv- visited Melbourne in February 1977 to win ants or enforce any contract of service, unless the support for the “boat people”. Thich Nhat “servants” agreed to come and share the perils vol- Hanh had been working in Singapore on the untarily? (One is reminded of what is said to be “boat people project” of the so-called [emphasis one of the oldest known jokes in the world that is added] World Conference of Religion and still wryly funny: a rich man on an ancient Roman Peace. However, he was asked to leave by ship foundering in a storm told his terrified slaves: the Singapore government because he was “Don’t worry, I have freed you all in my will.”) The so actively encouraging refugees to leave article quoted Toby Richmond in Nation Review (a Vietnam. In a speech at the Anglican church radical leftist journal of the time), who had written: in North Fitzroy, Thich Nhat Hanh asked for sympathy for those leaving Vietnam. When As I talked to them, each in turn, I began to questioned on his co-operation with Nguyen suspect that this group was a small core of Ngo Bich [right-wing] journal mentioned in upper caste Vietnamese who had assembled the preceding item, Thich Nhat Hanh urged a handful of expert seamen and marine his listeners not to be naive in their political mechanics to ferry them safely across to the judgements. He also mentioned in passing his gentle western society. Those who were not view that the Americans had brought land fitters or engineers were fishermen, ex-soldiers reform to Vietnam. or “Students” well into their 20s or 30s. Thich Nhat Hanh will be known to a number of readers as the Vietnamese Buddhist What exactly was suspicious or illegitimate monk who contributed to the anti-war about “ex-soldiers” wanting to escape? How exactly movement. The logic of his speech is hard to follow. could “expert seaman and marine mechanics” be He seems willing to grow vegetables on his French assembled and induced (and presumably bribed— farm but unwilling to go to work in the fields of but with what?) to undertake a perilous ocean voy- Vietnam. [emphasis added] age to an uncertain destination, a voyage which was also illegal, under the nose of a government with a Thus, according to Retrieval’s peculiar set of pervasive security apparatus which would impose values, it was illogical to prefer living and work- Draconian punishments if they were caught? ing in a free society to an unfree one. The article The whole sum of the allegations made no sense concluded: and fell apart when considered. And why were Retrieval and Noone, an ex-Catholic priest, pub- He and his companion, Sister Phung, spoke for lishing material plainly intended and calculated to a long time about the “boat people” and cited exacerbate hostile feelings towards the refugees, many faults of the Vietnamese communists. rather than calculated to create friendly, supportive It was in this context that they spoke of the and Christian notions towards them? refugee problem. The article continued: “According to Richmond most of the so-called refugees [emphasis added] had The same issue also carried an article, signed not heard of Australia before reaching Malaysia”— “V.N.”, supporting the anti-American fanatic Noam which made them very ill-informed for members Chomsky’s contention that the USA’s alleged con- of an alleged “upper caste” or thirty-year-old cern for “human rights” in Vietnam was merely “a students: moral-sounding excuse for aggression”. That is to

Quadrant May 2015 53 The “Boat People” and the 1977 Election say, America had spent 50,000 of its soldiers’ lives trapped into tacit support for the propaganda and astronomical amounts of treasure (ruining its juggernaut,” Chomsky says. [emphasis added] space program, its “Great Society” program, and much other infrastructure investment) merely for False, to the point of obscene, analogy could the sake of doing so. hardly be stretched further, or a more morally Americans and the Saigon regime were like decadent argument produced. This, of course, Nazis, so America and South Vietnam, not North accounts in part for the hatred and fear which Vietnam, were responsible for making aggressive the Vietnamese refugees aroused on the Left in war, and further America and South Vietnam were Australia and which made it a psychological evidently responsible for systematic extermination. imperative that they be discredited: by their very Retrieval also attacked and tried to discredit the existence, they were evidence that the tales of com- human rights campaign. The article continued munist atrocities were true, and, furthermore, were along the lines that although there were no atroci- of such a nature that masses of people were pre- ties or violations of human rights committed by the pared to risk their lives to escape from them, as communist regime in Liberated Vietnam, the anti- they had not under the Saigon regimes. war movement which had worked to install that Even if they were condemned and stereotyped government was not responsible for them anyway: as capitalists, bourgeoisie on the run or “black- marketeers” this might remind some people that Above all, the US rulers want to [maintain] Saigon had at least had an economic life with con- the original myth about Vietnam—namely siderable liberality, and that in the jungle re-edu- that it was a case of aggression against the cation camps of Liberation, there was no market South by the North. It is in this context, at all. Chomsky suggests, that we should assess the human rights campaign … Chomsky views hitlam at this time called again for at least the newspaper atrocity stories as unreliable … twenty new patrol boats for the Navy, for example the widely reported photos of Khmer Wreferring to ALP policy on refugees. Frank Rouge atrocities are fakes. [emphasis added] Knopfelmacher, Nation Review’s token conserva- tive, a political philosopher and psychologist of The Left was forced to do another flip-flop a lit- Czech Jewish background, whose family had been tle later when it was became clear that the photos of murdered by the Nazis, wrote: Khmer Rouge atrocities were not fakes and about 1.7 million people had been murdered. Liberated When I heard the ALP leaders refer to them Vietnam invaded Liberated Kampuchea and put as “yellow Croats” (Whitlam, being a patrician, the Khmer Rouge to flight. Even John Pilger, per- with a royal sense of humour prefers the haps for the first time, on that occasion used his expression “yellow Balts”), I shuddered, for the polemical talents to criticise communist atrocities. implications were gruesomely obvious. The article continued: The pogrom against resident Croats in 1973 did not harm anybody very much. A pogrom Tales of communist “atrocities” are meant against floating wretches not yet on land may not only to prove the evils of communism but be lethal. also to undermine the credibility of those in the West who opposed the war and might Knopfelmacher concluded: “A vote for Labor is oppose future such wars. People who opposed a vote for death.” This was probably the only pro- American aggression in Vietnam have no special refugee piece published in Nation Review, which responsibility to determine whether the victims otherwise published material contributing to the of American (and Australian) violence are guilty stereotyping of refugees as brothel-keepers, black- of evil practices, just as German resisters marketeers and bourgeois exploiters on the run. to Nazism had no special responsibility In Darwin, Waterside Workers’ Federation with regard to the behaviour of the French leader “Curly” Nixon threatened a waterside strike resistance or Jews. He writes, “We must bear unless the Song Be 12 was returned to Ho Chi Minh in mind the simple truth that any public City, preferably, as National Times correspondent political act must be assessed in terms of David Leach jocularly put it, loaded with “reffos”. its likely consequences, in particular, for The Labor Party spokesman on Immigration those who are suffering or will suffer from and Ethnic Affairs, Ted Innes, said the nation’s oppression … ignoring those points, many “migrant” community was “aggravated” by the honest opponents of the American war are government’s refugee policy and by what they saw

54 Quadrant May 2015 The “Boat People” and the 1977 Election as refugees jumping the queue. He added that the majority of the Australian public for his migrants in Australia “see that their relatives or demand that the Government put an end to the their immediate families are precluded from com- entry of illegal immigrants ... ing across here because of the economic situation Yesterday was a good day, too, and for that and that’s the criterion that’s being applied in pre- matter so was Sunday. If we can maintain the venting families from coming together”. scoring points we have been able to make over Mr Whitlam blamed Singapore for helping the last three days we will more than retrieve Vietnamese to reach Australia, and accused the ground lost last week. The Vietnamese Singapore of providing refugee boats with plans, refugee issue will, if it means anything at all, maps and petrol. Clyde Cameron, however, was count more against the Government than the to commend Singapore for placing Vietnamese opposition ... refugees in detention camps. [Deputy Prime Minister] Anthony On the same day the Deputy Leader of the ALP, conceded that the Vietnamese refugee situation Mr Hayden, in a statement again obviously aimed was creating difficulties for the Government, at the government’s policy of accepting refugees, but sought to minimise the effects by dragging attacked the poor state of Darwin’s defences, say- out the old Communist bogey, saying that ing that it was almost as easy to arrive in Darwin Australia had a duty to protect people from undetected as to cross Sydney Harbour in a Manly the ravages of Communism. The Government’s ferry. (Ironically, when Darwin was bombed in the position won’t be improved by the Vietnamese Second World War, its defences were incomplete Government’s demand for the return of all the because of union strikes.) 151 “pirates” as they are being described by the On November 23, Whitlam said South-East Vietnamese Charge d’Affaires in Sydney. [all Asian governments were using Vietnamese refu- emphases added] gees as a weapon against Australia, moving them on to Australia in order to “twist This third extract can be seen as our tails” because of their dislike an unintended tribute to the gov- of the Fraser government’s poli- uring the 1977 ernment’s humanitarianism and cies. Plainly if this argument was D political courage. Whatever the accepted by the community it federal election later shortcomings and confusion would tend against the refugees campaign, the ALP displayed by Malcolm Fraser, this being welcomed. should not be forgotten. As my Mr Al Grassby, the Comm­ was counting on own employer, a federal minister, issioner for Community Relations using anti-refugee said at the time, “We can’t just let and a former Labor Minister for sentiments in the them drown.” Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, Cameron, meanwhile, who and thought to have connections community for apparently thought the Australian with organised crime, made a political advantage. electorate shared his own callous- statement attacking right-wing rac- ness, gave no evidence of caring ist propaganda, which he said was if refugees drowned or, if forcibly being put out by groups such as “White Power” repatriated, were shot as “pirates”. He continued, and the National Front. in a passage showing contempt for concern over “human suffering”: he diaries of Mr Cameron for this period, published in 1990, in recounting ALP strat- The Government is clearly worried about Tegy during the 1977 federal election campaign, the Vietnamese refugees. Andrew Peacock show the ALP was counting on using anti-refugee and Michael MacKellar issued a joint sentiments in the community for political advan- statement in Adelaide yesterday saying that tage. Cameron used the words refugees and illegal Australia’s acceptance of refugees must not immigrants interchangeably. His hatred of the refu- be allowed to become an election issue, gees and contempt for any notion of compassion adding, “The basic question of human towards them shone through the pages: suffering involved transcends partisan advantage.” Australia, they said, was Bob Hawke has now bought into the committed to accepting a regular flow of Vietnamese refugee question. He has issued a refugees from Indo-China, but priority very sensible statement on the matter. And would be given to refugees who met normal he can count on the overwhelming support of migration requirements.

Quadrant May 2015 55 The “Boat People” and the 1977 Election

Following Labor’s second consecutive landslide That a communist-aligned union should be defeat at the 1977 election, Cameron recounted: concerned with Australia’s security was a novel idea. The WWF in Darwin had been notorious The phone hardly stopped ringing today. Tony for strikes even in the darkest days of the Second Mulvihill … complained about Gough’s public World War, deliberately damaging Australia’s statement declaring that Vietnamese refugees security and the war effort. Manski repeated the landing illegally on Australian shores would claim from Retrieval that refugees had landed with not be deported. This, he declared, was contrary gold bars and servants, despite the lack of any evi- to his own public statement in which he had dence and the inherent extreme improbability of made it clear that a Labor Government would this. He went on: see that illegal immigrants were deported. [emphasis in original] Thirdly, we said they weren’t refugees, they were illegal immigrants because the war had he various communist parties in Australia been finished for two and a half years. Nor then in existence—the Communist Party of were they displaced, they were leaving because TAustralia (CPA) which had broken from Moscow, the Vietnamese Government was sending them to largely over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; work and they didn’t like it. the Socialist Party of Australia, which remained They were, in fact, from the privileged classes. aligned with Moscow; and the Communist Party “If they didn’t have they wouldn’t be here,” said of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), aligned with Manski. [emphasis added] Peking—though feuding bitterly, all attacked “We’ve learned about the ones in Western Vietnamese refugees, as did other small far- Australia who landed with bars of gold and Left groups. These attacks were on the grounds servants. Since then we’ve seen them ourselves. that the refugees were capitalists and enemies of There’s stories floating about all over the place Liberation and that they were that “cheap labour” about the gold.” which had long been portrayed as an enemy of the labour movement and unionism, the spectre Note once again the presumption underlying of which had been responsible for the creation this story that if people fleeing from a revolu- of the White Australia policy. How they could tionary communist government had money they simultaneously be rich capitalists and cheap labour could not be genuine refugees, and, by implication, was not explained. because of this they were undeserving of any help, The CPA’s national newspaper Tribune head- even when they were in peril of their lives. Further, lined a story on December 7, 1977: “Wharfies Stop any very rich people in South Vietnam should have Work Over Fake Refugees”. The story stated that been able to get out by safer and more comfortable the refugees were illegal immigrants from the means earlier. Tribune continued: “He agreed that privileged classes. They could not be refugees, it some people in Darwin supported the stoppage for argued, because the war had been over for two and racist reasons. ‘Their reasons were totally differ- a half years. According to Tribune they were soft- ent from ours. These racists have got on the same life seekers who could not stand the fact that in bandwagon.’” Liberated Vietnam they were having to do hon- In other words, the Vietnamese should be est work for the first time in their lives instead abandoned to perish or be forcibly be repatriated of exploiting the down-trodden. The absurdity of to their ruthless government not because of race this statement was self-evident and catering to but because of class. The statement emphasised a mythology: in the modern world, and perhaps the essential and historic moral bankruptcy of especially in Asia, no class of any considerable size Marxism and communism. Tribune continued: except a tiny number of millionaires and some Western university students can live without work- What did he think of the latest boat, the stolen ing. Tribune stated: Song Be 12, which the Vietnamese government has demanded be returned? Waterside workers twice stopped work over “This ship has been hijacked. They should the arrival of Vietnamese refugees. WWF all be sent back to the Vietnamese government. Secretary Kevin Manski told Tribune why they At present we’re trying to get a better deal for acted. “Originally it was on the basis of our the guards imprisoned on the ship.” (Three security, since the first two boats simply sailed soldiers were seized when the ship was hijacked into the harbour. Second it was because of the in Ho Chi Minh City.) quarantine regulations.” “All those mugs get up and talk

56 Quadrant May 2015 The “Boat People” and the 1977 Election

about humanitarianism. But where’s the Malaysia and Singapore to process refugees humanitarianism towards these people locked to Australia at a time when unemployment up?” Kevin Manski asked. in Australia was the highest since the depression.” n December 6, 1977, the Brisbane Courier- Mail quoted the president of the Queensland On May 3, 1978, Tribune published a leader OTrades and Labour Council, Mr Hausenschild, attacking Vietnamese refugees under the heading: to the effect that the sudden influx of refugees “The Vietnamese Ustasha”. This leader described was a plot to smuggle in cheap labour for the Vietnamese refugees as “fascists” and “criminals and mining of uranium—thus pressing two buttons queue-jumpers”, escaping with their private “booty”. simultaneously. Some, it said, were killers. It implicitly equated them This attack was made on the opposite grounds with white supremacists from South Africa. (Its to those claiming the Vietnamese were rich gold- suggestion of a “flood” of the latter being imported laden capitalists and soft-life seekers. It claimed by the Liberals for domestic political purposes the refugees were “without homes, possessions or indicated that Tribune was not fully conversant with jobs” and were thus a ready-made cheap labour Malcolm Fraser’s ideas on the matter.) It suggested force. It was more than a coincidence, he also said, dire consequences for Australia if Vietnamese were that they were leaving liberated Vietnam two years permitted to enter. It also made the surprising after the war had ended. charge, in the absence of any evidence, that they had He did not elaborate on the question of often hijacked boats from other refugees, though how he thought this plot had been arranged, without explaining how hijackers and hijackees presumably between capitalist Australian uranium were to be told apart: mining interests, the federal government, the Vietnamese penniless/gold-carrying refugees, While yet another flotilla of Vietnamese and the government of Vietnam. And how did it refugee boats heads for Darwin, those already square with Whitlam’s claim that the ASEAN here are organising para-military secret governments were using refugees as a weapon societies. Last week, fully 200 of them met to punish Australia, or Cameron’s gloating that at Sydney RSL club to plot the Vietnamese the refugee issue was embarrassing the federal government’s overthrow by military force … government? Once again, the argument was absurd if they are as lucky as the Ustasha [an extreme and without even a veneer of either common right-wing or fascist Balkan group] the sense or consistency, let alone humanity. All that Australian government could even help them. mattered was that the refugees be attacked and What can be done to stop these fascists stigmatised: encouraged to enter Australia? Firstly, the Government must stop The Federal Government wanted to use encouraging the “boat people”. Many of them Vietnamese refugees as a stand-by workforce have hijacked boats, often from other refugees. for the mining of uranium, the Trades and Some have killed or thrown overboard people Labour Council President, Mr Hausenschild, who stood in their way. claimed yesterday. These people are criminals and He said the government was allowing boat- queue-jumpers. loads of refugees into Australia deliberately. The Australian Government must The government knew Australian unionists co-operate more closely with Vietnam in were opposed to uranium mining at present. arranging family re-unions … Most are It would be virtually impossible to recruit “economic” refugees, escaping from the Australian workers to mine Northern Territory poverty of Vietnam with their private booty. deposits. It is therefore important to aid Vietnam Mr Hausenschild said the refugees, without and demand that America pay its promised homes, possessions or jobs, would provide an reparations. If this were done some would immediate manpower source of mining and return to their homes. [What? Criminals, exporting yellowcake. “It seems more than a queue-jumpers and all?] coincidence that the Vietnam War has been … The Government must disband any group over for two tears and the influx of refugees forming an army to fight the Government begins now,” he said. of Vietnam, a government supported by “It was also more than coincidence that most Vietnamese who fought 30 years to win immigration officers were being sent to national liberation.

Quadrant May 2015 57 The “Boat People” and the 1977 Election

Tribune went on to state that the real plot of Vietnam Today, to which the Rev. Mr Noone was a ultra-right Liberals was to use a Vietnamese para- frequent contributor. military force in Australian politics “as they have used the minority of fascist refugees from some n the September 2010 issue of the left-wing other countries”. (Tribune in 1956 had also described magazine the Monthly, academic Robert Manne anti-Soviet Hungarians as fascists.) It concluded: wrote,I quite bizarrely: “Just imagine what would happen should the Liberals next support a flood of white supremacist The success of the settlement [of Vietnamese refugees from Rhodesia and South Africa.” refugees] relied on the existence of a bipartisan consensus within the Australian political elite. he Vietnamese refugees were also likened to With the boat arrivals, the Labor Opposition Ustasha by then ALP Deputy Leader Tom under Whitlam, and then Hayden, resisted the TUren, President of the pro-Hanoi Australia- temptation to exploit underlying racist or anti- Vietnam Society. After a demonstration by anti- refugee sentiment for party political gain. Even communist Vietnamese in 1979 outside the Sydney the Cold War ideological divide was blurred. Trades Hall against a concert by the “Young The Right supported the refugees as escapees Socialist League” to raise money for Vietnam, from communism; the Left as part of the Mr Uren called on the federal government to project of burying White Australia. rid Australia of “violent extremists” among the Vietnamese refugees. He claimed in a letter to How Manne could write this in the face of the New South Wales Labor Premier Neville Wran: public historical record is baffling. The 1977 federal election brought a second There is an immediate need to maintain close landslide defeat for the ALP, virtually as surveillance of the extremists among the overwhelming as that of 1975. The ALP’s and the Vietnamese refugees. Left’s campaign of hate and fear against refugees, You will recall that it took some based on racism, anti-anti-communism and considerable time to convince the relevant xenophobia, had failed to gain traction with the authorities of the seriousness of the attacks Australian voters, who responded to the plight of by members of the Ustashi on their political the Vietnamese refugees largely with humanity enemies. and compassion, and supported the Coalition’s It was only after a number of bomb attacks policy of receiving them. that effective action was taken. The situation among the Vietnamese refugees is also capable Hal Colebatch’s two notable recent books are of escalating as a result of the activities of Australia’s Secret War: How Unionists Sabotaged extremist elements. Our Troops in World War II (Quadrant Books), which shared the Prime Minister’s Prize for Uren led a delegation of unionists to lobby Wran Australian History last year, and Fragile Flame: further on the matter. The Australia-Vietnam The Uniqueness and Vulnerability of Scientific Society was to raise allegations of violence by anti- and Technological Civilization (Acashic). The first communist refugees frequently in its publication part of this article appeared in the March issue.

Men like this risked their lives to preserve our traditional Australian culture

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British Australian Community P.O. Box 707 South Yarra, 3141

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58 Quadrant May 2015 IX Haiku night pulling over in a small town everyone has his door mountaintops Hog distant views never making the news You cock your wrist and blast the CBD with noise. centuries separate centuries Startled knees snap back and walkers make mini-Maasai museum guards check jumps into the air, land, utter and go on. our laughter Your Harley has an extra fat black back tyre while Kawasaki riders have parked their bees crossing sunny streets in honey-comb rows for buzzing off at six past five. a few days where Rome was built The motorbike replaced the quiet Western Front dispatches horse. For life they kept the din down. Now when the Postie comes and goes you need to listen out. New Year’s day outliving last year’s days You cock your wrist and blast the CBD with noise. for our world to end But your sign language isn’t going to work. Don’t be shy, if you want to say how lost you are: use words. under scattered clouds miles from land the dead weight of history It Got Lost more leaves fall hiding the fallen What happened to the gold watch? tourist signs What happened to working in one place all your life? in more than one language Sometimes such things get lost. What happened to all those blokes you worked with? where her skipping stone What happened to working in one place all your life? sinks Sometimes you only see things looking back. the latest news not changing our day What happened to those blokes you worked with? And playing football for the team where you grew up? clouds losing their place Sometimes you only see things looking back all the light between stars Like trachoma was a worry once. If they can pay you can play where you grew up But loyalty pays nobody’s bills. Gary Hotham Trachoma was a worry once And sometimes such things get lost. But loyalty pays nobody’s bills. What happened to the gold watch? I sold it.

Saxby Pridmore

Quadrant May 2015 59 Ross Babbage

A Well-Aimed Shot That Fell Short The Defence Department Review

he First Principles Review of the Department Success will only happen with strong, clear, of Defence was released by Kevin Andrews, wise and uncompromising leadership from the Minister for Defence, on April 1. A key the top (both public service and military) question is whether this review foreshadows major supported by an energetic, committed T and able senior leadership team … These progress in Defence reform. My view is that the review is the most thorough changes need to start quickly, be pursued assessment of Defence administration in this coun- with energy and be guided by new and try in a generation. It contains six positive features strong leadership … The time is right to and six notable surprises. clear the decks and liberate the organisation for the future.

Positive Features The fourth major positive is the breadth of he first positive is the forensic diagnosis of change recommended for Defence administrative the ills in Defence administration. The review structures and processes. The review proposes a doesn’tT hold back. It states bluntly: significant strengthening of power in the centre of the department. The responsibilities and account- The current organisational model and processes abilities of the Secretary of the Department and are complicated, slow and inefficient … the Chief of the Defence Force will be clarified. Waste, inefficiency and rework are palpable The Vice Chief will be given authority over the … Defence is suffering from a proliferation single service chiefs to plan and develop joint of structures, processes and systems with capability and the Associate Secretary will become unclear accountabilities. These in turn cause the integrator for all non-military functions. The institutionalised waste, delayed decisions, management of most derivative functions will be flawed execution, duplication, a change-resistant simplified, with named personnel carrying clear bureaucracy, over-escalation of issues for decision responsibility for delivering specified outputs. and low engagement levels amongst employees. Numerous committees will be abolished and many others, including the Defence Committee, The second positive feature is that the review thinned down. Under this new regime there will is clear in placing much of the blame for this state be less scope for hiding poor performance. of affairs on the poor performance of Defence’s A fifth positive feature is the review’s insistence leadership: on reducing the number of senior and medium- level managers and markedly reducing the number Previous reviews, more frequent since 1997, of reporting layers in the organisation: have resulted in only incremental change … we were puzzled as to why Defence has been Defence has been drifting and has not unable to reform itself. Organisations need been reshaped in decades. It is now poorly to be periodically reset and reshaped by their structured. There are up to 12 layers in some leadership. Substantive change appears to have parts of the organisation, from the Secretary been too difficult for Defence leaders … to his front line staff … This stifles innovation and slows down communication, decision- The third positive is that the review recommends making and execution. No more than six substantial change in the Defence leadership—its or seven layers of management is common experience, culture, focus and energy levels: practice, even in the largest organisations.

