Honour and good sense

Never give in, never give in; never, never, never, never. In nothing - great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

- Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, to Harrow School, 1941

Once again, misbehaviour at Sydney University's colleges has hit the news in Sydney, and thus been inflicted on the nation; this time at St John's College. There is, however, something different about the treatment of this issue. The way we look at such antics is different. These places claim to be helping raise the future leaders of our society, and because the society is different then the nature of leadership taught at and by places like St John's has to change.

The ideas behind "initiation ceremonies" at university colleges are as follows:

• Look, we're all corrupt. Just because you're sweet 16 and never been kissed, doesn't mean we all are. We won't be looked down upon by pure little swots when we're in our cups, so when you're covered in vomit and faeces you're no better than us.
• If you see anything wrong, shut up. Just shut up.
• You will exert power over others as a matter of course, and you will be able to pass on the humiliations of this day.
• Conventional morality is something you inflict on others (e.g. calling women 'whores'), not something you have to practice yourself, and if you play along we'll all stick together so that you don't wear any consequences.

None of those notions are relevant to any sort of leadership today. There are consequences from misjudgments and misbehaviour, and they have an importance that goes beyond mere solidarity or the keeping-up of appearances in which nobody believes any more. If you're a pig in the company of your besties then you're easily led astray, and will be no good to anyone as a team member, let alone as a leader.

Peter FitzSimons illustrates the leadership problem, however unwittingly, with this. He starts out by owning his Fellow Senate thing but ends with a particularly feeble bleat:

Not surprisingly, the worst of the excesses over the years have come from the all-male colleges, as the cocktail of undiluted testosterone mixed with too much alcohol and sudden liberation from school discipline has long been a fraught one.

These places are not mere dormitories as is the case on many American campuses, but wonderfully independent institutions with long histories and great traditions that have produced wonderful citizens who have made great contributions.

They have the capacity to change their own cultures, as we have seen with St Andrew's, particularly, and are now seeing with St John's. They will go on. And prosper. Independently.

"Independently" of what, Peter? Independently of whom? If the University can claim credit for colleges' successes it must also accept blame for the failures, and the legalistic duckshoving that allows the University to claim credit but escape blame is to be scorned. The Vice-Chancellor of the University resents the fact that his institution is being tarnished but there's not a damn thing he can do, so don't you make a show of owning the problem and then cheering your "independence" of it.

Why are those who have supposedly made "great contributions" unable to provide positive leadership to people with names like Benedict Aungles, who may not even survive beyond the rigidly hierarchical institutions like those described by Dickens or J. K. Rowling. You can't hush things up and shut down debate in today's world, and nor can you wait for these things to blow over like they might have in the past.

You just can't, and everybody who says otherwise - however eminent they may seem - is misleading you. They need a new operating model and there is nobody leading them toward what such a model might look like - not even Cardinal Pell:

FIVE Catholic priests quit the council of the elite St John's College last night as the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, and the Premier, Barry O'Farrell, voiced their disgust over the initiation ritual scandal ...

Cardinal Pell said he no longer had confidence that the council was able to fix the problems within the elite college at the university.

The mass resignation of the five priests from the 18-person council has left it powerless to continue to govern. Cardinal Pell called on the government to change the laws governing St John's in a move that could mean the church cedes sole control of the 150-year-old institution.

"Unfortunately, I no longer have confidence in the capacity of the council of St John's College to reform life at the college, despite their goodwill and the dedication of the chairman," he said. "I have therefore requested the priest Fellows of the council to resign."

"Unfortunately" is not the word to use here. This predicament isn't one of fortune, but of neglect.

Pell has the power to order the priests to resign, as the article should have made clear. He clearly has no call or suasion over the other members - none of whom were good enough to provide the sort of leadership that might have saved Georgie Carter from the assumption that those within the walls of the College were smarter than those without. Only later in that badly-edited article do we see that the council cannot operate without at least one priest (and a fat lot of good it did with six of them). Once again, for all their wittering about secularism, it falls to government to bail out a church institution.

The clearest MSM assessment of the current controversy, with its antecedents, is Johnsman Richard Ackland. Ackland** talked about the venerable institution he went to and the desire to fit in, and ends his piece with this:

At St John's the main concern of some of the fellows was the reputation of the young men who had conducted the horrible initiation ceremonies. Not the women who were the victims of their actions.

None of the male students have been rusticated because that might damage their reputations. They should be free to go on to higher things where as leaders they can bring their "values" unimpeded into board rooms, the professions and politics.

It isn't only women who are the victims here. As for "values", nobody seriously believes we are going to see a listed board or a Cabinet full of chundering dickheads yelling abuse at passing women. Ackland is right, however, in indicating that such "values" do not facilitate leadership but actually impede it.

All institutions require sound leadership, and even seemingly robust ones will fail without it. Leadership involves knowing when to introduce new ideas and when to rely on the tried-and-true; knowing what parts of Tradition are useful going forward and which have had their day. What the socialisation of somewhere like St John's does is remove the ability to tell the difference.

The people on the St John's College board are eminent people in their own ways, steeped in the symbolism of the Lord and the Queen and the Pope and all they represent. The fact that they are fighting tooth and nail for a set of pranks that are at best silly and repulsive and at worst deadly. They cannot tell what these traditions are upholding. They think that any weakening of any tradition, however redundant or counterproductive, is a victory for the Secularists and Feminists and Socialists and other sub-species of Barbarian.

Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey are both Johnsmen. Some believe that they are the next Prime Minister and Treasurer of this country. Neither is particularly good at identifying problems when they occur and taking action before they become bigger problems. Both have a fixation on hushing things up which they don't want to be made known. This attitude has become so pervasive that a non-Johnsman like Michelle Grattan shares their conviction that the leak is the big story, while the fact that the Coalition lack ability in economic management or policy direction is somehow beside the point.

Hockey can be forgiven for brushing off student pranks. Neither he nor Bill Shorten can, however, be forgiven for brushing off the much broader and more damaging issue of clerical sexual abuse as they do here. Hockey's record of action (rather than impotent if well-meant sympathy) on behalf of victims of clerical child abuse is not strong enough to sustain a claim that he's only trying to protect the victims.

As for Shorten: imagine if Daniel Grollo was harbouring a nest of pedophiles*, and see if your mealy-mouthed bullshit would be any different.

