Has anyone asked Costello about the PMs “children overboard” claims? Maybe he’d respond along the lines of John Anderson, saying Prime Minister John Howard is a trustworthy individual and most Australians know it. Or maybe we’d get one of the more equivocal formulas (perhaps a quote from Howard himself) of which Costello is so fond. Unless things get drastically worse for Howard, I can’t see Costello making a challenge (Chris Sheil discusses this further) but I also doubt that he’d be willing to tie his own credibility to Howard’s.

As the story keeps running, I’m beginning to think it possible, albeit remotely, that Howard might be forced to ‘fess up. There’s been a new development every day, and there’s at least one more to come – the Liberal Party dirt unit’s campaign against Scrafton for having porn on his computer here’s an old newspaper article [PDF], linked by Crikey which reports the dirt unit’s role (hat tip to Ron, commenting on Ken Parish) This story gets a blogospheric run from Bernie Slattery here. This may damage Scrafton, but it will also remind everyone of previous similar campaigns, against Mick Keelty, the “doddering daiquiri diplomats” and so on.

In addition Howard’s attempt to parse as supporting his own story a statement from the former head of the Defence Department public affairs unit, Jenny McKenry, confirming Scrafton’s story invites a clarification from her.

And so far, I have yet to see a single person, no matter how vehemently they support Howard, willing to say that they believe he is telling the truth[1].

fn1. To be clear here, I don’t mean something “morally true” or “true enough to satisfy the Australian people” or “true in the postmodern sense”, or “true, given appropriate rules of grammatical construction”. I mean that when Howard says something like “at no time during his telephone calls with Mr Scrafton had he discussed photos relating to the sinking of Siev4 on October 8, 2001”, this actually means that the photos were not mentioned by either party.

The Institute of Public Affairs has been an eager participant in History and Culture wars, vigorously assailing postmodernist notions of “multiple truths”. Plenty of people, including me, have made the obvious tu quoque pointing out that, in practise, truth for the IPA is whatever happens to be convenient at the time[1]. Now the embrace of postmodernism is official, or at least as official as it can be for such a slippery and ambiguous doctrine. In today’s Fin, IPA Fellow (and, I think, former Liberal apparatchik) John Roskam writes

One doesn’t necessarily have to believe in the post-modern idea that ‘there is no such thing as truth’, to appreciate the difficulty of establishing precisely what was said, or what was thought to have been said, three years ago

It sure helps, though.

I think what I like best in this passage is the ironic use of ‘necessarily’, a fine appeal to the postmodern sensibility. It adds eloquently to the ambiguity of Roskam’s position, with the hint that his adoption of postmodernism is the result of aesthetic choice rather than necessity. Roskam goes on to articulate the postmodern notion of “socially determined truth”, arguing that the election outcome will retrospectively make Howard’s position true in the only snese that matters.

To take him seriously, if we suppose that it’s impossible to determine the truth of clearly-defined events three years ago, with multiple witnesses, and plenty of additional evidence (for example, as regards the truthfulness or otherwise of one of the key witnesses), we might as well admit that no historical fact can ever be known.

As I’ve said previously, it would be much more sensible for the government and its defenders to come straight out and say “We lied, everyone knew it, and we still won. Get over it”.

fn1. For example, the IPA assails anti-science opponents of GM foods, but denounces the scientific establishment as a left-wing conspiracy when it comes up with the “wrong” answers on global warming and the Murray-Darling.

The WashPost runs an Op-Ed piece byPradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman, claiming that the failure of third parties to do well in the US is due, not to plurality voting or other institutional factors but to excessive political centralisation. The claim is that since third parties

once competed successfully in congressional elections, winning significant portions of the popular vote and often gaining seats in Congress. This was true for most of the 19th century and even the early part of the 20th

the cause of their subsequent failure must be something new – political centralisation[1].

Chhibber and Kollman seem to be well-regarded political scientists. But their argument here is riddled with errors, or at least large logical gaps.
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There seems to be a kiteflying campaign from commentators with connections to the government, suggesting that the US might reject, or threaten to reject, the Free Trade Agreement on the basis of Labor’s amendments regarding patenting. Howard raised the possibility when he agreed to the amendments, and the US Trade Representative spokesman Richard Mills, kept it alive, with the ominously worded observation

We have chosen not to intervene in the internal debate within Australia about the FTA implementing legislation and amendments at this point.

(emphasis added).
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Since the topic of elites seems to be popping up a bit, I thought I’d link to a piece I wrote a couple of years ago. Here are some extracts

Of course there is an Australian elite. In fact, there is more than one. Business wealth commands one sort of power, central position in political machines commands another, and senior office in the public service yet another.

The recent discussion of elites in Australia has focused on the ‘opinion elite’. Many of the assertions that have been made about the opinion elite in recent months, particularly by supporters of the Howard government, have been self-serving nonsense. Nevertheless, there is no denying the fact that some Australians have more influence than others in determining the ideas that are taken seriously in formulating public policy, and that, on many occasions the views of this influential group are not representative of the population as a whole

…

With the election of John Howard, and his advocacy (punctuated by occasional backflips) of the social agenda represented by Pauline Hanson, positions hardened. Today, the Australian elite is divided in much the same way as the population as a whole, between a right-wing group which favours both free markets and a conservative or reactionary social[1] agenda, and a left-wing group which supports republicanism and reconciliation, and opposes free-market reform.

The main difference between the elite and the population as a whole is the absence of any group corresponding to the One Nation support base, opposing both free-market policies and social liberalism. Because of this absence, the Australian elite is both more ‘economically rationalist’ and more ‘socially progressive’ than the population as a whole. However, it is increasingly uncommon to find both traits in the same person.

This is slightly less true of the blogosphere than of the opinion elite, but still not far off the mark.

fn1. In this context, I don’t regard attitudes towards sex and drugs as being significant markers of social views. In Australia, these issues are pretty much separate from views on broader social and economic issues.

I just heard Howard being quoted on the ABC News with a very lame denial of the claim, detailed in today’s Oz, that he had been advised by Mike Scrafton, at the time senior adviser to then defence minister Peter Reith of the falsity of the “children overboard” allegations, the day before he went to the National Press Club and repeated those allegations. The PMs spokesman admits that the conversation took place, and doesn’t deny Scrafton’s account of why it took place, which I quote

“I rang Reith straight away and said to him that the best spin you could put on the tape was that it was inconclusive,” he told The Australian yesterday.

“It certainly didn’t support anything like children being thrown overboard. Nor, in my view, that threats had been made to throw children overboard. None of these claims were confirmed by the video.

“Reith said: ‘The PM will probably want to hear this.’ He rang me back about 20 minutes later and said: ‘I have given your mobile number to the PM and he will give you a ring back at some point during the evening’.”

but wants us to believe that Howard somehow still wasn’t told that the evidence was bogus. I expect they spent a lot of time discussing the prospects for the Ashes series.

Looking at the political implications, continuing lame denials will, I think pose a big problem for Howard and those who want to defend him on this. The line they really want to push is

Yes, he lied, get over it. Everyone knew he was lying and most people wanted to be lied to

But it will be hard to push this openly while Howard is still saying the opposite.
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