60 Quadrant May 2015 A Well-Aimed Shot That Fell Short

The review recommends a substantial de-layering be front- or rear-wheel drive, the interior designers of the organisation, increased spans of control propose a new air-conditioning system and the elec- for middle managers and stronger standards of trical engineers propose a new digital fuse-box. Very accountability for performance. little thought is given to the more important ques- A sixth positive feature is the detailed imple- tion—the new vehicle’s operational performance mentation plan specified in the review. Noting the when it gets onto the road in twenty years’ time. failure of the department to effectively implement After twenty years of this tribal contestability the conclusions of numerous previous reviews, this the end result would probably look like a clumsily- report specifies how its recommendations are to be designed and poorly integrated Corolla. However, implemented, by whom and over what period. It if serious thought had been given to the design of also advocates the appointment of a strong external an optimal total vehicle for the demanding times oversight board to report directly to the minister for ahead, a decision might have been made at the out- two years in an effort to ensure that the department set to build something like a Land Cruiser that can doesn’t drag its feet. handle sustained travel on rough tracks and deep river crossings. Once that decision is taken the specification and acquisition of components is far Surprises simpler and the end result after twenty years will he first major surprise is the failure of the review be a much better integrated and higher performing to drive reform so as to achieve key outcomes. vehicle for undertaking the priority tasks. TThe review talks generally about the need for the The type of tactical contestability described in the organisation to reliably deliver priority outcomes review will suffer from precisely the same flaws. It but it fails to specify either the primary organisa- will not produce a rigorously-analysed total defence tional goals themselves, or the processes by which force strategy and structure for the future. Nor will the department is to achieve them. The reformed it provide a robust means of convincing ministers department will probably operate more efficiently that Defence knows what the country needs for but there can be no guarantee that it will be much the more challenging security environment that is better in delivering key outcomes. developing. In consequence it will not win the sus- The second surprise is that the review fails to tained support of ministers for budgetary priority. specify a strategy-led process for designing, analys- In order for these benefits to be won by the reformed ing and testing alternative total force structures for department envisaged by this review, the newly- the future Australian Defence Force. It talks loosely empowered Vice Chief will need to design, develop about the need for greater contestability in key and drive a completely new total force strategy and force development decisions. However, the word- structure development process, probably against the ing implies that the services are expected to develop fierce resistance of the single-service chiefs and oth- proposals for new or replacement capabilities, pre- ers. Unfortunately, this review will not help him sumably in broad accord with the general priorities greatly in this critical task. identified in the latest Defence White Paper. These The third major surprise is that while the review proposals are then to run the gauntlet of a series of recognises the need to align strategy, plans and critical reviews with the resulting messily-derived resource allocations, the structural and process mix of capabilities proceeding to acquisition. changes recommended are unlikely to achieve this. This tactical and highly reactive processing of The primary changes proposed in this context are a never-ending procession of sub-element propos- to draw together all policy functions into a single als is a recipe for continued poor performance. It is organisational unit, to encourage strategic, technical akin to a car company deciding that it will need a and cost contestability of individual proposals, and new car in twenty years’ time. In the first two years for the minister to meet the Defence Committee the drive-train engineers propose a new-generation twice yearly to review strategy, capability and fund- V6 engine and attract fierce debate about whether ing alignment. this is the right choice at the right price. The inte- The fourth major surprise is that while the review rior designers are excited by a new-design steering acknowledges the need for deep cultural change in wheel and in the spirit of contestability there is then Defence, it doesn’t discuss in detail how this huge an intense debate about whether the new steering change is to occur: wheel should be round or oval or made of carbon. The electrical engineers propose a new type of tail Defence lacks a service delivery culture. This lights and again intense debate follows on the most manifests itself in providers and customers cost-effective option. In the second two years the not appropriately negotiating with each other, drive-train engineers debate whether the car should enabling functions not providing responsive

Quadrant May 2015 61 A Well-Aimed Shot That Fell Short

services and customers duplicating functions as To prevent continuing drift and to provide the they do not believe they will get the required greatest chance of implementation success there services. should be, as much as realistically possible, minimal leadership turnover. The leadership The weaknesses in Defence culture are also team needs constancy and unity in order to reflected in the extended tolerance of the current tackle Defence’s problem of inertia and make loosely federated structure, the excessive layering the bulk of the changes within two years. We of management, the weak and inconsistent system recommend stability in the key leadership of performance management and numerous other positions, particularly over the next two years to problems noted in the report. While the review provide consistency of direction and ownership addresses some of the structural and process aspects of change. of these challenges, it fails to spell out how the deep cultural flaws are to be remedied. Most notably, there So in order to undertake the myriad fundamental is no discussion of the reforms needed to the train- reforms that the review argues are urgent, it places ing, education and development systems to encour- trust in the current Defence leadership that the age and force the changes required. More detailed review argues at length has failed to drive efficiency planning and a broader listing of remedial measures and effectiveness for many years. This recommen- will be required before a major program of transfor- dation directly contradicts the calls for leadership mational change can be launched successfully. change earlier in the report and seriously under- The fifth major surprise is that while the review mines the review’s credibility. notes that Defence tends to be inward-looking, it does not propose any remedy. The review notes that Defence’s public servants are the most likely of Conclusions those in all Commonwealth agencies to have only o what is to be made of the First Principles ever worked in one agency. Moreover, a quarter of Review? Does it portend great improvements in all Defence public servants are retired ADF per- SDefence efficiency and effectiveness? sonnel. In order to reduce this insularity the review This report is the most important review of recommends increased use of external personnel to Defence administration in thirty years. Its primary assist with key analytical tasks and proposes that the strengths are its frank assessment of the present Defence Science and Technology Organisation out- state of the Defence Department and its detailed source elements to industry and academia. However, implementation plan for important structural and the review does not recommend significant increases process improvements. in links to other government agencies, to commer- However, the review does not clarify the depart- cial entities or to not-for-profit organisations. ment’s key outputs and outcomes and it does not A sixth surprise is the failure of the review to direct how the organisation is to design and deliver propose a workable mechanism for refreshing the a fully integrated future defence force. Nor does department’s leadership, the current weaknesses of the review address in a convincing manner how the which are highlighted in many parts of the report. department is to achieve the deep cultural changes For instance, the review states that: it says are needed. So while the review’s recommendations deserve Failures of leadership are confirmed by recent to be implemented in full, they are unlikely to result survey data that show Defence’s public service in a Defence administration that is fully effective leadership trailing that of the Services and the and approaches world’s best practice. In conse- broader Public Service in key areas … Defence quence, the review’s plea that Defence be spared staff reported little confidence in their senior from any further reviews for some years may prove leadership. The leadership was seen as not very to be a forlorn hope. effective at leading and managing change and did not appear to be held accountable for their Ross Babbage is a former senior Defence official, a performance. former Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at ANU, Founder of the Kokoda Foundation, The review is silent on how this central problem Managing Director of Strategy International (ACT) is to be overcome. Indeed, in an amazing conclusion Pty Ltd and a member of the Academic Advisory on the final page of the review, it states: Council of the Menzies Research Centre.

62 Quadrant May 2015 So If You Know My Inmost And since you’ve seen the wiles o’ me, Come tell to me your name. —Traditional, “The Forester”

“So if you know my inmost why not reveal your name? For Annabels and Clarabels will not be thought the same She’s chased him through the valleys and beside the reservoirs, by one upfront and forelock boy, then down into the city with sleek beside swimming pool, its serpent gleam of cars. adroit with pleasantries between our sheets of sweet misrule. He’s in the lift and rising fast to Level Forty Four, For now the dawn has come with broom but she is in the stairwell and to sweep away the stars arriving there before. and slip them in her pocket with her keepsakes and ménage, The views are angel views up here Hobart to Borneo, and I am now your data, love, and Daddy’s in his swivel chair, yes, your magnetic field, his hirelings come and go. so since you know my physics, love. I’ll have your name revealed.” “Big Daddy, here’s your flunkey who crept below my guard, “Some call me Shy, some call me Shock, but would not give his name to me some call me Scaramouche. for all he left his card.” But I’m the chough with crimson eye, the bronze-wing in the bush. Her daddy gazes through the glass, Hobart to Borneo. Some call me Raindrop-on-a-leaf, Her daddy speaks with quite a growl … some call me Hidden Face, “Here’s what I think will flow … but when I earn my livelihood I’m simply known as Ace.” If Wally has a loving heart, but more, a careful ear, “Some call you this, some call you that, then I foresee there might well be some call you demigod, the wedding of the year. but when you’re at your workplace, love, I know you’re Wally Plod.” But if he is a fly-by-night, a varmint and a shonk He’s jumped astride his motorbike, he’ll sleep his nights with crabs and mites he’s off across the hill. in the slums of Honkytonk.” On skateboard she’s abreast of him though still she’s deshabille. Confetti blushed across a scene, they’re married forty years, a magnate’s only daughter and a scamp with careful ears.

Alan Gould

Quadrant May 2015 63 John Carroll

How I Became a Political Conservative A Memoir

ow do we come to believe what we believe? for political order. Rousseau’s “noble savage” was It is hard to know because the person a delusion, and his famous line attacking civilisa- with the most knowledge of my develop- tion wrong: “Man was born free, and is everywhere Hment, namely myself, is probably its least detached in chains.” It was not that I had accepted a mono- observer. But it is unusual for someone of my gen- chrome black view of human proclivities; rather eration who gained undergraduate and postgraduate one of complexity. Six months earlier I had spent qualifications, and then devoted a career to writing three weeks in Alice Springs doing volunteer work and teaching in a university, to have become politi- for the Inland Mission helping to build a college cally conservative. Because it is atypical, my pathway for Aboriginal children. In that time, I had been may be of interest. charmed by the Aboriginal relationship to the land, Looking back, two experiences were to prove and the texture of Aboriginal religion as much (or formative to my political orientation. Needless to say, little) as I understood it. I am unclear about the degree to which they merely The second experience was May 1968, in Europe. gave clarity to an inborn nature, which was in the I had been a student at Cambridge University for process of emerging from under the mental clouds almost two years, and had already travelled widely, of adolescence; or were in themselves instrumental including half a dozen visits to Paris, a city I had to my later views. I suspect more of the former than come to love. I had attended meetings in opposition the latter. Frank Knopfelmacher once remarked that to the Vietnam War, and even joined a couple of the key to a person’s political formation was what marches—out of curiosity rather than conviction. I happened to them in their twenties—yes, but I think had been mildly in favour of the war up until 1967, he underestimated what was innate. then swung mildly against it. In Australia, then in The first experience was a six-week visit to Cambridge, I had been more inclined to the Labor/ Papua New Guinea early in 1963, when I was eight- Labour parties. My political reading had swept from een years old. Papua New Guinea was still an Plato, Machiavelli and Max Weber to anarchists like Australian colony at the time. I spent a few weeks Stirner and Nietzsche, and on to the neo-Marxist in the Highlands including a period trekking with Frankfurt School, which was, at the time, the most the local Australian Patrol Officer in a very remote intellectually vital group still extant. I had even area, part of which had only been visited once before had a phase slightly taken by the Romantic guer- by whites. I was shocked by the casual brutality of rilla fantasy in the West surrounding Che Guevara. the local people. The Patrol Officer had just returned Looking back, what seems obvious is that I was from intervening in a tribal war triggered by sorcery; roaming around intellectually, trying to find a home. I was present at men joking and laughing about an Then the student uprisings of May ’68 occurred. incident in which a group of them had been playing I was not in Paris at the time but had been a few with a grenade, which had exploded killing several weeks earlier. Two months later I was travelling of their number. And I was in attendance when the in Greece, and at one point staying on one of the Patrol Officer, who was police and justice in the area, islands with an Australian family linked to the conducted an impromptu trial of a local man who embassy in Vienna. At lunch one day at a table with had chopped off his wife’s thumb when she protested a dozen or so present, drinking retsina and gazing about his getting their teenage daughter pregnant. out across the Aegean Sea, I was asked by the host I became what I would later learn to categorise what was going on with the student unrest. What as a Hobbesian—about human nature and the need was it all about? I remember vividly sitting upright

64 Quadrant May 2015 How I Became a Political Conservative in my chair, taken aback but then having a sudden and its pathologies (an influence that I now regard as moment of clarity, as if this had been on my mind in detrimental to my own early to middle work, which an inchoate state, struggling to find form. I replied over-psychologised culture and its vicissitudes). My to the effect: “It’s spoilt rich kids from very privi- doctoral thesis drew on them in projecting what I leged backgrounds pretending to be the wretched of characterised as an anarcho-psychological perspec- the earth, throwing a tantrum. They identify with tive on the human condition. No conservatism dwelt some imaginary working class, but actually none of here, but there was a critique of socialism. them would know what to say if they actually met a It was back in Australia that I soon took to worker in the pub. It’s rank hypocrisy.” the English eighteenth century and the works of My reaction against May ’68 was reinforced by Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, David Hume and growing distaste for the hippie drug culture which Jane Austen. Here lay the flesh and colour for my was emerging at the time. Fellow Cambridge students growing conservatism. It was spearheaded by Burke’s spending the day in a haze of marijuana listening to attack on the French Revolution, as it mirrored my the same Bob Dylan song like a mantra repeated own response to the far more tepid and ineffectual again and again seemed like a kind of world-denying May ’68, also set in Paris. Burke’s confidence self-annihilation. Music did charac- about the good sense and healthy terise the times, and there had been prejudices of the ordinary English some seismic shift away from the man and woman struck a chord, zesty ebullience of Elvis, the early The major way a as did his scepticism about grand Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. government can intellectual blueprints for society, From the simple Dionysian fun of contribute to social his dislike of the unworldly ranting that music, which I had enjoyed in intellectuals who put them into my late teens and early twenties in well-being is to secure practice, with inevitable unforeseen Melbourne, something dark and a thriving economy consequences, and his observations ugly was emerging. The Woodstock that good institutions need time to conference of 1970, as viewed on with low levels of build, drawing on the cumulative film (I was not there), symbolised unemployment. wisdom built up over generations. I the new. Those same progeny of the was also drawn to the earthy, witty privileged upper middle class were common sense of Dr Johnson, and rolling round stoned and nude, pretending to be to Hume’s scepticism. And the sober decency, calm uninhibited noble savages, but looking stiff, gawky thoughtfulness, stability and civility of Jane Austen’s and embarrassed, before rushing off to the telephone gentry complemented, for me, Burke’s incarnation of to call home—seemingly lost and lonely. noblesse oblige. In January 1976 in London, I bought a first edition of Burke’s 1790 version of his Reflections spent a few months in Frankfurt in late 1971, by on the Revolution in France. Burke remains my now turning off the highly intellectualised neo- favourite political philosopher. MarxismI that had prevailed there. Indicative of shift- ing interest, I was reading Heidegger on Nietzsche. hat view of politics did I come to? It is quite Then I returned to Australia. My political views had simple really. I like Weber’s characterisation of so moved by this time that when Gough Whitlam led theW vocation of politics as the hard and slow boring the Labor Party into the election of December 1972, of hard boards. Its real work is difficult and unglam- with the slogan “It’s time!” I was underwhelmed. orous, requiring a lot of selfless discipline, sobriety, This was in spite of the sitting Prime Minister being tenacity and judgment. Charisma is usually a curse Liberal William McMahon, for whom I had noth- in politics, except in times of national emergency— ing but contempt (if he had remained in office long notably, Winston Churchill in 1940—or, at most, in enough he might well have set the standard for the very dilute doses when leaders need to convince the nation’s worst Prime Minister). I was in England at electorate of the need for major changes. the time of the election and remember being relieved In times of peace, the major task is steering the at having had an excuse not to vote. ship of state adroitly, taking account of international From the mid-1960s, I had become increas- circumstances, exploiting national strengths, ingly engaged by the works of German philosopher compensating for weaknesses, with the ultimate Friedrich Nietzsche and Russian novelist Fyodor end of underwriting prosperity. The major way a Dostoevsky, and in particular their wrestling with government can contribute to social well-being the challenges of ultimate meaning in an increas- is to secure a thriving economy with low levels of ingly post-religious world. I was also fascinated by unemployment. The worst inequality afflicts people their brilliant psychologising of human character who can’t find work, and as a consequence are unable

Quadrant May 2015 65 How I Became a Political Conservative to lead self-sufficient lives, affording a reasonable narcissism, is not to my taste. The sociological standard of living. It is particularly demoralising for evidence simply does not support such cultural those leaving school, entering the adult world, not to pessimism, certainly in Australia. Nor does it be able to find a job. support the tradition of cultural conservatism within In post-war Australia, the parties of the Right sociology that is concerned about the decline of have been better at managing the economy than the community, and the steady reduction since the 1970s Labor Party—with the striking exception of the in the extent to which people socialise together—a Hawke–Keating years. While Labor has made con- tradition warning of social disintegration, rank tributions to particulars of social justice, health, and anomie and mounting levels of personal despair. strengthening a welfare safety net, those contribu- Australians continue to rate very highly on well- tions are minor compared with the benefit of ensur- being indicators; visiting tourists rank them as the ing prosperity and near full employment. friendliest people in the world; and they have built In the context of this discussion, economics the world’s most liveable cities. None of this suggests is merely functional, outside political categories. I moral decay. myself have drifted from a largely Keynesian incli- It is true that much more of human behaviour nation, with emphasis on government intervention today is cast in a grey area between good and bad, to soften the extremes of boom-recession cycles— where it is difficult to make confident judgments one which is sometimes falsely identified with social about right and wrong. I think that is truer to the democracy—to a more free-market view. The shift nature of things—more honest. I like living in a was in response to Australia’s extraordinary prosper- time in which many of the big questions about value ity since 1990, a prosperity guided by increasing mar- and meaning are in doubt. ket liberalisation since the Hawke era. The fact was From the Humanism book onwards my work has that the free marketeers had been proved right. And been concerned with the ways people find meaning it makes no sense to call dry economics conserva- in their lives. It has equally been concerned with the tive—it is radical liberal. By the way, I like capital- failure of High Culture to answer the big metaphysi- ism—as I believe does virtually everybody who lives cal questions about life and death, its abrogation of in the modern West, if they are honest. its traditional duty to provide convincing frame- works of understanding—especially through arche- et me return to politics in the broad. The one typal stories—to help people live better, and to bear major change that occurred in my later think- up to the tragedies that will inevitably befall them ingL was to reject a view of culture as primarily about at times during their lives. Here, I have argued for a morals—the Ten Commandment view that identifies type of modern decadence—located in the cultural culture with Thou shalt nots. My revaluation appeared elites. in the book The Wreck of Western Culture, Humanism There is a political tie. Most thinking on the Left Revisited, which was first published in 1993. I had has been self-confessedly “critical”. In this it has come to question Dostoevsky’s equation that with- often distorted one of the indispensable strengths out God everything is permitted: his argument that of the Western tradition since classical Greece, the without faith in a transcendental absolute—God— habit of subjecting human life and society to scepti- there is no authority or reference point by which it cal questioning and reflection. The Left impulse has can be asserted categorically that, for example, a kiss been less calmly quizzical, more aggressively hostile, is good, a murder bad. The empirical reality was that seeking to undermine existing authorities without the modern West had not degenerated into anarchy replacing them. Accordingly, art has to be shocking; and mayhem as the Dostoevsky formula predicted. values have to be deconstructed; meanings have to On the contrary, consensus about the main moral be exposed as rationalisations for entrenched wealth laws is not a problem in contemporary societies like and privilege. Marx had himself set the tone, with Australia, which in any realistic historical terms are his own great passion for destruction—in effect, for very orderly and law-abiding, with low levels of vio- destruction in itself—with but passing and half- lence. If anything, as the churches have emptied, hearted interest in what green shoots might sprout society has become more law-abiding. The typical in the ruins of capitalism. It is as if any true belief modern individual is not an amoral egotist whose has perished, leaving a rage against the present. pleasures know no limits—a false caricature shared A friend, John Dickson, has suggested that I have by many on both the Right and the Left. For me, been unfair to the Left in underestimating the need morals were not the problem; meaning was. for charisma in a world in which the old gods are no I am not a moral conservative—Puritan, Catholic more. With the decay of institutional Christianity, or Humanist. Lamenting some moral decline, the longing for something to believe in has strayed or fraying of the social fabric due to increasing into politics. John has, I think, rightly suggested

66 Quadrant May 2015 How I Became a Political Conservative that I may have been unsympathetic to political his idealism was not just naively utopian, but idealism because I had little equivalent yearning for often harboured a darker side—rancour. The charismatic direction myself. Indeed, I am, in tem- Tmanifestations of rancour have been diverse, includ- perament, more like the vast majority of fellow citi- ing hatred of country, to the point of hoping it would zens—the so-called ordinary men and women in the to lose a war to Hitler; the idealisation of mass-mur- street—in finding in everyday life heroes to admire, dering totalitarian dictators like Mao Tse-Tung; or activities to inspire, and tasks that are worthwhile. the actions of Australian unionists during the Second In work, in sport, enjoying the outdoors, and in the World War sabotaging parts for American planes to complexities of communal life, there is fertile soil in be used against the Japanese. Cultural masochism, which to lead a meaningful and gratifying life. and the well-springs of rage that drive it, remain a Of particular relevancy here is love of country— phenomenon in need of psychological explanation. and for me, love of my city, Melbourne. I have, since Surely, the twentieth century is one long cautionary my Cambridge days, been shocked that so many on tale about redemptive politics: promises of salvation the Left hate their own country and identify with its through politics were central to the appeal of both enemies. George Orwell wrote in England in 1944, Nazism and communism. And true, the idealism on in an essay for Partisan Review, that he had come the Left has largely dissipated (with rare exceptions to judge the entire Left intelligentsia as hating their like euphoria about President Obama, quickly country, to the extreme of being dashed on the rocks of reality). But dismayed whenever Britain won a the carping negativity continues to victory in the war against Hitler. thrive. Using neo-Marxist categories Hence the continuing idealisation Left rancour of exploitation and oppression to of Stalinist Russia, wilfully blind to has been readily find “victims” of their own country’s the available facts about its totalitar- observable in the mendacity, as a device to whip it— ian horrors. My country’s enemy is my so Australia becomes racist, cruel to friend. Orwell still identified him- universities, among refugees, misogynist, homophobic self as a socialist when he wrote this, writers, artists and increasingly riven by inequality. the Left’s most trenchant critic from The tropes endure, with Islam the the inside, so to speak. and musicians, current exploited and oppressed Georg Lukacs proved the most and across the repository of virtue. The extremity intellectually distinguished twen- culture industry, and irrationality of the hierarchy of tieth-century example of Left ide- bitterness, with one’s own nation alism. He read bourgeois culture which includes the as Public Enemy Number One, is as the last Western form capable ABC, galleries and illustrated when some feminists of providing life meaning, the last applaud Taliban or Islamic State viable real culture in the evolu- museums, and in victories over Western troops. tion of the West. It was in termi- school curricula. In Australia, Left rancour has nal decline—as he interpreted it been readily observable in the uni- projected through the novels of versities, among writers, artists and Thomas Mann. Lukacs had tried the religious paths musicians, and across the culture industry, which of both Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky (and with such includes the ABC, galleries and museums, and in a degree of seriousness as to learn Danish in order school curricula. It has been much less noticeable in to read Kierkegaard in the original), but found them the Labor Party itself, where leaders, ministers and wanting. Out of cultural despair, feeling that it was their staff have generally been patriotic, moderate in not possible to live in an absurd world stripped of their ideology, and pragmatic. ultimate values, he took a leap of faith into commu- On the Right, there has been an equally nism in 1918. Thereafter, he would spend decades as unconvincing jump into redemptive illusion, in this an apologist for Stalin. case that of religion. In England, there was T.S. Later in the century, Lukacs’s spiritual offspring Eliot’s embrace of conservative Anglicanism, and would be driven by a similar disenchantment with likewise for W.H. Auden—in both cases, paralleled middle-class existence—with what they saw as, say, by a radical decline in the quality of their poetry. the dreariness of suburban life, the banality of con- In America, there was Daniel Bell’s sociology of temporary management politics, and the meanness religion, a perspective that goes as far back as the late of an everyday world geared to petty pleasures. So, in Plato of The Laws, holding that religion is good for reaction, there arose the need for visions of an ideal the people, even though the author doesn’t believe world, for causes that meant something, for action in it himself. Philip Rieff championed an imagined to get the blood flowing, and for charismatic leaders. sacred order, in an equally vain antidote to a remissive

Quadrant May 2015 67 How I Became a Political Conservative world without ultimate meaning. then not, in that the challenge is always to create Max Weber had been more honest in clinging to new works in tune with new times, while subser- “intellectual integrity” in a time in which God has vient to the central questions of meaning, which been replaced by small-g gods, ones that he saw as themselves don’t change. For instance, whilst I do failing to retain their authority for long. (I happen to regard the Golden Age of Western painting to have think Weber was too pessimistic about the small-g ended in 1665 with the death of Nicolas Poussin, gods.) I am not suggesting that there is no genu- since then the most serious attempts to answer fun- ine religious experience and practice in the modern damental questions of life meaning have moved into West—that would be presumptuous. Rather, it has other art forms (the music of Bach; the philosophy struck me that proclamations of faith, and the need of Nietzsche; the novels of Henry James; the films for faith, from prominent members of the intel- of John Ford). I myself have devoted two books to ligentsia have looked desperate and forced. In the attempting to retell the West’s enduring stories in case of Rieff, the problem is not whether there exists a contemporary voice—The Western Dreaming (2001) something beyond the material plane, but that his and The Existential Jesus (2007). manner of asserting it rings with a grandiose and I retain confidence in the good sense of the public. false tone. I have provided a sociological elaboration in a book which celebrates the small-g gods that engage people ack to myself. Fundamental to my own work— in their everyday lives—Ego and Soul: The Modern to what I have written and what I have taught— West in Search of Meaning (1998, 2008). I retain an hasB been a belief about the obligations of the cultural equal confidence in the healthy vitality of popular elites. Bound by an ethic of a kind of noblesse oblige, culture. Recent American cable television series, like given their privileged social position, they are the The Sopranos and Deadwood, have been profoundly custodians of High Culture. It is their responsi- and edifyingly engaged with the existential ques- bility to keep alive the classic and enduring works tions that matter. In fact, they have been doing the of Western culture—in philosophy, literature, art, work of High Culture, and doing it brilliantly well. music and more recently film and television. A part Finally, my admiration for Burkean practical politics of this responsibility is that of constantly renewing endures, a politics which, as Burke himself put it, the archetypal stories and myths, retelling them in needs to balance principle and circumstance. new forms so that they speak to changing times. The churches first abdicated this central task; followed John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, more recently by the universities. La Trobe University. He has a website at https:// My view of culture is in part conservative; but johncarrollsociologist.wordpress.com.