In recent years we have seen apologies for church-government co-operative policies to take children from their mothers. We have acknowledged such policies as misguided and the perpetuation of such policies as failures of leadership (and when I talk about "we" here, I refer you to set-piece speeches on the record by both Hockey and Shorten. Oh, and Abbott too. Our representatives). Clerical child abuse is another example of this phenomenon, yet Hockey and Shorten and others raised to occupy leadership positions take no action to head off such widespread systemic failure and poo-pooh any attempts to do so.

If that's what it takes, then go drink a bucket of off-milk and dog-food boys, get over yourselves, and show us some leadership.

It is telling that there is a very strong push for people to join corporate boards and judicial placements who would never have set foot in an animal house like that - women, people who speak Asian languages, people with an understanding of the arts - anyone but your bog-standard Johnsman-like output who has been raised to assume that positions of leadership are his thing.

The last word goes to, of all people, the well-meaning and much-undermined Rector of St John's College, Mr Michael Bongers:

Mr Bongers plans to keep confronting the old ways at John's. "There is a wonderful learning experience in this for everyone. But it's not just the whole student community. It's beyond that: the old boy network."

He is not intent on banning every tradition. "They must pass the test of commonsense, of decency, of the laws of the land. You've got to show you are respecting people and that you are respecting property and respecting the reputation of this college."

In other words, it's a question of leadership. Knowing which traditions enhance institutions and which disgrace them. It's a paradox that institutions that traditionally provide our leaders have to change fundamentally in order to continue doing so, but hopefully we can get some leaders who can manage the transition. Michael Bongers has shown more leadership than pretty much every living Johnsman, and this lesson in leadership should be recognised as more than just another journo-led kerfuffle bound to blow over eventually.

* This is a hypothetical example, I make no assertion to this effect.

** Update 10/11/12: I apologise to Richard Ackland for the slander of calling him a Johnsman and thank the commenters below for pointing out my error.

The Grand Old Praetorians

I wrote an article for the mighty King's Tribune here (but you need to be a subscriber) on US conservative politics, and how a defeat by Mr Romney will most likely encourage rather than discourage them. You can and should support The King's Tribune by clicking this.

Grist to the mill

By the time wheat makes its way to Sydney it is pretty well processed and refined. It's easy to take it for granted as a commodity and to underestimate the politics involved in making and selling it.

If you want to be Prime Minister, and especially a Coalition Prime Minister, you have to get your head across the politics of wheat. The idea that you should rise to a senior position without having done so is negligent.

Wheat was grown in small and feeble quantities in early Sydney. The Indian strain ruti was grown on a hill to the west of the city that is still known as Rooty Hill, but from which all trace of agriculture has since been lost. When the vast lands to the west of Sydney were exploited by the British it came to be grown in vast quantities; later vast quantities were grown in Western Australia due to subsidies channeled from gold revenue.

Government involvement in wheat-growing took off after the 1930s. It had become one of Australia's key industries and was then labour-intensive. One of the first impacts of the Depression on Australia came with the drying-up of wheat markets, when agents and brokers and other bulk-purchasers went broke and/or slashed their prices, leading to real and immediate impacts on jobs and liquidity generally. Government took over the selling of wheat with the aim of insulating the economy from that degree of shock, offering to pool wheat output and sell it through a "single desk" - with the consequences you'd expect, really, in a neoliberal age.

Firstly, wheat farmers have generally received an even but rarely grand income, as highly regulated as any award employee.

Secondly, the politics of selling wheat has gone way beyond mere hypocrisy and gone into the kind of dissonance that causes mental illness in individuals:

• Coalition MPs who made bloody denunciations of communism were happy to flog Australian wheat to the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China (until Whitlam the communist regime in Beijing was not recognised as the official government of China, the Guomindang government of Taiwan was regarded as "China");
• The Howard government sold Australian wheat to Iraq despite UN sanctions against that country. There was a royal commission into the private sector's role in this, but the role of the then government has not been examined to the same extent. I expected the Rudd government to square that circle, but no;
• When you factor in government involvement in selling Australian innovations such as Synroc and Securency you have to concede that, in certain situations, libertarians have a point.

Basically, wheat farmers in Western Australia want to privatise the profits where prices are high and production is abundant, while wheat farmers toward the east of the country are prepared to stay under government protection to better ride out slumps driven by prices (set by overseas markets and competitors) and production (i.e. droughts, floods etc in Australia). When the government proposed to abolish Wheat Exports Australia (the latest label on the "single desk"), the Coalition found itself wedged:

• Eastern-states Coalition MPs were instructed to vote to keep the "single desk" in some form, and did so;
• Tony Crook, whose presence in Coalition ranks was always tenuous, voted with a calmly united Labor in the expressed interests of his constituents;
• Julie Bishop, the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, was mocked by some old has-been in her attempts to get Coalition MPs to all vote one way on the issue, and in a way that embarrassed the government;
• Mal Washer and Dennis Jensen, two long-serving MPs who had relied on government incomes before entering parliament, decided they would play libertarian in abstaining from voting either with their Coalition colleagues or with the government (if moderates had done this, the Liberal right would have gone apoplectic); and
• For their (non-)efforts, both were denounced by the Coalition spokesperson on agriculture, John Cobb. Cobb showed his genius for agricultural policy over New Zealand apples. He managed to harvest rural anger when the government banned live cattle exports to Indonesia, without a clear idea what he'd do given the breadth and force of opposition within Australia to Indonesian abattoir practices. Cobb pointed out that Jensen and Washer were not part of "the farming community", by which he means the agrarian socialist shakedown that makes people like him possible. 

Cobb's record of political and policy failure remains intact and ripe for rural independents to take advantage of. More broadly, the Coalition looked like a rabble in the lead-up to that vote, during it, and since in taking it to the government in Question Time (in the hope of uniting people deeply divided on matters of principle and what it means to represent the community's best interests).

Julie Bishop was used to brokering deals among fractious Western Australians, but this just proved too hard. Instead of focusing on policy, and taking the initiative away from the government, she instead focused on reacting to whatever the government did and making MPs toe an increasingly silly line.

MPs representing wheat-growing areas tend not to be party hacks with little direct experience in private-sector production, unlike most Coalition MPs. Simply cracking the whip and making these people do what they are bloody well told was never going to work, and nor would once-talismanic but no longer relevant input from Mark Textor jabbering on about elites. The main political tools of people like Bishop, and Abbott, were completely blunted in the face of a political issue that is, as it were, perennial as the grass.

