The deadly backlash of ‘sit-down money’

 

The deadly backlash of ‘sit-down money’

ALEX MCDERMOTT

Since the defeat of the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum, Indigenous truth and justice commissions have continued to extend their reach throughout different Australian states. They are all based on the assumption the Uluru Dialogues articulated: the problems that plague Indigenous communities can be traced back to the original trauma of dispossession.

Yet reality tells a very different story. Were 1788, and the train of colonial occupation that followed on from that, the primary cause, then you wouldn’t find such wide variation among Indigenous Australians.

Indigenous Australians in urban areas and regional centres are hard to distinguish from the rest of the population in those places for levels of wealth, health, education and life outcomes.

The human crisis that produces and reproduces the Gap is much more clearly locatable. It is in the remote outstations of homeland settlements, and around some towns in isolated parts of the Australian interior. It is where there is no economic life outside the government provision of welfare and social services, and no jobs other than those government creates.

These places, where basic social order and safety have largely vanished, have been described by Noel Pearson as worse than Third World countries.

Let’s face it: 1973 and 1974, not 1788, better explain this longscale traumatic hurt and human damage. Those are the years when the new policy of self-determination, and the remote homelands ideal, properly took hold.

The idea that Indigenous peoples should themselves collectively decide the terms on which they would engage with Western life and settler society first emerged in the 1950s, thanks in no small part to the Australian Communist Party. As of 1931, communists argued that indigenous minorities in the advanced capitalist countries were oppressed colonial peoples. The glorious Soviet Socialist republics were “selfdetermining”, they declared – so should be indigenous minorities.

In an age of decolonisation, the idea had obvious appeal. Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who believed separating indigenous from other Canadians was a retrogressive step, and an inherently undemocratic one at that, issued a white paper, An End to Separatism, against it.

In Australia, Paul Hasluck, the commonwealth minister for states and territories, and thus the Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, shared Trudeau’s views.

Under his stewardship in the 1950s and 1960s, government repudiated the policy of protection that dominated the first half of the 20th century.

There is a solid argument advanced by Tim Rowse, an emeritus professor at Western Sydney University, that protection helped stabilise and rebuild the Indigenous population. But it undeniably treated Aborigines as inherently different, secondclass citizens, to be kept apart from the ordinary population. Hasluck instead sought a system “under which Aborigines were recognised as Australian citizens and were regarded as having the same status and rights as other Australian citizens”. Aborigines should be equals, treated equally.

It was through Hasluck that Aborigines regained much of what they’d lost or been denied under protection: civil rights, and the right to vote federally, in 1962.

But after Harold Holt’s drowning, Hasluck narrowly lost the partyroom vote to John Gorton and shortly after effectively left public life. With Hasluck gone no one else seriously pushed back against the new policy concept of self-determination.

Conflated with the shame of the recently junked White Australia policy, assimilation and even integration became bogey words, freighted with the stigma of racism.

Hasluck’s policy was condemned for violating the Indigenous right to decide for themselves.

Like multiculturalism – another buzzy, yet originally nebulous word that became policy without public debate about what it meant – self-determination germinated under the Coalition, was supercharged under Gough Whitlam, and then became orthodoxy.

Even to question it was to be tarred with hankering for the bad old days of assimilation. Yet self-determination produced failure on a vast, indeed cataclysmic scale.

Activist bureaucrats such as Herbert “Nugget” Coombs enthusiastically endorsed the idea that Indigenous communities in remote regions should be established largely outside modern capitalist Australia. After Whitlam’s 1972 election victory unemployment benefits were made available to all Indigenous people, even if they lived in communities where there were no jobs. It proved to be one of the most poisonous policy decisions of the 20th century.

In the 1950s and 1960s Aborigines had been employed at remote settlements and missions in government-run enterprises, which enabled them to work and live there. Piggeries, orchards, chicken runs, vegetable gardens, sawmills, bakeries and butcheries flourished.

After 1972 young people knew they could get paid more money by not working – “sit-down money”, or the dole. The enterprises collapsed.

In many areas self-determination’s wave of social destruction was made worse by the equal wages decision of 1967. On pastoral stations Indigenous cattlemen worked in a largely cashless economy. They were paid for work largely in rations, clothes and basic accoutrements, while continuing to work and live with their families on traditional country. The rations were often paid to the women, giving them considerable influence.

Once equal pay came in, pastoralists switched even more quickly to new technology, and to more skilled workers to run their stock.