Among the Leaves

The first to come peers without malice from the wires towards the forest branches in the nearby slope. That afternoon I watch both pallid cuckoos, grey on grey with rounded heads prison stripes on their tails, fly wings-spread half gliding above the canopy into a slow west wind, searching downward for the nest to con with their egg and the large chick that will eject other nestlings for their feeds. The time of crime passes into heat and the cuckoos and their young move on in nature’s daunting tolerance.

Paul Williamson

68 Quadrant May 2015 On Bravery i.m. Kenneth James Oxley

Be reassured, no-one who is brave Ever knows it at the time. My father In his pithy Mancunian way Said that bravery is stupidity With a happy ending. It is not-thinking-acting, impulse-propelled The brain left far behind. Stuff Of our mothers’ nightmares. Diving into unknown water to retrieve A child. Shielding a stranger’s body with your own. Engaging a wild-eyed madman (with a gun?) In conversation about the weather. Be liberated from the burden Others want you to carry for them. Kranky You need take no credit. If you can’t be You need never do it again. An old goat when you’re old, It cannot be explained. Embarrassment When can you be? Is an appropriate emotion. Pride can wait. Archaic in address, You were stupid/you were brave Eccentric, you allow A heartbeat between the two. Yourself, antique Or inappropriate Elisabeth Wentworth Styles of dress. Write disgusted comments On and letters to, Tabloids, magazines, Curse, bitterly, and frequently, Inanimate machines. The universe against us Tangles hoses, ropes, and cables, Makes paintings fall from walls And pens to roll off tables. Entropy wins; You lose your keys & glasses, Things move from where you put them, And, friends aside, The world is full of asses. Young women, if they notice you, Take compliments as passes; What would once have passed as romances Would now play out as farces.

Peter Jeffrey

Quadrant May 2015 69 Giles Auty

Brian Sewell and the Rise of State-Approved Art

uring those happy days when I was as likely be utterly outstanding artists, how then may we to be found on a plane to Paris or Venice as apply exactly the same critical criteria to Marcel on an express train heading to Edinburgh I Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol or Joseph soonD learned not to discuss what the purpose of my Beuys—let alone to Jeff Koons or Damian Hirst— trip was or what my role might be when I arrived at and then consider them similarly to be great artists? my destination. That was so I might not get involved The short answer is that we can do no such in a conversation either with the IT expert seated thing; it is only by altering the qualities thought on my right or the financial consultant seated to my vital for outstanding artistic excellence more or less left about the possible purposes of art criticism— entirely—for example, by trying to make mere nov- nor feel obliged to respond for the umpteenth time elty a virtue in itself—that we can even begin to to the following question: “Surely all art criticism is come up with such a result. simply a matter of subjective opinion?” Over the preceding years I had indeed formu- preface my words about the last published lated a number of responses to this tiresome query anthology of Brian Sewell’s art criticism, Naked but often found these relied too much on my ques- EmperorsI , in this manner simply to establish a few tioner’s knowledge—or lack of it—of art history. ground rules, not just regarding the excellent book The all-purpose answer I favour is this: “If you take itself but also about the dilemmas which face con- the six centuries of European art from the time of temporary art in general. Giotto to the death of Gauguin in 1903 you will find Brian and I both began our mainstream criti- there is a huge consensus among experts about who cal careers in 1984: in his case at London’s Evening the truly outstanding artists were and who were Standard and in mine at the Spectator. Inevitably our merely the also-rans. So kindly tell me whether this paths crossed frequently before I came to Australia overwhelming consensus is a matter of pure coin- to work in 1995. To state that Brian was a highly cidence or perhaps one of covert conspiracy among respected rival rather than a particular friend merely international scholars?” reflects a divergence in our extra-mural activities, The true essence of the matter is this: violent because in terms of art criticism and reasoned argu- disagreement among so-called experts about the ment I was and remain a paid-up admirer of one respective merits of artists does not really begin of the last true—and utterly fearless—defenders of until we start to deal with those artists principally lasting artistic values. active from the beginning of the twentieth century Naked Emperors contains thirty often lengthy onwards—for example, from the first Fauves exhibi- articles of criticism of English contemporary art. tion in 1906. In general these articles are as remarkable for their Thus if we apply the largely aesthetic criteria high-flying prose as for their biting and often hilari- by means of which many of us consider Giotto, ous wit. Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Vermeer, The presence of wit is especially vital to the book, Goya, Constable, Manet and van Gogh, say, to because much of what Sewell describes might oth- erwise seem deeply depressing. Yet the essays all deal with figures proposed by other critics from Naked Emperors: Criticisms of English our present thickheaded age as being thoroughly Contemporary Art deserving of national and international fame. While by Brian Sewell some of the artists described in the anthology will Quartet, 2012, 368 pages, £15 probably be unfamiliar to Australian audiences, the

70 Quadrant May 2015 Brian Sewell and the Rise of State-Approved Art issues with which Sewell deals are universal as well be by hanging a sloppy Hodgkin between a pair as timeless. of Poussins that we all know to be monuments Of course, working in close proximity to Europe of scrupulously careful pictorial construction, and not too far from America makes it much eas- the contrast made perhaps to reassure the ier for British critics to base their beliefs on a deep visitor who perceives the work of Hodgkin as knowledge of international collections and master- pretentious trash. pieces in a way that is impossible for most critics based here. Brian is therefore justifiably rude about Probably the names of David Hockney, Lucian the host of British and European critics who betray Freud, Damian Hirst, Tracey Emin and Gilbert & the knowledge readily available to them by buying George will be more familiar even to expert audi- into “equivalence” theories which are fundamentally ences here than that of Howard Hodgkin, and all false. Thus Sewell is right to ridicule the notion are given a varied but largely justified degree of encouraged by authorities from the Royal Academy comeuppance in Sewell’s book. After all, Hockney of Arts in London in 2001, for instance, that Frank and Freud have large and extremely ill-chosen works Auerbach is somehow “a Rembrandt of our times” in the National Gallery of Australia where they bear by deliberately exhibiting an earnest but plodding witness to the general cluelessness of former direc- painter at the same moment as one of the greatest tors of that institution. masters who ever lived. I was in London last year when the vast exhi- Such “equivalence” arguments represent false bition “Australia”, largely sourced from the NGA, reasoning at its worst yet are very popular indeed— struck the Royal Academy with all the force of a it hardly needs saying—with the ambitious dealers much downgraded cyclone and Sewell was one of who represent fashionable contemporary artists. the many critics there to give it the thumbs-down. The lie is given to such silly arguments, of course, London is a much more sophisticated city now than when the real thing is so often available to be seen in when the 1961 exhibition of Australian art at the London itself or nearby continental Europe. Whitechapel Gallery awoke many to the originality To his great credit, Sewell carries in his mind an and insouciance of artists such as Nolan, Boyd and exhaustive list of artists from earlier times whose Whiteley. Very sadly for me, since I am a dual pass- achievements make the pretensions of over-praised port holder now, “Australia” was widely considered artists from the present seem ludicrous at best. Thus, by British critics to be the worst major exhibition in writing about Howard Hodgkin, whom too many London of its year. now propose as some kind of “modern master”, How, with the considerable resources at its Sewell says: organisers’ disposal, could such an entirely unnec- essary travesty occur? Since late June thirteen paintings by Howard Hodgkin have been hanging in Dulwich ewell’s book describes with great force how the Picture Gallery. They are not confined to development of “state” art in Britain and the rise a single room, there to be venerated in a ofS bossy, dumb or corrupt ancillary funding bod- cataleptic trance; they are instead scattered ies have combined to usher in decades of generally among the distinguished pictures in the worthless “official” state art. Indeed, Sewell describes permanent collection, rubbing shoulders Britain’s Arts Council, possibly too kindly, as “a with Poussin, Ricci and Guercino, keeping nest of vipers”. I first locked horns with that body company with Claude, Rubens and myself, to my professional disadvantage, way back Rembrandt, illuminating all—or so we in the 1970s. Sewell’s book is therefore not without are told—the juxtaposition leading to our relevance to Australia, where similar institutions greater understanding of the present and the exist which help render this country incapable of past, Hodgkin and his wonderful precursors representing itself appropriately—or fairly—on an speaking the same language. That is the official international stage. Think for a moment of some of way of perceiving this chalk and cheese display. the bizarre or atrocious choices made to represent Australia at prestigious international events such as Later from the same article he adds: Venice Biennales and you will see what I mean. Today’s problems of art are international because It is, of course, just possible that Dulwich they arise from the same or similar sources. That is is being subtle, guileful and subversive, its why Sewell’s hugely entertaining book is one every- intention quite the reverse of what at first it one with a true interest in the subject should make seems—that Dulwich is, in fact, demonstrating a strenuous effort to obtain and read. how fatuous and vacuous contemporary art can Here is another sentence, drawn at random from

Quadrant May 2015 71 Brian Sewell and the Rise of State-Approved Art the book, regarding a typical “state art” occasion before the year is out), or to whom the large held at the Tate Gallery: prize is given by the judges, for the real and far larger arena is not within Tate Britain, but in There is, in the exhibition, not one single work the press, the media, the fashionable watering of interest or merit. These are paintings that holes of Islington and the mahogany dining say with drip, splash and sweep of the brush: tables of Tunbridge Wells. In all these quarters “Look, look, I am a painting”—but drip, splash the Prize is seen as a Brueghelian bout between and sweep of the brush are merely marks that drunken Carnival and sober Lent, blind Folly reflect the physical action of the painter and, and dumb Wisdom, so weighted in favour of meaningless without intelligent purpose, are not the Serota tendency that Carnival and Folly enough to make a painting. always win.

Do you feel, at this moment, some inclination to rian has recently been desperately ill. Should rise from your chair and cheer? he not survive I wish to pay tribute to the man When I first started out in art—as a painter—it who,B as a dissident voice, has probably contributed was fashionable in Britain and elsewhere to poke fun more than any other to keeping the causes of san- at the official state art of the Soviet Union, which ity and scholarship alive in British art—although frequently featured heroic tractor drivers or wives the critic David Lee, founder and editor of the arts bidding last farewells to Red Army patriots setting magazine the Jackdaw, would run him a close sec- forth to defend their motherland. ond. The Jackdaw has just reprinted I was probably one of the first a lengthy essay I wrote for Quadrant people in Britain to source and buy in April 2006 on the grounds that a book about such art: Vladislav Sewell describes it explains the complex dilemmas of Zimenko’s The Humanism of Art with great force how Modernism in terms anyone inter- (Progress Publishers, Moscow, ested can understand. 1976). Its author signed my copy a the development of In the Spectator of February dozen or so years later in Moscow’s “state” art in Britain 17, 1996, the eminent historian Arts Club. and the rise of bossy, and worthy amateur painter Paul Here indeed was an example of Johnson was kind enough to include art totally controlled by the state— dumb or corrupt me among “only four outstanding indeed all too obviously so. In its ancillary funding art critics in Britain in the previous favour, however, the artists involved forty years” and I refer to this now generally underwent a six-year bodies have combined only to take issue with one of his training on traditional lines which to usher in decades of other inclusions: John Berger. The included courses in anatomy or—in generally worthless other two critics he named were the cases of sculptors—in the carving Peter Fuller and Brian Sewell. of marble. How many students in “official” state art. As a former Marxist, Fuller Western art schools know anything awoke late to the menace inherent of such matters today? in Berger’s theories, and most Little did we imagine, nearly half a century of Fuller’s books chart his disillusionment with ago, that official “state art”—of a more informal Berger and his belated discovery of the merits of nature admittedly—would similarly rear its head the nineteenth-century English critic John Ruskin. in most Western democracies. Yet no Russian arts Sadly, Fuller was killed in a motor accident twenty- commissar probably ever achieved the power of five years ago but he was never, in my view, the such contemporary figures in Britain as Nicholas possessor of “a good eye”—in other words his Serota at the Tate Gallery, who effectively enjoys aesthetic judgments were often fallible. the “thumbs up/thumbs down” powers there of a Berger was a strange paradox: the possessor of Roman emperor. Instead of gladiatorial contests, excellent aesthetic instincts which could easily find however, Britain’s unfortunate public is treated to themselves swamped by his lifelong devotion to such meaningless non-contests as the annual Turner Marxist causes. His influence gave rise forty years Prizes, which perhaps belong more properly in a ago to a school of so-called “social” critics devoted totalitarian state such as North Korea. Sewell is to “Marxist analysis” and to a belief that art should scathing about such non-events: be judged for its social or political influence rather than by its intrinsic merit as art. A corollary to this It hardly matters who is chosen for the short fatal and ultra-destructive view was that “aesthetic” list (though sceptics believe this is decided long values were somehow a “bourgeois” myth—a

72 Quadrant May 2015 Brian Sewell and the Rise of State-Approved Art means, in fact, whereby a privileged social class to the concept or idea. For example, a phial of could impose its cultural tastes on less privileged the bath water in which the artist bathed while ones. The so-called “culture wars” feature this kind ruminating his world-shattering ideas might suffice of issue prominently, but if we substitute the words as “evidence”. “well-educated” for the word “privileged” a rather Essentially Sewell and I are aesthetic critics different complexion emerges. who would be as happy to write long essays on Almost all of the most stupid and unjustifiable the superiority of Titian to Jacopo Bassano, say, art movements of the past forty years—such as a brilliant and original painter of the time—if “conceptualism”—arise from political theory. In someone had a use for them. But who is interested the latter case the idea prevailed that if commercial in intelligible criticism or scholarship today? dealers could be deprived of physical objects with which to trade then this would hasten the demise Giles Auty is the former art critic for the Spectator of capitalism. So art should be reduced simply and the Australian.

Instructions

Today we shall all be water pipes, she said, pipes that know nothing of slouch but stand upright against walls to let water travel unimpeded into baths, basins, radiators. Becoming pipes means unlocking shoulders, ironing out kinks in backs and knots in knees, challenging faulty hips, waking up feet, exulting in the glory of flow. In our new roles we shall be carriers of water which blesses grass and flesh, water which has no crises of confidence, offers itself freely although we mistreat it. Now we have re-invented ourselves see how tall we are, tall as organ pipes, as telegraph poles. Everything is possible if we don’t stifle, but let in imagination and its music. Listen, the sound is as uninhibited as water. Inexperience is unimportant— we shall practise the ocho step, enjoy the brush of thigh against thigh, enter the rhythm, its excitement, draw its emotion into our bodies, move with the clear intention of river water. In reality, as well as fantasy, each one of us will become a dancer of the tango.

Myra Schneider

Ocho step: The basic 8-count in Argentine Tango

Quadrant May 2015 73 R.J. Stove

Sculthorpe Remembered

orace is said to have advised fellow authors embarrass posterity—for five decades. This feat never to publicise any of their writings, Sculthorpe managed. “Schoolboy Composer Writes however time-sensitive, till at least nine Opera”, blared a headline in the Examiner (chief yearsH had elapsed; but then Horace, dying as he newspaper of his birthplace, Launceston) during did in the year 8 BC, did not have to confront his childhood. Said opera remains unpublished, the demands of cyberspatial correspondence or of but it is improbable that its exhumation would have utilities invoices thoughtfully printed in red ink. disgraced him. Much of the following was originally written in the Aged only twenty-six, in 1955, Sculthorpe had fortnight just after Peter Sculthorpe’s death. The already had his Piano Sonatina—still one of his responses it met from magazine editors in the USA, finest compositions—performed at a Baden-Baden the UK and Australia varied from “Sorry, not really festival. By the time I met him (I could scarcely say of interest to American readers” via “I say, old chap, I knew him) in 1980, he had become as immovable who was Sculthorpe?” to “Sod off, Stove, you f***in’ an institution in national art as Menzies became in Nazi.” (It will require no undue skill to match the national politics. And, as with Menzies, such staying responses to the correct nations.) power could with excessive ease be underrated, in In recent months, what with the releasing of fact be mocked. compact discs devoted to Sculthorpe’s piano works, It speaks well of Sculthorpe’s capacity for and with the Henri Dutilleux affair having convulsed disinterestedness that he refused to bawl me out. He France as few worldview clashes since Sartre-versus- must by this stage have divined the role which he Aron have done, the issues raised by Sculthorpe’s played in the private demonology of his fellow Sydney creativity and awe for East Asian cultures may have University academic: my father, David Stove. By acquired a new weight. Whatever the truth on that some improbable and luckless planetary alignment, score, at least I had a slight personal acquaintance both men found themselves serving on the same with Sculthorpe; so much obituary nonsense was Academy of the Humanities committee (this service written about him by those who never so much as being a chore which my father routinely loathed, met him that in the country of the blind, the one- but which he equally routinely never boycotted, eyed man is not so much king as Boswell. and never dared delegate to others). Admittedly, it would be false to suggest that Sculthorpe moved * * * Dad to the same detestation as did Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Whitlam, Ho Chi Minh, Pol arly in 1936, Wodehouse told a friend: “Doesn’t Pot, and anybody ascribing original sin to cricketers. Kipling’s death give you a stunned feeling?” To Equally invalid, though, would be the concept of anyE literate Australian who came of age during the Dad showing hypocritical politeness to the man. 1970s or 1980s, the demise on August 8, 2014—in It is entirely plausible that if Dad had unleashed a Sydney suburb, Woollahra—of Peter Sculthorpe his free-floating id upon committee meetings, an inspired a similar condition of near-disbelief. True, accurate transcript of the ensuing minutes would he had been ailing for months; but near-disbelief have included what follows: persists. One would perforce be at least seventy years old to retain clear memories of an Australia Sculthorpe: Good morning, Professor Stove, how where Sculthorpe’s name counted for nothing. are you? As that statistic implies, Sculthorpe’s career Dad: Shut up you bloody communist, why don’t longevity has to be reckoned with. Rare is the you get back to Hanoi? And while you’re at it, composer who stays at the top of his game—with shave off that disgusting moustache, it makes neither gauche juvenilia nor drivelling senilia to you look like John Lennon.

74 Quadrant May 2015 Sculthorpe Remembered

From which readers will infer that Dad found Arnold Bax (“whom I always thought simply a bad Sculthorpe’s appearance no less irksome than composer”); but of ill-will towards Meale’s abilities Sculthorpe’s music. Even in 1980 the Sculthorpian he felt no detectable hint. And regarding Bax, he attire inclined to ostentatious casualness. Ten years might perfectly well have changed his mind later earlier, as surviving photographs confirm, it had on. In 1980 almost nothing by Bax could be heard, foreshadowed Cheech and Chong. by Sculthorpe or any other Australian, on disc (LP So the potential for “issues”—as we would now back then, need one say). say—in any contact between the musician and the Even before long-time Sculthorpe champion philosopher’s son loomed like distant thunder. But Tamara-Anna Cislowska had given us an overdue CD in his few dealings with me, Sculthorpe could not intégrale of the man’s piano writing (ABC Classics), have been more courteous. Other undergraduates, most of Sculthorpe’s output—the Sun Music series, far better acquainted than I with him, reported Memento Mori, Irkanda IV, Mangrove, the Requiem, likewise. With his fame, he had every motive for the string quartets, the aforementioned Piano pulling rank. In my presence, he never did. Nor Sonatina—ended up on commercial recordings. (and this does him still more credit) did he blatantly These recordings will enable future generations, as drop rank, after the fashion of those Matthew Arnold might have said, antipodean god-professors from to see him steadily and see him yore, who micro-managed their whole. From Opus 1, the largely students’ social lives as a prelude to Nowhere did self-taught Sculthorpe exhibited dominating their sex lives. (Many Sculthorpe lastingly a stylistic freshness which many of my compatriots can still recollect sound like anyone weightier and more polyphonically the pre-feminist collegiate maxim, versatile composers crave in vain. “A lay for an A.”) except Sculthorpe. He never played the piano or any To have one’s voice other instrument at a professional culthorpe enjoyed greater standard. (To arts administrator esteem among critics and recognisable in the James Murdoch, he asserted that Saudiences than among his fellow first five bars of his slow reflexes debarred him composers. That same year, 1980, every single work, for from instrumental proficiency.) brought forth—in the July number And this very lacuna might have of 24 Hours, an Australian arts whatever medium, been his creative deliverance, as magazine long since defunct— which one composes: it manifestly became the creative a terrifying two-page attack on deliverance of Berlioz, although him by his Canberra-based foe, that is a musical fate Berlioz conducted at a world-class the émigré pianist-musicologist- most would envy. standard and Sculthorpe did not, composer Larry Sitsky. This attack to my knowledge, conduct at all. savaged each aspect of Sculthorpe’s At no stage could Sculthorpe worldview and exterior, while cleverly skirting the be mistaken for either Webern or Messiaen, libel laws by not using Sculthorpe’s name once. however obviously he shared Webern’s unease It must have inspired in its victim a homicidal with large forms, and however great a debt his anger. Yet not through so much as a raised eye- own orchestration owed to Messiaen’s scintillant, brow did Sculthorpe reveal to us the hurt he surely clangourous timbres. (Surely Yeats had something experienced. like Messiaen’s Des Canyons Aux Étoiles in mind About another rival, the late Richard Meale when, in “Byzantium”, he spoke of “that gong- (probably most celebrated for his opera Voss, not tormented sea”?) Nowhere did Sculthorpe lastingly performed till well after the events described here), sound like anyone except Sculthorpe. To have one’s he spoke with gentle affection. During the 1960s voice recognisable in the first five bars of every and 1970s, Sculthorpe’s and Meale’s respective single work, for whatever medium, which one advocates conducted journalistic combat which in composes: that is a musical fate most would envy. retrospect seems as addled as European music’s far more famous and ferocious pamphleteering ne hostage to fortune he did give. Through battles: Brahms versus Wagner, Debussy versus a malign fluke which he could not have Ravel, Elgar versus Sir Hubert Parry, and so forth. predicted,O Sculthorpe’s adoration (not too strong In such quarrels the artists themselves habitually a word) for Indonesian culture coincided with the behave with a tact foreign to their respective cheer- post-1965 kakistocracy of Suharto’s goons. In any squads. So in this instance. Sculthorpe found other country than Australia, this kakistocracy’s unfathomable Meale’s increasing fondness for Sir very name—“New Order”—would have set off

Quadrant May 2015 75 Sculthorpe Remembered conservative alarm-bells. But since the New Order’s memoirs comprise little more than a catalogue of East Timor subdivision concentrated on killing duty done. Any formal religious beliefs he retained, Catholics with a genocidal zest beyond Titus he nowhere flaunted. That he shared with Sibelius— Oates’s or the Ku Klux Klan’s most pornographic not among his favourite composers—a heartbroken, daydreams, all was joyously forgiven it. near-pantheistic, cognisance of natural beauty (in Be it newly stressed: the public Sculthorpe (and particular Australian landscapes’ natural beauty) is the public Sculthorpe is for most of us the only observable from every musical phrase he wrote. Sculthorpe) remained so much the aesthetician, so I have wondered several times, and never more little the ideologue, that he cannot have apprehended often than since his death, how much he owed this the correct nature of his earthly paradise’s rulers. painfully acute awareness to his Tasmanian origins. Nor, had he suspected the truth about Indonesia’s Even today, the Tasmanian-born individual, statist terrorism, would he have been other than however suave in comportment, will seldom be horrified. Yet, as with Shostakovich and Stalin, mistaken by mainlanders for one of their own. the question must be faced somehow, even if most As well suppose that an Alabaman will pass—or of us (like “jesting Pilate” in the classic Bacon indeed want to pass—for a native of Massachusetts. essay) would prefer “not [to] stay for an answer”. (The cultural and pedagogic gap between island The question being: how much autonomy can any and mainland yawned still more abysmally in 1929, outstanding composer keep, when the country the year of Sculthorpe’s birth, than it does now.) which he loves to the inmost core of his being (it can To pronounce with greater firmness than that on be, but need not be, the country which issued his Sculthorpe’s inner life would be, for us outsiders, passport) is ruled by the most globally resourceful impudent. But enough has been said to show how branches of Murder Incorporated? little he had in common with the screeching, (Right now the subject of how France’s leading cocksure pagan Oxbridge demagogy of a Richard post-Messiaen composer, Henri Dutilleux, behaved Dawkins and a Christopher Hitchens. under Vichy is being furiously argued about in Le During that final struggle in his hospital bed, Monde and Le Figaro as well as the specialist press. so dignified a figure as Sculthorpe might well have One can only hope that people keep their tempers reflected on the dying Sir Walter Scott’s plea to his at the next big Australian musicological conference, biographer: “Be virtuous … be a good man. Nothing and that this conference does not turn into a else will give you any comfort when you come to lie variant of the once-world-famous late-nineteenth- here.” The Sculthorpe whom I met, rarely but (for century Parisian cartoon by Caran d’Ache. Panel 1: me) profitably, gave me every indication of being Paterfamilias at domestic dinner table: “Above all, not just a greatly gifted man, but a good man. I let’s not speak of the Dreyfus Case!” Pandemonium- shall miss him much more than, in my green youth, saturated Panel 2: “They spoke of it.”) I would have considered possible.

ew Australian public figures stayed as private Melbourne organist R.J. Stove, Adjunct Research as Sculthorpe. Whatever physical relationships Associate at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, heF had, he kept largely under the radar. (Engaged Monash University, is the author of César Franck: twice, he married neither fiancée.) His 1999 His Life and Times (Scarecrow Press, 2012).

