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 
S Brid,
In answer to your Ever (X 11) rhetorical questions, the answer is, “No, and loving it.”
And so far as I know, nor has the Age encouraged propagation of the following:
“Scientific racism is valid.”
“When it comes to women’s intelligence, biology is destiny.”
“The world was created in 3003 BC, at 9 am.”
“Papal infallibility: a case of too little, too late.”
and many other positions that don’t merit the oxygen of publicity in a respectable newspaper.
“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. ”
Jack, I’m a great fan of evolutionary biology as a positive research program and amateur polemicists like you don’t do it any favours by linking it to your monomanical political obsessions. I fail to see how evolutionary biology contradicts the basic principles of rule of law and equality under the law that ‘wets’ like Henderson invoke when discussing the asylum seekers issues. So for God’s sake and Darwin’s sake don’t use that term again in such a context.
Jason Soon Says: June 10th, 2005 at 8:27 pm
Excuse me, but even my harshest critic would concede that my political obsessions are polymaniacal.
So do I, which is why I am puzzled by you bringing it up. I said that GH’s cultural analyses suffered from an apparent ignorance of socio-bio. The knowledge of this research program is, as you implicitly concede, proving informative in the never-ending debate over the legitimacy of bio-diversity related status-differences in a globalizing world. Especially now that the human genome is being translated.
I did not say that GH’s ignorance, or abhorrence, of evo-bio was the basis of his Cultural Wet ideology. The two programs are epistemelogically distinct. Evo-bios apply a empirical theory which stands or falls on the facts of the world. Cult-Wets have an ethical philosophy which floats on a certain feeling about the world.
There are no doubt a few evo-bio analysts out there who would be delighted with the whole nine-yards of the Cultural Wet agenda, although I am not one of them. John Gribbin comes to mind.
Conversely, there are plenty of dyed in the wool Cultural Dries who are actively hostile to Darwinism in all its shapes and forms. The mainstream of the US Republican Party, for instance.
I am amused by your cavalier use of the phrases “rule of law” and “equality under law”, as if they were the personal property of the Wets. This is a shaky high horse you are riding on. Would these wonderful principles include the rorting of immigration law by ALP ethnic lobby? Or the over-lawyering of assylum-seeking claimants? Those were Howards policy targets and his dirty politics has suceeded in putting a stop to them. Not that GH appeared to care or understand.
As I said, I am happy to see the assylum seekers released into the community, under certain conditions. I am also glad that Howard put a stop to the people smuggling trade, continued tolerance of which would inevitably lead to further mass drownings.
My philosophy, since you seem interested, is civic nationalism. I want equal rights for all actual and existing citizens within the framework of a democraticly accountable nation state. So sue me.
Katz:
You are one funny dude. Seriously. That’s what I mean when I say this is a good lefty site. Although I do think your postions are silly and badly thought out. But funny, yes!
David and CS. No I haven’r conceded on anything, and please don’t be painfully.. what was it again disdainful, nasty and “sneerful”.
Who really cares, except for the dwindling number of people who actually read the print media? If it eventually comes to a battle of the broadsheets, Fairfax is as doomed as the Comitern (except, of course, in faculties everywhere). Henderson was at best a mild centrist, so not synch with the leftward lurch of Fairfax. I’m glad I own no shares in that ill-fated organ.
S Brid, I’ll accept your comments as sincere.
Let me return the compliment by observing that I found your comments on oil economics and the swaps market very educational and engaging.
Just two comments:
1. You seem to be sensible enough to distance yourself from your tic-ridden, tourettes-suffering fellow-travellers on the Right side of the street. Some of we Lefties would enjoy any exposition you may favour us with on this subject. I believe the product would be more light and less heat.
2. Is it possible for you to inject a bit of humour?
Now to return to thread: I think Pr Q has raised a very interesting point about the ideological valencies of opinion editorialists. There are no end of cultural progressive columnists who enjoy a strong following in the metro dailies, eg Adams, Manne, Horin. They are popular because there is a market for cultural complaint and because they are gifted plaintiffs.
There seems to be a dwindling number of cultural conservative columnists. And those that publish are not – as the Henderson saga indicates – of an especially high standard. The tabloids have a few – Bolt, McCrann, Ackerman – who are perhaps best left to Mr Murdoch’s devices. The metro dailies also have a handful of right wingers – Sheridan, Pearson, Parkinson – who have regular gigs. But they see themselves as defenders of the Liberal party.