Combined with the total loss of incentive to work from sitdown money, and the new ubiquity of the modern cash economy – including guns, grog, pornography and drugs – the traditional societies of remote Australia began to rapidly disintegrate, precipitating a dramatic rise in rates of offending and incarceration.

The fate of Vincent Lingiari’s Gurindji people illustrate this tragedy all too vividly. Writer and historian Charlie Ward describes how welfare payments, infrastructure development wages and “unprecedented amounts of funding” from the government fundamentally compromised Gurindji autonomy in the years after Whitlam had poured a handful of sand into Lingiari’s open palm in 1975.

Younger generation Gurindji refused to work in the Gurindjioperated cattle operation, rejecting their elders’ traditional authority.

A society that “had masterfully sustained itself by hard work and self-motivation” fell apart, chiefly “as a result of government assistance given under policies of Aboriginal selfmanagement”.

Indigenous policy has been our greatest failure. Ultimately, it is not just a failure of policies but of ideas. In a society where all Australians depend on each other – economically, socially, politically – the notion that any group can be “selfdetermining” is a fantasy.

Fifty years after the Whitlam government raised that fantasy into a religion, it’s time reality was given a stronger say.

Alex McDermott is an independent historian.

No road to net zero

 Eco heroes leave reality to ‘someone else’ 

CHRIS UHLMANN 

We need a name for the carbon clergy’s wildly popular game of proclaiming large numbers linked to short deadlines for scrubbing the economy clean of fossil fuel. Let’s call it Eco-Bluster Bingo. Anyone can compete but the only Australian professional leagues are in state and federal parliaments. There you get paid to play and Canberra’s league is first grade. You win if you outbid an opponent with an improbable emissions-cutting target set on the nearest horizon. More points are awarded if you land both target and deadline on an elegant zero or five. The coveted prize is the adulation of much media, the envy of fellow players, and the gratitude of the legion of green industry carpetbaggers who feed on taxpayer dollars like sharks on the carcass of a whale. You also get to denounce the loser as a morally bankrupt planet wrecker to your modest posse of followers on Elon’s X, Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram, and Beijing’s TikTok. The true savants of Eco-Bluster Bingo score bonus points for rote denouncements of all forms of Earth-devouring mining and the use of gas, nuclear energy (or any wind farms in your electorate’s line of sight) on the road to the promised land of Net Zero. Then, feeling properly smug at sitting week’s end, our champion hops into an imported commonwealth car – best if it’s one of the new electric BMW iX40 SUVs – for a trip to Canberra Airport to sip fine wine from gas-furnace glass in the Chairman’s Lounge, before burning jet fuel to fly business class back to her/his/their capital city. There they can climb into a minerals-hungry Tesla (its battery fully charged of black or brown coal-generated electricity) for the drive on oil-based tyres across bitumen roads to an inner-city estate built with the fossil fuel children of bricks, steel and concrete. Over an Aperol spritz (delivered from Padua by diesel-burning ships and trucks) our hero’s pampered Eco-Superego hides the primal Id of their existence: fossil fuel is almost as essential and invisible to sustaining their life as the oxygen they breathe. Nothing in the built environment, including the clothes they wear and the fertiliser-fed food they eat, is fossil fuelfree. How do they square the circle of rank hypocrisy in the distance between what they say and how they live? Douglas Adams gave an insight into this in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote that developing an invisibility shield had proved impossible so the problem had been overcome by hacking the brain. Scientists discovered the next best real invisibility is to hide something behind an “SEP field”. The book’s narrator explains: “The Somebody Else’s Problem field … relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.” Every Eco-Bluster Bingo player is wilfully energy-blind and minerals-blind. So the technical and physical barriers to building their nirvana are literally invisible to them because turning their unicorns into work horses is somebody else’s problem. Meanwhile some grunt, somewhere, has to have a crack at working out how our hero’s Greenwished(™), bulldust numbers can be transformed into something approaching reality. Doing that demands writing reports chock full of heroic assumptions about billions of tonnes of yet-to-be-mined minerals, imagined engineering feats and uninvented industrial processes running on imaginary fuels. These studies in fantasy are then proffered as proof of concept. Nor do our ecowarriors ever trouble themselves with debating tricky technical arguments. Why should they when they wield the One Ring that rules all 1 Greenwishing(™) arguments; casting the verbal spell of “climate change denier” and turning your opponent into a reactionary toad. This charge has now spread like Covid beyond heretics questioning “The Science” to include anyone raising concerns about retooling the world around weatherdependent power in the space of a generation. The totems of solar panels, and particularly the three-armed crucifix of the wind turbine, are sacred symbols and despoiling them is now a thought crime. Outside this climate church there is no salvation. But let’s nail just one rational heresy on the door of this church. Where will the minerals to build the bridge to net zero come from? Has anyone, as the Americans would say, done the math? Physicist and former Australian mining engineer associate professor Simon Michaux, from the Geological Survey of Finland, has calculated the material challenge of meeting the stated emissions reduction ambitions of the EU, China and the United States. He found that the available minerals demanded by the transition to net zero were a fraction of what will be needed to meet every country’s pledges. Out of the veritable periodic table of elements the green transition will demand let’s take one mineral: copper. In a paper produced this year, Michaux notes, “The human species produced approximately 700 million tonnes of metal over the 4000 years prior to 2020. For global economic demand for copper to continue its current trajectory of growth, another 700 million tonnes would need to be produced in the next 22 years.” The world’s pre-eminent expert on energy systems, Professor Vaclav Smil, has calculated the amount of copper needed to electrify just the world’s vehicle fleet, noting the average electric vehicle contains about 80kg of copper, “compared to less than 15kg in an internal combustion engine car”. “Replacing today’s 1.4 billion ICE vehicles by EVs would thus require more than 90 million tonnes of additional copper supply during the next 27 years,” he said in a paper for the American Society for Mechanical Engineers. Smil went on to detail the staggering amount of mining that would be needed to extract that copper, given the very best mines have only 0.6 per cent of metal in the copper ore. “This means that the extraction of an additional 90 million tonnes of copper by 2050 would require drilling, blasting, removal, processing and waste deposition, amounting to about 15 billion tonnes of rock, a mass equivalent to the world’s annual extraction of all fossil fuels and of all metallic ores, combined.” So, a big job then. Just for the copper needed to electrify the world’s vehicles and not counting the 610 million tonnes of copper that will be required for everything else. And once we have solved the copper question, we can turn our minds to finding the dizzying array of other elements needed for this witches’ brew. It is impossible to predict the future but this much is certain, the path to net zero won’t be mapped in fantasy numbers. That is a road to nowhere. Technology may save us. Faith won’t. 