A Satisfying Answer

Out of nothing popped something rushing away from itself at an ever increasing speed and that’s what we call a scientific explanation

Immanuel Suttner

76 Quadrant May 2015 At the Sheridan Food Pub in Shannon Airport Wind The dark-eyed young woman with lustrous and long black hair Though the day has come for us, sits across from a short-haired young man the wind is all that seems real. in a solid-grey tee shirt. And real enough it has been, Except for two arm-length tattoos, blackening leaves and stalks he is nondescript. and scattering petals. But the woman, whenever he speaks, Though we will not revert throws back her head. to our gardens again, Her very red lips spread wide, to us they seem infinitely sad and her white, flashing teeth and replete with nondescript meanings. reflect an abrupt laugh. What’s more, her dark eyes glitter. Arrangements have been made for us, and as we lack cause for further delay, Is the young man really we step out into the wind. a master of wit We care so little for the future of our past whose bland, featureless face that we leave our doors open conceals a command of words? to swing on their hinges. Or is this responsive young woman— for all of her apparent Bent forward, we lean on the wind, scintillation—simply simple? assured of each other’s presence— even though our eyes, downcast, We could ponder these questions and perhaps extend no farther than our feet. draw a conclusion. But time, as they say, has run out. Knute Skinner Our flight has been called.

The Dawning of Sadness

I see now that this red earth that colours my blood, this country I love, they are still mine, but her people are not. Like an elderly couple no longer compatible so are my people and I.

C.R. McArthur

Quadrant May 2015 77 Michael Connor

Humpbacks in Love and Other Plays Rediscovering Jean Anouilh

iscovering and rediscovering Jean Anouilh, in disused stables and bakeries or taking over the I’m suddenly returned to the stage of an old universities and public-owned media. theatre. The play is The Cavern (La Grotte) The traditional text-based theatre which St Dand the theatre is St Martin’s in South Yarra. Martin’s exemplified is a lost treasure. Government Anouilh described the set, designer Paul Kathner subsidies destroyed commercial theatre (which is a made it, and I swept it. At the time I had a small poor term for classifying St Martin’s) and produced offstage job at the theatre. On stage were two levels an odd two-winged creation with large subsidised of an unrealistic house linked by a staircase. The theatres on one side and smaller, fashionable, setting was an attractive suggestion, in wood and experimental theatres on the other. Only big musi- canvas, of the upstairs and downstairs of a wealthy cal theatre productions exist in the space between, Paris residence, about 1910. It’s not in the stage while outside the arena amateur theatre completely directions but at one performance a young girl, the ignores the new writing which has cost taxpayers count’s daughter, tripped and fell from the high so much and instead draws on old favourites that platform where the aristocratic family preened. She bring in audiences. Anouilh, who placed himself in bounced, and got up as though nothing had hap- France’s boulevard theatre, was disappearing from pened. The child was the niece of one of the actors. our view at about the same time St Martin’s went Her stage father was a male model in the knitting- down in 1973. pattern books Mum bought and seldom used. Arts funding is fairly simple to understand. The The reputation of Anouilh, once one of the best- carefully constructed methodology behind it has known names in twentieth-century French play- been worked out over time and has made Australian writing, has dimmed. In April his name briefly arts the envy of the world. Funding major arts flickered, like a signature written in antique neon, organisations is a matter of real estate. Those with when a performance of Darius Milhaud’s inciden- harbour views, river outlooks and hectares of native tal music for his play Traveller Without Luggage was title do well: other companies do not. Backroom given at the Sydney Opera House. Concert pub- ladies in black work out the remaining fiddly bits. licity notes called it a “classic” play, though it has What happened to St Martin’s well represents not been staged in Australia since the early 1960s: what has happened to Australian theatre. After its some readers may recall the Broken Hill Repertory closure the premises were bought by the state gov- Society production (in the Police Boys’ Club ernment, and from the late 1970s and early 1980s Theatrette) in 1961. they have been the home for St Martins Youth St Martin’s was a small professional theatre Arts Centre. The change represents far more than presenting well-crafted productions of good writ- a mislaid apostrophe. Presently, the early vitality ing—the 1960s cultural revolution turned that into of the youth theatre seems exhausted. One of the wrongheaded graffiti for dreary, politically compro- Centre’s latest productions is “a promenade per- mised and economically unsustainable theatre. St formance work” called 16 Girls. It was a feature Martin’s had grown from the earlier amateur Little of the Castlemaine State Festival in March and is Theatre group and had opened its own specially built based on an event in America when girls in a local theatre in 1956. It was a subscriber-based company high school deliberately became pregnant: offering thirteen plays a year in three-week seasons. It was an institution to be scorned or ignored by the 16 Girls presents a striking image of an ensemble “New Wave” radicals making plays to be performed of heavily pregnant teenage girls as they engage

78 Quadrant May 2015 Humpbacks in Love and Other Plays

in ordinary, everyday activities in a collegiate she is pregnant. Now: repurposed as a drone manner. pilot, hunting the enemy by day, living in Las 16 Girls is a beautiful sculptural work that Vegas by night. turns ordinary places into activated performance spaces; the image of a large group of pregnant nouilh’s acceptance outside France was not teenage girls raises many questions and easy. New York critic Walter Kerr recounted challenges for all those who encounter them. theA playwright’s history of American flops in the 1950s until They got that right. 16 Girls raises questions about using young girls in this way, and the role a careless off-Broadway group that had not yet of the responsible adults involved. The St Martins heard of Anouilh’s disgrace ventured to mount Youth Arts Centre receives financial support from his Thieves’ Carnival. The mood was light, the all levels of government. Why? manner mocking, the conceit engaging, and If the old St Martin’s had been able to survive the upshot startling: the newspapers, quite the financial stresses it might have offered a home forgetting themselves, liked it. to Australian playwrights who, like Anouilh, would have benefited from working in a traditional thea- Anouilh’s acceptance outside France is still not tre. In the 1960s new plays by writers like Russell easy, as demonstrated by Charles Spencer’s 2002 Braddon, Hal Porter, Thomas Keneally and Morris review of Wild Orchids (originally Time Remembered) West were slotted in between Friedrich Dürrenmatt, which featured Patricia Routledge: “It is axiomatic Lillian Hellman, Jean-Paul Sartre among many theatre-goers that and Harold Pinter. The writing Anouilh is an alternative spelling which has come from the new thea- here is a spontaneity of the French word for boredom.” tres could have been balanced with T After complaining of set, direction writing from these older theatres. in the writing of and new translation Spencer finally Instead we went in just one direc- Anouilh (and also succumbed to the play’s “boule- tion which became conformist and vard charms” and “La Routledge”: controlling and, locked in place by the underestimated “With her on board, it’s great fun.” government subsidies, has taken us Sacha Guitry) which When Anouilh selected his texts into a cultural cul-de-sac. Sixties is hard to capture for publication he invented clas- radicalism was built of intolerance. sifications: black plays, pink plays, St Martin’s educated and cultivated in translation, and brilliant plays, grating plays, costume their audiences. difficult for actors. plays. Though he wrote about forty Earlier this year Red Stitch in dramas, only a few remain visible Melbourne offered two new plays in recent productions—Antigone, by British and American writers. The selling pitch Becket and Ring Round the Moon. Other works suggests a very limited audience they would appeal performed in English like The Lark (on Joan of to and, simply from the outlines given, both plays Arc), Poor Bitos and The Cavern have disappeared. probably accurately represent the state of contem- Returning to the plays is a pleasure. porary theatre writing: introverted, feminised and The Cavern, with a cast of fifteen, is theatre submissive. within a theatre and is a delicate mixture of mur- Wet House by Paddy Campbell: der, rape, abortion, class conflict and love. It is introduced to the audience by the author, who has A Wet House is a hostel for homeless alcoholics been unable to write it. His characters stand about where the residents are permitted to drink. not knowing what to do or what play they are in, Andy, an idealistic young graduate, has begun and the author can’t help them. On the high level working as a carer and is full of idealism and are the aristocracy. Below is the kitchen of Marie- increasing confusion. He is plunged into a Jeanne, their cook. When young and beautiful she world where rules about what is right and what had been loved by her employer, the count. Their is normal have become blurred. And that’s just child is now a seminarian. She has been stabbed to among the other staff! death, and the inspector investigates, or would if the author could get on with his play. The seminar- Grounded by George Brant: ian, who has not taken his final vows, falls in love with the maid, who may already have gone to work She’s an F16 fighter pilot; a rock star of the great in a brothel in Oran, Algeria. The author can’t quite big blue above. She loves the sky. And suddenly get this worked out. It is odd to find mention of a

Quadrant May 2015 79 Humpbacks in Love and Other Plays place where I would later live sitting in a play I knew The performance on the whole was uninspired, years before. The maid, if she has not already left yet the fragment I saw was tantalizing, there the play, is pregnant by another man who raped her, seemed an enchanting mood hidden away and Marie-Jeanne pushes her to accept an abortion. behind it, and I was in a fever for a copy of the The author’s characters make their own suggestions script. on where the play should go and complain of his writing. Scenes are changed and replayed. The dead Brook recognised the traditional nature of come to life, actors are banished from the stage. the play and set it running as commedia dell’arte. There is a spontaneity in the writing of Anouilh Anouilh, he wrote, “is a poet of words-acted, of (and also the underestimated Sacha Guitry) which scenes-set, of players-performing”. His actors is hard to capture in translation, and difficult for included Paul Scofield (playing twin brothers actors. Audiences saw The Cavern as theatre in the who entered and exited almost simultaneously), making; I saw it from prompt corner. Margaret Rutherford, Claire Bloom and Richard Ardèle was written in 1948 and only performed Wattis, and they were given a richly decorative set- once in Australia, in 1952. The stage represents ting to play in. Even twenty-two-year-old Kenneth the great hall of a French chateau. Tynan was impressed with the Two stairways lead up to a gal- design: “Oliver Messel has done lery at the back of the stage from nothing for twenty years as good which many doors open, though A bad and boring as the flimsy conservatory in which one remains locked for much of play, they said, and Anouilh’s lovers flirt and part.” the performance. Behind it is Aunt so convincing were The play with its mood of “love and Ardèle, a forty-something hump- foolishness” was a musical Stephen back. We never see her onstage, they that Paris Sondheim wanted to write. After or hear her. She has fallen in love decided to come and his second attempt to buy the rights with her young nephew’s tutor, was rejected he instead picked up also a humpback. Her brother the see for herself, and Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a general is outraged at this shame- the play ran for 308 Summer Night, and turned it into A making event and has locked her Little Night Music. into her room and called a family performances. Night conference, which is the excuse for after night audiences hen Anouilh died in 1987, assembling the cast. From offstage laughed at a reading most theatregoers with is heard the cry of peacocks. Their memoriesW would have thought sound mimics that of the general’s of the terror laws he had taken a final curtain years bedridden wife calling him: “Léon! of Prairial, 1794. before. Appreciation of his work Léon!” Her debilitating illness is has dimmed. When his plays love and jealousy, of her husband: were immortalised by publication both characters reappear in Waltz of the Toreadors. in Pléiade editions in France in 2007 (thirty-four Their absent eldest son, a sailor overseas, has mar- plays in two volumes) the editor was upfront about ried a young woman who loathes him and loves Anouilh’s eclipse: “In this edition, the text is offered his brother, who returns her love, hopelessly. The to readers like a ‘play in an armchair’ and to men of general’s sister arrives with her husband, another the theatre as an appeal to renewed productions.” count, and her lover. The count becomes quite sym- English readers and directors would be helped by pathetic and explains to his hostile and uncompre- modern translations. hending family that “Aunt Ardèle has a soul in her When one of his rebellious characters in The hump.” The situation is hopeless. The humpback Cavern makes a joke the stage author complains lover, who has no dialogue, steals onstage and into that such jokes have given him a bad reputation Ardèle’s unlocked room where they suicide. This in Paris: “elsewhere, it is less important because one-act comedy was turned into a three-act play in they are unable to translate them, because of that English, and the New York production was short- I have a much better reputation than in France”. lived: “Cecil Beaton designed the elegant chateau Cuts in the old English-language translations, per- setting and period costumes, neither of which were haps necessary for practical production purposes, needed after two performances.” need restoring for armchair readers. Some changes Ring Around the Moon was adapted by from the original text now seem slightly pointless. Christopher Fry from L’Invitation au Château. In the English Time Remembered (Léocadia) the Director Peter Brook had seen part of the original Prince in his make-believe café orders “Pommery, production in Paris: ’47”. In French he orders “Pommery brut 1923”. His

80 Quadrant May 2015 Humpbacks in Love and Other Plays companion, poor thirsty Amanda, asks for “a gin are like boules, it’s a French game.” De Gaulle and and lime with lots of water”. In French she orders Brasillach came to mind when a character remarked an anisette with water, and the Prince specifies that in France a general could always be found to Marie-Brizard (Anouilh had earlier worked for sign a decree, or refuse mercy. an advertising agency). There has also been some That night Poor Bitos worked its magic. A critic rearranging of acts which need restoring to give for a far Left magazine stood up threatening to go foreign readers a better appreciation of Anouilh’s backstage and beat up Anouilh (he didn’t). After theatre. And it’s surely time to have another look at the play the critic left for supper at Brasserie Lipp Christopher Fry’s adaptations of The Lark and Ring and had hardly had time to wipe the foam from Around the Moon. his lips, so the story goes, before another car cut in Anouilh’s private life was kept as private as front of him and took his parking spot. Preparing he could make it, his plays can’t be neatly classi- again for battle he opened the car door, started to fied, and his politics seem too independent to sat- get out, and dropped dead. Surviving Left critics isfy modern theatre-makers. There is a suspicion were hardly better intentioned. A bad and boring by the Left that writers who keep their politics to play, they said, and so convincing were they that themselves are hiding their attraction to the Right. Paris decided to come and see for herself, and the Anouilh had had certain problems with Antigone, play ran for 308 performances. Night after night which was approved by the German censors and audiences laughed at a reading of the terror laws opened in occupied Paris in 1944. Post-war there of Prairial, 1794—which may say something about were unfounded criticisms that the play was sup- the seriousness of humour in Anouilh’s work, or portive of Vichy. may not. In 1945 he was one of the few French intellectu- The brilliant actor Michel Bouquet was Bitos. als to protest against the death sentence imposed on There is a short piece of old film showing him in the homosexual collaborationist Robert Brasillach. costume in his dressing room and then acting a With much personal courage he organised a peti- scene from the play. His face alone is remarkable. tion calling on de Gaulle to show clemency. Only His wide forehead seems to slant unnaturally fifty-one signatures were obtained—Camus, backwards while his narrow chin juts forward in Colette and Cocteau signed, Sartre and Simone de a perfect manifestation of hypocrisy in human Beauvoir refused. It was one of the moments that form. The costume is for the audience’s first view marked Anouilh’s life: of Bitos: he is arriving at a dinner party where the guests are each taking on the role of a famous The young man Anouilh, whom I had revolutionary figure. Naturally, Bitos, responsible remained until 1945, left one morning, insecure for legal cruelties in 1945, is Robespierre. He wears (understandable in those deceptive times) but a long overcoat and on his head is a chalk-white, on his left foot, to go get signatures from his fluffy eighteenth-century wig. Above the wig is a colleagues for Brasillach. He went door to door bowler hat. He takes off the long coat and reveals for eight days and returned home old—as in a the dandified costume of the famous Left head- Grimm’s Fairy Tale. lopper, circa 1794. Bitos, in wig, bowler hat and open overcoat with glimpse of sky-blue costume, De Gaulle had Brasillach shot. Anouilh fired could have been drawn by Hergé for a Tintin back in 1956 with Poor Bitos. adventure. Today, without too many adjustments, The opening night of Poor Bitos in October the costume would suit a Monsieur Rudd, or a 1956 turned into the rowdiest audience demonstra- Monsieur Hollande. tion against a play in a Paris theatre since Victor Poor Bitos has been away from our stages for a Hugo’s Hernani in 1830; Hugo had more support- long time. While its references to now forgotten ers in the audience. The Left critics were unhappy contemporary political matters have dimmed, Bitos that Anouilh brought together the Terror of the himself, the mid-twentieth-century Tartuffe, has Revolution and the post-Liberation epuration grown bigger while our idea of theatre has grown (purification), and laughed: “Summary executions smaller.

Quadrant May 2015 81 Daniel O’Neil

The World a New Leaf D.H. Lawrence on Australia

ince even before British settlers began to downward” into the ground), and the black swans arrive in numbers on its shores at close of the presaged oddities later to be discovered: porcupine- eighteenth century, Australia has exercised like creatures that laid eggs (let us not forget that bothS fascination and repulsion on the European Echidna was the “mother of all monsters” in Greek mind. The wide, open horizons, fertile and ripe myth, an abomination who in Hesiod’s words “dies with possibility, were yet inhabited also by strange not nor grows old all her days”), great mammals, tall and lethal creatures, not to mention inscrutable as men, that hopped about on their hind legs and people. Europeans gazed upon the great southern carried their young in pouches. When the first plat- continent with ambivalence, uncertain whether to ypuses arrived stuffed in London they were taken fear or love it. for a crude taxidermist’s joke. This ambivalence manifested itself in a variety Thomas Watling, describing this mystifying of ways. Let us ponder, for a moment, a phenom- new continent in a letter of 1791 to his presumably enon as superficially unremarkable as the existence baffled aunt in Dumfries, could speak in the same of black swans. From the composition of Juvenal’s paragraph of an environment with features both Satires some fifty years after the crucifixion of “elysian” and “grotesque”. One need only glance at Christ, “black swan” became a byword in Europe early colonial landscape painting to see the difficul- for the fantastical, the non-existent. What could be ties the European eye had in processing this alien more self-evidently absurd than a swan with black world, and the difficulties the European hand had feathers? More than being simply silly as, say, lime- in depicting it. Fear and beauty inhering in the same green foxes or fuchsia kestrels might have been, the phenomenon—once again, ambivalence. black swan represented the very opposite (the anti- This vein ran no less through literature, from pode, if you will) of the standard white swan. It was Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations to Algernon the anti-swan. Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest But then, in 1697, at the mouth of what would (“Australia! I’d sooner die”) to, in the first quarter later be named the Swan River, Dutch sailors discov- of the twentieth century, D.H. Lawrence. In 1923, ered a waterway choked with the very birds whose Lawrence published a novel called Kangaroo, the existence popular European wisdom had explicitly story of a period spent by an Englishman and his denied. In time, stuffed swans would reach Batavia, wife in Sydney and the southern coast of New South and then later Europe itself. For the next century, Wales. It is, perhaps not unjustly, one of his lesser- visitors from the northern hemisphere would remark read works. Regarding Kangaroo’s broader literary on the frequency with which they witnessed flocks significance, I am not qualified to speak. What I of Juvenal’s rara avis on the lakes and rivers of the can speak on, however, is the profound interest it new continent. In one of those magical moments holds as a vision of Australia and Australians. historians so relish, the European absurdity was When I was buying my second-hand copy of revealed to be the Antipodean commonplace. Kangaroo, a tiny, yellowed receipt from the Sydney Europeans had long suspected that the south- University Co-Operative Bookshop, dated April 18, ern hemisphere would be inhabited by monstrosities 1962, fell out from among the pages—one pound, (the early Christian philosopher Lactantius declared seven shillings and threepence someone had paid the Antipodes an impossibility, stating that were for Lawrence’s novel in the classic orange-and- such a place to exist it would be inhabited by “men cream, phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes Penguin whose footprints are above them and their heads paperback edition, in a pre-decimal link to what was down”, and that there “trees and grain [would] grow once called the “mother country”, now lost. Given

82 Quadrant May 2015 The World a New Leaf the novel’s theme, the appearance of this odd little These remarks are not terribly original; they memento seemed appropriate. could have come from the pen of any transplanted The year before Kangaroo’s publication, Lawrence English grumbler. One is almost surprised not to and his wife had, like the protagonists of the novel, find a crack about convicts thrown into the mix for spent a period in Australia, arriving in Fremantle good measure. What makes Lawrence’s frustrations (he notes, with muted pleasure, that a copy of his with Australia intriguing is that they are the frus- novel The Rainbow sits on the shelves of a library he trations of ambivalence, of a man who once wrote visits in Perth) and sailing on to Sydney via Adelaide “[f]or some things … I love Australia” (during his and Melbourne. Lawrence spent by far the greater time in Sydney, Lawrence composed, in addition part of his time in Australia in New South Wales, to his novel, an unambiguous tribute in verse to and ended up writing most of Kangaroo in a seaside the poise and dignity of the great kangaroo), and bungalow in Thirroul. yet who lamented that “[i]t eludes me, and always would”. They were, at base, the frustrations of a he great man of early twentieth-century English man with a profoundly authoritarian streak cast letters did not think terribly highly of Australia. adrift in a (comparatively) egalitarian society. They TIn fact, Lawrence’s deep antipathy towards all are philosophical objections to an Australia of the things Australian shines through on almost every imagination. page of this strange novel. He insists on rendering Though he is remembered today as a transgres- our speech, what he calls “Cockney-Australian”, in sive novelist—perhaps even as a sexual revolutionary demeaning eye dialect (“next peo- avant la lettre—whose vivid depic- ple who kyme arfter must ’ev tyken tions of human sexuality in Lady it”). His protagonist prickles at the Chatterley’s Lover so scandalised Australians’ “aggressive familiar- Lawrence laments the middle classes of his time (even ity”. This grating personability and that Australians had thirty years after Lawrence’s death, its attendant vulgar upward mobil- effaced the “categorical a barrister could ask an English ity are embodied in the novel’s jury whether Lady Chatterley was titular character, an articulate but difference between “a book that you would even wish menacing barrister whose real name the responsible and your wife or your servants to read”), is Benjamin Cooley, and who acts as Lawrence was not a man of liberal the charismatic ringleader of a New the irresponsible political opinions. On the contrary, Guard-type paramilitary organisa- classes”. Australians he was something of a dyed-in-the- tion of former comrades-in-arms “ fail to admit the wool reactionary: in a July 1915 let- from the Great War called the ter to Bertrand Russell, he fumed “Diggers Club”, a crew of what one necessity for rule”. that “the extant democracy … is our could perhaps call ocker blackshirts. enemy”, and proceeded to lecture It is not merely Australia’s men the great philosopher on the insan- upon whom Lawrence heaps his opprobrium. “So ity of allowing the idiot proletariat a say in the run- many women,” he writes, “almost elegant”—momen- ning of the country. Democracy, he fumed in an tarily lured in—“[y]et their elegance provincial, essay four years later, meant “the reduction of the without pride, awful”—and then repulsed. The human being to a mathematical unit” (the so-called superficially enchanting shell of Australian wom- “Average Man”), and the equalisation of human anhood, as with all else in this continent, hides a beings who were patently not equal in intellect or vulgar interior. This lack of elegance extends to the physique. His opinions on the Jews, or the non- city of Sydney itself, with which Lawrence is most white subjects of the British Empire he encountered unimpressed: in Ceylon, are best left unrepeated. Yet for all this Lawrence was no traditional- In Martin Place he longed for Westminster, in ist—a man of humble social origins (his father Sussex Street he almost wept for Covent Garden a coalminer, his mother a teacher and sometime and St Martin’s Lane, at the Circular Quay he lace factory worker, and D.H. himself likewise pined for London Bridge. It was all London trained as a teacher), he did not yearn for a return without being London. Without any of the of the aristocracy. The future of which he dreamt lovely old glamour that invests London. This would see “women governing equally with men”, London of the Southern hemisphere was all, as with a “Dictatrix” ruling alongside a “Dictator”. If it were, made in five minutes, a substitute for the Lawrence’s political philosophy reminds us of any- real thing. Just a substitute—as margarine is a thing it is the ordered utopia Plato presented in his substitute for butter. Republic and his Laws: Lawrence envisages “a body