Paul Sheehan is perhaps the most capable cultural (and ecological)conservative with a regular op-ed. Michael Duffy is also a little conservative, but only in relation to his more leftwing peers at Fairfax and ABC.
Off-hand I cant think of any thoughtful, non-partisan, conservative who regularly publish op-eds in a MSM metro daily. There used to be a few about – Coleman, Santamaria, Knopfelmacher, Ryckman, Blaimey – but they seem to have disappeared from view with the end of the Cold War.
This is strange because over the nineties the populus have been attracted to folk conservative parties (One Nation, Family First) but there are no formal conservative advocates. One must assume that the people are in advance of those who presume to lecture them.
I wonder if this means that intelligent right wingers think that the Culture Wars are over, or not worth fighting. Probably the long period of the Howard Ascendancy has made them fat and complacent. No doubt Costello and resurgent Liberal Wets will bring them out of the woodwork.
“This is strange because over the nineties the populus have been attracted to folk conservative parties (One Nation, Family First) but there are no formal conservative advocates. One must assume that the people are in advance of those who presume to lecture them.”
Or it could be, Jack, that the people are attracted to ‘folk conservative parties’ because they are rationally ignorant (i.e. they have accepted the tradeoff that the benefits of investing in knowing more about public policy are exceeded by the costs and their ‘just enough’ information collection predisposes them to form ‘folk conservative’ views) in which case it is precisely the role of public policy elites who specialise in these areas and the tendency of such elites to offer different perspectives? That thought ever crossed your mind, Jack? That’s why representative democracy underpins most stable democracies. not direct democracy (at least levels above local government where the ‘people’ would be expected to face less informational disadvantages).
“Off-hand I cant think of any thoughtful, non-partisan, conservative who regularly publish op-eds in a MSM metro daily.”
As Michael Duffy pointed out a while back, there is just not much demand for non-partisan conservative commentators. The same is true in the US – anyone who is not a full-time Republican loyalist can expect no sympathy from the conservative side of politics (a bit of non-specific libertarianism is tolerated, as long its confined to sex and drugs).
Arguably, this has been electorally helpful to the conservative parties, since their commentators are always on message, whereas the lefties spend half the time attacking Labor or each other. The tightly-disciplined turnaround on the Corby case was an interesting illustration of all this.
” the tiny little Scotsman” – shurely shome mishtake? Perhaps you mean “the small but perfectly formed”?
Why are we taking S. Brid seriously?
That kind of dumb, fatuous, malicious posturing is neither enlightening, intelligent nor fun to read.
JQ and Jack Strocchi, the “lack of demand” for non-reflex right wingers isn’t at the consumer level but at the gatekeeper level. The likes of Peter Ryan can now only appear via the likes of Quadrant, having been marginalised by more mainstream outlets.
“here used to be a few about – Coleman, Santamaria, Knopfelmacher, Ryckman, Blaimey – but they seem to have disappeared from view with the end of the Cold War. ”
Being dead probably hurt the careers of Santamaria and Knopfelmacher more than the end of the Cold War. Coleman still regularly reviews books, and Blainey regularly writes them. Blainey’s prominence in no way rests on his work in newspapers.
jquiggin Says: June 11th, 2005 at 2:13 pm
Typical US rightwing commentry is in-your-face and confrontational in writing or ranting style. The average US rightwing commentator is now a shock-jock, think-tanker or a paid hack. He caters to the typical rightwing media consumer who is likely to be a, somewhat frustrated, angry white male caught up in traffic or passed over for promotion. The partisans set up a nice drumbeat in the rightwing echo chamber, making it easier for to the wing-nuts to march in lock-step time.
It was not always thus. The US Right has sipped from Ceasars poisoned chalice and is intoxicated with power. Once upon a time it was much interested in truth, but now its pursuit of power has corrupted it.
The US Right used to be dominated by a combination of segregationist Southerners more or less reactionary, dispossesed aristocratic East European emigres with strange sounding last names and Jewish ex-Trot veterans of the progressive movement. This certainly gave the movement some independence of mind, if nothing else.
It was in opposition for along time, which helped to sharpen its critique. Hence the incredible revival during the seventies of right wing neo-intellectual disciplines eg neo-liberal economics, neo-conservative sociology, neo-classical political theory, neo-realist foreign policy, neo-Darwinian socio-biology, neo-foundationalist philosophy etc
However, from Gingrich on, the the lure of power in office meant that the US rightwing started to base itself on Deep South Bible-Bashers and Wall Street Fat-Cats to garner money and votes. Their theological and ideological committements require them to reject mainstream economics and biology.