Weak leaders are bringing the West to its knees

 Weak leaders are bringing the West to its knees PETA CREDLIN 

At the recent meeting of the G7, the only democratic leader present with an approval rating north of 40 per cent was its host, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. The best of the rest, at 37 per cent, was the United States’ Joe Biden (although this was before his debate disaster), followed by Canada’s Justin Trudeau at 30 per cent, Germany’s Olaf Schulz at 25 per cent, Britain’s Rishi Sunak also at 25 per cent, France’s Emmanuel Macron at 21 per cent, and Japan’s Fumo Kishida at just 13 per cent. Sunak is almost certain to be thrashed in the British elections on Thursday and a way-past-his prime Biden might well be dumped by his party even before November’s US election. Our own Anthony Albanese’s current 42 per cent approval (for a net approval rate of minus 11) looks almost glowing, yet his government will almost certainly go backwards at the next election. 

Not for almost a century has strong and confident democratic leadership been so needed yet almost never has the leadership of the main democracies been so lacklustre. And so, why? First, it’s because almost none of the current crop of leaders has addressed their societies’ underlying problems. Second, it’s because large percentages of the electorate in these main democracies feel politically homeless – indeed disenfranchised. And third, as suggested on this page earlier this week (“The West hasn’t figured out what’s going wrong. Voters are the problem”, 2/7), democratic electorates are, as yet, in no mood to welcome the leadership that’s needed. As the US commentator George Will said during an earlier dispiriting period (the late 1970s), “the cry goes up for leadership from millions of people who wouldn’t know it if they saw it, and would reject it if they did”. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the widespread perception that liberal market democracy was permanently ascendant, the main democracies have militarily, economically and even culturally disarmed. Yet it’s one thing to recognise the gathering storm; quite another to have a plan to deal with it. 

For all its residual strength, compared to China, the US is militarily much weaker than even five years back. Certainly, it’s a long time since the mere appearance of a US carrier strike force in the Taiwan Straits would be enough to deter any thoughts of aggression from Beijing. As the Ukraine war has shown, collectively, the main democracies’ preference for butter over guns means they’re woefully incapable of matching the armaments production, even of Russia, whose GDP in US dollar terms is scarcely a third more than Australia’s. And as the subsequent war in Gaza shows, not only are the main democracies scarcely capable of maintaining two democratic allies’ conflicts at once – let alone three, should China attack Taiwan – but large sections of their people and leadership can’t decide whose side they’re on: that of the Middle East’s only functioning democracy, or an apocalyptic death cult. 