Since his momentum has been slowed by sexism and misogyny, Abbott has been kept above the fray. The Coalition has realised that there is no further advantage for Abbott in his "junkyard dog" role. Bishop has taken over the role but she is no good at it. Pyne has disappeared from view and this is a good thing, nobody wants to or should have to hear from him. Hockey needs to be Mr Policy Substance but somehow he has been drafted into parliamentary theatre. Having abandoned his frontline role, Abbott sits there like his vision of the monarch: to advise, counsel, and warn.

The trouble for Abbott is that role is taken by Howard. His advice and counsel is not that valuable and his warnings have no impact. He sits in Question Time shuffling through papers like Kevin Rudd in 2007 - Rudd was a much more successful Opposition Leader and Abbott could do worse than emulate him more than he did. The difference is that Rudd probably read those papers, they were less likely to be the empty props that they are for Abbott. He will not become more Prime Ministerial by rising above the fray, but irrelevant in comparison with the hands-on Gillard.

The reason why you work on policy in opposition is that you can deal with "sudden" issues like this, complicated by an additional self-imposed requirement to gainsay whatever the government puts up. The Coalition reacts to events rather than demonstrating their capability in managing them. Pissant compromises are all very well for issues that come and go - but wheat is not an issue that disappears from Australian public life for long. The Abbott-led Coalition is not demonstrating that it is ready for government because it is not ready, therefore its criticisms of the incumbents will lose traction, and the Coalition will not be elected to replace them.

Big Daddy

According to this, Liberals fear the prospect of the next election being a referendum on Tony Abbott. Well, what did you expect? When you not only have no policies but no vision for the country on which to base them, yet are so far ahead in the polls that the journosphere echoes with talk about when not if you win, all you have is the personality of your leader. And when your leader is an arsehole, that's an unfortunate position in which to have put yourself.

In this, Annabel Crabb finally wakes up to the idea that Abbott is not just one of those people you have to put up with, but a real live dickhead who should never ever become Prime Minister. She misses the point of what happened to Abbott on The Grill Team, however. He failed the Phwoarr test.

A bunch of guys like Matty Johns and Mark Geyer will test a man by going the Phwoarr test when that man is with his girlfriend/wife/daughters. Basically, this test involves a bunch of guys (it is never done man-to-man) approaching a man in said company, and making remarks that indicate their appreciation for the lady's/ladies' desirability. The man has three choices:

• Leap to his feet in defence of the lady's/ladies' honour, and attacking the guys' oafishness, like a figure out of Dickens or Downton Abbey;
• Go along with the guys, giggling away, destroying his credibility with the lady/ladies; or
• Gently telling the guys about his pride in an achievement of the lady/ladies, something to do with their brains/character/other positive quality not related to their appearance or sexuality, which raises the tone and leaves both the guys and the lady/ladies with more respect for one another, and for the man in question.

People who like Abbott would reckon he behaved as per the third point above. Nothing doing; he behaved like the second, leaving his daughters on their own while he ingratiated himself with "the team" (the first makes you a laughing stock).

I can understand why Crabb might have found the encounter frightening, but the Abbott women were not the target: Abbott was. They asked the question about him saving people from a fire once, but the question of Abbott's character had been settled long before.

Crabb refers to Marr's Quarterly Essay on Abbott, which mentioned but did not examine the idea that Abbott was insulated from the consequences of his actions. He was not pursued for restitution for petty acts of vandalism, let alone penance or punishment. Minor legal actions were met with the sort of heavy-handed representation that would be more appropriate for high-stakes criminal or commercial matters. This is a man whose first step at every new stage of his career has been to do whatever it took to secure the loyalty of powerful men who, like his father, would reward his loyalty by indulging his foibles and insulating him from any consequences that might flow from them.

When the media dutifully report Abbott's sisters Christine Forster and Jane Vincent saying that Abbott is a great guy and PM material, they are speaking from the same family paradigm in which The Situation was raised: Ya Gotta Let Tony Be Tony. Not surprisingly, this is a paradigm with which Tony is more than comfortable. It was one of Howard's impositions on the Liberal Party: first Amanda Vanstone, as Education Minister, had to Let Tony Be Tony (in public service terms: LTBT), then so did the nation's Cabinet. By 2007 Liberal candidates who might have won without his help found their careers sacrificed to LTBT. In 2010 Queensland candidates capitalising on Rudd had to LTBT because the press found him captivating: disciplined and authentic at the same time, apparently.

In Crabb's article she wondered whether Abbott was somehow calculating in appealing to some vast insensitive sexist vote. Consider Abbott's challenge, from a Coalition perspective:

• More than sufficient number of people voted Coalition over the four federal elections before 2004;
• In the two federal elections since 2004, an insufficient number of people voted Coalition (we'll have none of your "so close" or "points for trying" malarkey, thank you). Therefore;
• The challenge is to encourage all (or as many as possible) of those who voted Coalition in 2010 to do so again next year, as well as encourage those who didn't (but who might have before 2004) to do so, so that the Coalition ends up with a majority of votes in a majority of electorates. Not only must many thousands of Australian voters be persuaded to vote differently to the way they voted in the past two elections, they must also be more than happy to LTBT and while doing so, have the Treasury of the Commonwealth at his disposal.

Here's what follows from that, in answer to Crabb:

1. There is a huge constituency of sexist dickheads who voted for Kevin Rudd, the apology to Aborigines, early childhood education and who will give all that away because - finally! - we have a leader who is prepared to stick it to The Man Person Woman; or
2. No such constituency exists in any real numbers, and in the whole of the once-proud Coalition, there is nobody at all with the combination of guts and brains to confront the leader with the error of his ways.

Part of the Coalition's tragedy is that people like Grahame Morris and Mark Textor have charged them millions for longer-form and less perceptive analyses than the above. When people sneer at the big parties for taking corporate donations, consider: how much do you think it costs to keep Morris and Textor in the, er, style to which they have become accustomed?

Part of the media's tragedy, including Crabb's, is that they lack the skills and the inclination to test the above points and come up with a hypothesis to communicate to people.