This has led to the US Rights intellectual degeneration as exemplified by the downward spiral of the neo-con movement. In the seventies it was famous for hard-headed empirical social science but in the naughties it got hooked on head-in-the-clouds ideological utopianism .
The ideological partisanship and anti-science on the Right is now having counter-productive policy consequences. It is a striking fact that the doyens of intellectual conservatism in the US – Kennan/Nitze in foreign policy, Friedman in economics, Huntington in cultural analysis and Bill Buckley in everything – were apparently skeptical, and ultimately opposed, to the Gulf War II.
But you would never have known this during the debate leading up to the war. The commissars and censors of the New Right, notoriously David Frum, who declared the conservative anti-war position to be anathema and ex-communicated the heretics from the movement.
This lead to free-thinking conservatives setting up the American Conservative to provide a forum for rightwingers who were inclined to think for themselves. This magazine is distinguished by its openess to a plurality of viewpoints and its iconoclastic minds (eg Patrick Buchanan, Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, Jerry Pournelle, Greg Cochran, Samuel Huntington). It is also somewhat marginalized and despised by the movers and shakers.
I think that the US Right needs a lengthy spell in opposition to set itself to rights. But the US Left is committed to cultural policies which are unpopular with the populus and is also failing to reproduce. It is noticeable that Bush’s current unpopularity is not coinciding with a surge of support for the Democrats. And the US Right is thoroughly entrenched in office by means of patronage. So I dont see any satisfactory resolution for the time being.
Jason Soon Says: June 11th, 2005 at 1:57 pm
I am genuinely shocked by this frank expression of centralized elitism coming from a supposed supporter of Hayek. The foundational Catallactic thinker has, more than anyone else, alerted intellectuals to the countless dispersed wells of knowledge from which the populus may draw from. Who, after all, should the democratic citizen believe then, the theories of “[specialized]…public policy elites” or the evidence of his own ‘lyin eyes?
But I must say I like “rational ignorance”, a phrase which I think nicely characterises the viewpoint of politically correct cultural elites. The high-falutin’ remain blissfully unaware of the riotous going-ons that make life of the hoi-polloi outside the leaf, or water-viewing, suburbs…how shall we say…so interesting. Until someone likes Pauline Hanson pops up and bites them on the bum.
S Brid says
“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. ”
In today’s Sunday Age, Terry Lane advocates nuclear power as a way of combatting global warming, criticises greenies, and praises John Howard for saying we need to have a debate on this issue.
Maybe Lane read S this past week and thought he should become less predictable.
Or maybe S has no idea what he is talking about.
You be the judge.
S.Brid:
Two points:
1. Can you point to any figures showing that The Age’s sales have actually declined by more than the average for capital city broadsheets? (The daily papers in general have been losing 1-2% of their circulation per year for several years now.)
2. Would you accept that you’re further to the right than the average Australian -including in a number of areas the current Government? If so, your view that 50% of us must share your view of The Age is poorly based.
The One Party State is almost upon us.
Enjoy the next few weeks while we have democracy, federally.
Rupert is thrilled. Fairfax shareholders will enjoy the ride.
Shake up is happening and all papers will become condensed Pravda , if they haven’t already.
Joe2,
I think you misread Howard. While I disagree with many of his policies and dislike him as an individual (at least his media persona) Howard is a true conservative in the literal sense of the word.
Howard is unlikely to do very much that is radical once he has control of the Senate, it simply isn’t in his nature.
The radical changes under the Liberals – such as the GST and industrial relations “reform” – were mainly driven by Costello or thrust on Howard from outside.
Until and unless he manages to actually replace Howard, wjhich looks unlikely, Costello’s influence is likely to be on the wane.
Ian, I hope your optimism is well founded. Note what Bracks has done with his majority in the upper house. Victoria may end up with either major party having to deal with hostile small parties.
The opposite of what early indications suggest under a power hungry Howard or Costello government. They seem hellbent on creating a two-tiered society where the poor struggle on crap wages, no conditions and no security of income.
Remember Howard was a supporter of South Africa ,under white rule, until he decided it was politically inexpedient. If he gets the opportunity he will run his battlers into the ground as fodder for some crazed idea of economic reform. He has already started and should not be let of the hook, as you suggest.
Just hope you dont end up on 8 dollars an hour and casual,mate.
Joe2
A one party state? I agree! We ought to put a limit on the number of Senate seats a conservative coalition is allowed win. This of course would allow Bob Brown and that other rabble, the Dems or even Labor to be certain of holding the majority.