Meanwhile, all the main democracies are engaged in economic self-harm in the name of climate change and other luxury beliefs. The latest example is our own parliament’s banning of the live sheep trade this week on the grounds of alleged cruelty to animals. And the main Anglosphere countries are full of doubt about their fundamental legitimacy and self-worth: America over slavery, Britain over colonialism, and Australia over the dispossession of the original inhabitants. Very few democratic leaders show unqualified pride in their countries or appreciation of how the Pax Americana has helped the wider world, until very recently, to be more free, more fair, more rich, prosperous, and more safe for more people than ever before in history; and that migrants to their countries have won the lottery of life and should be grateful. And almost none of them are prepared to say that in order to stay free, fair, and prosperous, the main democracies need to be less obsessive about reducing emissions and climate catastrophism, much readier to clamp down on out-of-control immigration, much more strict about morally relativist and culturally self-loathing education systems, and be willing to make at least some sacrifices in support of freedom. The partial exceptions are Meloni, who’s been better at railing against immigration in opposition than reducing it in government; and Donald Trump, although he never quite “built the wall”, didn’t even come close to “draining the swamp” and continues to pretend that there’s no cost to unilateral protectionism and no downside to America opting out of being the world’s policeman. 

Britain is about to get a greenleft Labour government with a super majority, not because the electorate has much enthusiasm for Sir Keir Starmer but because voters, especially strong conservative ones, are utterly disillusioned with a Tory party that (Brexit aside) hasn’t governed like one. France could be about to get a so-called “far right” National Assembly majority because the longestablished centre-right party comprehensively failed to respond to voters’ concerns about mass illegal migration that is impacting on living standards and social cohesion. That’s because when parties of the centre (left and right) consistently fail to address popular concerns, parties on the fringe that do so will eventually get traction. Both the Gaullists in France and the Conservatives in Britain have been part of the official “uniparty” consensus that immigration is always good and that renewable power is indisputably cheap, but that’s not the perception of people on “struggle street” which is why all the political establishments, left and right, are under pressure, either from fringe parties (such as Reform UK in Britain) or internal insurgents (such as Trump in the US). Yet almost no one contending for high office, establishment or insurgent, is prepared to tell voters the truth that there are few cost-free changes. Trump has nothing to say about America’s unsustainable deficits beyond “growth will fix it”. 

Looking at the creaking NHS, no British leader is prepared to say that patients simply cannot always get treatment that’s the best, immediate, and for free; so, one or more will often have to give. Here in Australia, it’s generally accepted that the NDIS, for instance, is a fiscal time bomb but no one will face up to the fact that eligibility and entitlements have to be curbed if the scheme is to be sustainable. Our officialdom recalls the fate of the 2014 budget, the last one that attempted difficult economic reform, and concludes that things might have to be much worse before most voters would willingly accept the need to wind some things back. In a democracy, there can’t be strong leadership without strong voters which is why countries ultimately get the leaders they deserve. And yet, some change-for-thebetter might be in the offing. By being upfront with voters that nuclear power is the only way to get to net zero and keep the lights on, and that the inescapable choice is between paying more for a reliable emissions-free system, or even more for an unreliable one, at least Peter Dutton has shown the political integrity we claim to expect of a leader. The question now is whether voters have sufficient collective character to recognise it.  

Crisis of entitlement

 Crisis of entitlement leaves West on the precipice of disaster. MATTHEW SYED 

“A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean,” historian William Durant wrote in The Story of Civilisation. “If war is forgotten in security and peace … then toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude.” They are words that are perhaps worth pondering as the Western world moves closer to the precipice while distracting itself with endless cat videos and online spats about whether plaiting hair amounts to cultural appropriation. The alarm bells are ringing everywhere. You can hear them in the travesty of an election taking place in the UK, the rightward turn about to hit France’s Fifth Republic and the parody of a debate in which a pathological liar and someone apparently suffering cognitive decline were put forward as prime candidates to become leader of the “greatest nation on Earth”. Yet even now I fear the West hasn’t figured out what is going wrong and why. 

While pundits examine exit polls and consult focus groups, they miss the rot buried so deep in our system that it has become all but invisible. And – if you’ll forgive me for being candid – it has nothing to do with hopeless leaders, Russian bots, high taxes, low taxes or being members of the wrong trading bloc. The problem is Western electorates. Us. Let’s briefly look at what most people agree are the symptoms of political decay. Debt is rising: approaching 100 per cent of GDP in the UK, 115 per cent in France and 120 per cent in the US. These are highs previously reached at the end of World War II, when we had just financed a conflict, after which levels rapidly fell. Today they are set to rise – and rise (partly because of changing demography). The US Congressional Budget Office projects that the share of GDP used to service the federal debt will be twice what is spent on national security by 2041. The Office for Budget Responsibility foresees UK debt reaching 300 per cent by 2070. 