For year after year, Annabel Crabb thought it was part of her job to be an LTBT enabler; that anyone coughed up by the party system into Parliament was there deservedly ("the public usually get it right") and was to be celebrated rather than examined. She appears to have taken her chances with the substance of Julia Gillard's speech against sexism and misogyny than insist on the "context" of Slipper as more sexist than Abbott. Now she's reached a point where simply making excuses for Abbott is not an option, she assumes there is a method behind the madness; Abbott's problem is that the madness is the method, and that LTBT is not some benign indulgence but a form of madness which the nation appears less likely to embrace.

Joe Hockey will vote to strip single mothers of entitlements but wants everyone to have a government-funded pram, the prices of which are already absurdly inflated. When to be indulgent, and when to be ascetic, is the arbitrary but unquestioned decision of the father. Any who question him are beset by his enablers, e.g. Credlin, one of the sisters, either Bishop, Mirabella. Those people have chosen to be LTBT enablers but are particularly bad at persuading the rest of us to be LTBT enablers too.

It's one thing for me to say that my life is richer for having been a parent than it was when I was childless. It's quite another to do what Abbott is doing, and imply that he is a better person for having been a parent than someone else is for not being one.

No parent I know looks down on those without children. You know enough people who have want to have kids but can't, and/or who have miscarried, or whose "parenthood journey" has been so rough, to know that parenthood is a matter of good luck and/or grace. It is only a source of virtue to those who romanticise it from afar. Hands-on parents regard Abbott with a gall that only he and his enablers confuse with awe.

The stupid thing is that he and Gillard made essentially the same lifestyle decision. He gave up a child he believed to be his for the sake of his career. She never had a child to give up. He largely outsourced his parenting duties but crowed about holding an empty title. Each considers themselves to be in the business of helping families, so long as we overlook Abbott's oft-professed (and indulged!) boredom as Shadow Minister for Families Families Families Baked Beans Families Families Families Families and Families in 2007-09.

Tony Abbott is appealling to a constituency that doesn't exist, and appalling to one that does. Rather than just report all those "Liberal sources" who will inevitably say "I knew Tony wouldn't make it", the time has come to find out why they are not confronting him. Howard did his own thing but when a big enough bunch of backbenchers came toward him, he sat up and took notice.

Abbott takes no notice. His silly tactic of trailing his coat to get the Prime Minister to go off at him again makes him look like the schoolboy taunting the female prac teacher. Even if he does rattle her, he won't convince anyone that he should be teaching the class; he's still just a naughty boy. There is no switch to flick to make him Prime Ministerial, it's too late.

The MSM have serious questions to consider about what falls off their schedule in pursuit of the latest pearls to drop from his lips. The idea of "balance" is not a public demand but one of the journosphere, because a "balanced" political system places them at the centre of events. Politics is out of balance, and politicians are spending all day wrapping themselves around "the media cycle" for zero impact; this simply can't go on.

I felt sorry for Michael Brissenden, who describes the storm clouds rolling toward him but ends his piece insisting that people like him need not modify their behaviour at all. Pollies are more nimble than the journosphere, and woe betide all the box-tickers in the press gallery who find one day - while out of the country or otherwise distracted perhaps - not that the bus has gone without them, but that it isn't going anywhere. Young journalists, why not sit up the front of a stopped bus and talk to Michael Brissenden? You could fetch him coffee while you listen to his cracking yarns (do some research first to find out who "Peter Costello" was).

Failure to plan means planning to fail

The Coalition's response to Australia's victory in the UN Security Council vote showed a bunch of people with no short-term media strategy nor any longterm policy direction. They have had years to plan for this: not only for the vote itself, but the whole context of how Australian foreign policy generally accommodates a place on the UNSC, what the country is expected to do with it, and what happens to this country and its foreign policy once the term is over. What have they been doing?

Julie Bishop has squeezed in the odd trip to Jakarta in between choreographing parliamentary silly-buggers (probably a shorter distance from Perth than the trip to Canberra), but she's been in the job long enough to have a position - or at least have a statement ready. General Eisenhower had a speech written incase the D-Day landings had failed. President Nixon had a speech written incase the moon landings had failed. You can be sure Bishop, Abbott et al would have come out all guns blazing if the UNSC bid had failed.

It seems that we only engage distant nations, like those in Africa, when we want something from them - the Sydney Olympics, the FIFA World Cup 2022, and now this. It will be interesting to see what will happen when they want something from us. Neither Carr nor the Coalition, nor foreign policy sages in the MSM and beyond, talked much about that in the context of Australia as a global citizen.

When athletes like Anna Meares and Evan O'Hanlon won gold in London, theirs were not Labor victories - they were victories for Australia. Labor supporters of Kevin Rudd struck the right note when they praised "Aussie diplomacy". Foreign Minister Carr talked about Australia's reputation as a good global citizen, leaving the door open for the Coalition to build on their role in building that reputation - but no.

Abbott wittered on about cost, but the shadow treasurer didn't. Hockey made a frankly idiotic link to asylum seeker policy, which the shadow immigration minister didn't back up. Their publicity effort was a shambles, and bodes poorly for the Coalition election campaign. The buck stops with Abbott but this isn't his failure alone - it goes all the way down, Bishop, Hockey, Credlin, and into the so-called future of the Liberals with the much-touted but little proven Briggs and Frydenberg.

When Alexander Downer was appointed to a UN rapporteur role by the Rudd government, the journosphere position on it was bipartisanship, Rudd reaching out to the Coalition. The appointment was also a case of Rudd snookering the Coalition. If the Coalition was going to trash the UN, as is their wont, they would also have to trash the man who - for all his failings and shortcomings - has forgotten more about foreign policy than the rest of today's Coalition put together. Downer's advisers Jamie Briggs and Josh Frydenberg are in the Coalition party room today, and neither man has added much to the debate on what UNSC might mean to a Coalition government.

On the face of it, not a lot of votes are won or lost on the basis of foreign policy. Perceptions of its real importance are hidden by nebulous poll-jockey concepts like "approval ratings", "preferred Prime Minister" or "fitness to govern":

• Mark Latham's decision to bring troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan looked rash and ill-considered, hurting him far more than the taxi driver incident;
• Kim Beazley's whole career involved defence issues. In September 2001 he could have struck a middle course between supporting the US while standing against the demonisation of Muslim Australians, and insisting on civil liberties protections while allowing for security legislation to adapt to new technologies. He'd have been Prime Minister and lots of things would have been different;
• Fraser made Hayden look like an amateur on foreign policy, as Holt did to Calwell;
• McMahon tried doing the same to Whitlam over "Red China", but when Kissinger and Nixon went there too that boomerang smacked him in the face.

