Australia's 13 Biggest Mistakes

Australia’s 13 biggest mistakes ar from the wars of Old Europe, relatively im- ers we can lay the blame at the door of the judiciary, mune to the totalitarianisms of the twentieth like the Harvester decision or the Uniform Tax cases. Fcentury, and endowed with ample land and re- But in every case, these decisions and events have sources to fit a country many times our population, moved us further and further away from the liberal Australia has had a lot going for it. ideal of small government, equality of opportunity and However, this also means that we can be squarely freedom of contract. blamed for some of the disastrous policies enacted by governments either propelled by ideological folly, eco- nomic ignorance or naked lust for power. Some events, Contributers were: Richard Allsop, Chris Berg, Jason like our lack of success at the Montreal Olympics, Briant, Scott Hargreaves, Alan Moran, John Roskam Patrick White’s Noble Prize for Literature, or the publi- and Louise Staley. cation of On Liberty, have been pounced upon by governments eager to spend more taxpayers’ money. Oth- Invention of Canberra cratic capitals of the world, thrived on the constant jostle and contact of decision-makers, officials and citizens in 13(1908) crowded agora and lanes bursting with life. To experience Canberra is a document of Australian immaturity the contrast, try walking from Parliament to the Lodge, —Australia, 1930, Keith Hancock from DFAT to DITR, or from the High Court to any- Canberra was blighted from birth—a grubby compro- where. As with Speer demonstrating to the Führer the mise between NSW and the other States (particularly model for the new Welthauptstadt, Germania, the plan- Victoria) who laughably believed that they had limited ners’ ‘vision’ is beyond human scale and comprehensible the power of the ‘Mother Colony’ by allowing the capi- only from the air. Parliament House follows the pattern tal’s location in that State, provided it was no less than with interminable corridors, massive chambers, and care- 100 miles from Sydney. ful segregation of politicians from both citizens and of- But worse was to come as Canberra’s functional pur- ficials. pose was overtaken by grandiose plans for a ‘garden city’, Instead of one of the founders of our democracy, the complete with ornamental pond. There was a design Lake at the centre of Canberra is named for the city’s process described by Hancock as ‘a competition of for- designer, Burley Griffin, and perhaps there his spirit eigners judged by mediocrities’. The result: a meticulous- resides. As the north wind blows across the frigid wa- ly planned city of sprawling suburbs, of looping bitumen ters, the inhabitants of the High Court and Parliament mazes, divided rather than linked by bloodless arterials, House—whether elected, appointed, or from the fourth and here and there punctuated by official buildings of estate—breathe a misty air ��imbued with the central plan- indeterminate style and uncertain purpose. ners’ dreams. No wonder Canberra is the last bastion of Athens, Rome and London, like all the great demo- belief in the transformative power of Government. E V I E W The damage to Federal money for 11science blocks at the Australian non-government schools psyche was (1963) In 1963, Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced that he would introduce Federal funding to non-gov- irreparable. ernment schools to build science blocks if he won the election. This was the beginning of Federal aid for private schools and the beginning of the end for the possi- bility of a student-centred system for funding schooling in Australia. Patrick White Wins the School funding today is a complex combination of Nobel Prize (1972) tied and untied, capital and operating, special purpose, 12 Federal, State and parent contributions. As a result, ev- ‘I am amazed at the way Australians have reacted, in a way ery election campaign includes vociferous attacks by the they usually behave only for swimmers and athletes’, said union movement, the Greens, and parts of the Labor Patrick White. But he should not have been: it was 1972, Party on the amount of money the federal government it was Time, and the cultural cringe had been stood on its gives to non-government schools and similar, if more head. With the Nobel Prize for Literature on the national discreet, appeals from the Catholic Church and inde- mantelpiece, our emerging cultural elites announced that pendent schools for a continuation of funding. no longer should we judge our creative products as infe- This mishmash of funding and the attendant brou- rior to those of our parent nations; from now on they were haha is inefficient, inequitable and leads to poorer edu- better. And just look at all those films. Now if only we cational outcomes. Under the current system, schools could get our hands on some Government money... And expend substantial resources applying for the various so, in 1973, the Australia Council was duly