As a generally left-wing columnist for a generally right-wing paper, I naturally spend a fair bit of time thinking about how to keep my spot. So I was interested to see this piece by Gerard Henderson on why he got sacked from the Age (Hat-tips to Philip Gomes and Tim Dunlop), where he had the converse position. Henderson’s explanation is that the Age is moving to the left and attributed his sacking to the fact that the Left was offended by his last three columns, which
* said that Evatt was to blame for the Labor Split of 1955
* attacked the Labor Party’s opposition to the Vietnam War
* claimed that Australia’s involvement in the Gallipoli campaign was justified.
Having read the columns, I’d say Henderson was half-right. They probably contributed to his sacking, but on commercial rather than political grounds.
As far as the Split goes, Henderson is probably right[1], but if there are 100 people left in Australia who care one way or the other, I’d be surprised. Most readers probably wouldn’t even know who Evatt was and would remember Santamaria, if at all, as an elderly gentlemen with a late-night TV spot.
There are more people who care about Vietnam and Gallipoli, but not many who are likely to change their minds at this point, or to be particularly interested in historical revisionism on the subject. In any case, neither column puts a convincing case: the Gallipoli column says the campaign was justified because Turkey was allied with Germany and we were at war with Germany, which is as pretty a case of begging the question (in the traditional sense of the term) as I’ve seen in a while.
One column giving a partisan slant to historical issues that have been debated to death years ago might be considered a pardonable indulgence. Three in a row and the readers would have been turning off in droves. If I wrote three successive columns in the Fin pointing out the weaknesses of monetarism, the failure of the Premiers Plan and the evils of the Industrial Revolution, I expect I’d get the sack, and rightly so.
fn1. Actually, as Robert Murray’s book The Split made clear way back in 1970, there was plenty of blame to go around. More importantly, ever since Murray’s book, it’s been clear the whole thing was, as usual, more stuffup than conspiracy. After the effective disappearance of the DLP in 1975 and the departure of most of the active participants from the political scene, most Labor people came to accept this [everyone else had long forgotten about it]. I don’t think it’s been a live issue for 25 years or so.
John Quiggin 
Henderson’s explanation is that the Age is moving to the right
I think you mean moving to the left, John.
Agreed – Hendo has become dull as dishwater. There was a time when he was well informed and interesting, but it passed a long time ago. I think he’s been on autopilot for some time. Logic also seems to have gone out the window in his recent efforts.
Incidentally, there was an article in Eureka Street on the conference on the Split that upset Hendo. He claimed it was one-sided and didn’t discuss Evatt’s role. Apparently there were current NCC members and DLP members there, as well as some Split veterans from the Hendo side. And apparently Evatt got a good airing on both sides.
There is a reason news is called “news” and not “olds”.
Pardon the horrible, horrible pun. It is late.
Well, I certainly wont miss him.
I guess there are many leftie luvvies all over Australia blubbing into their chardonnay tonight.
His columns were either quite good, even if you disagreed with him, or they were really crap. It was about 50/50 which is pretty good considering how hard it must be to write regular newspaper columns. Completely different readership than bloggers get and they are being paid for it as well.
Sorry for the left-right confusion Mark. Fixed now.
I think there are very few columnists who can’t be turned over and put out to grass for five years or so. You can get them to come up with their best for a while and then they become repetitive.
John I think your column is monthly – which sounds like a good stretch. Coming up with one or two a week is fine if you’ve got a fair few things on your mind and can string together the ‘links’ between the news and your ideas. But after years and years, you’d have to be pretty special not to be repeititive.
And I’d like to see a bit of a cleanout of the ABC presenters. I have my faves – like Geraldine and Norman, but really there’s a lot who could move into different positions. Robin Williams for instance. Andrew Ford can stay – he’s marvellous.
Oh – and who will put David Stratton and Margaret P out of my misery. David Stratton the most patronising man alive – and they’ve found the woman to prove that being patronising is not all bad. What a ghastly pair. Please please please take them away. There really shouuld be a rule that you have to be pretty special to be allowed to become an institution.
