While I’m dubious about the validity of the Dawkins analogy between memes and genes, there’s no doubt that we need some sort of word for a minimal unit of argument that is subject to reproduction and selection, and meme seems to have become that word.

One I’ve noticed in particular among supporters of the Howard government is exemplified by Michael Baume in today’s Fin (subscription required). He writes that the Howard government has halved youth unemployment, then immediately follows up with the small print “since the Keating era peak in 1992”. If seen similar comparisons regarding interest rates and, I think even occasionally on inflation. In all these cases, the majority of the improvements occurred before Labor lost office.

In political terms, this is a straightforward case of claiming your opponents’ accomplishments as your own. Underlying this is the fact, which I’ve pointed out that, in economic terms, the Howard government is essentially a continuation of those of Hawke and Keating, with a gradual (and not continuous) slowdown in the pace of microeconomic reform.

As it’s normally used, this argument is clearly dishonest. There might be circumstances in which it could be used honestly, particularly in relation to policy instruments under direct government control. For example, if the government controlled interest rates, it might say that “we have kept interest rates low, and will always do so. By contrast, Labor allowed them to rise to 17 per cent”. But in terms of targets like unemployment, the natural base point for comparisons is 1996, not 1992, and the government’s performance looks most unimpressive.

As is often the case, I’m coming late to a story that more alert ploggers have covered at length, that of Governor-General Michael Jeffery’s remarks supporting pre-emptive military action. Roughly speaking, it seems that opinion is divided along left-right lines as might be expected. The left line, represented by my blogtwin, Tim Dunlop focuses on the Howard government’s hypocrisy in view of its criticism of less overtly political statements by William Deane. The right line, which I’ve seen but can’t now locate a good instance of, is that the hypocrisy is on the side of the left, who cheered Deane on, but are now deploring Jeffery. I have a couple of observations.

First, this is a typical instance of the policy dynamic under the current government. When faced with some aspect of Labor’s behavior in office (weak code of ministerial conduct, publicly funded political advertising and so on) the Howard government has initially deplored it and promised to do better. But when this inevitably proves inconvenient, the response is to take actions which are claimed to be in line with precedents from the Labor government but which in fact are “pushing the envelope”. Ministerial conflicts of interest and use of public money to fund political ad campaigns allow for much more impropriety (relative to the views of propriety that prevailed until the 1980s) than under the last Labor government (though who knows what the next one will be like).

In the present case, the government disliked Deane’s attempts to act as a social conscience, so it decided to appoint Hollingworth who seemed to have a track record that would protect him from adverse comparisons with Deane combined with a willingness to look dignified and stick to his script. When it turned out that the latter qualities, in operation as Archbishop of Brisbane, had produced some disastrous outcomes, the government decided to give up on neutrality and appoint someone who would speak out on their side of the debate.

The second point is that, as a result of this, it’s now clear that the post of Governor-General is a political one and that anyone who holds it is a politician. The natural conclusion is that a politician holding such an important office should have the legitimacy that can only be derived from popular election.

This is logically independent of the Republic issue. We can have an elected governor-general (David Solomon pushed this idea after 1975, and Ken Parish revived it recently) or an appointed president. Realistically speaking though, a move to directly electing the GG would lead straight to a republic with a directly elected president. By giving up on the idea of the GG as a neutral figurehead, the government has effectively conceded defeat on the main arguments against both a republic and direct election.

Everybody else has had their say about Jim Cairns, and I suppose I should put my own thoughts on record, too, even if they are not particularly original. In my view, Cairns played a significant and essentially positive role in the Vietnam moratorium movement, and everything after that was largely irrelevant.

In talking about Vietnam, it’s important to remember not only that the war was wrong in itself, but that the government was conscripting young men (too young to vote against it*) to fight, rather than making a moral case strong enough to attract volunteers or paying wages high enough to make the army an attractive choice. Whereas it’s possible to make a case for the war itself (not, in my view, a convincing one) this was unequivocally wrong.

As regards the anti-Vietnam campaign, Cairns must get a fair bit of the credit for the fact that, despite some fringe violence, the movement never produced the kind of terrorist offshoots that emerged in the US and Europe.

Once the war was over, so was the role of someone like Cairns. He wasn’t a great minister, but that’s not surprising – the politics of the street don’t translate well into the requirements of public office. The kind of moral certainty that was needed for the Vietnam campaign was of little use in the period of chaos and compromise that emerged after 1974.

His infatuation with Junie Morosi led him to dishonest and arguably corrupt actions and contributed to the dismissal of the Whitlam government, but any social democratic government elected in 1972 was doomed in the face of the global economic crisis of the early 1970s.

I’m not a Melbournian so I only know of his later life, selling his books at the market and so on from occasional reports. It sounded rather sad, but substantially more honorable to the post-Parliamentary careers of a lot of other Labor MPs.

* As I recall, the govt acknowledged the untenability of its position by letting conscripts vote after they had been called up.