Damn! If only the stupid electorate would stop voting conservative. They can’t be trusted with anything, these people!
S Gould:
SMH were down about 2%dd. The Age was about 1.2% up. I don’t believe the Age’s figures (it is only intuition which makes me think someone is messing about with the distribution figures).
Whatever way you look at it these numbers are horrible as it shows they don’t exactly have a growing market. This means they have to control costs pretty hard in order to make profitability grow- a horrible way to run a business, as anyone would know if they have ever been caught in market, which is not growing.
Am I further to the right of most of the electorate and this Government? Probably. But that doesn’t mean I am not objective with my thinking. Left or right Terry Lane is a bore. So are some of the right wing writers.
I actually thought Henderson was a good writer. He bought a mildly right wing perspective to the table mixed with historical anecdotes. I guess that’s just a personal opinion.
David:
Wow! Lane brought up nuke power? And he actually supported Howard on this issue? Glad was you who reads him! And he brought up nuke power? Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t he just the topical dandy- so up to date and all?
Let’s be very honest about this nuke thing. Most of the left and those Greens pretending they support it are bull shitting. They would tie it up regulation and related processes with so much red tape that electricity would end up costing us the equivalent of 5-buck s a litre if it were petrol. I am not going to fall for that one. Has anyone asked who would pay for scrapping perfectly good generators we have now? Do we capitalize the costs or not? Who pays for this? I have no problem with nuke reactors as I think they are quite safe. But it would not give us the cheap energy we have now in most of the Australian major cities. I would be happy to see nuke plans built and sell it to those people who want to buy “green energyâ€? and leaving the rest alone who don’t. We do that now in a fashion. In fact David why do we need nukes when all you have to do is tick the box which allows to buy green electricity right now! When you say some numb skulls like Lane etc. would go for nuke my instincts tell me that it wouldn’t look like the same nuke power conservatives have in mind. So I would say we shouldn’t be wasting our time on this, as it is a non-starter from the very beginning. Brown coal is fine with me as it is very cheap.
While we are on this matter I find it interesting how people apply linear progression to all their thinking about global warming etc. by extending out for a hundred years or so without giving any due consideration to the technology and tech. progression. It is as though this side of the ledger doesn’t even count. It is the stasist, chicken- little crap we have to endure all the time.
The next biggest, hugest, largest advance by humanity is nano-tech. This is going to blow away our minds in terms of its impact. Nano-tech will not only be used to produce new and wonderful materials, it will also be used to figure out things like filtration systems at the top of chimneys.
The first fabricator is due to roll out in about 10 years time. If there is something you and the rest of you chicken- littles ought to be worried about it not Greenland warning up about 1 degree in 150 years time. You ought be concerned with the social revolution nano- tech is gunna have on the social fabric of society. Nano-tech promises you global warming ideas to be the same as worrying about too much horse shit on the paved roads of London 100 years ago. So relax.
Jack:
Don’t worry about Jason Soon. He gets a little confused. He keeps picking up das kapital and thinks Hayek wrote it. He sometimes picks up Road to Surdom and thinks it was Marx’s. I can understand that as I sometimes pick up a copy of the SMH and swear blind I am reading The daily worker.
David:
While we are on this subject. Hereis another point that blew my mind when I heard it.
Alan Greenspan was doing his annual spiel some years back, to the Congressional oversight committee. He stated that the US annual GDP if measured in terms of weight ( in other words if you picked up the entire GDP production for the year put it all on a weighting machine) it was 25% ligher than what it was in 1970 but the economy was three times bigger.
That’s why I think these 100 years projections relating to global warming are crap.
Message 72 sounds like “relax, you’re dead anyway”. But to a certain mindset the whole “resistance is futile” thing seems like a non sequitur. If it’s futile, what has that to do with whether we resist or not? It’s not like we’ve got anything better to do, and hey, it might work. But the likely developments are not nanotech self-replication as such, but some other related technology or something else that changes the whole game.
I’ve only just noticed message 49. Katz, I’ll tell Anna on you, so she can react to those implications herself. You know, applying the same sort of argument to her and wondering if she’s a “right wing death beast” (RWDB). That’s a bit like calling some a dangerous psychopath; if he isn’t one, you just made a mistake, and if he is, you just made a very big mistake.
S. Brid: “While we are on this matter I find it interesting how people apply linear progression to all their thinking about global warming etc. by extending out for a hundred years or so without giving any due consideration to the technology and tech. progression. It is as though this side of the ledger doesn’t even count. It is the stasist, chicken- little crap we have to endure all the time.”