Oh come on, M&D are a class act.
No, the SBS movie show crew have definitely improved. David and Margaret are getting very stale and predictable. I’m with Nicholas.
Andrew Jaspin, the tiny little Scotsman who took over at The Age is attempting to turn the Newspaper into the Guardian. All well and good as it is a private concern, except Melbourne isn’t the size of the UK and by doing that he is turning off just over 50% of his audience. This is really going to be interesting because advertisers may have something to say about that, especially when your target audience is offended everyday.
What’s interesting is that he fired Henderson (well actually he got someone else to do that) and then hired a limey buddy who’s first op-ed piece was to lament job and funding cuts at the BBC…er in a Melbourne newspaper: not a story in the regular section, but in the op-ed. So tiny Jaspin (all of 5 feet) fires Henderson and then hires his buddy to do a piece on the BBC (not ABC).
John most of your pieces are about re-regulation and re-nationalization in the AFR are really only differnet in terms of the political spectrum. If Fairfax was a serious, middle of the road organization your column ought to be threathened to the same degree as Henderson’s especially in a business daily.
In a round about sort of way, Henderson’s firing is a good thing because it focuses attention on just how extremely left wing the Age has become. Let’s see what the advertisers do when they see how their real target market disapppearing. I guess tiny Jaspin is going to get a one way ticket back to clan land at a kids fare rate. The little man doesn’t weigh all that much. And not too soon.
Nic said: Well, I certainly wont miss him.
Alas, the West will still run his column, despite the fact that its audience is even less likely to get excited by the prospect of yet another Downeresque history column.
Little people, eh, S Brid – troublemaking runts, that’s what they are. What are we to do with them? Didn’t Stalin have a policy of killing all those small enough to pass under the yoke of a wagon?
Perhaps he wasn’t so crazy after all…
Just for the sake of the balance that Hendo is crying out for, I think that Alan Ramsey deserves to go as well.
But really it’s the Bolts and Akermans that should really be fired, Henderson is actually pretty solid if boring and predictable, as is Ramsey.
Given a choice of reading the tabloid twins or those two I’ll take Hendo and Ramsey any day.
It’s Jaspan, S, not Jaspin. I’ve had to tick you off over your spelling of people’s names once before. Don’t me have to do it again.
And he’s not a Scotsman, he’s English. He used to edit a Scottish newspaper, but that doesn’t make him Scottish.
And on the advertising and audience, you are wrong yet again. The Age readership is the AB demographic who either agree with the left wing slant or are business types who are not going to switch to the tabloid Herald Sun even if they don’t agree with the editorial line. These people have nowhere else to go (and don’t make me laugh by suggesting that they are going to switch to The Australian).
Furthermore, The Age makes its money with its Saturday classified ads. This is mainly AB people selling their houses to other AB people, and BMW dealerships advertising cars to … guess who?.
Jaspan is shaking up the Age. Good for him. Henderson’s problem was not that he was right wing but that he was stale and predictable. A good contrast is Miranda Devine in the SMH. Generally very right wing, but not always predictable, as her recent rant against 4WDs shows. Now there is a conservative columist who knows how to play the game.
Henderson seems to have followed a similar trajectory to Greg Sheridan. Once the Cold War was won, they seemed to free themselves from the need to do their comradely duty by the Right, and for quite some time produced some interesting, thoughtful and principled pieces of democratic liberal-conservative (Henderson) and democratic Catholic conservative (Sheridan) contrarianism.
The events of 9/11 and the subsequent US and Australian political responses seem to have scared them back into their bunkers. The debate over Iraq has strengthened this tendency.
The bottom line is that I agree with John Q and Mark B – Henderson has become boring. However, I think John was onto something with his Freudian slip about “moving to the right”. Henderson’s replacement, Tony Parkinson, has been as predictably hawkish as Henderson in his comments on Iraq and the war on terror, and just as ready to kick the commo can, the only difference being that he lacks Henderson’s historical knowledge of communism and the Cold War.