France – well, who knows what will happen if Marine Le Pen gets the chance to enact her deluded version of populism? Let us rattle through the other problems too: we can no longer build, whether it is homes, roads, railways or power grids. Then there is the addiction to low-wage immigration and funny money (otherwise known as quantitative easing) and our abject failure – notably in Europe – to spend adequately (or wisely) on defence. I gration means paying workers more in the here and now, but it also means that we are not storing up vast fiscal liabilities and putting extra pressure on our physical infrastructure and (if these immigrants fail to integrate) cultural capital. Or take public borrowing to finance current spending. We have a choice: do we resist the temptation to use the credit card today – which implies we will have less of everything else? Or do we max out the Amex, enjoy extra consumption and borrow again next year, saddling future generations with could go on, but allow me to cut to the chase. 

Policy wonks tend to analyse these challenges in isolation and come up with what look like solutions. For example: we can cut public debt by abiding by fiscal rules. The problem is such rules are serially broken or subverted. The same happens to promises on infrastructure, immigration, monetary realism, you name it. And the reason is that the dysfunction is a symptom of a deeper – much deeper – problem. For when you look again, you notice a single and, in my view, unavoidable cause: an inability to make short-term sacrifices to secure a brighter future; to defer instant gratification for long-term success. We have become a civilisation that’s all about “now, now, now” and “me, me, me” – the antithesis of what the West once represented. Building railways, for example, represents a sacrifice in the here and now because the money to hire diggers and pay workers can’t be splurged on day-to-day consumption. But guess what: if we make this sacrifice, in a few years we will have extra connectivity to fuel growth. Similarly, weaning ourselves off low-wage immi crippling interest payments and structural weakness? The latter choice is easier, but also – over time – insidious, chipping away at the vitality of a civilisation. 

My point is that success for nations, as for individuals, requires tough choices. This is what we tell our children, isn’t it? Work hard. Practise. This might not be as much fun as playing another game on the iPad but it will confer blessings that last a lifetime. And we have words, do we not, for children who refuse to make such sacrifices? Spoiled. Entitled. The same, I suggest, applies to civilisations. When Rome was lean and driven, it built infrastructure, created a superb military and grew. A few centuries later, flabby and complacent, it wanted the blessings of success but not the costs. The empire had entered a fantasy land, where expenditure on ever more generous welfare payments and bread and circuses rose beyond the capacity of the state to afford it. So when the money ran out, the emperors debased it, reducing the silver content until the currency was worthless. The West is (I’d estimate) three centuries into its period of global supremacy, roughly the time between the beginning of the Roman principate and Diocletian’s splitting of the empire. And is it not reasonable to note a similar pattern, with China playing the role of the insurgent Vandals? 

Yet instead of confronting the disease, we look for scapegoats: immigrants, populists, wokesters, MAGA, remainers, leavers and so on. Anything to distract us from the more challenging truth that almost every section of Western society has drifted into a state of endemic entitlement. And this is why, if I were prime minister, I’d be saying to benefit claimants cheating the system: I’m coming for you. I’d be saying to the army of rent-seekers in the administrative state: your time is up. I’d be saying to the entitled old: I’m no longer allowing you to use your voting numbers to rig the system. I’d be saying to the mobile super-wealthy: I’m closing your tax loopholes. I’d be saying to cronyist regulators: I’m locking the revolving door. And (some readers might not like this) to the homeowners who enjoyed zero interest rates generated by funny money after the financial crash, and who laughably think they deserve their inflated gains, I’d be saying: I want to claw some of this cash back to make the investments we so desperately need. Yes, I’m coming for you, too. 

But the devastating, potentially terminal truth is that a critical mass of voters are not ready to hear this. They are too  comfortable in the delusion of their own entitlement, pretending the problem lies with everyone else (in this sense, polarisation is another symptom of the rot). And let’s not pretend the problem is short election cycles or hopeless politicians, because these retailers – Starmer, Sunak, Biden, Trump, Farage – are merely regurgitating different versions of the fantasy voters wish to hear, but never daring to tell the whole truth. In a seminal intervention recently the superb Paul Johnson, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, called the British election a “conspiracy of silence”, but I’d suggest the true conspiracy engulfs the whole Western world. Our only hope is to escape our delusion and embrace realism. For perhaps the killer point is this: as the audacity and brilliance of Western civilisation degenerates before our eyes, it is the world’s autocrats who are rubbing their hands with glee. 

