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Our Culture Warriors Are Fanning Too Much Foreign Fare by ABC's Annabel Crabb

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Our Culture Warriors Are Fanning Too Much Foreign Fare by ABC's Annabel Crabb Our culture warriors are fanning too much foreign fare By ABC's Annabel Crabb Updated July 28, 2011 08:47:01 I'm not against foreigners, or anything - don't get me wrong. But I think it's time we started to talk about a new fault line that has opened up of late in the Australian intellectual macro economy. I speak, of course, of the acute trade deficit we are presently experiencing in the argument sector. Once upon a time, we would crack open our newspapers to find Andrew Bolt, Guy Rundle, Keith Windschuttle, Robert Manne, Anne Summers and so on arguing fiercely about stuff happening in Australia. We had thriving local stoush industries whirring away, offering hours of fun and profit to home-grown polemicists of varying degrees of ability. And now? Our finest minds are forced miserably to import cheap-jack foreign arguments on which to scrape up a living. Today's issue which has everyone's undies in a bunch is the question of just who is responsible for the horrible events in Norway. Actually, the argument is not so much about who is responsible, as about who is being more disgusting in taking political advantage of the event. Mr Bolt is all afroth today about the "cackling" and "gloating" of "Leftist polemicists, gleeful that the Norwegian murderer was a 'far-right Christian'." The domestic evidence for this observation appears to be the fact that an ABC News report filed on Sunday, for which the author did not provide a link, mentioned "three times" that the killer was a Christian. (I thought the repeat mention might have something to do with the fact that global coverage in the preceding hours had done a pretty good job of incorrectly and loudly guessing that the killer was a crazed Muslim, but - hell. I'm no public intellectual.) Mr Rundle, writing in Crikey, is offended by the speed with which the "global right-wing commentariat" leapt to the conclusion that the Norway attacks were Islamist: "It is highly possible that Breivik will be no isolated author of atrocity, but the start of a new period in which terror once more comes from the Right." An ambitious early call. In New Matilda, Aron Paul picks up the killer's threat to "decimate cultural Marxism" and has a bet that these words "did not originate in the mind of the terrorist, but were planted there with the help of poisonous political discourses which have enthusiastic proponents here in Australia." Which of course leads him to Quadrant magazine, whose circulation of about 5,000 seems to run as far as Norway, given that the Norwegian gunman has not only heard of Quadrant's editor, Keith Windschuttle, but cited him for a couple of paragraphs in his rambling and prolific diaries. Mr Windschuttle pens a wounded response in this morning's Australian. Has no-one in this tussle recognised how bilaterally stupid - not to say offensive - it is for this argument to be raging among Australian ideological warriors keen to dust the rifle-grip for semiotic fingerprints while in Norway, parents are still identifying their children? Can't we get back to arguing about the school chaplaincy program while a decent mourning period elapses? Can't we legislate for a formal Australian content requirement in the culture wars? Where's Bob Brown on this? The Federal Government is not helping. In recent weeks it has hyper-exacerbated the argument trade deficit by importing an entire case against the media - virtually intact - from the United Kingdom. The Government is concerned about political bias in the Australian media. And in response to this domestic problem, it has introduced a foreign case about phone-hacking, in what must be the silliest response to a domestic threat since the cane toad. We have plenty of things to argue about in this country, but we are constantly importing foreign aids with which to have them. Yesterday - in a joint press conference - Julia Gillard hung out for an explicit endorsement of her carbon scheme, and Tony Blair silkily withheld it. We import Lord Monckton on repeat speaking circuits, perhaps because our own climate kooks aren't cutting the mustard. A subsidiary debate rages on, like a peat fire, over Margaret Thatcher and what she really thinks about global warming. Poor old Baroness Thatcher is beyond the point where she can settle the argument, but her speeches and writings are dragged around relentlessly nonetheless; Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull count her squarely in their camp, but Janet Albrechtsen reads the tealeaves a different way this morning in The Australian. I cannot bear to watch our once-proud culture warriors content themselves with such generic foreign fare. I demand an inquiry. .
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