David, in order to avoid further corrections and for brevity’s sake, I’ll just refer to Jaspin as the little runt. There are two parts of the advertising story for a paper like the Age. As you correctly point- classifieds the bread and butter of the business- and then there the big ads like Myer for example. The web is attacking the classified section in a serious way, which doesn’t need explanation. The cream of the business, like Myer and David Jones ads have a target audience who in my mind if not entirely conservative would at least be offended by the paper’s slant. I would never thought it was possible, but the lil runt has managed to carry the paper even further to the left than it already was.
I wouldn’t say there weren’t any other choices for that cold city. If you take a look at recent dynamics from the US some staggering number of kids between the ages of 18 to 30 get their news from the web, like I would presume a lot of us do who read John’s blog. I would bet this stat is beginning to apply in Australia.
You shouldn’t laugh when suggesting The Australian is unable to compete. Adding say a Melbourne news lift out section to give it more local colour could be a way of competing in that market.
The truth is the more slated The Age becomes, the more narrow its audience. That does not make good business sense.
As for production line 12 comments: I never suggested Stalinizing the little runt, I was suggesting he ought to be given a one way ticket back to Scotland, or wherever he comes from as shorty is clearly out of his depth.
I normally wouldn’t refer to someone’s size, but the runt does seem to have issues that are part and parcel when lacking.
re: The Age and it being Left.
personally, I don’t mind what political position it or any newspaper takes, as long as it is open and transparent about it. Eg, When in London you read the paper that suits your particular political bent – eg the Guardian for the left, the Sun for the populist right etc etc. (I know one’s a tabby the other a broadie) At least there you know what opinions you are buying.
At the end of the day, opinions are as much a commodity as anything else.
“You shouldn’t laugh when suggesting The Australian is unable to compete. Adding say a Melbourne news lift out section to give it more local colour could be a way of competing in that market.”
Been tried before, S, and failed. The Australian is run by and for people in Sydney. It just doesn’t ‘get’ Melbourne. It has no feel for Melbourne. Token attempts to add a Melbourne flavour just draw attention to the problem.
The Age does ‘get’ Melbourne, or at least the parts of Melbourne that it needs to get.
I said this at Surfdom and after reading S Brid’s comments I’ll have to say it again: can anyone, without conscious irony, really consider the Age as ever being ‘extremely leftwing’?? As far as I know, it never came out against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war while that war was afoot (cf. The Australian), and then in 2003 editorialised in favour of our going in to slaughter Iraqis. Did I somehow miss the intervening period of leftism? The Clean Up the Yarra campaign perhaps?
At least thank God, after years, Leunig has finally given up that sickening faux naif schtick. He’s now the only regular counterweight to armchair bombardiers like Tony Parkinson and Pamela Bone.
David:
The Age’s strategy of moviing even further to the left has got to be the stupidest thing any management could think up. They are narrowing their readership base as technology hits them on everyside.
The first principal which doesn’t need to be taught in business school is that you don’t try to piss off 50% your clients at any one time. Some while ago they ran an op-ed “Titled are conservatives sick”, written by a Melbourne based writer (or somone who escaped from the asylum more likely). This wasn’t published during the runt’s rein of terror, but just before he arrived. Not only was the piece silly, but was more insulting was the fact that The Age ran it in the op-ed section.
Look, as far as I can see, the small one is trying to re-create The Guardian in Melbourne. It won’t work!
Henderson hasn’t so much become more boring (he was always on the dull side) but more shrill. Much more. In the late nineties, he was quite willing to be candid and critical of the Howard government, both in print and on his Radio National spots (hey JQ, you should pitch for one of those). But since the Howard goverment’s bouts of being on the nose become regular events, starting early 2001, he’s been this laughably staunch defender of all that he used to get quite cross at, notably ministerial (non)accountabilty. Suddenly it’s alright to forget, fudge, and blame the underlings. And he went mental, bringing up a (world record?) number of straw man arguements to throw at anyone anti-“invade Iraq requardless”. In fact, that about sums him up – he’s a great user of the straw-man arguement, preferably post-hoc. And every two months or so, he writes a nearly identical column bagging people of the left for the poor predictions they’ve made (ignoring his own), or some outburst of hyperbole (his favourite word), again, ignoring his own.