Where else could a media-junkie like me turn but to the sage at the juncture of domestic and foreign policy, Peter Hartcher? He clearly learned the wrong lessons here. Of course the incumbents rate their predecessors, and of course Abbott will lean on Howard for the consistency and decorum that he lacks.

It's partisan bullshit to say that everything our side did was great and everything the others did sent the country to hell. You can see this in UK politics: incumbent Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron professed to admire Tony Blair, who paid the compliment back to Thatcher, who in turn had praised Attlee. Keating was hobbled by his inability to find a good word for Liberals, while Howard looked like a statesman for praising Labor leaders Hawke and Chifley.

Prime Ministers are part of a continuum in the life of the nation, and successful Prime Ministers recognise that. They are about encouraging as many people to vote for them as possible, which means making co-partisans feel put out when they slaughter a fatted calf to welcome those who had voted otherwise in the past. Part of this is a sly narrative to paint the incumbent as a wan imitation of their party's past masters rather than the rightful heir.

Gillard has this right in her portrayal of Howard:

"I always thought he was a commendably disciplined person and enormously psychologically strong in terms of a conception of himself and a conception of what he wanted to do next and if I can replicate some of these things I would be happy with that."

It was his manner but also some of his decisions she admired: "As prime minister, Mr Howard had some fine moments and I believe when those moments are shown, we should celebrate them in a spirit of bipartisanship.

Subtext: compare Abbott's macho strutting, his absence of policy and antipathy to bipartisanship, to Howard, the man Abbott supposedly emulates. If you want guts, determination, vision and pragmatism, you'd have to vote for me over him.

Earlier in the piece Hartcher quoted probably the only Liberal-voting tenured academic in the country, Greg Mellueish [sic], associate professor of history and politics at Wollongong University [sic]. Why? A bit of column-stuffing, but hardly big on perspective or analysis:

"You got Kevin Rudd, who wanted to be another John Howard at the 2007 election, because Howard seemed to be the definition of political success".

There is the conservative paradox right there. Why would Rudd want to emulate a man on the way out? Do you think Gough Whitlam spent a lot of time being Billy McMahon? Remember how Rudd drove Liberals crazy in 2007 by picking a few key differences but basically differing little on everything else? Again, compare and contrast with Abbott forcing the Liberals to fight on all fronts, with few real policy options. Melleuish, whose Quadrant pieces should not, I hope, count toward his academic publishing requirements, missed that context and so too did Hartcher.

Hartcher's attempt to bring in US politics clouds the point he is trying to make. He is trying for a bit of Sheridan-like intellectual overreach. Neither he, Melleuish, nor the other conservative academic Hartcher quotes, Tom Switzer (the man who, along with Simon Berger, put Brendan Nelson where he is today), manage to square their circle and compare Abbott not to Howard, but George W Bush. The recklessness, the relentless opposition to all things bipartisan, the sheer disdain for contrary opinions however well grounded, the unusually close relationship with key female subordinates; all of these things are aspects of the prospect of an Abbott government that need some further investigation. Where would we get some of that?

The nearest thing we have to a comprehensive Liberal critique of Australian foreign policy generally and the UNSC vote in particular is not from the shadow minister, Julie Bishop, who has been in the position for years. It hasn't come from cocktail-party accessory Josh Frydenberg, who has Abbott bluffed into thinking he's a foreign policy expert. No, it has come from a former pothead, the man who made the South Australian Liberals almost unelectable for two generations now, and who plays the Cheney or Tebbitt role of ideological enforcer on Australian conservatives from retirement: Nick Minchin.

Minchin spent ten times the amount spent on UNSC lobbying enriching Joe Cocker and Kerry Packer, selling us a tax we had no choice but to buy. He put in place the policy shambles that is our telecommunications policy, which the NBN is designed to undo. Minchin kept Howard going long past his use-by date and had a hand in every Liberal leadership campaign since. The next Liberal Prime Minister will unchain Nick Minchin from his party's heart: Tony Abbott is not the next Liberal Prime Minister. Meanwhile, marvel at the sheer gall of this man:

"I think it's frankly disgusting that we've spent this money, this time and this effort to pursue something that I think compromises our aid program and potentially compromises our foreign affairs positions."

Um, what policies and positions in particular?

"And now we've got Bob Carr prancing around the world saying he's going to solve the Syrian civil war," he said.

Really? I can't find any statements to that effect. Maybe we should just sit back and wait for Syrian refugees to start lobbing up on Christmas Island.

"What about our backyard? We've got lots of problems in the Pacific we should be focusing on."

Problems that should have been addressed by the government of which Minchin, Abbott and Bishop were senior members, not the least of which is the neo-colonialist perception of other people's countries as our extended property.

"We will have no influence because all the decisions are made by the permanent members of the UN security council," he told Network Ten's the Bolt Report program on Sunday.

Really? Is there no precedent for middle powers having an impact on the UNSC? Bishop should have diplomatically set Minchin straight on that - Condoleezza Rice would've done that, and examples like Canada and Scandinavian countries come to mind here. They don't however. come to any Coalition minds - and more's the pity for their attempts to show us that they have what it takes to govern us.

Minchin's position is silly and reactionary and ignorant and all bad things - but it is a critique, and it's consistent with a long tradition of UN-phobia in the Coalition ranks, and those references to existing foreign policy challenges gives it the sort of occasional resonance necessary to develop truthiness. Minchin's remarks are exactly the sort of jetsam that gets sucked into a vacuum and becomes confused with substance and principle - and we have seen that Coalition foreign policy is a vacuum, and that it is endemic, and vested in the very people Minchin props up.

If Barnaby Joyce can bring on a foreign policy crisis over Chinese interests taking over a farm in Queensland (no problem with British interests doing so), you can see Coalition foreign policy is a lightweight thing, buffeted almost to breaking point even by hot air. Joyce and Bishop got a free trip to India thanks to Gina Reinhart to attend a wedding. How they will build on our relations with India, which seems to be reaching a new high plateau, is a question that Peter Hartcher might be better off examining for the sake of his credibility if nothing else.

