After Philip Adams, Margo Kingston is the journalist Australian bloggers love to hate, though she is not without able defenders. The debate has now spilled over into the comments thread of one of my posts and been linked to by Margo’s blog nemesis, Tim Blair. So I guess it’s time for me to wade into the fray.

An added incentive is that, according to Tim, Bob Carr’s attack on Margo has been based on the arguments of Mark Steyn. As regular readers will know, I’ve appointed myself as Steyn’s nemesis, with a so-far unanswered challenge to his fans to produce a single article that doesn’t contain either a gross factual error, a plagiarised/distorted quote or an obivous distortion of the truth. As it happens I’ve already met this challenge for the piece referred to by Carr, which asserted that Sinn Fein (and not the Real IRA) was responsible for the Omagh bombing, but the attack on Margo Kingston gives an opportunity for bonus points.

The Steyn piece has been moved to the Oz archives, but I found a link to another version here. You can then look at Margo’s article and see if she was making any assertion about root causes. It begins

There is no meaning yet. We don’t yet know for sure what happened. We don’t know who did this. We don’t know why

and ends

Will we now swing behind war with Iraq or pull out and focus on our home? The Pacific. South East Asia. East Timor, especially, where we’re protecting a baby, Christian democracy. The places where we have duties and responsibilities and, in the end, where our self interest lies. I don’t know.

Arguably, Margo would have been better off waiting to clarify her thoughts before writing anything on the subject*, but this isn’t always an option for a working journalist. In any case, I much prefer her honest confusion (which, in the immediate aftermath, I shared) to the heresy-hunting that marred so much of the reaction to Bali, including Tim Blair’s, which spoiled, for me, some great and impassioned writing.

The fact is, as most sensible people have now conceded, that the ability of terrorist organisations to recruit members and maintain significant popular support is rooted in things like poverty and dictatorship. This doesn’t mean that individuals become terrorists because they are poor or that anything we can do will appease the hardcore members of Al Qaeda. But you only have to look at the loss of support for the IRA in the Republic of Ireland after it joined the EU to see that prosperity and national optimism cause a rapid loss of interest in historical and religious grievances.

* Not that this would necessarily protect her. I refrained from putting forward any analysis for some days, but even my expression of sympathy for the victims and their families copped a heresy ticket from an American warblogger (Asparagirl) because I mentioned that we should remember other grieving families as well.

Ken Davidson demolishes most of the key claims about the economic management of the Kennett government. As I’ve argued elsewhere the privatisation of Victoria’s electricity industry was roughly neutral in terms of its effect on the finances of the Victorian government – this is better than average for a privatisation, but does nothing to offset the losses associated with disasters like CityLink, the long-term damage associated with cuts in education spending or the waste associated with “Think Big” extravaganzas like the Grand Prix.

The one point I think it is necessary to concede is that the political-economic strategy of the Cain-Kirner government was hopeless. They were facing steady cuts in grants from the government and pressure to follow the neoliberal policy line favored by Keating. They neither openly attacked the Federal government (a sustainable political line that would have put the blame where it belonged) nor implemented the cuts. Eventually, they had to fail, and Keating got a premier who would implement the policies he wanted.

Ken Parish has a couple of interesting posts on First steps to constitutional reform. In his latest he revives the proposal of David Solomon to Elect the Governor-General!.

A lot of Ken’s discussion has to do with the relationship between the President and the Prime Minister and the ‘elephant in the corner’ everyone is ignoring, the possibility of another crisis caused by a Senate refusal of supply. I have a different perspective, perhaps a surprising one for a Whitlam fan.

A lot of concern about direct election has been the prospect that Presidential power will weaken the democratically elected government and particularly the Prime Minister. As a born-again conservative believer in checks and balances, I welcome this. The idea that the possession of a majority in the House of Representatives, typically based on 40 per cent of the vote or so, entitles the PM to act as an elective dictator is not one that appeals to me. And looking at the support for minor parties in the Senate and the increasing numbers of independents and hung parliaments it seems that the same is true of the Australian electorate as a whole.

Our democratic system is strengthened by the fact that we have a democratically elected Senate as well as a democratically elected House of Reps. Neither is perfect – the Senate because each state has equal representation and the House because a constituency system overweights big parties. On the whole the Senate is better, but the House typically provides a majority that can sustain an executive government.

There’s an obvious problem if these two disagree bitterly, and at present such problems must be resolved by an unelected Governor-General, subject to near-instant dismissal by the PM. An elected President would have the legitimacy in resolving such a problem that John Kerr so conspicuously lacked.

More generally, if the elected President used his or her mandate to cause trouble for the PM of the day, for example by critical comment in the manner of Sir William Deane, or by exercising discretion with regard to the calling of elections, so much the better as far as I am concerned.