He’s well past it.
-peter
S, it’s a lot less than 50% of the readers that they will offend and, and I said, those that are offended have nowhere else to go. In anycase, your underlying premise that people choose their newspapers based on the editorial line or the opinion pieces is suspect in any case. There is the news itself (it’s funny how no one ever talks about that), there is the sports section – very important in the Melbourne market, especially during the football season – there are the entertainment sections, the business section etc etc etc.
The Age doesn’t have to be all things to all people and Jaspan might well be trying to turn The Age into the Guardian on the Yarra. That might or might not turn out to be a good business decision. You say the market’s not big enough. He says it is. If you disagree, sell your Fairfax shares. Eliminating Gerard Henderson, who was as fresh as last week’s fish and chips, was a good start. In any case, Jaspan is the editor; he was hired to make these decisions and it’s his call to make.
I basically endorse Anthony’s point. The Age could not be considered “extremely leftwing” by anyone who wasn’t extremely rightwing.
As for audiences, Melbourne people of right-wing views who want their prejudices confirmed in big words will already be buying and reading the Australian. Melbourne people of right-wing views who want their prejudices confirmed in monosyllables will buy and read the Herald-Sun. In Melbourne, people in the spectrum banded by wet liberals and proper conservatives a la Malcolm Fraser at one end, and the Greens and ALP Left at the other, are not trivial in numbers or in spending power.
I totally agree that what the labor party was up to in the 1950s has absolutely no interest or relevance to me or my friends (all Age readers).
But can someone tell me how we get Hendo off RN on Friday mornings? He is desperately predictable.
David:
Don’t get me wrong on this, I’m all for the lil’one following this strategy. In fact I say go for it: get The Age moving even further to the left of the old “Daily Worker”. The runt has my full support on that. I think though he is gunna have a problem reaching the light switch when it comes to the end.
S Brid, why so sneering, disdainful and nasty?
Well, I suppose calling Jaspan (note spelling, please) a Tiny little Runt is a change from “Michael Moore is fat”. And just as intelligent. Should I be pleased that now it’s not just women who are having their intellectual or business credentials analysed from the point of view of their physical attractiveness or lack of it, or sad that the cancer has spread to both genders?
S Brid: the Daily Worker was, I believe, a British publication. In Australia we had Tribune. I note among the pejorative epithets you have hurled at Mr Jaspan is ‘limey’. Do I perhaps detect a hint of American origins here? That would help explain the origins of your argument. I understand most of the denizens of our great and powerful ally believe the Democratic Party to be left wing – an analysis of similar profundity to Stalin’s characterisation of social democratic parties as ‘social fascist’.
I was thinking the same thing myself, Hal, especially given our friend’s use of the term “math” – a deadset giveaway if ever there was one – in his discussion of the swaps market.
Gerard Hendersons premise is right – the Age is slanting ideologically to the Left. And Pr Q conlcusion is correct, that H. deserved to lose his column for professional, rather than political, reasons. GH. is more concerned to grind long discarded ideological axes rather than deal with the situation.
The Age in particular, and Australia in genral, desperately needs intelligent exponents of the non-Left point of view, particularly in cultural and political analysis. (The RBA presents a moderate Rightist economic analysis and CSIRO does the same for Leftists in ecological analysis. Technological analysis is still up for grabs.)
Unfortunately what passes for conservative op-eds (Henderson, Parkinson, Sheridan, McGuiness) in Australia is pretty weak. They seem more concerned to vindicated generational vendettas against the idiot Left of the seventies, which is now more or less in full retreat.
This is a pastime with limited appeal. The modern Australian Left has had its Trafalgar (1996), Borodino (Hanson 1998) and Waterloo (2001) which has pretty much knocked the bs out of it. Bashing what remains of the idiot Left is an industry with diminishing marginal returns, as Tim Blair’s site proves. Especially when the lunatic Right starts taking over the assylum, as the present Bush admin proves.