Now is the time when people are starting to take the Coalition seriously as a potential government. They have failed to demonstrate that they can rise to the national interest, nor can they play politics effectively, and they have wasted five years in letting their policy skills atrophy. They are not ready for government and will not win. They cannot and will not deal with surprises, and nor can they flick the switch to competence on issues more directly relevant to voters than the UN Security Council.

In terms of this election cycle the Coalition are finished, the Abbott experiment is over, and with it the happy little Minchinite dream of coasting into office thanks to a self-sabotaging Labor government. Labor is run by people who win votes, Minchin et al only lose them: that's political context for ya. Let the polls catch up when they will.

How to hobble a high-profile candidate

* Update: this post has two new paragraphs: "Anderson did ... on principle".

Major parties talk about recruiting high-profile candidates to run for Parliament, people with community-building and media-relationship skills already developed and no toxic history of intra-party warfare, so that the parties don't have to carry their candidate base and can devote more time to fundraising or campaigning.

For all their talk, major parties really don't want high-profile candidates. They want candidates who would be nothing without them, who fear losing whatever the party may deign to grant them. This used to be a Labor preference, avoiding high-profile and personally secure candidates who might become tempted to buck the party line and 'rat', but now the Liberals and Nationals have adopted the same approach. In the process they haven't really thought about what they want from high-profile candidates. They continue to court them, but they just can't use them effectively, which makes both the suitor and the wooed look more than a little silly.

A recent case in point is Mr Gary 'Angry' Anderson.

Anderson grew up in Melbourne's tougher low-income industrial suburbs. He became famous as lead singer of Rose Tattoo, fine purveyors of four-on-the-floor Aussie rock in the 1970s and '80s like this. More substantially, Anderson works with young people from difficult family and personal circumstances; Rose Tattoo's gritty, grinding rock gave him credibility in dealing with kids from similar backgrounds to his own. This is hard work requiring full engagement of brains and hearts and guts, often confronting, an underappreciated branch of the emergency services that operates in slow motion. Anderson deserves a lot of respect for his years of work in this area.

In the course of this work Anderson decided to become a conservative politician. He didn't announce this on national TV or start pontificating about it, he subtly met with party officials and asked how he might become involved. Anderson's interest coincided with the similarly unusual career shift of Peter Garrett, where he only made his announcement once a seat had been lined up for him. When Anderson showed his hand, he got only platitudes and vague talk of a seat somewhere:

The director of the NSW Nationals, Ben Franklin, says Anderson is "an icon of the Australian music industry and has an outstanding record as a community activist".

"He's a strong voice for all of the traditional Labor supporters out there ..."

So, not a good Nationals candidate then, which may explain why Franklin was happy to sell Anderson out. He got a good deal overall for the Nationals because he was dealing with Liberals who wouldn't fight their corner, apparently, even though anything that upsets Alby Schultz has that to commend it alone. The Liberals got the Nationals to agree to not run Anderson in Gilmore, and they won't. They didn't rush to find him another seat either.

The geniuses who caved to the Nationals took Anderson in but look just as bad with this. All the mouth-breathers who think that the polls somehow reflect what will happen ten months hence would regard Greenway as pretty much a lock for the Coalition, and must wonder why Rowlands would even bother fighting the inevitable. It is, however, the very sort of seat where a hard-working and entrenched incumbent, backed by a Prime Minister who is more popular than Liberals can bear to allow, will finish ahead of an interloper who lacks hands-on political experience.

A close reading of that article will show that Anderson hasn't even been formally endorsed. Christianists like David Clarke kyboshed a candidate in 2010 who would have made Rowlands' task (and by extension, Gillard's) even harder than it was. Anderson has spent his life laughing at those sorts of people, but it is the Christianists who will blanch and gasp and carry on when the lyrics of Bad Boy For Love or Rock 'n' Roll Outlaw are thrust under their noses.

“When I spoke to the Liberals Greenway was suggested. The powerful men suggested it would be a good fit,” he said.

“I am very confident I could do a great job for the people of Greenway,” he said.

“I represent people who have struggled all their lives.”

Sources close to Tony Abbott, who is a neighbour and friend of Mr Anderson, said the Opposition Leader was seriously considering backing Mr Anderson as a way of breaking a deadlock in the seat.

Mr Abbott is understood to be unhappy with the frontrunner in the pre-selection ballot, Blacktown lawyer Jayme Diaz, 36, who contested the seat in 2010 ...

Anderson didn't want to rustle any feathers, he did what party insiders would hope aspiring candidates would do. They have rewarded him with a kite-flying exercise: Anderson is a bit rough around the edges, and so are many people in Blacktown, so why not run him there? Clarke was happy with Diaz, who came so close, and is a local ... don't you worry about Tony, whoever the Christianists run will be fine by Tony.

Anderson should have run in one of the communities in western Sydney where he helped so many young people (and had he not done so, the communities where their anti-social tendencies would have been felt most directly). He should have run for state politics, where the issues he cares about are actually delivered. He could have helped Mike Baird and Pru Goward understand the false economies of cutting social services - or even the big-picture opportunities open to a longterm government, where increased social spending could have reduced out-of-control expenditure on prisons over time. Oh well, too late for that. He would have been a lot better than the local government worthies occupying those seats now.

Back in January, Anderson declared that he wouldn't be hobbled. Now it's October and he has been hobbled, not through direct confrontation but by being stuffed about. The Nationals hobbled him by suggesting he run anywhere from the north coast to the south coast so long as there was bugger-all chance of him winning. The Liberals hobbled him by kite-flying, he might be a useful candidate somewhere or other in the western suburbs, but no promises or commitments.

Anderson did participate in the protests against the carbon price which led to all sorts of nasty misogyny, conspiracy theories, racism and goodness-knows-what oozing out. All Liberals and Nationals have to spout absolute crap on carbon pricing for the sake of party unity, and Anderson thought he was helping. He even lent support to some of that in the past. There was a time when major parties would have taken a firm line against such views as having no place in Australian society, but that has gone now. The reason why Ben Franklin did not tell Anderson unequivocally that he could not hold to extreme views on race and other issues is because there is no line in the sand - Barnaby Joyce regularly flirts with CEC types in his jaunts around rural Queensland, and the protected species Dennis Jensen regularly airs a range of appalling opinions on how the world works.