Quadrant May 2015 83 The World a New Leaf of chosen patricians” whose sole objective in gov- Yet, for all his bilious denunciation of the deprav- erning will be “the highest good of the soul of the ity of our culture and the hollowness of our institu- individual, the fulfilment in the Infinite”. Beyond tions, the great southern land nevertheless continued this, it is a resistance to the spirit of modernity that to exercise an almost primal allure on Lawrence. hearkens back, not to an idealised golden age in In what, given his previous outbursts, feels almost the past, but to a basic human authenticity (how- like a moment of Freudian parapraxis, he goes on ever hierarchically and undemocratically perceived) to describe Sydney later in the novel as “[o]ne of the against the poisonous atomisation of the industrial great cities of the world”, before drawing himself age. back to castigate its lack of “heart”. He wonders Fascist is not the word to use here—partly whether Australia isn’t in some awful fugue state, because Lawrence never described himself as such, doomed to be rudely and damagingly awoken one and because, in any case, polemic overuse has slowly day by reality. It seems to trouble Lawrence deeply drained that word of all meaning beyond “political that this degraded polity is able to function at all. phenomenon I do not like”. No, Lawrence was no But the true horror of Australia does not perco- fascist: if nothing else, he could not stomach the late through to Lawrence’s consciousness until he fascists’ street-fighting and head-kicking, and before leaves the city for the outback, for the vast emp- coming to Australia he had been in Italy, where he tiness. It is difficult to think of a landscape less had himself had a chance to witness the brute reality similar to the Australian desert than the rolling of the fascist squadristi. Indeed, at Kangaroo’s cli- green of Lawrence’s native Nottinghamshire (try as max, a brawl between Cooley’s Diggers and a group Englishmen might to replicate the latter in the former of anarchists leaves the Lawrence-protagonist disil- by founding settlements with names like Eastwood, lusioned. This was the politics of the ugly mass: the Mansfield and Carlton). Australia, he writes in gathering “of all the weak souls, sickeningly con- the letter of June 1922, is “empty and untrodden”, scious of their weakness, into a heavy mob”. indeed, “so empty, so nothing, it almost makes you feel sick”. From Darlington, east of Perth, Lawrence awrence knew exactly what he did not want wrote to his German mother-in-law that the land- in a society, and he had found exactly that in scape was such that “the people who are here are LAustralia. In a letter of June 1922, he wrote that “the not really here”: in Australia, human beings merely more I see of democracy, the more I dislike it”, and “schwimmen wie Schatten über die Fläche davon” (float that Australia was “the most democratic place I have like shadows over the expanse of the place) or, to use ever been in” (it goes without saying that he did not another of his metaphors, are like ducks skating on intend this to be a compliment). There are hints of the surface of a pond. what Lawrence clearly perceives to be the bankrupt- cies of negative freedom here: the idea that, undi- The soft, blue, humanless sky of Australia, the rected, ungoverned, people will simply attend to pale, white unwritten atmosphere of Australia. the “little things”, and their own “little egos”, at the Tabula rasa. The world a new leaf. And on the expense of the great and the beautiful. The natural new leaf, nothing. order of humanity, and the institutional architecture that holds it together, would erode, with disastrous It is, to use a Lawrence phrase from another let- consequences for all. In Kangaroo, Lawrence laments ter, a “country to disappear into”, “where one can that Australians had effaced the “categorical differ- go out of life” and fade into a landscape that evades ence between the responsible and the irresponsible even human sight—“nobody has seen Australia yet: classes”. Australians “fail to admit the necessity for can’t be done. It isn’t visible.” This is Australia as rule”—a cardinal sin in Lawrence’s book. The result Lawrence fears it most: without command, without is a sort of hollow ghost polity in which effective authority, without order, unable to be assembled even authority ceases to exist: for the benefit of the human eye. There is awesome strength there, but it is untrammelled, uncontrolled But in Australia nobody is supposed to rule, and, indeed, perhaps ultimately uncontrollable. and nobody does rule, so the distinction falls Here we have moved beyond mere ambivalence: this to the ground. The proletariat appoints men to is Australia as an Englishman’s nightmare. administer the law, not to rule. These ministers are not really responsible, any more than the Daniel O’Neil is an Australian who is studying history housemaid is responsible. at the University of Oxford.

84 Quadrant May 2015 Neil McDonald

Tudor Film Noir by Candlelight

n the 1970s a BBC historical mini-series such technology. Stanley Kubrick used very fast film as Wolf Hall (currently screening here on the stock and specially adapted Zeiss lenses, originally BBC Australia subscription channel UK TV) developed by NASA to record the moon landings, Iwould have been shown in Australia free-to-air so he could shoot some interiors for Barry Lyndon on the ABC. This series about Henry VIII’s chief (1975) by candlelight. That was very effective, but minister Thomas Cromwell, based on two Booker with six hours of television Kosminsky recreates Prize-winning novels by Hilary Mantel, would almost completely the visual experience of living in have been exactly the kind of program the national the sixteenth century. In the night scenes characters broadcaster was expected to show. Indeed, in the are shadowy figures, occasionally illuminated by a early 1970s, for many of us mini-series such as The lantern. Day sequences seem to have been filmed Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth R took over in natural light. Unobtrusive travelling shots give our Sunday nights. It was not ideal—for one thing the narrative an immediacy that is often lacking in the BBC was “filming” in colour and Australia still the more formal groupings of the traditional period had only black-and-white television. But we did film. get it for nothing, without advertisements, and we The series was shot almost entirely on location were watching superb writing and acting. To be using surviving Tudor and medieval houses. Dover sure, the style of a series such as Elizabeth R was Castle doubled as the Tower of London for the somewhere between theatre and film. It was shot in public execution scenes in episode six. The Long long takes and written and played in a heightened Gallery, Tapestry Room and Queen Elizabeth style that evoked the rhetoric of the period while Room in Penshurst Place doubled as specific rooms being expertly pitched to the camera. in Whitehall. The Long Gallery, which was actually Wolf Hall could not be more different. The used by the real Henry and Anne Boleyn, doubles visuals combine documentary realism with pain- as her chamber. The film-makers soon discovered terly images that evoke the style of Hans Holbein, that these buildings were specifically designed to whose contemporary portraits were a major influ- be lit by candles and found the appropriate spots— ence on the production. Director Peter Kosminsky while the actors complained about bumping into and cinematographer Gavin Finney are drawing the furniture in the dark. on a long and honourable tradition for period tel- evision and film in recreating the style of contem- olf Hall’s action is seen from the perspective porary artists—Jacques-Louis David for Marie of Thomas Cromwell. He is of course the Antoinette (1938), Van Gogh for Lust for Life (1956), Wvillain in A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt’s play while Toulouse Lautrec was almost entitled to a about Sir Thomas More, most famously played by designer credit for the famous opening sequence of Leo McKern in the film version as a bullying thug. John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952). Historically he was more complex, a loyal servant of But Kosminsky has gone further. Many scenes Cardinal Wolsey and later Henry VIII, and a major have been filmed using the light from candles and force in distributing the translated Bible. Mantel sometimes the fires supposedly warming the rooms, made him the fascinatingly ambiguous protagonist with the camera almost entirely hand-held. This is of the two novels on which the mini-series is based, anything but traditional. Gavin Finney exploits the Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. capacity of the new digital cameras to literally “see” The screenwriter, Peter Straughan, condenses more clearly than the human eye. Mantel’s original brilliantly. The first two episodes, It has been attempted before but with different “Three Card Trick” and “Entirely Beloved”, portray

Quadrant May 2015 85 Tudor Film Noir by Candlelight the fall of Wolsey, beginning when the King’s Wolf Hall is one of the few fictional series to officers demand the Great Seal of England from make a real contribution to our understanding of the Cardinal. A figure emerges from the shadows the period. Damian Lewis’s Henry captures the and whispers in the prelate’s ear and Wolsey charm and authority described by contemporaries. blandly points out that they have not brought the When Wolsey speaks of loving the King it seems right papers. This is the viewer’s first introduction quite plausible. And as the King’s cruelty emerges to Mark Rylance’s Cromwell. Jonathan Pryce is it comes as a genuine shock to the viewer, much as a sympathetic Wolsey, and together they make it did for many of his subjects at the time. Claire this first attachment of Cromwell’s touchingly Foy’s Anne Boleyn is both vicious and vengeful as believable. Some nicely placed flashbacks explain well as being resolute and courageous at her end. the King’s Great Matter—the divorce of Catherine of Aragon from King Henry that Wolsey has failed t is a pity a similar balance was not struck to secure. with the portrayal of Cromwell’s great rival Sir Wolf Hall is perhaps the first of these series to IThomas More. As played by Anton Lesser he is show the details of a great man’s fall—the plunder- a fanatical persecutor of heretics and a torturer. ing of his possessions, how his retainers move him More did have a darker side. Accusations of tor- to another residence, and of course ture were made against him in his the anguish. Straughan, following lifetime. They were denied, but he Mantel, makes these sequences the openly approved the burning of motivation for Cromwell’s pur- As with so heretics. Mandel and Straughan suit of the instigators of Wolsey’s many of the great were therefore entitled to portray fall. When another retainer of the tragedies, the revenge these less attractive qualities. But Cardinal describes their patron’s they should not have distorted the death while being taken to the once achieved is trial. As we know from A Man for Tower charged with high treason horrifying; even All Seasons, More was charged with and calls on God to take vengeance high treason for refusing to take on all those responsible, Cromwell more so here because the Oath of Supremacy affirming replies quietly that there is no need it is all true. Henry VIII as head of the Church to trouble God: “I will take it in in England and would not say why hand.” It is one of Wolf Hall’s most he would not take it. He was con- chilling moments. No one can be absolutely certain victed when Richard Rich testified that More had this was the reason Cromwell pursued the Boleyns denied the supremacy in a private conversation in and their allies, but it is quite likely, and makes for his cell in the Tower when Rich came to remove his splendid drama. Throughout he is haunted by his books and papers. Undoubtedly Rich perjured him- memory of a masque staged at court to influence self and the perjury was suborned by Cromwell. In the King where a figure representing the Cardinal episode four of Wolf Hall, Rich is telling the truth is prodded into a hell mouth by masked “dev- and More is worsted in the exchange with him. ils” impersonated by some of the men seeking to This contradicts the transcript which records this encompass his disgrace. The incident is completely devastating response: accurate although whether it influenced Cromwell in this way one can’t be sure—but once again, it is Can it seem likely to your Lordships that in highly probable. so weighty an Affair as this as to trust Mr As Mark Rylance’s Cromwell moves down the Rich, a Man I had so mean an opinion of, in corridors of the great houses occupied by King reference to his Truth and Honesty … that and court, or sits at his desk perusing state papers I should only impart to Mr Rich the secrets and the reports of informants, he seems to be yet of my Conscience in respect to the King’s another film noir protagonist, flawed, vulnerable, Supremacy, the particular Secrets and only laconic, witty and deadly—“You made a mistake Point about which I have been so long pressed when you threatened me.” Yet the portrait is at to explain myself? least a valid interpretation. Neither Mandel nor Straughan makes any attempt to mitigate the enor- Similarly Mantel and Straughan only give their mity of his judicial murder of Anne Boleyn, which More a few fragments of his great oration in which, is portrayed in the novel and the series in chilling after being convicted, he condemned the Act of clinical detail. As with so many of the great trag- Supremacy. He isn’t even allowed his final line edies, the revenge once achieved is horrifying; even before being executed: “I die the King’s good servant more so here because it is all true. but God’s first.” The trial was done brilliantly by

86 Quadrant May 2015 Tudor Film Noir by Candlelight

Robert Bolt, who condensed the exchanges and Certainly this is fiction, and the less attractive side speeches to give the actor playing More some of Sir Thomas was overdue for an airing, but artists great moments—watch Charlton Heston and Paul of this calibre should have embraced the complexity Scofield in the film versions. But all Mantel in the of his trial and death, not simplified it. novel and Straughan in his script had to do was Nevertheless, Wolf Hall is great film-making to stay closer to the transcript and allow More and this is only a minor lapse in an otherwise his moral triumph and not distort the history. extraordinary achievement.

The Swede

More like a deformed animal than a vegetable, I imagine it snuffling in the dark, dreaming itself a globe as it heaves against waterlogged clay and stones to fill out its girth. Hard as mahogany, heavy as flint, its thick skin is marked with blotches purple as bruise, ringed with ridges. This one has an outgrowth which looks just like a foetal limb. At first I brand it inferior to the leeks I dug up in the garden one year, each smooth as a pole and more whitely alive than snow but the ungainly body speaks of persistent labour, quiet confidence, gravitas, and I admire it for making no pretence to be other than it is. I wonder why we’re so careless of the planet which coddles seedlings that look frail enough for worms to crumple and harbours weighty vegetables, why we’re forever looking up at the sky, probing Mars for signs of life, seeking out ever fainter galaxies and, as the mystery of space-time grows, why we keep trying to crack the secret which began the universe. Better to consider the casserole we’re having for supper, how when I lift the glass-lidded pot out of the oven slow cooking will have turned the pieces of swede luminous orange and soft enough to slip down the throat, warm the belly. Better to ask how long it will be before the swede’s an endangered species.

Myra Schneider

Quadrant May 2015 87 S t o r y

Somebody Sean O’Leary

ete Moss is waiting for his girlfriend. He’s sitting outside at Big Mouth Café on Acland Street in St Kilda. He has just purchased a new type of pre-paid mobile. “Time”, a new mobile phone carrier, has just brought out these new disposable phones. You purchase the phone for $50 and receive that amount in credit and get a mobile number that expires with the credit. And after the $50 is used up you simply throw the phone away, like those old disposable cameras. Handy for his type of work. Pete’s a drug dealer who doesn’t want to be a drug dealer Pany more. “What do you want to do?” she asks him. “I could study. I could work at 7-11. I could be a chef. Work in a café like this one.” “That’s better. You have all these different options.” “Would you still go out with me if I worked at 7-11? No more free drugs. I’d probably have to move out of the apartment on Inkerman Street; wouldn’t be able to afford the rent any more. No more eating out for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You like eating out and coffee and going to nightclubs with me, don’t you? Gonna dump me if I stop dealing?” “I don’t go out with you because you’re a drug dealer.” “Don’t you? What about the guy I buy the drugs off? What happens when I tell him I want out? I don’t want to do this any more. I make a lot of money for him. He’s going to ask me some questions about who is taking over from me. Can he be trusted? How am I going to compensate him if I can’t find someone? I deal to you ex-private school types with money.” “Is that what I am? A type?” He ignores her and goes on. “Are your friends going to trust someone else, and the friends of your friends, what will they do for drugs? I’ll be pretty much on the outer if I stop dealing.” “No you won’t.” “Why would your friends be interested in someone who grew up in St Albans and left school at fifteen and learned he could make money dealing drugs because one night when he was nineteen he got lucky with a girl who oozed money and good looks.” “Thanks for the compliment,” she says laughing. “You can afford to eat out without me and go out to clubs and live the good life, but the drugs, they’re the aphrodisiac, that’s why you’re with me. It’s who I am. What I do. All cachet is lost if I stop dealing.” “If you’ll let me speak for a second.” “Fire away.” “I’ll love you whatever you do. Whatever you want to be. We’ll find someone to take

88 Quadrant May 2015 Story over the dealing. Square everything with whomever you get the drugs from. I can think of a few people that might want to take over.” “This isn’t like Jim’s Mowing. There’s a fair bit of bravado and the fear factor needed. Most of your friends are a little scared of me, right. So, there’s the fear factor.” “There’s other ways, Pete. You never bashed anyone, did you?” “Not since I hooked up with you.”

Julia, his girlfriend, showed him the right clothes, how to wear the cool clothes. Gone were the Target black jeans and jumpers. In came the black Levi’s and shirts from Country Road; Arthur Galan suits, one of which he wore to a Melbourne Cup party in the carpark at Flemington; cool jackets from French Connection and factory warehouses; shoes and boots from Windsor Smith; clothes bought online. Julia started following the men’s fashion blogs and bought clothes for him. The sex was the best she’d ever had. He was tall and rakish, long sinewy muscles in his arms and legs, body thick and strong. Acne scars on his left cheek. Head shaved. A powerful man. Julia introduced him to all her friends. She told them he was a chef. The little joke about being a chef at Big Mouth a few moments ago. He started dealing to them. Spent less time in Yarraville and Footscray. Her friends would pay above the usual rate. Jess, the dangerous man he got the drugs from, was pleased. It was a relief. Pete was happy. But he wanted to be someone. All this wealth and ambition had rubbed off on him. All of Julia’s friends were professional people, bar one or two of them, and they were only killing time before their father kicked them up the arse and told them to get serious or they could be the one who falls through the cracks. They partied hard but they seemed to know when to switch off. When enough was enough. He ditched his old life. Found this cool apartment on Inkerman Street. Julia didn’t work. She was the wealthiest of them all. Her father wanted her to be happy. She wanted to design clothes and jewellery and she probably would one day soon. It thrilled him that every time he called her she came to him.

“Don’t worry so much, Pete. Do you want me to move in? I could just pay a share of the rent for you, if you didn’t want me to move in.” He leans across the table and grabs her hand, “Shit yeah. I want you to move in. The sooner the better.” “I will then, soon.” And already she’s wondering why she said it. “Where will we go tonight?” she asks. He shakes his head to get all the information in order or to get it out of his head. He takes a deep breath. Lets it out. “Whooo. I don’t know.” He looks at her and thinks. I don’t want to lose you. I hope you’re telling me the truth. Let’s go home back to my place.” “Oh,” Julia says, “I have to meet, Sally. Um, no, I’ll call her. You’re right; we’ll go back to your place.” “No, go and meet your friend,” he says. “I will, thanks.” “Julia, I want to be somebody,” he says, almost pleading with her. “Maybe your father. He might have some connections to get me started somewhere.” “Doing what?” she snorts. He gets an odd feeling in his stomach. His temper rises and she says, “Oh, work, you mean. Yes, I’ll ask him.” And they stand up and she comes around the table and kisses him openly on the street, unashamedly, and he hugs her close and she turns to go and he almost pleads again, “Ask your father, please.”

Quadrant May 2015 89 Story

She breathes a sigh of relief as she walks off. What on earth could he do? She doesn’t want to lose him. Why does he want to change all of a sudden? What’s got him thinking like this? You and your friends have got him thinking like this. Pete calls Jess. “Jess, when do you want me to pick you up?” That was his code to go over and pick up the drugs. “D’you buy a new mobile?” Jess asks. “Yeah, um, I’ll explain when I see you. You’ll like it.” “Pick me up in an hour, two hours at the most.” “I’m in St Kilda. I’ll leave now.” He calls a taxi. Pete hasn’t bought a car yet. He gets out of the taxi at Flinders Street station and takes the St Albans-line train. He thinks about Jess. The small white weatherboard house with the perfectly cut lawn front and back. The big wire gate down the side. The two pit bulls’ faces pushed up against the wire. Barking and snarling. Jess as big as a mountain. He lets the dogs in the house when Pete is there. Increases the fear factor and Jess controls them as if he has them on a remote control. Claps and hand signals and barked commands that only mean something to him and the dogs. How to untangle himself from Jess is the biggest puzzle of all.

Julia is twenty-two, with a round pretty face and cool black eyes, slim but strong and with a mane of chestnut hair. She was a good runner at school, a basketball player, not a netball player. She does have bold ideas about fashion and design. She will be successful when she puts her mind to it. She and Pete have been together for just over a year. She used to annoyingly correct his speech but she doesn’t have to do it any more. He’s whip smart, like a chameleon, the way he picked up on their way of talking, the speech patterns. How they move and act and dress. He’s had to defend Julia a couple of times in bars and nightclubs. He stared at her tormentors, gave them that look of his, and they backed away like frightened kittens. No match for her bad boy drug dealer. Should she ask her father? What could he do, she wonders. Her father owns a chain of bakeries; pubs and clubs all over Melbourne too, and a whole raft of other businesses. Her mother runs a chain of fashion stores. Her mother is business, not creative. Where could Pete fit in amongst all that? She doesn’t think he’d be happy sweating it out in the back of a bakery. She calls her father and arranges to meet him.

Pete knocks on the door of the small white weatherboard house. The dogs go apocalyptic at the wire gate. Jess opens the door. “Come in,” he says. Pete follows him into the lounge. They sit on a black leather sofa with chrome handles on the sides and the headrest. “What’s this about the phone?” Jess asks, and Pete explains the phone. “So, you’ll be changing your fucking number every few days.” “You’ll get the new number straight away on caller ID. I think it’s designed for overseas tourists.” “I don’t care, mate. I need to know what you’re up to.” “You going to drive me back soon?” “I’ll drive you now, extra big delivery today.” The only place where they talk directly about drugs is in his car with the music on loud. Pete sometimes thinks it’s a bit like the cone of silence on Get Smart. Jess drives a ten-year-old black ute, slowly, within the speed limit but not too slow, not too careful. He doesn’t take the dogs with him. Wants to draw no attention to the car. As they drive, Jess says, “Ten thousand back to me within three weeks, might let

90 Quadrant May 2015 Story you have a month. Good quality grass, plenty of E. Speed as always. Some ice because I know you’re always looking for new ways to get your friends high. They are your friends, aren’t they? Don’t screw anyone’s girlfriend, mate. Don’t use violence at all. These kids’ll rat you in to the cops. Whatever you think, you’re not one of them.” Pete thinks Jess is probably right. Selling ice would be a mistake, though. He needs to get out of that. Fuck it. He’s getting out of the whole thing. He calls Julia. She’ll meet him at the apartment on Inkerman Street. Jess tells Pete his vision for his life. He’s going to be moving up in the world and the usual warnings about keeping his trap shut. And as ever, just before he gets out of the car, “Don’t try and screw me, Pete. I go to jail you go to jail, and in there nobody can help you.” Pete walks up the stairs to the first-floor two-bedroom apartment and opens the door. Breathes out and goes through to the bedroom. He’s wearing grey chinos and a light-blue polo shirt. It is winter but mild today. He stashes the drugs under the bed in a suitcase. He uses Jess’s logic. Never makes excessive noise, no loud music. He uses headphones for that. He crashes onto his bed then picks himself up and goes to the La Trobe University website. He has ideas of becoming like Julia’s friends. He spoke to this guy studying film and arts in general. A Bachelor of Arts. They all think he’s a chef, and the guy explained to him he could apply as mature-age student. Pete the drug dealer at university. He hasn’t told anyone. How can he escape from Jess and make this new life work? Jess doesn’t want to let him go because Pete knows everything: where the drugs are grown; the person with the pill press; the guy who cooks up the speed. Jess told him and showed him all this because it was entrapment. You know too much mate, can’t let you go. Julia knocks on the door. He logs out of the La Trobe site and turns off the laptop. “I have news for you,” she says. “What news? It better be good.” “I got you a job as a barman at a pub on Chapel Street. My dad set it up.” She sees the crestfallen look on his face. “But that’s what you want, isn’t it, to change your life? You could still deal and work too if you wanted too, you’d meet more people, new customers.” “I had this idea I might like to study something.” “Oh yeah, like TAFE, you could um, yeah, I don’t know, doing what, Pete?” “I was speaking to your friend Vincent about what he studies at La Trobe.” She shakes her head and laughs. “You left school at fifteen. No, you got kicked out of high school at fifteen.” He looks hard at her as if he’s trying to figure her out all over again and then says, “You keep telling me how smart I am.” “You are smart but I mean street smart. You adapt. University is ... you have to have a high intellect. Vincent is brilliant, a genius.” “And what about all the other students? Are they all in the genius category too?” “You don’t get it, Pete.” He smiles at her, shrugs and then goes and hugs her close. “You’re right,” he says. “I’m kidding myself.” She laughs and kisses him hard on the mouth and he kisses her back and then takes her hand and leads her into the bedroom. In the morning he says, “You’re beautiful. I love watching you get dressed.” She turns and flashes a quick smile at him. “Listen,” he says, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something. I ... uh, could you get me ten grand cash.” “What!”