The Age needs an intelligent non-Leftist for commercial reasons as it is losing circulation to more conservative tabloids (and losing advertising to the on-line classifieds). Unfortunately GH does not make the cut as an intelligent conservative, which requires a sophisticated analysis and defence of (cultural) traditionalism, (political) nationalism and (industrial) capitalism.
He seems to occupy some sort of squishy soft-centrist pov on culture, with virtually no understanding of the revolution in cultural analysis that evo-bio thinking portends. GH also pretty much ignores the revolution in capitalism that has occurred as a result of the disonnection between financial and industrial operations. His analysis of foreign policy is more or less reflexive pro-Americanism, without machiavellian insight.
In short, GH makes the common mistake amongst conservatives of defending “right wing” partisan cultural, industrial and political interests rather than institutions. Partisan interests come and go, whereas general institutions have more permanent value. Hence one feels a wave of nauseating nostalgia when opening the page to one of his columns, like coming accross an old, yellowing newspaper when pulling up the floorboards.
Henderson, certainly tends to go on about the same theme. However, there are many more journalists on the left and right of the political spectrum who are more deserving of the sack. This includes many so called quality journalists whose work is often essentially a more articulate and left wing version of the crap that Fox TV or a host of right-wing talk back radio shock jocks produce.
For example, when John Pilger (or was it Robert Fisk or both) implied that the US or the Iraqi government might have decapitated aid worker Margaret Hassan to serve their interests, it certainly made exciting reading and no doubt encouraged the ‘US and Israel are the main source of evil in the world brigade’ to come back for more. However, it was completely incorrect and inexcusable – as is much of the analysis by so called quality media commentators of the Iraq war or just about anything the US or Israel does. As for Ramsey, apart from being unreadably he carries every week like he has a ferret stuck up his bum.
Jack Strocchi as always wins the prize for heterodoxy, being the only one to criticise Henderson for being insufficiently ‘cultural conservative’. If anything his principled line on asylum-seekers (one he shared with Sheridan) is what marks him as more thoughtful and able to bear dissent with his compadres than Howard yes-men and arse-lickers elsewhere.
“You shouldn’t laugh when suggesting The Australian is unable to compete. Adding say a Melbourne news lift out section to give it more local colour could be a way of competing in that market.”
S Brid. You may or may not know that the Dirty Digger tried that a few years ago. He even sold the Oz in the Melbourne market for 20 cents (it may have been a little more). It didn’t work.
Middle class Melbourne stuck with the Age.
Perhaps bourgeois Melbourne, ears relatively unassailed by the hateful bilge spewed out by shock-jocks in other cities, have more liberal sensibilities than the citizens of other leading Australian cities.
RWDBs and their fellow-travellers take note: we Melburnians don’t like you.
And what’s to like? What a pack of grubby fetishisers and frotteurs you are. And probably don’t know which cuttlery to use, to boot.
When I got here in 1989 I was struck by how much better the print media was than in the UK, despite the UK’s pace being set by the likes of Murdoch. However it has gone downhill, particularly in the Age. I noticed that the Age threw out a whole load of talent (including science journalists) at around the same time that they pushed Peter Ryan out – it wasn’t a simplistic political bias thing, just a race for the bottom (the Age got what it asked for).
On columnists sustaining high quality, I don’t think you can beat Chesterton. By dying in 1936 he managed to demonstrate that what he thought about European dictators wasn’t reworked later with the benefit of hindsight; his essay(s) on pacifism are spot on, and much more perceptive than the views of the worthless Professor Joad who specialised in proving there would never be another war. But the intelligentsia scorned GKC.
Katz, a friend of mine characterises certain kinds of reasoning as the “your friends smell” argument.
Helen:
I agree with you. Pretty, intelligent women should not be judged on just the pretty part. I cannot for the life of me understand how any red-blooded male could ever stoop that low. They are not there to be gawked at!!! There is, from a male perspective far more to woman than just the pretty looks part.