Sir John Carrick would not have messed about with Anderson. Sir John McEwen weeded out candidates who wanted to perpetuate the war against Japan long after it was over, and who thought that anti-Communism meant not selling wheat to the Soviet Union. The Liberals and Nationals should have forced Anderson to recant or bid him good riddance - they've done neither, so I hope they don't want credit for taking a strong stand on principle.

The proof that the Coalition can't tolerate candidates who are secure in themselves was demonstrated clearly under the Howard government:

• Russell Broadbent had made a comfortable life selling furniture in Melbourne's fast-growing southeastern suburbs.
• Judi Moylan sold real estate in WA.
• Dr Mal Washer was an esteemed medical practitioner in Perth.
• Petro Georgiou had been a senior advisor to Malcolm Fraser when Howard was a backbencher.

None of those people had entered Parliament at an impressionable age. They all knew how politics worked, but they refused to regard Howard's word as immutable and refused to regard themselves as less important than one of Mark Textor's focus groups or some 2GB transcripts. Younger members of the Howard government (e.g. Abbott, Julie Bishop, and given the overreach of staffers these days, Credlin too) seethed at these backbenchers calling the Prime Minister to account. Howard must have seethed too, but having come up through the old school he knew he actually had to persuade independently-minded Liberals rather than merely jerking their chains, like Abbott and Credlin do now.

Anderson would be an independently-minded MP too. He'd toe the line for a while, just like Garrett did, especially on issues like asylum-seekers (where Anderson is less convinced than Broadbent et al). The difference is that Garrett wasn't working with the ninnies that Coalition MPs not only sit along side but are led by. Peta Credlin would not tolerate him for a second - these are people who don't have a lot of Rosey Tatts albums or gig-ticket stubs, but who can find stuff like this in a Google search.

Anderson put his political fate in the hands of those who wouldn't stand and fight him, but who'd happily stuff him around until he gave up or his credibility was shot, which is what has happened. This doesn't make him a patsy - far from it, he went to the parties' great-and-good in good faith, he had much to offer them and they let him down. Say what you will about Angry Anderson, but he's got guts and brains and stature in the community. These are qualities that are not assets but inconveniences and impertinences to those who run the Coalition, however much they pretend (or, sadly, even believe) otherwise.

And that, my friends, is what 'context' means when we report on political stories. We piece together known facts and draw upon our experience of politics in order to tell a story. We do not dare bluff to our readers that someone who set up some narrowly-defined, low-stakes and sordid feint in parliamentary theatre is somehow a true winner, while his opponent who overwhelmed him at the time and since has won nothing. Nor do we insist that those contending otherwise have no right to construct a Narrative which we have not fed them.

Journalists titter and sneer at those who complain at being taken "out of context", yet they seem put out when they try it on and get the same response. This blog has outlasted several press gallery journos and will be going long after others who fancy themselves as big names have had the last of their credibility shredded, too.

Media regulation: everything will be all right

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

- George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four

The only hope for the media in Australia lies in innovation and courage. In the absence of those qualities it will almost certainly plump for more regulation rather than less. This is a reversal from their timeless principles of, oh, earlier this year. It will be interesting to see if the regulators oblige.

Last year there was an inquiry into the way the mainstream media handles complaints, chaired by former judge Ray Finkelstein. At the same time was the inception of a different but related inquiry into the way that online media effectively blurs the distinctions between of previously separate domains of print, audio-only radio and audio-visual TV (known as "the Convergence Review"). At the time, the journosphere consensus was that:

• both would result in greater regulation of the media; and
• that greater regulation of the media was a Bad Thing, if not a Threat To Democracy And Free Speech; and
• that even the merest tweak to existing legislation, let alone A Whole Raft (a raft being the collective noun for legislative measures, apparently) would mean Goebbels and gulags and gabble gabble gabble ...

At around the same time there was a bit of coat-trailing to the effect that if the government funds some journalists (at the ABC and SBS), why not keep all journalists and journalism in the manner to which they/it had become accustomed? This came hard on the heels of sizeable government subsidies support incentives donations to the car industry. Tendentious comparisons were made to public funding for utilities or the arts.

Soon afterwards, the government proposed to retain the internet browsing data of all Australians. They imposed Control Orders on some people and locked others up indefinitely without charging them. The MSM were not as alert to threats to the liberties of Australians as you'd hope their experience would have taught them, focused as they were on former union officials misappropriating expenses and a political staffer who seemed, career-wise, attracted to a politician as sordid as himself.

The whole process demonstrated the sheer bankruptcy of the idea that when the MSM campaigns on an issue, the politicians had better watch out because the public will get right behind it and sweep away any governmental inertia or stalemate. If they can't act in their own interests then their periodic campaigns about public transport or crime or anything else will be worthless: have your say, make a comment.

Then came the Alan Jones thing, which has hit commercial radio in Sydney as suddenly and as decisively as September 11. Jones is the most commercially and politically powerful shock-jock in a town that tolerates them more than most. Much is made of Jones' part-ownership of his station, 2GB, but until two weeks ago he largely carried that station financially: to the victor the spoils. It wasn't as though social media campaigns in this country picked off a succession of commercial radio small-fry before taking on the big guys - target number one was the biggest target in the biggest market.

Notwithstanding Mike Carlton's dump, the fact is that Jones has - had - the veneer of class and success that the rest of the station has always lacked, and which it keens for now. That veneer kept the oldies loyal. It is indispensable to conservatism generally and the myth of that station as the place through which you reach a wide and influential audience: going, going ...

Without Jones 2GB is like Kyle Sandilands without the catchy tunes: reporting on politics, but as remote from it as Sandilands' showbiz gossip is from actually influencing events there. The other presenters on that station tend to be grubs, there is no reason to talk or listen to them.

"Without Jones" is a real possibility. No other radio announcer - not even on the ABC - would have kept their job after embarrassing their station and causing it such massive financial damage. Jones is in his early 70s. It is clear that there has been no succession or key-man planning even assuming that their business model hadn't been broken, which it has been. This is the epitome of sloppy management: a failure to plan for contingencies that are eminently foreseeable.

For 2GB to let Jones go would see it fall off a cliff of relevance. It would concede that their entire business model has failed, that its audience was never as valuable as the ad space fees suggested. It would see the whole station do what Jones accused another man of doing: die of shame.