Quadrant May 2015 91 Story

“I’ll pay you back fifteen grand, five grand profit in three weeks.” “A drug deal?” “What else. Can you get the cash?” “Yeah, I have much more than that in my bank account. But listen, just pay me back the ten thousand. Keep the profit for yourself.” I need it more than you, that’s what you mean, is what Pete is thinking, and he says, “Great. How about we walk down to Acland Street, you can get me the cash and then we can have coffee and I’ll go and see my man and buy the gear. I have some stuff for Vincent too and three or four of your other friends that I need to drop off. Could I borrow your car?” “Yeah, sure. What about the bar job?” “I’ll probably stick to what I’m good at.” And he gets out of bed naked and grabs her and she squeals in delight but he lets her go and goes into the bathroom and showers. She gets the cash and Pete drops her off at her father’s house in St Georges Road, Toorak. He drives back to St Kilda and stops at his flat to get the drugs he’s going to sell and a jacket and then drives down the Nepean Highway. He goes into a used-car dealership. A salesman comes straight for him. “Trading in the BMW?” Pete looks at the cars in the yard and laughs and says, “Not here I’m not. I’m just gonna take a look around.” And the salesman backs off. He wanders through the small yard and comes on a 2007 Peugeot for $12,000. He asks to test-drive it and the salesman sits in the passenger seat while they take it around the block a couple of times. “I like it,” Pete says. “Just need some time to think.” Back at his apartment on Inkerman Street, his phone rings. “Buying a car, mate?” Jess says. “How’d you ...” “Tony saw you talking to a salesman in a car yard on Nepean Highway. He was on his way back from seeing his girl in Chelsea. What gives, Pete? I’m getting a bad feeling, mate. Like you don’t love me any more. These fancy new phones, looking at cars, these yuppies you’re hanging around with giving you big ideas.” “I want to buy a car. Nothing sinister in that.” “No, mate, nothing sinister in that.” “It’s Tuesday,” Pete says. “I’ll be over to pick you up on Thursday afternoon. I’ll let you know if I get a new mobile by then.” “Good, that’s good, mate. See you, then.” Pete goes to see Vincent and then on to Miranda and Sissy, who put him onto Lionel and Victor, and he’s nearly sold half of the stuff Jess gave him. He drives home and makes a few quick calls. He waits at the apartment for an hour for three of Julia’s friends to turn up and he sells some more gear, pressures them into buying more than they want to, then he stashes the rest of the gear back under his bed in the suitcase. He drops Julia’s car back off at her parents’ place and leaves the keys with the gardener and gets a taxi to Warrigal Road, Moorabbin. He looks around two car yards and sees a 2000 Subaru Impreza, takes it for a test drive. The price is $8800. He gets it down to $8650. Big concession. And drives off. He buys two more of the new-style $50 disposable mobile phones and drives home. In the morning he deliberately calls Jess at 7.30 a.m. because he knows he’ll be asleep. He uses one of the new phones and leaves a message. “This is my new number; I’m still picking you up Thursday.” He flushes the rest of the drugs down the toilet, slowly. Wraps the grass in toilet paper in small bunches and flushes, all the pills flushed slowly. No traces left, but he cleans the toilet with Ajax

92 Quadrant May 2015 Story powder to make sure. He deals drugs, he doesn’t use them. He paid the rent for another month a couple of days ago. The deal is month by month. He calls the landlord and they agree that he can leave after the month is up. He packs two small backpacks, leaving most of his fancy new threads in the cupboard. He packs all his shorts and jeans and T-shirts. Leaves all the shoes and boots behind except for one pair of black shoes, but takes all his runners. He starts out of the apartment but stops himself and smiles and turns back and takes one of the black suits with him. He leaves his regular mobile on the kitchen table and takes the two new disposable phones with him. Jess doesn’t call him until Thursday afternoon and by that time he’s at a service station in Glendambo on the Stuart Highway, 592 kilometres north of Adelaide. Jess says, “Where are you, mate?” Pete smiles, “Just filling up at a servo on Kings Way. I won’t be able to pick you up until tomorrow morning though, I haven’t ...” “Mate, you get your arse over here soon, pronto! Now! Something’s not ...” Pete turns the phone off and throws it into a bin beside the petrol bowsers. He fills the tank and gets into the car. He didn’t call Julia. She didn’t believe in him. The money is inconsequential. A lesson. He drives north up the Stuart Highway, sleeping in short spells and then driving some more.

When the chameleon reaches Darwin he changes his name by deed poll from Pete Moss to Brian Pattinson. The name means nothing. The blander the better. He enrols at Charles Darwin University but has to do a bridging course for six months before he can start his BA. He stays at the YMCA for a while and then moves into accommodation on campus. He never saved much from all the dealing. It was, as he said to Julia, eating out for breakfast, lunch and dinner and then the clothes, the taxis everywhere, the rent on his apartment. He survives for a while on his savings and the rent on campus is reasonable. The other students like him. He tells them he was a waiter in a restaurant in Northbridge in Perth and he wanted to change his life around, so he moved up here. He does well in his studies. After a while he runs out of money and takes work scrubbing pots and pans in the kitchen of the cafeteria at the university. He’s a good worker.

Four years after leaving Melbourne, Brian Pattinson gets his degree and then commits to study another year and a half to become a primary school teacher. He does well and completes the course. On his first day at school in Minter, a suburb of Darwin, he enters the classroom and looks at all the different kids, different colours and shapes and sizes. He says good morning and the kids say nothing. He says, “My name is Brian Pattinson. You can call me Mr Pattinson.” And he turns and writes his name on the blackboard, turns back to the class and says, “Good morning everyone.” And they say, “Good morning Mr Pattinson.” And he smiles broadly. At lunchtime he finds a quiet spot and thinks about his life: the fifteen-year-old kid who got kicked out of school because he wanted to run with an older, wilder pack of boys. Meeting Jess and the beginning of things. Drug deals and easy money. The swaggering nineteen-year-old who somehow caught the eye of Julia. The drug dealer living the high life in a St Kilda apartment. The escape. Now this: legitimate; a teacher. Somebody. He can teach these kids a trick or two.

Sean O’Leary is a Melbourne writer. He published a short story collection, My Town (Ginninderra Press), in 2010, and several of his stories have since appeared in Quadrant.

Quadrant May 2015 93 S t o r y

Wellington Valley Bob Wright

30th March 1827

To His Excellency Lieutenant-General Ralph Darling, Governor and Commander in Chief in and over His Majesty’s Territory of New South Wales and its Dependencies, etc, etc, etc.

Sir, I have the honour to acquaint you with the facts of a very curious incident that occurred here in Wellington Valley during my recent visit. The affair could have had very serious consequences, but fortunately I have been able to clear it up to the satisfaction of all concerned. It is more than a year since Your Excellency was pleased to appoint me to the position of Inspector of Roads and Bridges, and it is only now that I have reached the outer limits of settlement in my general tour of inspection of the colony’s roads. From Bathurst I have come 102 miles west to this remote convict settlement, reaching it on the morning of the 27th. On arrival at Government House I found the Commandant, Lieutenant Percy Simpson, on the point of ordering the soldiers under his command to carry out a general attack on the local aborigines in order to drive them out of the district entirely. Conscious as I am that such action is totally against Your Excellency’s benign policy with regard to the native people, I enquired of him as to the cause of such a drastic intention. He related the following extraordinary circumstances to me. Several days previously an aboriginal man named Wiradjura was arrested by the soldiers for attacking one Private John Lynch in the bush with murderous intent. He wounded Lynch with his spear, at which point Lynch called out to his fellow soldiers for help and they swiftly came to his assistance and saved him from any further harm. Lynch was furious and wanted to shoot the man there and then, but his fellow soldiers would not allow him to commit so wanton an act. They insisted the man be arrested and brought before the Commandant for punishment by due process of law. The wounded Lynch kept hold of Wiradjura’s spear as evidence, and the soldiers conveyed the aborigine to the jail, where he was locked in by the settlement constable, the convict Vincent Russell. A report on the incident was then made to the Commandant, who questioned Private Lynch. Lynch said the attack was entirely unprovoked. In the eyes of the Commandant this was a very serious development, coming on top of a recent escalation of tensions between the natives and the settlers. The natives have been provoked to an increasing number of retaliatory attacks by outrages committed upon them by stock- keepers, who interfere with their women and subject them to other acts of aggression. Consequently the settlers, who are now fearful for their safety, have been calling on

94 Quadrant May 2015 Story the Commandant to clear the aboriginal tribes right out of the district. An unprovoked attack on a soldier so close to the centre of the settlement made it more difficult for him to resist their demands. It being already late in the afternoon, the Commandant decided to leave Wiradjura locked up overnight and question him in the morning. That evening the constable brought the prisoner a meal and found him to be in a sullen mood and making threats to kill Private Lynch. He left him locked in the jail and retired to his hut, which he shares with the principal overseer, the convict George Brown. The following morning, when the Commandant was ready to question the prisoner, the soldiers went to the jail with the constable to fetch him to Government House. To their utmost astonishment, when the constable unlocked the jail they found inside not the man Wiradjura, but the soldier Private Lynch, run through with Wiradjura’s spear and quite dead. Of Wiradjura there was no sign. This unexpected development was reported immediately to the Commandant, who sent the soldiers out in search of Wiradjura and closely questioned the constable, who swore that he could not understand how the body of Private Lynch came to be in the jail in place of the aborigine. Vincent Russell was adamant that Wiradjura had been in the jail when he locked it up the previous night, that he had gone straight to his hut afterwards, from which he had not stirred all night, and that he had the only key to the jail with him the whole time. He could not account for the strange turn of events. The Commandant then sent for the principal overseer and questioned him, and George Brown confirmed that Russell had not left their hut from the time he returned from taking Wiradjura a meal until the following morning. The Commandant surmised that the only possible explanation was that Private Lynch, who still had Wiradjura’s spear, must have somehow stolen the keys to the jail from Russell and opened it in the night with intent to kill Wiradjura in revenge for the attack upon himself. The aborigine must have fought Lynch off and got the better of him in the ensuing struggle, spearing him to death and fleeing into the bush. Upon their return the soldiers reported that after an extensive search they had found no trace of Wiradjura, nor would any of the other aborigines say where he was. At this point the Commandant sent word to the aborigines that if they did not deliver Wiradjura up he would have no choice but to attack them and drive them away. He gave them twenty-four hours to meet his demand. The killing of one of his soldiers could not be allowed to go unaccounted for and unpunished. The twenty-four hours having expired with no word from the aborigines, the Commandant mobilised his soldiers in preparation for hostilities, and that is how I found matters on the morning of my arrival. On Your Excellency’s authority I ordered the Commandant to suspend his action pending my own investigation of the case. I was not entirely convinced that his explanation of the facts was the true one. For one thing, it did not explain how the jail came to be locked again the morning that Private Lynch’s body was discovered inside, and the keys back in possession of the constable. I told Lieutenant Simpson that I wished to question both the constable and the principal overseer myself. He ordered them brought to Government House and I questioned them separately in the presence of the Commandant. They both told me exactly what they had told him. I then told the Commandant that I wished to examine the body of Private Lynch, which had been removed from the jail to his hut, and had not yet been buried. He took me to Lynch’s hut, where I found the unfortunate man’s corpse laid out on his bed, which was soaked in his blood. The spear had been removed from his body, leaving a gaping hole in his chest. His face was contorted in pain. It was a gruesome sight. The

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Commandant informed me that he had the bloodied spear safely in his possession at Government House. I next asked to see the jail, where Lynch had been killed. The constable was sent for again, and he unlocked it for me. I looked it over carefully, but there was nothing to be seen, nothing to give any clue as to what had taken place so recently within. I was perplexed, and decided at this point that I needed to hear Wiradjura’s side of the story. I declared my intention of visiting the aborigines on my own to attempt to speak with Wiradjura. The Commandant protested against this course most vehemently. He was of the opinion that I would be putting myself in danger, and he said he would not be able to guarantee my safety if I did so. I assured him that I would come to no harm. The Commandant gave me directions and I rode into the bush in search of the natives. At first they kept their distance and fled at my approach. But I called out to them that I was a friend and meant them no harm, that I only wished to speak with them. They saw that I was alone and eventually they permitted me to approach them. I explained who I was and assured them that I would permit no attack upon them by the soldiers. I asked to speak with Wiradjura, but they said he was frightened and had gone into hiding and would not come. I could not persuade them to bring him out. As I turned to leave however, a comely young aboriginal woman came forward and identified herself as Wiradjura’s wife, Bangaree, and said she would speak with me. Bangaree then told me that Wiradjura had attacked Private Lynch because the soldier had tried to take her by force when he happened across them in the bush. Wiradjura had only been defending her against an attempted outrage. She fled, and did not see Wiradjura again until the following day. Her husband told her how he had been taken by the soldiers and locked in the jail. She said that Wiradjura did not kill Lynch. She said he told her that after he had eaten the meal the constable had brought him he had fallen asleep in the jail and woken the next morning in the bush, with no idea of what had happened in the interval. This was a queer tale indeed, but I had no reason to think that she was not telling the truth. She insisted upon her husband’s innocence. I was now getting suspicious about the peculiar circumstances surrounding Lynch’s killing, and as I rode back to the settlement something was nagging at me, something that didn’t seem right. On arrival I made some examinations of the ground which confirmed my suspicions. I also questioned some of the other convicts to see if they could tell me anything about this mysterious affair. They provided me with certain information which made the whole thing clear to me. I asked to question Brown again and had him brought to Government House. In the presence of the Commandant I told him that I knew that he had been lying and that he and Russell had murdered Lynch. He denied it and said they had no reason to do so. I then revealed that the convicts had told me that Lynch had treated both Russell and himself with contempt and never lost an opportunity to heap insults upon them, despite their positions of responsibility, and that consequently there was bad blood between the two men and Lynch. The convicts had been willing to tell me this because they despised both the constable and the principal overseer due to their harshness. Brown said the other convicts were slandering him out of jealousy and that I had no proof that Lynch wasn’t killed by Wiradjura. I told him that was impossible because Lynch’s bed was soaked in blood, but there was none in the jail. If he had been speared in the jail in a struggle with Wiradjura, then there would have been blood stains in the jail, but when I had examined it earlier in the day there were none. Conversely, if Lynch had been killed in the jail there should have been no blood in his hut, or at least not the quantity that I had observed there. There could only be one explanation. Lynch must have been killed in his hut and the body removed to the jail afterwards. I had confirmed

96 Quadrant May 2015 Story this by carefully examining the ground between Lynch’s hut and the jail, and sure enough I had found evidence of dried blood, the larger quantity being near the hut and a lesser amount closer to the jail. Furthermore Russell was the only one who could have locked Lynch’s body in the jail, and that meant that he must have had a hand in the man’s death. Since Brown had given Russell an alibi, Brown must also be involved. I told Brown this was sufficient evidence to hang them both for murder. At this he went ashen-faced and begged for mercy, insisting that he had taken no part in the killing of Lynch. I told Brown his only hope of avoiding the gallows was to tell me the whole truth immediately. He said I was right in all particulars except that he had only assisted Russell after the event, and colluded with him to cover it up. He said Russell had left their hut in the night and returned a little later and asked him to help with something. They had gone to Lynch’s hut where Brown saw that Russell had killed Lynch with Wiradjura’s spear. Brown and Russell then carried the body to the jail and locked it in. Brown said Wiradjura was quite unconscious at the time, and did not stir at all when they removed him to the bush—a circumstance he could not account for. I now sent for Russell, and Brown repeated his account of events in front of him. With no way out, Russell made a full confession. He said he hated Lynch and was just waiting for a chance to be revenged on him. He seized the opportunity provided by Wiradjura’s arrest to kill Lynch and make it look as though he had been killed in an attempt to murder the prisoner. Knowing Lynch was wounded and vulnerable, Russell had stolen into his hut that night, seized the spear and run him through the chest while he slept. He then solicited Brown’s assistance to remove the body to the jail. Earlier in the evening he had laced Wiradjura’s meal with opium, so the prisoner was totally unconscious when they brought in Lynch’s body and took him out to the bush. Russell’s idea was to blame the killing on the aborigine, who would have no knowledge of events. The constable’s mistake was to lock up the prison afterwards, which he did out of habit and without thinking. With the mystery resolved and Russell now locked in the jail awaiting trial, the Commandant is satisfied that the aborigines had no part in the murder of Private Lynch. He has cancelled the planned attack and re-established good relations with the natives, sending them word that they will not be harmed and that Wiradjura will not be arrested. I have forbidden Lieutenant Simpson to take any extreme action in the future, whatever pressure he may be under from the settlers, and reminded him of your policy in these matters. I have also warned him severely against allowing any of his soldiers to mistreat the aborigines or their women. Of course it is harder to police such behaviour amongst the settlers and stock-keepers on so remote a frontier. Perhaps it would be wiser after all to withdraw the settlement at Wellington Valley entirely. I will send a further report in my next letter.

I have the honour to be, Sir, Your most Humble Obedient Servant,

Captain William Dumaresq.

Bob Wright lives in Sydney. This story won the Rolf Boldrewood Literary Award for prose in 2014.

Quadrant May 2015 97 B o o k s derisory, one parent exclaiming (quite correctly, and with a much better grasp of the rule of law than the framers of the Norwegian penal code) that he should have been sentenced to seventy-seven sen- tences of twenty-one years to run consecutively, Anthon y Daniels that is to say 1617 years’ imprisonment: in effect, of course, imprisonment for the term of his natural The Mind of a Mass Murderer life, assuming no dramatic breakthroughs in medi- cal science to extend the span of human life well One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the beyond that of Methuselah. Massacre in Norway But there is a get-out under the Norwegian by Åsne Seierstad penal code, a get-out that is genuinely and seriously Virago, 2015, 544 pages, $35 in breach of human rights: for if, after twenty-one years, Breivik is considered still to pose a danger to Utøya: Norvège, 22 juillet 2011, 77 morts society, he may be kept in prison for a further five by Laurent Obertone years, and after that for another five years, and so on Editions Ring, 2013, 400 pages, €20 ad infinitum. Since Breivik is now only thirty-two years of age, it is conceivable that he could spend wo years after Anders Behring Breivik set off a twice as long under preventive detention as under bomb in the centre of Oslo, killing eight peo- detention mandated by a proper court: in other Tple and injuring two hundred, and then went to words, serve twice as long for what he might do as the island of Utøya where he shot to death sixty- for what he actually has done. But such preventive nine young people, all young members of Norway’s detention, susceptible to all kinds of political pres- Labour Party, and injured severely more than thirty sures, to say nothing of the inherent impossibility others, the European Court of Human Rights ruled of predicting anyone’s future behaviour beyond rea- that the whole life sentences passed on three British sonable doubt, either in the direction of committing murderers (which meant that they would never be further crime or of not committing it, has no place released from prison) were degrading and inhuman, under the rule of law. in breach of their fundamental human rights: for, The three British murderers on whose case the said the court, such sentences allowed for no repent- ECHR ruled were not as bad, which is to say as ance, redemption or rehabilitation, the three Rs of prolific in killing, as Breivik, but there comes a the humanitarian theory of punishment. point in evil at which it is fruitless, even obscene, It beggars belief, surely, that judges on a con- to apply a simple measure of comparison. A man tinent that had within living memory witnessed who rapes and murders four people is not half as bad some of the worst atrocities in human history could as one who rapes and murders eight: and the three conceive of no crime so terrible that it was beyond British murderers were bad enough to have merited the reach of those three Rs. Had Dr Mengele been their sentence. One killed five members of his fam- captured and imprisoned, for example, they would ily; another killed his wife shortly after having been have been content to release him once he had con- released from prison after serving a sentence for the vinced them that he was sorry for what he had done murder of another person; and the third killed four and would never do it again. For them, punishment young homosexual men for his own sexual pleasure. and therapy were indistinguishable, perhaps because Apparently, the ECHR thought they all deserved a in their philosophy no man does wrong knowingly second (or a third and a fifth) chance. and therefore has to be brought not so much to God No doubt the judges of the ECHR hugged their as to knowledge, including moral knowledge, for robes tightly around themselves as they delivered example that conducting vicious experiments on lit- their judgment, warmed by their awareness of their tle children is wrong. own humanity; but in fact their judgment was as Their grasp of the principles of the rule of law was cruel even to the appellants as well as it was psy- weak, as indeed was that of the Norwegian penal chologically crude, additionally being against the code according to which Breivik, having been found rule of law for the reasons given above. For they criminally responsible for his acts, was sentenced to did not rule that the men should never actually be the maximum term of imprisonment allowed under released, only that consideration be given to such the code, that is to say twenty-one years. Twenty- release regularly, thus laying them open to a cycle of one years for having killed seventy-seven people, or false hope and subsequent disappointment, allow- just over three months’ imprisonment per murder! ing, indeed mandating, officialdom to play a game No wonder many Norwegians thought the sentence of cat-and-mouse with them. By contrast, a man

98 Quadrant May 2015 Books may make the most of his situation if he knows for principle and therefore unjustly. From resentment at certain what it is. supposed injustice it is but a small step to paranoia. Breivik, in fact, had every intention of making Like many of his type, Breivik was an ambitious the most of his imprisonment, at least according mediocrity. In that regard, at least, he was repre- to a book about him, One of Us, by Åsne Seierstad, sentative of his age, which has passed seamlessly a well-known Norwegian journalist who attended from meritocracy, the social ascension of the able Breivik’s trial. Unlike most mass killers, Breivik did irrespective of social origin, to that of mediocracy, not die either by police action or suicide, but meekly the social ascension of the ambitious irrespective of gave himself up; indeed, he had already tried to their ability. do so when he had killed “only” forty youngsters, Ambition cannot remain free-floating for long, but could find no one to surrender to, so he went it has to attach itself to something. Early in his life on killing. His plan was to use prison as a retreat Breivik, who had no patience for scholastic achieve- in which he could write and from which he could ment, sought eminence among the youth of Oslo spread his ideas; he was outraged when his access who adorned the walls and buildings of that city to a word-processor was limited and the pen he was with graffiti; then he tried several get-rich-quick given to write with was not to his taste. It may seem schemes, the most successful of which was in the incredible that a man who had just killed seventy- sale of fake university diplomas. He soon lost any seven people should immediately money that he made on one scheme start to complain of minor on the next; and, never having had inconveniences (he also complained t is often the most a steady job, he then retired to a of the view from his cell and that I room in his mother’s flat where, for he was given the wrong sweaters to conscienceless criminals five years, he played a competitive wear) as if he were being maltreated, who have the liveliest online war game in which he rose in if not tortured, by the authorities, the ranks, an achievement of a kind but in fact it is often the most or most acute sense but a worthless one. conscienceless criminals who have of what is, or what Breivik was a serial fantasist the liveliest or most acute sense of they think is, their who loved to dress up in uniforms. what is, or what they think is, their Thanks to the influence of an uncle, due. Few men are so lacking in due. Few men are so he joined the Masons and had compassion that they are incapable lacking in compassion himself photographed in Masonic of self-pity. regalia: but Masonry were far too that they are incapable rigorous, and demanded far too t was only natural that world of self-pity. much discipline, for him to rise in attention should be fixed for a the ranks. He devised a military timeI on a man who, in a matter of uniform for himself, complete with only a few hours, singlehandedly more than doubled self-awarded medals, though he had avoided his his country’s annual rate of murder. Indeed, it is dif- compulsory military service by claiming to be his ficult not to conclude that seeking such attention mother’s carer (he would have liked the army, pro- was a part, probably a large part, of the motivation vided that he entered it with the rank of general). for his mass killing: for there undoubtedly exists a Like many an ambitious mediocrity, he was a firm class of men (almost always men) so avid for fame believer in hierarchy so long as he was at the top of but impatient of the discipline usually necessary to it. achieve it by normal or constructive means that they Having previously expressed little interest in resort to a dramatic, bloodthirsty coup that will keep politics, his first political commitment was to their names alive if not for ever, at least for much the Progress Party, Norway’s most conservative longer than if they had just gone to work like eve- parliamentary party (an odd choice of name, ryone else. How else but by slaughter would Anders perhaps, for a conservative political formation, but Behring Breivik have had books written about him not even conservatives would vote for a Regress in several languages? His victims were sacrificed on Party). Breivik was soon disillusioned by the party, the altar of his ego. initially not because of any disagreement with Are such types as he more common now than its policies but because it failed to choose him as previously? The cult of celebrity certainly breeds an a candidate for a council election. Ever inclined ambition to be noticed by large numbers, as if to be to find fault with those who did not recognise were to be seen; and the cult also breeds resentment him at once for the genius he took himself to be, and bitterness, inasmuch as celebrity is a scarce com- he decided that the route of conventional politics modity that is distributed according to no obvious was hopeless, that Norway was too far down the