The weakened West

 West is weak, divided and lacking in self-worth TONY ABBOTT 

The Western democracies are now feeble and divided, having militarily, industrially, and even culturally disarmed in the years since their seeming triumph in the Cold War against the old Soviet Union. Facing unprecedented challenges – including a militarist dictatorship in Moscow, an Islamist dictatorship in Tehran, and a communist dictatorship in Beijing – this is clearly a “civilisational moment” because others clearly don’t believe in us, as they were supposed to after the “end of history”; and we no longer quite believe in ourselves, despite all the objective evidence about the merits of the Western achievement. One of the reasons Russia is now slowly grinding down gallant Ukraine is because Ukraine’s friends in the West have helped it enough to avoid defeat, but not enough actually to win. Partly from fear of what a humiliated nuclear-armed tyrant might do. Partly through internal division over the extent to which other people’s wellbeing is our business too. And partly through resistance to the industrial mobilisation needed to match an economically declining but geopolitically driven dictatorship. After initially being the largest non-NATO contributor to  Ukraine’s defence, primarily through the delivery of some 100 Bushmaster armoured vehicles and by helping to train in Britain the Ukrainian infantry, Australian support has now almost dried up, with even a recent request for coal refused, presumably because that might add to the temperature in Kyiv. 

Likewise, one of the reasons Israel is bogged down in Gaza, hesitant to destroy the Hamas leadership, is because its friends can’t quite grasp the moral distinction between a liberal democracy prosecuting a just war against a terrorist statelet pledged to its destruction, and an apocalyptic death cult that uses civilians as human shields. Somehow, civilian deaths in Gaza are not the fault of the terrorists who put command centres and military stores underneath schools and hospitals but of the Israeli Defence Forces, even though the Israelis have been far more fastidious about avoiding civilian deaths than Bomber Command ever was. In a further perversity, global institutions, invoking bogus morality, have bid to arrest both Israel’s and Hamas’ leaders for war crimes; and to restrain the actions of Israel but not Hamas. This is the moral confusion arising from the left’s long march through the institutions, with a generation of students conditioned to see issues in terms of oppressors and oppressed, with Israel damned as a settler state with “white privilege”. And thanks to a generation of permissive immigration, there are now Islamist subcultures within Western countries for whom sectarian solidarity is what matters most. It’s this growing conviction of the democracies’ decadence that’s emboldening Beijing in its intimidation of practically independent Taiwan. They doubt our will to resist. 

 Partly because of the economic cost of decoupling from China. Partly because US commanders now question their ability to win an air-sea battle in the Taiwan Straits. And partly because societies that have had it so good for so long are simply unprepared for a potentially existential struggle, even on behalf of a country like Taiwan that testifies to the universal appeal of the Western way of life. It’s telling that for the first time since the ANZUS treaty in 1951, Australia has just refused a US request for military help, declining to send a freedom-of-navigation frigate to the Red Sea. Our government is using its commitment to AUKUS submarines a decade hence to mask cuts to our fighting capacity now. Rather than admit to an instinctive pacifism, it would prefer to tell our allies that we’d like to help, but lack the means to do so. This general decline of the West is the dispiriting background to our strategic disarray. People have never had more access to information, yet rarely been so ignorant; never been more materially rich, yet rarely more culturally and spiritually bereft. And whatever might distinguish today’s leaders – in business, the academe, the law, the military, and the church, no less than in politics – it’s rarely character, conviction and courage. Historically, at least in the Anglosphere, our most iconic institutions have worked for the protection of society against the state, and for the freedom of the individual against oppression. 

From centuries of trial and error, the king was under the parliament, the parliament was under the people, the people were under the law, and the law was under God – or at least some concept of the common good. At its zenith, there was an expectation of humility. Even for exalted people and institutions, our pride was supposed to vest in the things beyond ourselves; an attitude most wonderfully conveyed in the statement of our late queen on her 21st birthday that: “My whole life, be it long or short, shall be devoted to your service and that of the great imperial family to which we all belong.” Our strategic confusion is just another example of the myriad problems that arise when people are ignorant of their own story, fail to understand how their culture has evolved, and haven’t grasped how society is a trust between the  dead, the living, and the yet-to-beborn. It’s actually an abundance of respect for all cultures other than our own that’s now the mark of most Western countries. It’s very hard to mount a defence unless there’s something worth defending. Yet all the main Anglosphere countries are now angsting over their self-worth: America over slavery, Britain over the empire, and Australia over settlement and dispossession. 