As for the other pejoratives: you got me. But since the age of PC (who introduced that?) the only things left to criticise are size of girth and height. Unfortunately Moore does look like he had one too many burgers and Jaspin (er …Jaspan) is height challenged (is that better). These are the only two things allowed to poke fun these days. But I would never poke fun at a pretty woman.
If you guys want to see dull and boring, which is how some of you describe Henderson, I suggest you take a read of Terry Lane in Sunday’s Age. If you’re bored with Henderson, Lane will make you feel you overdosed on valium.
More to the point, The Age has become so boringly predictable even for lefties. I read some talented lefty writers on this blog who demonstrate a great skill for writing, although their ideas are pretty useless. However, I would much rather read this blog for instance than I would The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald for that matter (which is worse) if I want to take in what the opposition is thinking. It is interesting lively, and well written on the hole. Most people only have a short time to read opinion pieces so why buy The Age when I can get more interesting stuff here and it’s free. John’s topics also help. So who really needs The Age?
When The Age is trying to compete with you guys, or John’s Blog for being interesting and well written, I think they have a real serious issue with their business model.
“It is interesting lively, and well written on the hole”
In which case, S, we’re very fortunate it’s not full of shit.
David:
Key: on the whole.
You know there are ways of dealing with this dark side. The subsidized health plan offers interesting choices in drugs. And just when I thought you were in remission!!!!??
Sorry for the “me too” but I’ve got to support Anthony and Paul: How o how could anyone think The Age (or the SMH, or the ABC) is “left-wing”? Has political discourse in this country really reached the point where “left-wing” means “Occasionally prints things critical of the Government?”
Have S Brid and Prof Bunyip ever been seen in the same room?
At a bare minimum, to qualify as “left wing” one would have to have some kind of critical sensibility towards capitalism. By this I don’t mean one has to be a socialist or an anti-globalisation protester. Rather, I mean one has to have some consciousness that capitalism is imperfect (even if one thinks we can’t do better in terms of social systems), and that left to its own devices it tends to create certain injustices and negative consequences which require some degree of intervention by society and by a democratic state to rectify or avert, and also to do and provide things which capitalism by itself won’t do or provide. Thus mainstream social democrats and US “New Deal” liberal Democrats represent the starting point for the left of the spectrum.
Those of the Howard government’s critics who don’t have such a critical sensibility towards capitalism, but who find some of its actions worthy of criticism from a liberal or conservative standpoint (e.g. Malcolm Fraser), or who find political advantage in criticising the Howard government (e.g. much of the right wing of the Labor Party and its journalistic spear carriers) do not qualify as left wing. Similarly, the fact that such people often get a run in The Age does not, by itself, constitute a left-wing slant.
Paul:
Ever seen a view either in the news section or the op-ed that doesn’t go with the view that Greenland is warming. Henderson aside in the op-ed
Ever seen a Washington correspondent for the Age or SMH or AFR ever go without Democratic talking points and how bad and miserable Republicans are
Ever seen an op-ed, which describes “the Left as sick”.
Ever seen the deranged Luenig from the right grace the pages of the Age.
Ever seen the equivalent or the right wing version of the Indian woman implying all Australians are racist because a Real Estate Agent asked her if she wanted Asians in her rental.
Ever seen a piece or the news section suggest that maybe Marbo was wrong or that the left treat indigenous as babies or doesn’t use a story to attack the Government on its treatment
Ever seen a news piece that doesn’t attack the US president or show him in a negative light.
Ever consider why it was the Australian who picked up Mark Styen one of the best right wing columnists in the world while the Age goes for MoDo.
Ever consider how on earth the demented Fisk and Pilger could get poll positions on the op-ed section.
Ever considered how on earth Media Watch could not be considered biased to the far left when it spends it’s time seeing if Janet A… gave proper attribution to the Wall Street Journal or Opinion Journal.
Ever seen anything written (Fairfax) or said ABC, which attacks the Government from a right wing perspective. God knows there would be lots of opportunities.