Funny, I think its the global warming skeptics who apply overly pessimistic short-term thinking to the costs and benefits of addressing global warming.
I think if we set the correct economic framework – which is essentially about internalising costs – we’ll be able to replace fossil fuels relatively cheaply and relatively quickly.
People who think otherwise need to expalin why the transition from horse-power to steam-power and from steam power to internal combustion didn’t have the sort of disastrous impacts they’re claiming will result if we shift away from coal and petrol.
Ian, while we are OT on global warming, I think that spelling out the costs of Kyoto is a vital part of convincing people that it’s a good thing — as well as a vital part of deciding that it is a good thing. I’d like someone to say: “if we sign Kyoto and use measures x, y and z to meet our targets, then petrol will cost a cents more per litre, electricity will go up b c/kw-hr, and the CPI as a whole will increase by c%. I’d also like the same figures for the c. 50%(?) reduction in CO2 output needed to halt climate change.
The reason why previous energy transitions didn’t have negative effects was that they were driven by changes in energy technology and changes in demand for energy, also driven by technological change/economic development. Obviously when you impose a change it is going to cost something — from almost nothing to a ‘disastrous impact’.
Tom,
For Australia, the best modelling to date is probably that of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics for the Australian Greenhouse Office. http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/international/kyoto/pubs/cop7.pdf
The worst result predicted is a reduction of GDP of 0.24% by 2015.
That’s a cumulative result not an annual one i.e. total GDP in 2015 would be 0.24 lower than in the “reference case”.
Quick back on envelope calculation – current GDP is around $800 billion and long-term average growth is around 3.5-4%. Total GDP in 2015 is likely to be around $1.2 trillion. 0.24% of that is around $3 billion. Divided between 20 million people that’s an average cost of $150 per person. Say 50 cents a day in round terms. 50 cents per day seems pretty trivial now, imagine how trivial it’ll look in a decade – when per capita incomes will be substantially higher.
Identifying cost effects on particular goods is cery difficult and depends on how the reductiosn are implemented. If you want to reduce emissions from the transport sector you could either increase taxes on petrol or subsidize ethanol and biodeisel. A subsidy for biofuels paid for from consolidated revenue would raise overall government spending but wouldn’t necessarily increase fuel prices at all.
S. Brid said: “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.”
Why? Suits ought to be left with their prejudices, while the rest of us can examine issues?
IG, most changes do indeed get some of the harm pessimists fear. It’s only that we also change; the full Latin quotation “tempora mutantur” (times are being changed) ends “… et nos mutamur in illis” (and we are being changed in them).
Specifically, things like the switch from coal to oil did indeed harm Britain’s imperial interests, and so on. But you are not from that time and place and you are indifferent to its issues except as and when they have been filtered by time and still apply – but that’s just survivor bias.
If you polled the general public, and asked “How much do you think it would cost you if Australia ratified Kyoto?”, I wonder what answer you’d get.
PM,
You’re right, of course, but you know I’m too busy of a morning reading a book on my airconditioned bus journey into the city to shed a tear for the displaced hay merchants and fettler of old.
IG, you misunderstand me. As you are now, so once were they. That is, a couple of centuries from now there will probably be someone saying “I’m too busy to worry what happened to all those [insert as applicable]” – and applicable includes you.
The thing is, once you pick your morally relative reference point, you shouldn’t shift it (otherwise you get the survivor bias). The plight of the weavers, as such, doesn’t count now; what counts now is the analogous plight of the programmers and so on. And for all of us, whatever it is we do isn’t safe that way.
So it still does matter, as a general principle from which you can draw lessons for your own particular case – even though all the particular cases which illustrate the general principle don’t apply any more.
I think many of the contributors on this string have misunderstood the purpose of columnists in daily newspapers.
Their job isn’t to put forward rational argument or add sensibly to the political debate (although they may think that’s what they’re doing).
Their task is to provoke the readers into writing outraged letters. That’s why Paddy McGuinness lasted so long. The measure of a columnist’s success is angry letters in response.
I wonder if this is why you get a lot of right-wing commentators (GH, Duffy, Devine, Sheehan) in centre-liberal newspapers like the Age and the SMH. Not because they are editorially endorsed, but because they stir up the readers and (to use the SMH’s current tagline) “start a conversation”.
(On the other hand, News Ltd commentators seem there to advance – through rhetoric, not reason – a conservative agenda. Sheridan, Bolt and Akerman don’t seem to generate much in the way of fan mail or hate mail, so on my reading they should’ve been dropped.)