What else can explain our present government’s insistence that no important announcement be made except in the presence of three flags: the national one, plus the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ones. These days entities that wouldn’t dream of toasting the king at a formal dinner, or beginning any official proceedings with a prayer, now routinely begin their activities with an acknowledgment of the traditional Indigenous owners, as if that’s the only cultural inheritance that matters; and even though Christianity, or “the coming of the light”, is almost certainly more important to more Indigenous people than ancestor worship. Until we have elected leaders brave enough to drop the pieties that imply that our country belongs to some of us more than to all of us; and to stop flying the flags of some of us co-equally with the flag of all of us, there’s really no hope of reversing the cultural decay that’s behind our strategic confusion. Are we collectively capable of recovering the historical memories and cultural self-confidence required to face this civilisational challenge? Sterner times could soon force us to rediscover our better selves. 

This is adapted from a speech this week to the Danube Institute in Budapest.

Hamas and Truth

 NONE SO BLIND TO HAMAS AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE

 GEMMA TOGNINI 

One of the most famous lines in recent cinematic history belongs to a (then) youthful Tom Cruise in the blockbuster flick A Few Good Men. Cruise plays a hot-shot young navy lawyer with thinly veiled daddy issues, and in the film’s most famous scene he has a perfectly wicked Jack Nicholson on the stand in a tense courtroom showdown. Nicholson plays a decorated US marine colonel who secretly has gone rogue, and Cruise is trying to goad him into confessing to murder. Nicholson is, of course, brilliant, channelling hints of Randle McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as he stares down Cruise’s impassioned demands for the truth. You can’t handle the truth, he bellows in return. And thus a legend was born. This was a work of fiction but we are living it today, this aversion to the truth. Australia collectively is incapable of facing up to so many of the things challenging who we are and the values we’ve built across generations, the values hewn from the blood, sweat and tears of Australians from all backgrounds, creeds and faiths. We may not be able to handle it, but believe me when I say Australia needs a headfirst encounter with the truth. 

There is no greater example than the war against Hamas, which I might point out is a war against terrorism that the global community is happy for Israel to fight alone. As this awful, necessary conflict continues, as the Israel Defence Forces edge closer to the goal of wiping out Hamas, there have been repeated calls for a ceasefire because of the start of Ramadan, which began this week. As the Muslim holy month began, Australians, both notable and beautifully including the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, wished our Muslim community Ramadan Mubarak. This represents the Australia we want to be part of, truly tolerant in the face of significant differences. However, the calls for a ceasefire because of Ramadan ignore important truths. Let me lay them out for you. Hamas broke the ceasefire and started this war on the Sabbath, the Jewish holy day. Not only was it the Sabbath but the violent orgy of murder, rape and mutilation was carried out on 

 Torah, a time of Jewish celebration to mark the completion, and the restart, of the annual cycle of reading the Torah. Another truth, courtesy of 1973: the Yom Kippur war was started on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Day in, day out, every month of every year since, rockets have been fired at Israel and its citizens on any and every single day, especially on the Sabbath. Israel’s enemies know many soldiers will be in synagogue. What I’ve just shared isn’t my opinion. It is the truth that Hamas started the war last year on Simchat Torah and the Sabbath. It is the truth that the Yom Kippur war was started on Israel’s holiest day. It is truth any ceasefire without surrender is simply an opportunity for Hamas to regroup and do what it says it will – repeat October 7, not only in Israel but in all Western countries. It has promised it; we best believe Hamas means it. This is the awful truth, and millions of Gazans are suffering because Hamas continues to knock back every ceasefire deal put on the table. This is the truth. So many Australians, especially in the progressive left, simply can’t handle it. They continue to deny the cancerous culture of anti-Semitism that has been laid bare in this country since October 7. They deny. They deflect. They gaslight anyone who dares call it out. They follow any conversation around the brutality of Hamas’s use of sexual violence with the word “but”. Ah, the truth is hard, the truth hurts. There’s a reason that’s a cliche and that’s because it’s true. 