The ABC uses this line of nonsense to cover their bias. And they take people to be so stupid! They wheel out disaffected soft liberals pretending they are unbiased. Even when they attack Labour they are doing so from a left wing perspective.
It is interesting how someone above slung together the ABC and Fairfax as though it is the same thing without giving it a moments thought that one is private with full rights to say or do what they want while the other is being funded by taxpayers.
Using Malcontent Fraser to bash conservatives is not quite an honest demonstration of middle of the road integrity
Robert, I’ve never read The West in my life. Unfortunately other people do.
If “The Age” is so left-wing, how come they came out so largely for Howard in last federal election? Reckon that we into the bullying before the picking of the carcas. One major daily in Victoria like S.A.
Terrific.
Print media diversity ‘lite’ soon goes down the drain.
Moving towards onespeak and won’t John be thrilled !
S, I’m flattered that you think what I wrote was interesting, although perhaps you think that for the wrong reasons.
The ABC, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are all regularly accused of being “left-wing”, but there’s precious little published or broadcast by them that could possibly be considered “left-wing”. The matter of ownership is entirely irrelevant to whether or not the charge of “left-wing” is correct.
The only nice thing I can think of to say about Henderson is that he is not as bad as Thomas Friedman. Or David Brooks.
S Brid, does the name ‘voice of sanity’ mean anything to you? Maybe not. I keep expecting you lot to be individuals.
The first part of this statement is sort of true. Although it must be said that Pr Q’s undoctrinaire brand of Left-wingery is not something that one would be ashamed to take home to one’s mother.
I would dispute that the AFR could be characterised as “generally Right-wing”, although there is no doubt that it generally caters to the interests of the elites – privileged, powerful and prestigous. The paper boasts, if that is the correct word, a stable of non-right wing columnists and op-edders – eg Toohey, Hartcher*, Barker, Macken, Walker. Thye are only too happy to indulge in daringly leftwing contrarianism, if this will titillate its more conservative readers.
The AFR’s stance on economic mattters is a fairly moderate RBA-style brand of neo-liberalism, leavened by Pr Q’s neo-socialism. It generally takes a “with-it” politically correct line on cultural matters, as befits the premier organ of AUS’s broad-minded, forward-thinking and fun-loving bourgeois. It is not exactly a bastion of populist nationalism in any form going by its coverage of Ms Hanson. And its editorials display more skepticism about the AUS-US alliance than any of the other metropolitan dailies.
Since GH lost form and has gone it seems that Paul Sheehan – who has always been a little bolshy on economics – is the most capable rightwinger with a regular op-ed spot in a major metro. And even he has and turned a fairly vivid shade of Green lately. It makes you wonder whether the Australian Right has run out of mileage. Michael Duffy has a bit of a soul-search about this the other day.
*recently migrated to the SMH.
Jason Soon Says: June 10th, 2005 at 1:36 pm
I take “heterodoxy” in, this context, to mean “free-thinking” or at least not beholden to “group-think” – a charge to which I willingly plead guilty.
As regards Hendersons ideological valency on matters of culture, it is pretty clear that he and his pinko wife subscribe to the boring Soft Left consensus on cultural matters – multiculturalism, the Republic, feminism, reconciliation etc BLAH X 3.
GH shows no sign of coming to grips with evolutionary biology, which must be the basis of cultural analysis in an era when minority groups the world over seek equal status to aggressive white males. Conversely, GH shows every sign of bending over backwards to pander cultural elite sentiment.
Self-defensive PS: FWIW I think that mandatory detainees should be liberated so long as they do not represent a flight risk and this gesture is not interpreted as a signal to people smugglers that the flood gates are open. So this policy is unnecessarily harsh.
But Howard was right to take a pro-active policy towards deterring and repelling people smuggling boats, given the large numbers of assylum seekers who were drowning in unauthorised, unsupervised and unseaworthy vessels. For any given genuine refugee the risk to life from drowning on route > risk to life posed by a persecuting authority.
“Katz, a friend of mine characterises certain kinds of reasoning as the “your friends smellâ€? argument.”
How good does your friend smell?
My friend has no nose. He smells terribly.