Update As usual, there’s lots of excellent stuff in the comments thread. A question of particular interest to me is whether it is worth trying to codify the powers of the Head of State before, or as part of, a shift to an elected presidency. Another question that interests me is whether there really are a lot of ‘conservative republicans’ out there. The ARM approach was based on the premise that there were, and that they represented the crucial swinging constituency. It seems to me however, that a model with a reasonably strong elected president would attract more in monarchist support than it would lose among conservative republicans.
PS Be sure to check the comments thread over in Ken’s blog, which also has lots of good stuff

Bizarre Science lives up to its name with a post premised on the assumption that economists aren’t qualified to comment on the economics of global warming.
An added bonus for the first reader to spot the gratuitous, if marginal, violation of Godwin’s Law.

(Link via Gummo Trotsky)

After getting so much good publicity lately, a lot of Ozploggers, beginning with Gary Sauer-Thompson have been discussing whether blogging is the new forum for public intellectuals. Inevitably, mention has been made of Richard Posner’s book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline . It’s not a great book, but it has its moments, and of course it has that essential for a bestseller, a list. I reviewed it for the Fin Review a while back. Here’s a short extract:

For an Australian reader, though, the really striking feature of Posner’s list is the obscurity of so many of the names on it. and especially of the American academic public intellectuals who are the primary focus of the book. I could only recognise about half the names in this category, and my efforts were boosted by the overrepresentation of economists in the list, reflecting the fact that my academic roots and Posner’s are much the same.

Although we are allegedly living in a globalised world, it is evident that the market for public intellectuals remains nationally segmented. Each country, it seems wants to hear its own policy problems discussed in its own accent. To illustrate this point, a Google search of Australian websites gives over 900 references to Donald Horne and over 2400 to the late Manning Clark, compared to just over 100 for William F. Buckley and 33 for William Kristol. Even rank-and-file Australian public intellectuals (such as the present reviewer) are better represented on Australian websites than these giants of the US scene.

Although the Australian (political) blogworld began as an offshoot of the US warblogger scene, and people like Tim Blair remain primarily attuned to that scene, a similar pattern is now emerging as ‘Ozplogistan’ becomes a real (virtual) community, rather than a mere collective noun.

Samela Harris in The Advertiser gives nice plugs to Tim Blair, Gary Sauer-Thompson and me, managing a local angle by mentioning that I am Adelaide-born.

At the end of a long and learned post Scott Wickstein awards the palm to “John Quiggin – Ozplogistan’s best beard”.

As Scott correctly observes “The Romans were quite insistant on this issue, and they regarded facial hair, and trousers, as the mark of a barbarian. ” In fact, the word “barbarian” means “bearded”.

Update Even blind Homer nods. I was confusing Latin barba “beard” with Greek barbaroi (babble or speak like a foreigner. Thanks to Robert and Scott for correcting this error. Actually the word appears to have come into English via Latin and it may well have gained popularity in Latin because of the association with beards. A comparable case is “hype” originally from “hypodermic”, but gaining strength from the fact that it can also be regarded as a short form of “hyperbole”.

It’s back! Give your views on any topic in the comments thread for this post. I’ll try to spin out a new thread for anything that looks interesting. However, as someone once remarked about universities, trying to keep order in a comments thread is like herding cats. As before the rules are
1. Civilised discussion and no coarse language
2. There is no Rule 2

Jason Soon refers to student criticism of a public statement by Sydney academics professing their Christianity and asks:

Would it surprise anyone if the people doing this condemning would be the first ones to defend the right of the same academics to sign anti-war and anti-WTO or pro-Kyoto petitions.

As one who has signed pro-Kyoto petitions I agree strongly with this. I also agree with Jason’s observation that

By the same token, neither should religious beliefs be exempt from criticism, even strong and robust criticism. If it is perfectly alright to excorciate ‘capitalism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘communism’ it should be perfectly alright to mete out the same treatment to Christianity or Islam

I’d qualify this slightly. To the extent that religious views are proclaimed publicly and used to advance political and social arguments, both the arguments and the religious position behind them should be open to criticism. On the other hand, social norms of civility discourage criticism of purely private religious beliefs. The danger is that these norms are exploited by participants in public debate to insulate their positions from justified criticism.

I’ve been slowing down with the move – I just finished Palace Walk and I’m still partway through The Eustace Diamonds. In the absence of anything else to report, I thought I’d give a plug to Frank Moorhouse and his two-volume novel sequence on the ill-fated League of Nations, Grand Days and Dark Palace. His protagonist is an idealistic young Australian, Edith Berry, who confronts both the deceptive world of 1930s diplomatic manoeuvre and her own ambiguous sexuality.
Most advances in democracy are failures the first time around, and the movement towards a peaceful world based on democracy within countries and co-operation between them has had plenty of failures. But the last decade has seen more and more successes, even if most have involved messy compromises rather than glorious victories.
In sporting news, my son and I attained the rank of yellow belt in karate today. To give an idea of the status attached, if a black belt qualifies academics to tackle crazed gunmen, a yellow belt is about enough to prevent yourself being shoved out of the queue at the refectory. But with practice, we’ll continue to improve.