Quadrant May 2015 99 Books declivity of what he called cultural Marxism, of But if we are destined finally not to understand, which multiculturalism was its most important and we are equally destined to try to do so: such is dangerous manifestation, to be saved by anything Man’s Sisyphean task. We use various means: the but conspiratorial revolutionary activity. However, biographical, the empathic, the sociological, the he failed even in his attempts to reach others of like historical, the ideological and even, sometimes, the mind. His overtures were not responded to, or only neurological. Åsne Seierstad’s book, for example, perfunctorily. He was too much of a crank even for relates Breivik’s personal trajectory in considerable other cranks. detail which, lacking intrinsic interest, she must do Failure only hardened his conviction that he on the supposition that the origin of the acts that had a mission of national, if not of world-histori- gave him worldwide notoriety must be sought in his cal, importance to fulfil. In this he was rather like biography. another Norwegian misfit, Vidkun Quisling. In fact, Anders Breivik was a child of the new type of Quisling was a man of much greater native ability family arrangements that have comprehensively than Breivik, being both a gifted mathematician replaced the traditional nuclear family in much of and linguist, speaking English and Russian fluently, Europe. His mother already had a child by a previ- an ability that made him Fridtjov Nansen’s right- ous liaison when he was born; his father, a diplomat, hand man in the latter’s efforts to bring famine relief had three children by a previous marriage to whom to millions of peasants in the wake of the Russian he seemed singularly indifferent and unattached. Revolution. But Quisling had some of the same His mother and father married when she was faults as Breivik, among them a belief that repeated pregnant; she had been so worried by his coldness failure only proved how right he was, and that he that she considered aborting the child, but finally alone had truly grasped the nature of the threat decided against and got married instead. The mar- posed by Marxists to his country: beliefs that made riage lasted only about a year, however; and young co-operation with others difficult and provided a Anders had very intermittent contact with his father justification in advance for anything and everything thereafter. that he did. What was written of Quisling in a biog- Early in his childhood, Breivik displayed signs of raphy could have been written of Breivik: oddness: inability to make friends, a failure to play normally and occasional misbehaviour, for example. [His] lack of realism was his strength and, at His mother found it hard to cope with him, and she the same time, his greatest weakness. Quisling’s herself was noticed to be odd. Before long, the social immunity from political reality provided him services and child psychiatrists were invoked, but with the power to ignore political reverses after a certain amount of inconclusive investigation which would have crushed the spirit of a less they came to the conclusion that there was nothing introverted man. they either could or should do. Nor are the results of interventions by social services or child psychiatrists Obstinacy might be a better word than strength to any guarantee of a happy outcome. describe these two men’s determination. What is one to make of this? It is clear that There was one difference between Quisling Anders Breivik’s upbringing was far from ideal, and Breivik, though; the former thought he was but many children have had far more disturbed the Saviour, the latter that he was only John the upbringings than his without resort later in life Baptist. Breivik’s act was supposed to be the spark to bombs and machine guns. Perhaps his genetic that ignited the fire of resistance to what he saw as inheritance was far from ideal also, for his father Islamic domination throughout Europe, resistance showed a marked tendency to emotional coldness that would save it from demographic and cultural and self-centredness. On the other hand, such self- extinction. centredness was l’air du temps: it was the decades following the 1960s, when human relations, espe- hen someone acts as cataclysmically as Breivik, cially those between men and women, were now without warning and apparently without seri- supposed to be founded upon the state of their affec- Wous criminal antecedents, we feel the need to under- tions and on nothing so unromantic and inhibiting stand, though it is by no means clear what would as mutual obligation, contract, material interest or constitute satisfactory understanding. At what point duty towards others (for example children). In such would any of us be able to say, “Aha, now at last I a moral environment, it was hardly surprising that understand why Breivik shot so pitilessly sixty-nine fathers, tiring of mothers, should abandon them in young people on Utøya”? That point, I suspect, will their search for personal happiness (“I needed my never come: for at the heart of all human behaviour space,” as many a child-abandoner has told me). there lies an unresolvable mystery. Limited though such material about Breivik’s

100 Quadrant May 2015 Books upbringing is in explanatory power, we should find Capote’s In Cold Blood, not a tradition that I much it odd if a book devoted to his exploits omitted it admire, for it seems to me that where such a book altogether, so strong is our instinctive belief that is accurate it claims the prestige of scholarship and the child is father to the man. where inaccurate the privileges of fiction. However, Obertone’s depiction of Breivik is plausible and not nother approach is taken by a French author, much in conflict with the known facts about him. Laurent Obertone, a pseudonymous journalist What upset the reviewers, I suspect, is that Aspecialising in crimes of violence. His book, Utøya: some of Breivik’s complaints against Norwegian Norvège, 22 juillet 2011, 77 morts, is an attempt to society as relayed by Obertone, while grotesquely tell the story in the first person, that of Breivik, on exaggerated, have an element of truth, or at least the assumption that if we could enter his point of an element that is not incontestably false. When view we should reach that Eureka! moment when the distinguished French novelist, essayist and edi- we felt that we had understood. tor at Gallimard (from which he was immediately The book was strongly criticised in France on sacked), Richard Millet, suggested, in his Éloge lit- two grounds. The first was that it was sensation- téraire d’Anders Breivik, that Breivik’s actions were alist, though this seems to me odd. What Breivik the reaction of someone exasperated by the delib- did understandably caused a sensa- erate and irreversible destruction tion; if it was to be written about of Norwegian national identity by at all (and what degree of censor- eierstad’s book, the policies promoted by multicul- ship would have been necessary S turalist dogma, he was immediately to ensure that it was not written probably without treated as a heretic rather than as about?), it could hardly be written meaning to, provides someone who had put forward an about in the language of the audit argument, however mistaken. of the accounts of a municipal an argument against Some of Millet’s formulations library. multiculturalism were both unwise and distasteful, The second criticism of the infinitely stronger for example that the killings had a book was that it attempted to see formal literary perfection; but the and recount things from Breivik’s than any that the fact that Breivik cold-bloodedly point of view and was therefore ranting, grandiose slaughtered sixty-nine young people some kind of apologetic for him. It on the island of Utøya who might risked not only lessening the mon- and brutal Breivik well have been the future leaders of strousness of what he did, but even could supply. the party most militantly attached partially justifying it. to multiculturalism (for among This criticism was also odd, but other reasons as a vote bank) does in another way. It was the same criticism that was not automatically mean that the policy of admit- levelled at the film Downfall about the last days of ting large numbers of people, a proportion of whom Hitler, which was accused of presenting Hitler in at least may be, or become, the bearers of a deeply too human a way. But Hitler was a human being, hostile and dangerous ideology, all for no reasons of not an alien parachuted in from outer space, which national interest but purely out of a kind of moral is precisely why he is so frightening; the realistic vanity, exhibitionism, grandiosity and hubris (“Aren’t representation of such a figure can only be objec- we good people?!”) is wise, prudent or even moral. tionable to those who believe that to explain all is Events in Europe and elsewhere do not ineluctably to forgive all, to those who take a purely naturalistic lead to the conclusion that, for example, Sweden’s view of humanity, so that ultimately morality has no determination to take in more refugees from Syria autonomous sphere but is only a matter of sociology, is in that country’s long-term interest, or even con- economics and even physiology as the movement of duces to the peace of the world. billiard balls is only a matter of the laws of motion. What Breivik’s monstrous action did was to Obertone obviously based his reconstruction of make discussion of the whole question difficult to Breivik’s thought processes before, during and after the point of impossibility. If you do not subscribe to the massacre on the public record and Breivik’s the eternal truths of multiculturalism (discovered, expressed opinions. After all, his 1500-page mani- it must be confessed, rather late in human history), festo was easily available on the internet (I read you must be an apologist for Breivik. Like many about thirty pages of it before deciding that life was dichotomies, this is a false one: false in logic, too short to read further), and so it would not be though not necessarily in political psychology, and very difficult to construct a plausible first-person it is the latter which counts. What Breivik did, who account. The book is in the tradition of Truman preposterously believed himself to be some kind

Quadrant May 2015 101 Books of Knight Templar, was immensely strengthen the husband. Having grown up mostly in Norway, she multiculturalists. On one side angels, on the other specifically disliked much of the Kurdish culture devils. her parents had fled. It is unlikely, had she married a Norwegian, that she would have taught her ne of Us recounts not only Breivik’s trajectory, children Kurdish; her Kurdishness would soon have but also those of a few of his victims. This is been reduced to cuisine and occasional folkloric Oalways a dangerous procedure, for it suggests that manifestations, that is to say fancy dress at outdoor the nature of the victims is what determines the festivals. Thus she died not for a multicultural seriousness of a crime. But Breivik’s crime would Norway, but because she wanted so much to be have been just as heinous if he had gone into a prison assimilated. She died not for multiculturalism, but and killed, say, the seventy-seven worst criminals in for assimilation, for Norwegian-ness. Norway. The crime is mass murder, not the mass murder of particular individuals. Nor does being a Anthony Daniels, who also writes under the victim make a victim retrospectively a paragon. pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, is a prolific writer For myself, I found the young members of the on social, medical, literary and other matters. His Norwegian Labour Party as depicted by Seierstad most recent book is Threats of Pain and Ruin (New somewhat unattractive. They were energetic and English Review Press). He wrote on Simon Leys in public-spirited all right, but priggish, as youth- the April issue. ful idealists so often are. On Utøya, for example, they heard a lecture about the Western Sahara, of which country they had never previously heard and of which naturally enough they now heard from one side of the question only, and immediately con- Alan Gould cluded that they had to do something about it. Not for an instant did it occur to them that they might All the Manner of Life not be intellectually qualified, or have a moral locus standi, let alone be morally required, to do something The Children Act about the Western Sahara. Here was moral grandi- by Ian McEwan osity in all its nakedness, together with suffocating Jonathan Cape, 2014, 213 pages, $30 self-righteousness and a complete lack of awareness that they were in practice forming themselves into his novel is, I think, a small masterpiece, and in an elite so that they might well grow up to be a what follows I want to illumine how its quality mixture of Machiavelli and Mrs Jellyby. But—need Tarises out of a meticulous naturalism in the writ- I really add?—killing them was still the most des- ing, one that gathers into the story its extraordinary picable act. mythic charge and the exquisite realisation of its Oddly enough, Seierstad’s book, probably with- central character, Fiona Maye, yet leaves us with a out meaning to, provides an argument against mul- sense of an everyday fabric having been delineated ticulturalism infinitely stronger than any that the just so, justly and so. ranting, grandiose and brutal Breivik could supply. Fiona is a respected High Court judge living One of Breivik’s victims was a young woman called with her husband, Jack, at Gray’s Inn Square in Bano Rashid, the daughter of Kurdish refugees. London. As the novel opens, we learn their long Born in Iraqi Kurdistan, she arrived in Norway as a marriage is in crisis, Jack announcing he wants young girl. Her aim in life was to integrate herself Fiona’s licence to proceed with an affair because thoroughly into Norwegian society, an admirable their own sexual relation has lapsed for several goal but not easily achieved, for the Norwegians, weeks. Fiona, hurt, angry, has been proofing the though welcoming in the abstract, are not partic- judgment of a recent case in which she has presided. ularly warm in practice. Nevertheless, gifted and Her cases often involve children, for her expertise is hard-working, she succeeded, becoming something in divorce settlement. The couple is childless. of a youth leader (horrible term!) and joining the And here, finely integrated, is the substance with Norwegian Labour Party. Breivik murdered her on which McEwan creates Fiona’s consciousness, and Utøya. the calibre of her intelligence. There are the fur- At Breivik’s trial, her sister, Lara, said, “Bano nishings of a bourgeois apartment, the good whisky didn’t die for nothing. She died for a multicultural and its matrix of respectable/indulgent attitudes, Norway.” This was untrue and betrayed her sister’s the incessant (unnatural?) summer downpours. memory. Bano wanted a normal career in Norway, There are the difficulties of her recent cases—one and would probably have found a Norwegian a custody battle in a strict Jewish family, another a

102 Quadrant May 2015 Books mixed marriage where the father has absconded to alike. Here, in the very impulses of composition, is Morocco with the child. And deftly included there what Leavis would have called “moral seriousness” is a consciousness of our wider planet, weather sys- and I imagine that brave chisel-faced old gent wav- tems off the Azores causing the rain, news from ing McEwan’s novel past his strictures. war-torn Syria. These details fret upon Fiona’s For Fiona, the effective argument from both attention, capturing the flickery nature of modern sides of the emergency determines her to travel to stimulae while revealing her clear, moral, authori- the boy’s bedside and assess his attitude for herself. tative being, now at a moment of personal crisis. This is conscientious of her, but also consequential, This is very deft depiction. So too is the pursuit for this act creates a personal relationship between of her reactions to her spouse’s iconoclastic chal- her and the boy. lenge to their union. These modulate from initial Adam has all the necessity of a precocious youth shock to a colder retaliatory mood facing death. The very candor she at the same time as she composes must use in quizzing him estab- herself for the family court where he essential value lishes their rapport. He reads her she presides. T one of his poems. On his violin he And then we learn (as her hus- of the Novel, as one plays her a favourite, Yeats’s poem band does not) that her reason for of the human arts, about faery, “Down by the Salley losing interest in sex arises from Gardens”, and she sings along. She a case where she has been com- is the fairness with returns to the court, and in the face pelled to judge in favour of kill- which it treats all of the Jehovah’s Witnesses prohibi- ing one Siamese twin in order that the manner of Life tion, orders that the blood transfu- the other might live. This, for all sion be given, and the chance of life her judicial dispassion, has made that comes before it, thereby made probable. her recoil against bodily intimacy. giving necessity to A month or so later she is doing For here, we are quietly aware, is judicial duty in Newcastle when a childless woman put in the way the welcome and the Adam locates her in her hotel. He of legally murdering a part-child, unwelcome alike. is now eighteen, immensely grate- and McEwan is searching in how ful to be alive, has run away from he exposes the visceral and moral home and believes he should now necessity in Fiona’s reaction. It is fair to add that live with Fiona. Naturally her professional and per- we encounter Fiona’s restive consciousness in a very sonal circumstances make this impossible, but in exactly mapped London, and all this preparation is dismissing him … encountered in the first chapter. lightly she took the lapel of his thin jacket n the law case that lies at the heart of the story, between her fingers and drew him towards her. Fiona must judge in a case where a hospital wishes Her intention was to kiss him on the cheek, but Ito give a life-saving blood transfusion to a boy, as she reached up and he stooped a little their Adam, just short of his eighteenth birthday, from faces came close. He turned his head and their a Jehovah’s Witnesses family for whom to perform lips met. She could have drawn back, she could such an operation is to contaminate essential beliefs, have stepped right away from him. Instead and both parents and patient have refused it. The she lingered, defenceless before the moment. hospital’s case for intervening to save life is crisply, The sensation of skin on skin obliterated any forensically delivered, inarguably one might say. possibility of choice. If it was possible to kiss Then the family and their legals reply, and McEwan chastely full on the lips, this was what she does something both clever and unerringly fair. did. A fleeting contact, but more than the idea He persuades us, not that the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ of a kiss, more than a mother might give her belief in withholding intervention is reasonable per grown-up son. Over in two seconds, perhaps se, but that it is fair for the reader to believe the three. Time enough to feel in the softness of Jehovah’s Witnesses parents and boy believe it and his lips all the years, all the life, that separated that this right-of-belief has a sovereignty that the her from him … She let go of his lapel and said law cannot automatically dismiss. I find this par- again, “You must go.” ticularly impressive in The Children Act, affirming as it does how the essential value of the Novel, as And here the scrupulous naturalism of the story one of the human arts, is the fairness with which gathers its resonant psychological and mythical it treats all the manner of Life that comes before it, underpinnings into itself. McEwan’s control is, as giving necessity to the welcome and the unwelcome I say, meticulous. This woman judge delivered the

Quadrant May 2015 103 Books precocious boy into his life. And now he returns throughout these 213 pages, know the textures to her, impelled to seek a mother. If that were not and noises of her present and have pools of light charged enough, in the glancing moment of affec- from her past. At the same time we’re aware of tion that passes between them, an impulsive mater- those Atlantic weather systems and Middle East nal gesture becomes charged with Eros. At one politics, the planetary context, or the hubbub of a level the encounter is outlandish, at another it has chambers Christmas party, the winking of hospi- complete pathological necessity. tal monitoring equipment, the social context, the From this, their brief re-encounter, Adam glimpses back on childhoods. Dimensions of being departs to his piteous fate, Fiona to a gradual res- are being arranged; does this cover the novelist’s toration of her marriage and the burden of that job? And beneath these everyday things, we touch decent, intelligent, stricken conscience we know the death-figures of shadow-play and the ur-rela- her to possess and which now lodges the perplexity tionships of myth, “that roar on the other side of of this case and its aftermath. Here is story indeed. silence”, as George Eliot phrased it. This world McEwan depicts is shimmery with its modernity, he placing of outlandish incident into a finely yet threaded with moral and psychic pressures naturalised context has been a feature of that are primitive and perennial. It is the novel- McEwan’sT fiction over a long period. In his novel ist’s knowingness, his control of these resources, The Child in Time (1987) a young father who grieves the confidence with which he integrates them in for the loss of his child in a supermarket, finds Fiona’s consciousness, that makes The Children Act a himself outside a café in a wood, and behind the small masterpiece in my view. The story is moving. glass sees his own parents as they were when young. The art leaves one grateful. They are in intent discussion. Later, the young man learns from his father that his mother had been Alan Gould’s ninth novel, a picaresque titled The Poets’ pregnant with him at the time, and the intentness Stairwell, has just been published by Black Pepper of their exchange turned on whether they should Press in Melbourne. One of his poems is in this issue; terminate the pregnancy or have the child; he more will appear shortly. watches his own chance of life in the balance. In the later novel Saturday (2005) we learn how the hero, a surgeon, first meets his very beautiful wife to whom he is devoted when he had to surgically cut open her face; the lover begins his lifelong pro- Robert Murr ay tection by taking a knife to the features he adores. These, and other instances in McEwan’s fiction, are Leaning on Anzac Day never presented as sensational. Rather, they make a home for the outlandish in the very fabric of the Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our natural, such that the strange sustains its charge National Obsession with no violation to the tenor of Life’s naturalism. by James Brown Indeed, this novelist tucks away his threads of Redback/Black Inc, 2014, 184 pages, $19.99 fabulism very neatly. For instance, near the begin- ning of The Children Act, one of Fiona’s fellow judges his sharply written little book is not another makes a wisecrack about dead bodies and lawyers sanctimonious demand from an ivory tower and the surface collegiality of the judicial chambers forT Anzac Day to be diminished or dropped, along is deftly sketched by this. Towards the end of the with Australia Day and even perhaps Christmas. story, as Fiona mounts the stage to perform at the Instead James Brown wants a better Anzac Day, piano, this same judge is at the step, imparting to a more “contemplative” one devoted to examining her some news she does not at first catch. It relates the Australian defence project as a whole, past and to Adam’s death. And suddenly we become aware present. that this casual character, at an emblematic level, is He points to unattractive political and com- also the novel’s death-messenger. mercial excesses under way for the centenary year, So the fineness of The Children Act, and the with alarming similarity to Santa Claus in stores fineness in McEwan’s fiction generally, lies in the in November and hot cross buns in February. The compass, the comprehending of its naturalism. He title summarises his argument that the emphasis on communicates a sufficiency of understanding. This Anzac Day covers up mediocrity that could result is a pacy novel; argument in court moves with a in feeble defence if war actually did come to our clip, a seeming legal digression returns quickly to shores. “We have Disneyfied the terrors of war,” he its psychological impact. We are close to Fiona says. And:

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We should cease to feel anxiety about passing government and the ADF were also making on the story of Anzac to new generations. a hash of telling the story of what Australians The government does not need to besiege were doing there. Most of the Australian war schoolchildren and schoolteachers with new was being fought in a media vacuum, and pictorial histories each year, nor to mount vast deaths were the only event that the media could displays. Our memory of war will not fade. But fix on. Australian soldiers became angry that our memory of recent wars might. the story of their hard work was not getting We would serve the Anzac legacy well by back to family and friends. commissioning new official histories of our There is so much Australians don’t know campaigns in East Timor, the Solomon Islands, about the war in Afghanistan that it is difficult Iraq, Afghanistan and our two-decades long to know where to begin. operations in the Indian Ocean. Brown says that where once it was possible to The legend of the lean, laconic but vanquishing neglect Anzac Day, Anzac or Digger is all very well, Brown suggests, as is the flag-waving and political grandstanding it is now possible to over-correct and create a over not only Anzac but the Middle East war as cycle of jingoistic commemoration that does well. But it is glitzy icing on the doughy cake of little to help the way we think about war or a defence effort characterised by a stodgy, overly to stitch veterans back into the fabric of the defensive and secretive bureaucracy in Canberra, society from which they came. and politicians, media and academia that prefer lip service to serious discussion of defence issues. The more contemplative Anzac Day should be: The proud egalitarianism originating with the Anzac landing on Gallipoli a century ago detracts clear of the clutter and detritus that have from the authority and performance of officers and accumulated over the decades. Clear them away encourages an atmosphere favouring “doers” at the for those who have made the choice to offer expense of “thinkers”. up their lives in the service of their country ... Brown does not call defence headquarters in Political debate on defence is characterised by a Canberra “Fort Fumble” as some critics do, but lack of critical analysis of soldiering operations he lists many weaknesses, generally those of a and military campaigns. Politicians do not stolid bureaucracy, lacking initiative, discourag- seem comfortable discussing military detail or ing even constructive criticism and politicised in analysing operations. Australian generals in the institutional sense. Discussing deficiencies in Afghanistan speak privately of their surprise performance reported by one of its own officers at VIP visitors’ lack of interest in the details of from the Afghan front, for instance, “is difficult the war. Platitudes are spread thickly. The focus in a defence force trying to live up to the image of is on the working conditions of soldiers, not the exceptional digger and woefully oversensitive assessing the strategy and performance. to criticism”. One of the defining traits of the Australian Brown is critical of the veterans’ charities, espe- Defence Force, he says, is a lack of professional cially of the growing divide between RSL clubs, debate: the RSL and newer generation ex-service people: “We need to police more strictly those who would This is dangerous in a society that does not take cash in on Anzac Day. The promise of donations much of a sustained or political or academic to charities should not be reason for compromise.” interest in studying the art and science of He says many military charities are largely war. For a start, the ADF is not very good at geared towards helping veterans qualify for com- sharing its experiences. Very few officers or pensation from the federal government. In part soldiers are permitted to write professionally; this is because the Department of Veterans’ Affairs even fewer choose to do so. funds a network of non-professional advocates to lobby for entitlements for their “clients”: He says partly because of Canberra timidity, Australians have been told too little of the ADF Peering through the veil of Anzac, both the part in the Afghan war: government and the public need to examine ex-service organisations and the privileged Besides finding it hard to explain why place they hold in our society, and assess their Australians were fighting in Afghanistan, the performance, critically if needs be.