formed, and types of funding and the bureaucracy to administrate Les Patterson moved into Arts Administration. all the grants is a further drain of funds actually getting White’s status did help justify the creation of Univer- to students. There are major inequities in the present sity courses in Australian Literature, and many students system, from the capacity of rich parents to pay noth- did read at least the first half of The Tree of Man. White’s ing for their children’s education by sending them to Voss meanwhile established for aspiring intellectuals that government schools, to the lack of resources and inex- the Australian interior was henceforth a blank screen for perienced teachers in poor government schools caused the projection of their own obsessions. by insufficient funding and union rules stopping the The AusLit racket was formed and soon established schools paying more for better teachers. the self-reinforcing pattern of grants, favourable reviews It is impossible even to trial an approach that and appointments which ensures political correctness is gives parents real financial choice about which school more important than ability. Three decades on, the heirs to send their child to when all the funding is allocated of this movement in our publishing houses would reject, to schools, not parents, and the governments cannot unrecognised and unloved, a chapter of one of White’s agree. School funding should be the preserve of the novels submitted as an unsolicited manuscript by a liter- States. ary prankster. The Nobel Prize commendation said that White ‘for the first time, has given the continent of Australia an authentic voice that carries across the world’. Duly anointed, the author was able to establish the now-crowded space in which authors act as the self-appointed conscience of the nation. Meanwhile, the insult implicit in the commendation—the notion that without White we are a literary terra nullius—was politely ignored. For the agents of the new culture, there was too much to be gained. IPA REVIEW The Release of Cane Toads of Queensland, down to Port Macquarie, and east into the Northern Territory. In Australia, cane toads were largely inef- 10(1935) fective against the pests they were designed to eradicate. Even though rabbits and foxes have done more damage to Cane toads have poisonous glands and are toxic the Australian environment than cane toads, rabbits and foxes both as tadpoles and adults. They’re blamed for the declining were introduced in the nineteenth century by private indi- populations of domestic quolls, goannas, and snakes. In Aus- viduals who fancied hunting. By contrast, the introduction tralian conditions, cane toads can breed and live in a density of cane toads was a policy disaster because they were released 100 times higher than in their native conditions. as part of an official government programme. Foxes came to In a sort of a reverse Stockholm Syndrome, cane Australia in 1855, and rabbits four years later when Thomas toads have entered Australian popular folklore as ironic he- Austin famously released 24 rabbits in western Victoria. Cane roes. There was outrage when Federal MP Dave Tollner toads were a later innovation. (from the Northern Territory) publicly embraced the killing A native to central and south America, cane toads of toads with a variety of blunt instru- were used in Caribbean sugar plantations to control sugar ments, including golf clubs and cricket cane pests. Following publicity about the success of cane toads bats. A cane toad is notoriously dif- against the white-grub in sugar plantations in Puerto Rico, in ficult to eliminate by such methods, 1935, William Mungomery, the head of the Bureau of Sug- and not even backing a ute over one ar Experiment Stations in Queensland travelled to Hawaii, will guarantee its demise. Instead, the and returned with 102 toads. They were released in northern RSPCA recommends euthanasing it in Queensland around Cairns. Today it is estimated that there the freezer. are over 100 million cane toads stretching across nearly all Publication of John The practical consequences for Australia of this intellectual 9Stuart Mill’s On Liberty contradiction were significant. The (1859) intellectual rationale for protection was com- bined with demographic practicality. The col- Published in 1859, On Liberty is one of the ony of Victoria, wishing to retain the tens of foundation documents of modern liberalism. thousands of able-bodied men who had come Its arguments for freedom of religion and free- looking for gold, adopted industry protection dom of speech were radical and enormously of manufacturing as a policy of job creation. powerful. On Liberty was compulsory reading David Syme, the proprietor of The Age, for colonial politicians in Australia—and there was an enthusiastic supporter of Mill and was a tendency to think that if Mill said it, through his newspaper he provided a ready then ‘it must be true’.

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