The fact that Jones and 2GB have gone from dominant to doomed within one ratings period explains why the story has gone on and on: it's no longer a political story but a media story, and the media will talk about itself long after more substantial issues have been declared passe and dispensed with.

(Google the headline) Christian Kerr illustrates the problems faced by the MSM in coming to terms with this. Kerr noted the story is entering its second week and, again like September 11, the media can't talk about anything else even though they have nothing new to say.

Kerr came to prominence under an online pseudonym, just like "Xerxes" or "Hairy Maclary", or the anonymous troll with the wetsuit metaphor. As with any white-collar worker, Kerr's indispensable work tool is a keyboard. In an earlier era Gough Whitlam called Billy McMahon "Tiberius with a telephone": a neat alliteration but, as with Kerr, it wrongly emphasises the technology over its political use. Any means of communication can be and is a political tool.

I wonder whether the images of keyboards on smartphones and tablets count as "keyboards", or as something else again. Perhaps Kerr's definition makes Jones a "radio activist"? No wonder he's regarded as toxic.

Like Alan Jones, Mark Textor stands on his dignity with a weak logical case and a fairly tendentious record. He asserts that people who organise campaigns through online media can't be mainstream because, ah, because - look, he just made Christian Kerr feel smart by co-opting him into propping up a bogus distinction. Textor was happy to credit Jones as being synonymous with mainstream Australia when Howard was in power, and the decline of Jones' audience was part of Howard's decline. I have written about Textor's strategic and intellectual laziness and Kerr has him compound it with his own, ah, um, well, words.

People have simply grown tired of Jones, and to be tired of Jones is to threaten an entire, previously comfortable industry. The lazy paradigm which he built and sells no longer applies in the real world. Like most conservatives Textor can't pick a fad from a structural shift. Whether he knows it or not, Textor is in a similarly uncomfortable position to the psychic who cancels a show due to "unforeseen circumstances". He will play a leading role in the Coalition's campaign of 2013 to the co-dependent detriment of them and himself. Textor has been shown up here, not by some radical leftie but by an admirer who took his genius as given.

Talkback radio is the nearest thing the mainstream media has to the "anonymous trolls" of Twitter and Facebook. "Bob from Cranbourne" or "Helen from Carlingford" are no less anonymous and pseudonymous than, say, "Hillary Bray". Commercial radio looks silly complaining about the very methods that saw them wield such disproportionate power for a generation. They will give up "Bob" and "Helen" and everyone else if their future depends on it, which it does.

The mainstream media will assert its credibility by railing against "anonymous trolls", and join their cause to that of increasingly intrusive government. This has started with the Daily Telegraph, which still runs quotes from "senior sources" and trolls like so-called "Piers Akerman". Moves to crack down on "online trolling" and "cyberbullying" will be increasingly and warmly applauded in the MSM. Julian Assange has broken more stories than all the journalists at News Ltd Australia put together, but those rallying to his defence are few and getting fewer.

Having learned their lesson with Grog's Gamut (where the pseudonymous blogger exposed as Greg Jericho became a respected commentator on social media rather than a harried, unemployed wretch cringing before the might of News Ltd), the mainstream media will flex its muscles by going after pathetically powerless individuals, especially teenagers embarrassing themselves like so many latter-day Digby Bamfords. They will make the case for government that online anonymity is not on, and the legislation will probably follow.

In return for publicly but selectively abandoning anonymity, the mainstream media will lobby for legal protection of its privileges. For those who abandoned 2GB, both advertiser and media outlet could launch legal action against Facebook users who had them break their contract, if only the law would allow. Press releases now freely available might be restricted, at least for a while, to help the good old MSM get a head start and showcase their "professionalism", while all those cyberpunks behind Gov2.0 have the choice of being co-opted or vilified.

The Right To Know Coalition has no chance against a Right To Exist Coalition. If government action were necessary to secure that then so be it, purely for the shareholders. Assertive independence is all very well but not when commercial survival, and the appearance of real clout, are at stake.

Don't give me any crap about fearless journos asserting an independence from management that they talk about, but don't really have. Journalists differentiate themselves from and above bloggers by the accumulated public reach, clout and history of their employers, compounded of course by their wisdom in hiring such talent as they. Having bagged bloggers so hard for so long they are generally not keen to join us, even when fate intervenes.

The political class (including MPs, staffers and lobbyists and limpets like Textor) did not get where it is through social media. It got where it is as part of a politico-media complex. It regards the insurgency against Jones as random and unpredictable, not foreseeable and controllable, and it will almost certainly act in order to bask in the adulation of the legacy media.

A political class that can get around the MSM effectively has not yet arisen, and only when it has will the impetus to regulate in favour of mainstream media abate. By lobbying for legislative protection the MSM will be even more co-opted than they are now, and that will truly be the death of them: propaganda is unreliable. Worse, it's dull to read, dull to watch and dull to listen to. Take the consumers/voters out and the logic is more compelling: we'll keep on being gatekeepers if you (re)build the gate, and any flaw in the construct is your fault.

Corporate Australia tends to oligopoly. This is true of banking, retail, telecommunications and many other industries. Large players maintain their positions through lobbying to secure regulatory environments that makes it difficult for all but a small number of competitors to challenge them. Libertarians spend time wondering why "free enterprise" doesn't reciprocate their support, time that might be spent more usefully challenging their own assumptions.

The tendency to oligopoly has been a feature of media too. Radio and TV rely on government licences for broadcasting spectrum, but Fairfax and News Ltd achieved the same in newspapers through accumulated scale and reputation and the ability to defend high-stakes lawsuits. As Jonathan Green points out, these organisations are "simple commercial self-interests that are no longer either a public necessity or holders of a public trust". It beggars belief that big media wouldn't engage corporate lobbyists to secure favourable public policy outcomes.

Media organisations won't be able to lobby themselves into existence forever, just as you can't botox yourself to immortality. Market forces, time and technology are against them - but they will give it a good go for a while yet.

There is some hope for a government that has recently been encouraged to go around the MSM, however tentatively, and engage with social media directly. This is hope compounded rather than dashed by its lack of overarching policy direction. By contrast, the Opposition looks increasingly doomed by sticking by the only media it knows: the "main stream", the quest for which is as futile to 21st century Australia as was "the Inland Sea" to the 19th.