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James Brown is a former army officer who served the Secession movement and its later offshoot, the in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now a fellow of the Wiener Werkstätte. Lowy Institute. He is a son-in-law of federal minis- Like that other great dynastic contribution ter Malcolm Turnbull. to modern British culture, the Freud family, the Wittgensteins seemed to know everybody who was Robert Murray is the author of The Making of anybody: their palatial home in Vienna’s Alleegasse, Australia: A Concise History (Rosenberg) and according to Bruno Walter, exuded an “all-pervad- frequently contributes to Quadrant on history. ing atmosphere of humanity and culture”. It is strik- ing to see a photograph of the young Brahms—with whom music came to a “full stop”, as Wittgenstein told his friend Maurice O’Connor Drury in 1930 (and even there he could begin “to hear the noise Iain Bamforth of machinery”)—dedicated to the philosopher’s grandparents, followed by an image of the com- In the Dark Room poser as a bearded old man (“Jehovah” Brahms) in the company of his aunts. Music permeated the lives Ludwig Wittgenstein: Ein biographisches of the Wittgensteins; his brother Paul, who lost his Album right arm in the war and became famous for his edited by Michael Nedo association with Ravel’s brilliant Concerto for the C.H. Beck, 2012, 463 pages, €39.99 Left Hand (to which he enjoyed lifetime perform- ing rights after commissioning it) used to tell his n the train of the acclaimed exhibition younger brother that he couldn’t practise “because “Wittgenstein and Photography”, shown at the I feel your scepticism seeping under the door”. (In LondonI School of Economics to much acclaim in many ways, Paul was all too like Ludwig: he refused the summer of 2012, Michael Nedo, director of the to play some of the left-handed works he commis- Wittgenstein Archive in Cambridge and editor of sioned for himself, including large-scale works by the Wiener Ausgabe of Wittgenstein’s writings, has Prokofiev and Hindemith, unless he first under- produced a sumptuously illustrated biography of stood their “logic”.) the philosopher under the imprint of the Munich It was in one of the family’s magnificent sum- publisher C.H. Beck. Like his earlier co-edited vol- mer houses around the capital, Neuwaldegg, that ume Ludwig Wittgenstein: Sein Leben in Bildern und Wittgenstein worked on the Tractatus on leave from Texten (1983), it combines the visual and the textual the eastern front in the last months of the Great in a compelling manner: this book is an album of War, finally completing the manuscript in his over 500 images—family snaps, letters, postcards, uncle Paul’s house in Salzburg. Many of the fam- patent depositions, walking routes, manuscripts ily pictures were evidently taken in or around the with handwritten annotations by Wittgenstein— hunting lodge at Hochreith, their favoured sum- accompanied by over 2000 excerpts and citations mer residence, surrounded by nannies and retain- from the work and letters (in both of the philoso- ers; Wittgenstein’s sisters evidently liked to indulge pher’s languages) many of which engage with his that old aristocratic penchant for dressing up in folk insistence on the ostensive. After all, in the intro- costume. Image after image in these years attests to duction to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein the fact that the philosopher who seems the arche- himself would appear to concur, observing that his typal outsider actually came from the heart of cul- work was “really only an album”. tural events in central Europe. There are far fewer Though he was always keen in later life to play than six degrees of separation between Wittgenstein down his privileged background, Wittgenstein, who and some of the most prominent Central European ended his life as a British citizen and is buried in names of the early twentieth century: Rilke, Trakl, St Giles’s cemetery in Cambridge, started it as the Kraus, Loos, Musil (whose apartment looked on to youngest of eight surviving children in the second- the famous gleaming white Platonic house which richest family in the Habsburg empire, and grew up Ludwig built in a pared-down, starkly-delineated, in most cultivated and elegant surroundings. His ornament-hostile manner for his sister Gretl) and industrial father Karl—a fascinating, driven and Friedrich Hayek, who was his second cousin. Each energetic figure—was a major patron of the arts, is present—and many more besides—in this monu- and funded much of Vienna’s musical and artistic ment to the transplantation of high European cul- life (of which the shimmering Klimt wedding ture to the island of tea-drinkers and superficial portrait of Wittgenstein’s sister Gretl in 1905 is manners that, to Wittgenstein’s considerable sur- one of the most widely known relics), including prise, as related by his pupil J.P. Stern, proved to

106 Quadrant May 2015 Books be a solid moral and physical redoubt against the aesthetics other than the framing of the scene nightmare of continental history. (Wittgenstein liked to crop his photos too). The An early photograph shows a surly-shy young nature of the image is such that there can be no such Ludwig with his pony Monokel, a present from thing as a fictive photograph, fictive being understood his brother Kurt (one of three brothers to com- as the work of the imagination—although a photo mit suicide); a year or so later, the eleven-year-old can of course be “doctored” or faked, especially can be seen seated at his lathe, the first evidence of now in the digital era. In its first hundred years the the interest in technical objects that would be one photo, like so many Victorian technical advances, of the constants of his life. At that tender age, he offered a new degree of verisimilitude in replicating had made a working model of a sewing-machine experiential reality—“the real”. Images were out of wooden rods and wires: his sister Hermine evocative, without revealing all the clues the viewer writes in her family memoir that it was actually might possibly want (or need) to know about the able to make a few stitches. In a few years kite photographer’s motives for taking the photograph. experiments in Glossop and the design of a motor- The aesthetics of the photograph is therefore one less “aero-engine” (British Patent No. 27.087, 1910: of present effect, obscured cause. And the scope of “Improvements in Propellers applicable for Aerial that effect is at the viewer’s discretion; meaning isn’t Machines”) followed the interest entirely or even necessarily inherent in anything that could be cranked in the photographer’s intention or and levered; and Wittgenstein was the half-coordinated, half-impul- to maintain a keen interest in the The British sive moment of the “snap”. (The mechanics of photography too. One knew this exigent influential American street photog- of the more curious exhibits in the intellectual type rapher Garry Winogrand confessed book is a composite image he made that he photographed “in order by superimposing individual facial from their literature. to see what things looked like in portraits of himself and his three Nobody, to my photographs”.) sisters with the idea of drawing out “Familienähnlichkeiten”, the incar- knowledge, has ever fter his initial attempt to con- nated resemblances in a family that commented on how tinue his studies in aeronauti- transcend the individual members. Acal engineering at Manchester in This slightly eerie picture is a much Wittgenstein 1908, Wittgenstein moved to study reminder that the criminologists fits the image of philosophy with Bertrand Russell of the nineteenth century were Sherlock Holmes, at Cambridge in 1911, when Russell experimenting with exactly this referred to him in a letter to Ottoline kind of anthropometric mugshot especially as played Morrell as “my ferocious German”. too in order to identify recidivis- by Basil Rathbone. On the outbreak of the Great War tic “traits” in criminals. Indeed, across Europe a few years later, Wittgenstein had read about the Wittgenstein returned home patri- technique of composite portraiture in the work of otically to enlist in the Austrian army: he served on Francis Galton, who spent many years perfecting the Galician front with courage and daring (receiv- his technique in the hope of being able to iden- ing many decorations for valour), and then in the tify deviations from the normal in the infirm and Tyrol, when he ended up as an Italian prisoner-of- criminal—he was looking, in a word, for types. war in a camp at Cassino, an episode that later pro- Wittgenstein took a blither, even mystical view of vided the title for a remarkable “machine-part” and the technique: he refers to it, in his famous lecture aluminium cast sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi. to the Heretics Society at Cambridge in 1929, as an Wittgenstein, who had always been attracted to analogy for his notion of ethics, progressing through monkish and even puritanical ways of life, especially relative aspects of ethical dilemmas so as to glimpse after being exposed to the “intellectual superficial- something of an absolute and formal nature emerg- ity” of Cambridge—as the several photographs of ing from them. Norway, where he built his own wooden cabin at Given that he frequently leans on the analogy Skjolden near Bergen, and Connemara attest—took between pictures and propositions throughout his it into his head after the war that he ought to be writings, a visual biography seems a clever strategy a simple schoolteacher in various villages in the to catalogue his life. The photograph is an index, as Semmering area of Lower Austria, and wound up the American polymath C.S. Peirce first observed: in the isolated village of Puchberg am Schneeberg: it presents an object immortalised in its natural a double-page spread taken outside an Alpine hut “projective relations” without any need for a formal with snow on the tiles shows him with his charges,

Quadrant May 2015 107 Books girls lined up in front, boys behind, all more obvi- train.” It is a reflection on our politically very cor- ously used to life on the farm than in the classroom. rect times that these days even the author of a work If a philosophical problem has the form, “I don’t of the order of Tractatus would be most unlikely to know my way about”, Wittgenstein had clearly secure a doctorate, no further scrutiny required. strayed into the valleys of stupidity (where “a phi- Without the proper paperwork “God” wouldn’t get losopher always finds more grass to feed upon”, a sniff at a chair in Cambridge. as he remarked elsewhere) rather than taking up Over the rest of his life Wittgenstein was to the Nietzschean example of exposing himself to turn away from the inert, unhistorical summation the crystalline heights. Both are self-consciously of facts that seem to constitute the world in the “authentic” poses, and both look pretty silly. Tractatus—a boxed-in Brownie-camera-vision of Wittgenstein’s attempt to shed his patrician iden- reality—to a realm in which many kinds of con- tity and go “among the people” ended badly, by ceptualisation are possible, and indeed welcome. most accounts, although there is no documentary In his writings on the nature of language itself evidence in this book of what has become known as Wittgenstein found what he had been denied in the “Haidbauer incident”, when he himself filed a the Austrian Alps. As the later photographs seem petition for a court hearing which acquitted him of to suggest in their altogether more modest scen- physically ill-treating one of his slower pupils. ery and even bleakness (cottages in Ireland and Perfectly out of place in rural Austria, he sub- deserted British beaches), although Wittgenstein sequently put in two years’ penance as architect turned towards the notion of language as providing and fittings designer to his sister Gretl, the out- communal and cultural legitimacy for thought, he come being the aforementioned house whose “lines, displayed no interest at all in politics and little more planes and volumes” were so pure his other sister in social issues. It seems fitting enough that a search Hermine felt unable to live in it. The early twen- engine like Google should cope with the problem tieth-century tendency—a trait held in common of the enveloping polysemy of natural languages by by the philosophers of the Viennese Circle and applying some of Wittgenstein’s ideas about syntax, the theorists of the Bauhaus movement—to reduce in which algorithms for keyword searches are now complex things to their simplest formal expression context-bound. “Don’t look for the meaning, but (a movement sometimes dubbed “simplexity”), had for the use”: it could almost be a new Mosaic pro- found an avid if unwitting disciple in Wittgenstein. nouncement for the age that owes so much to his What he had built was the general proposition of a quondam colleague Alan Turing, who designed a house plus fixtures, or as he wrote elsewhere: “I am logic machine in the hope that it, like Adam and not interested in constructing a building, so much Eve in the Garden of Eden, would inhabit—guile- as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations lessly—the future. of possible buildings.” This was Wittgenstein’s unofficial contribution to Rudolf Carnap’s “logical Iain Bamforth lives in Strasbourg. construction of the world”. Haus Wittgenstein is now the cultural institute of the Bulgarian embassy, having been saved from destruction in the wreckers’ decade of the 1970s by the concerted efforts of an organisation devoted to preserving landmark build- George Thomas ings in Vienna. By 1929, Wittgenstein was back in Cambridge— Two Warnings for good, as it were—where he was generally con- temptuous about the insider knowledge required This Tattooed Land to “be” a Trinity don—a status he had acquired by by Derek Parker the expedient of having his now famous (at least in Publisher’s Apprentice, 2014, 130 pages, philosophical circles) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus $19.95 submitted as a doctoral thesis. And why not? The British knew this exigent intellectual type from The Digital Apocalypse their literature. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever by David Groves commented on how much Wittgenstein fits the Publisher’s Apprentice, 2015, 225 pages, image of Sherlock Holmes, especially as played by $29.95 Basil Rathbone. And some famous people were pre- pared to range his eccentricities on an even higher he two novels under review are, I think, level, even if tongue in cheek. Keynes wrote to his symptoms of a widespread unease about radical wife: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 Tenvironmentalism. The fanaticism and zealotry

108 Quadrant May 2015 Books of the movement, its totalitarian tendencies, its Electricians left Australia en masse when they disregard for human life in favour of other forms of saw what the Greens were doing to their liveli- life, its contempt for Western civilisation and the hood, so there is nobody to keep things going. achievements and traditions of the past 2000 years, One of the rumours is that ex-Australian electri- and its use of the truth as nothing more than a tool cians have overhauled the entire Indonesian grid. that occasionally comes in handy, are only some (Another rumour is that the expatriate South of the reasons why Australians might view it with Africans in Western Australia are now governing unease, if not fear, when they see the Greens and the state and have seceded rather than submit to their supporters apparently gaining ever-greater the Greens.) Turner, who had been an electrician influence and power. before he joined the police, is able to earn food and There is a small but growing dystopian literature shelter at various places on his journey by repairing in which environmentalist fanaticism is extrapo- some of the remaining solar and wind generation lated into power in various forms. In these two equipment. new Australian novels, Derek Parker examines an I won’t reveal the ending, except to note that Australia in which the Greens have seized power, the Greens’ leaders have been affected in various while David Groves imagines global eco-terrorism ways by the madness that overtakes most leaders that aims to slash the world’s population. who govern by lying and refusing to allow dissent. While the novel succeeds as far as its 130 pages his Tattooed Land is a short novel, a warning go, and has the kind of angry humour satire needs, satire set in an Australia of the 2030s. The I was left wanting more. It might have developed GreensT have taken over, using emergency powers greater power with greater length and complex- they sneaked into a piece of climate research ity. We hear nothing of the means by which the legislation late one night a few years before. The Greens would have to try to persuade Australians, country has slumped into decay and demoralisation, except fear; even in totalitarian states like North a process overseen by the Green Corps, the Korea the brutal government endlessly propagan- government’s olive-clad Gestapo. dises, especially to children, in order to keep the Our narrator is Turner, a former policeman people happy and motivated. Also we get no hint who was jailed for refusing to fire on demonstra- of the sort of underground resistance that would, tors. He escapes after eight years on a Queensland I like to think, spring up in thousands of places prison farm (where they teach “sustainability” to across Australia—perhaps united by religion the inmates). Like all enemies of the new state, he (which, apart from the Greens’ rabid anti-Zion- has been tattooed on the arm with his misdemean- ism, is not mentioned; imagine what the Greens in our: “Recal”, recalcitrant, a category that seems to unopposed power would do to Christians) or sport take in all those who are not otherwise branded as (also not mentioned) or simply love of the land and Emitter, Zionist, Denier and so on. the people on it. Deciding that only drastic action can save his But while I believe that the ordinary Australians country, Turner heads south to Canberra, intending the Greens despise simply would not let such a to assassinate the prime minister using the police state of affairs happen, Derek Parker is evidently pistol he had secreted in his old flat in Brisbane. less sanguine. Turner, musing about the Australian On the way he looks back on his past, and learns character, says: “we let too much pass, too much go from those he meets about what has happened to by, things are lost before we realise it, things that Australia during his incarceration. It takes a while, might have been saved if we had ...” because there is little transport, and he travels most of the way by bicycle. he Digital Apocalypse is another warning novel, Communications have broken down, as has in this case of the fragility and decadence of everything else, because the electricity system the civilisationT and its decreasing ability to deal with nation had relied on has fallen into disrepair. In a increasingly likely global crises. It is set in England climate of official lies, and in the absence of the between 2003 and the 2020s. information that used to be spread instantaneously Winston Frobisher is a young history academic by electricity, nobody knows what is true, and at Exeter University with a special interest in rumour and fear govern people’s lives. But it is the effects of technology and environment on certain that millions of people have fled Australia society over time. He is particularly worried by (New Zealand has struggled to cope with the our growing economic and personal dependence numbers), many of them ironically becoming on modern communications media, and by our “boat people”, illegally fleeing Australia for the historical ignorance. Paralleling the story of his prosperous countries of South-East Asia. personal and academic life is the story of Adam

Quadrant May 2015 109 Books

Lampton, a young medical student who after a busiest international airports. The two catastrophes stint with Médecins Sans Frontières decides that occur simultaneously, producing global chaos and over-population is destroying the planet and, the deaths of billions before the world’s societies inspired by visions of Charles Darwin, decides to are able to settle to a new, chastened, order. do something heroic about it. It is a good story, and Frobisher is a likeable From his studies of human and planetary history main character, but unfortunately The Digital Frobisher concludes that the sun is a far more Apocalypse is not a very good novel. It really needed important influence on the earth’s climate than at least three editorial passes—for punctuation human activity. He gives appropriately climate- (several hundred missing commas, for a start), for sceptical lectures at Exeter which receive the sort redundancy (unlike Derek Parker’s disciplined, of reasoned response one does not usually expect economical writing, here twenty or so pages could at a modern university; he is awarded research have been profitably cut), and for overall consistency grants and promotion. He discovers that a severe and coherence (for example, Frobisher’s wife is solar storm is about to strike the earth, probably inexplicably slain by Islamists, and while her death destroying much of the communications system. affects the plot, the Islamism just disappears; for Foreseeing chaos, he retreats to his cottage on the another example, apart from one or two good Scilly Isles, which he has prepared for just such an passages there is too little about the chaos and emergency. its effects, which might have been the extended Meanwhile Lampton, working at a high-security climax of the novel in the manner of the dystopian virus-research institute, manages over time to steal novels of John Wyndham). There is a better novel samples of a highly virulent strain. He has formed inside this one, trying to get out. a group of like-minded fanatics, who carry out his plan of releasing the virus at some of the world’s George Thomas is deputy editor of Quadrant.

The Close Distance

In the redbrick church in Brunswick the priest brings warm water to the font to baptise the first child of a couple from the parish. Family and friends smile—some are from interstate one, like the father, from overseas. For three years his mother had stitched Carrickmacross lace in a Monaghan hamlet to make a First Communion veil for his sister. Now mother has sent it here to grace the baptismal dress. The baby with dark hair and connecting smile, claimed her on a flying visit before the icy northern winter. The lace on-loan reminds of Grandma and a vow to cherish.

Paul Williamson

110 Quadrant May 2015 g u e s t c o l u m n

Jenny Stewart

omewhat to my surprise, I have, in recent most useful, these scholars give us a reasoned years, become a Christian. I am still not quite and reasonable confidence to think for ourselves. sure how this change happened, or what it The forms of worship we adopt are, as the prolific means.S I am certainly not an orthodox believer. But British theologian Keith Ward has argued, in every I have found my way into a strange kind of faith— case the legacy of many centuries of change, dispu- partly willed, partly organic, by turns frustrating tation and development. and sustaining. It is obvious, though, that in twenty-first-cen- To end up as a Christian is to swim against the tury Australia, organised forms of religion, as rep- Australian tide. Most of my contemporaries have, resented by the churches, are eroding away. While with varying degrees of relief, jettisoned religion. I most Australians (just over 60 per cent according respect their reasons for doing so. But my experi- to the most recent census) classify themselves as ence may, possibly, suggest a way back. Christian, Christians represent a declining propor- I had spent most of my adult life way beyond the tion of the total population (a century ago, the fig- reach of the church, as an atheist or as a Buddhist. ure was 95 per cent). Of this group, the proportion But something about traditional Anglicanism had going to church regularly is also falling. always drawn me, first when I was confirmed in It is the traditional churches that seem to be suf- my early twenties, and later, when my mother was fering the most. Total attendances at both Catholic dying, I found myself, one evening in early sum- and Anglican churches are in decline. In rural mer, walking through the door of my local church. areas, the fall in numbers has been greater than in After a lifetime of not quite fitting in, it was the cities. Without a growing population base to wonderful to find somewhere where I felt at home. support them, churches in the country are particu- Christians will take anyone, I suppose—that’s the larly at risk. From within, many churches are full point of it. But my new friends have shown me a of life, of people caring for and about each other. kind of community that I did not know existed. I But in overall terms, the institution they represent have been an analytical person all my life and am is shrinking. not about to stop now. But whatever errors I make, There will always be those who are drawn to I know my more conservative friends will forgive ministry. And while they are still about, middle- me. With the delicacy of Australians, they will aged and older women will continue to be the leave my search to me. mainstay of many congregations. There are many When I first started going to church, I was reasons for this. Census data tells us that women, very unsure about the nomenclature of belief that in general, are slightly more likely to be religious seemed to require one’s assent. Then it just seemed than are men. By and large, women still do the natural to give the responses. The language of meta- emotional work of families, and many continue phor becomes, over time, the language of faith, and this role in a religious context. Some are finding faith is quite different from belief. Belief implies refuge from non-religious or difficult husbands. In certainty, whereas faith contains both commitment any society, older women are also the most neg- and uncertainty. But if you pay close attention, atively-constructed group. The Christian religion you find something else. Even faith must be tran- gives us work to do and a measure of autonomy. scended by love. For without love, we are nothing. Increasingly, the religious professional carrying the We know this, but how to translate this insight service is a woman. into a practicality of living defeats all but the most Yet it is the schools the churches run, and the saintly of us. Contemporary theological writings not-for-profits they own, rather than the churches offer a plethora of differing perspectives. At their themselves, that constitute the bulk of their social

Quadrant May 2015 111 guest column activity. Given the predatory behaviour of at least on the average, I hope that we are still looking out some of the male clergy in the past, the fact that for each other. lay teachers and other professionals do most of the We have never been subjected to the appara- extra-religious work is to be welcomed. But there is tus of power and of class that crippled so many a paradox at work here. The more successful their European societies. Many of our forebears were schools become, the fewer Christians they seem to rejects and outcasts. Blessed with a wide brown be turning out. land which resists cultivation, we do not have an The result is that the organised churches, con- over-large population. We break the hearts of our sidered as religious entities, are nowhere near intellectuals, but never their bodies or their minds. as prominent, in the lives of We are the supreme pragmatists. If most people, as they used to be. it does not seem relevant, we ignore Anglican bishop Tom Frame, in his think there is an it. In what sense, then, might book Losing My Religion: Unbelief I Christianity come closer to us? in Australia, fears that the meta- opportunity in this I do not think it is the form narrative, the over-arching story, of country for the exercise of worship that needs to change. Australian Christianity will soon There is, in any case, a verit­ be lost. The churches, he believes, of a truly significant able smorgasbord of forms from will concentrate on large catch- spirituality, not which to choose. But the churches ment areas. They will become more because Australians should be more ready than they introverted, less socially oriented, are to acknowledge that they do less liberal. Evangelism beats the are somehow not have all the answers, and only quiet assurance of the prayer book, unspiritual and some of the questions. They should the rotund tones of the organ. acknowledge that belief and non- Certainty trumps doubt. in need of special belief need each other. They should This may well be the path of the attention, but because acknowledge the importance of future. But if they simply become there is already doubt, not as a dire problem that more conservative, the churches must be overcome, but as a simple will have missed a significant a firm tradition reality. opportunity for growth. We know to draw from. It is possible, too, for Christians that many people have a belief in to learn from other traditions. As God. We know that the reason a Buddhist, I learned not to over- they do not attend church is that they find religion theorise myself. I learned that my ever-present per- to be irrelevant to their lives. For most Australians, sonal identity was not as important as I had thought. the morality that they practise comes from family, I learned that thoughts are not realities. I learned or peers, or cultural tradition. the importance of equilibrium. I learned practical methods for generating compassion. I learned that o what should the churches do? Should they the only way to beat the dark stuff is with love. just forget about the marketing, and be them- Jesus said exactly this, of course. The right prayer is Sselves? Should they become more, or less hard-line? always answered. Should their congregations stand on street corners, There is too much still to absorb from the teach- and spread the good word in person? The problem ings of Jesus—and our thinking about them—to is that most Australians run a mile from this sort let these possibilities die. There are many ways to of “good news” proselytising. We do not want to belong, just as there are many ways to believe. The be “converted”. Nevertheless, I think there is an Christian conversation has not stopped. It may just opportunity in this country for the exercise of a truly be renewing itself. significant spirituality, not because Australians are somehow unspiritual and in need of special atten- Dr Jenny Stewart is a Canberra-based writer and tion, but because there is already a firm tradition to former academic. draw from. Don’t be fooled by the thongs-and-barbecue image. Despite the increasing materialism, I think Peter Ryan is unwell, but he hopes to resume most Australians are natural Christians, even if his contributions to Quadrant shortly. they never go to church. When we had nothing, we looked out for each other. Now that we are richer,

112 Quadrant May 2015