Psychologists have studied a phenomenon called the backfire effect, a term to describe what happens when someone presented with irrefutable truths on a matter that should shift their thinking instead doubles down. Gregg Ten Elshof is a professor of philosophy at Biola University in the US. In 2009 he wrote a book called I Told Me So, in which he unpicks humanity’s seemingly unmatched capacity for self-deception. Ten Elshoff unravels, with excruciating accuracy, what happens when finding the truth becomes the secondary motivation for asking questions. It turns out humans are masters in the art of embracing denial when it suits us. So, in the Australian context, what is the primary goal? Is it electoral? Is it fear of being wrong, is it the pain of having to look at your ideology and accept it’s flawed? Beyond the war in Gaza, there are many examples of what I’m talking about, few as striking as the treatment of gender dysphoria in children. This past week in Britain, the National Health Service announced that puberty blockers would no longer be prescribed to anyone under 18. This follows the damning scandal and subsequent closure of that country’s Tavistock gender identity clinic and a growing bank of evidence on the danger of these treatments more broadly, which includes links between transgender hormone therapy and cancer. This is truth. Australia? Still stuck on the fence. Clinging to the idea that gender-affirming care is the only valid approach. The British decision is based on truth, based on science. Finally, the truth in this space is being accepted but here in Australia so many still hold that children who the law recognises are too young, too emotionally (and in all other ways) vulnerable to consent to sexual relationships, can decide to take life-altering medication from which there is no return. 

So many other issues. Our energy mix and reckless refusal to consider anything other than renewables. The plight of Indigenous Australians who live in places that are out of sight, hence out of mind. What will it take? This question runs laps around my mind and my heart daily and this is where I have landed. We need an encounter with the truth. Australia and Australians need a headfirst, deep-hearted, full-frontal collision with the truth. Not “my” truth, or his or her truth, the facile indulgence that allows people to construct and reconstruct various matters to suit their own narrative. But the truth. Most of us in this country do not understand existential threat. We have the luxury of not knowing what it’s like to have to defend our borders or go catch the bus wondering if you’ll be knifed or shot by a terrorist. So many times I’ve said to people, in relation to the Hamas war, what if it were your daughter who had been raped and desecrated? What if it were your son who had his eyes gouged out in front of his children while being forced to listen to the sexual brutalisation of his own wife? Would that be an encounter with truth enough? We don’t need any more facts. We have scant need for more information. But boy, do we need a collective come to Jesus moment on more than one front, and I pray this happens without a need for first-hand experience.

No two state solution

 

Can there be peace between Israel and Palestine?


History says probably not. At least four times, Israel’s generous peace offers have been turned down.
By GREG SHERIDAN

Can there ever be peace between Israel and the Palestinians?

If history is a guide, the answer is no. But we are right to believe in miracles.

The Israeli government has only weeks to finish, or at least change fundamentally, its operation to destroy the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza. International pressure on Israel is mounting drastically. The humanitarian cost in Gaza, though entirely the moral responsibility of Hamas, is unsustainably high.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not be moved by the Albanese government signing a defective, one-sided UN resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire but not even mentioning Hamas by name, nor its October 7 atrocities.

It’s demoralising, of course, the defection, and confusion, of Australia, which was once at the centre of the Western alliance.

But much more important is the attitude of US President Joe Biden, who warns that Israel is losing international support. Biden himself is under immense pressure for solidly backing Israel.

The biggest operational problem for Israel remains the 500km of Hamas tunnels. Israel must destroy or disable these if it is to capture or kill top Hamas leaders and permanently disable Hamas militarily. The international pressure is immense. Israel will finish its operation by January or change its methods such that large-scale humanitarian aid can enter Gaza.

But it’s what happens the day after the operation ends that is where the biggest disagreement between Jerusalem and Washington (and Canberra, though Australia now has no influence at all with Jerusalem) comes in.

The Biden administration, like most international opinion, wants negotiations to resume towards a two-state solution, a Palestinian state living next door to Israel. Given that’s agonisingly distant, in the short term it wants the Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank, to administer Gaza.

Netanyahu says no on both scores. He doesn’t want the PA in charge of Gaza and he now rejects the two-state solution. My guess is he’d compromise on having the PA back in Gaza. The two-state solution, however, extraordinarily complex and difficult, seems impossible operationally.

Nothing generates more ignorant cliches than the Israel-Palestine dispute. Much discussion of it just involves endless recycling of familiar cliches that mostly float clear of reality. The difficulty with the two-state solution is that Palestinians, and in the past their Arab neighbours, and now their Iranian sponsors, have rejected every single genuine offer of a Palestinian state.

Until recently, most Israelis wanted a two-state solution. As anyone who has visited Israel knows, it’s a successful modern democracy, with a vibrant society, ethnic diversity and great economic achievement. It yearns to live normally, in peace. But decades of relentless attack by regional enemies who don’t accept its right to exist has changed its attitude to the utility, and dangers, of peace negotiations.

Notwithstanding three regional wars aimed at Israel’s annihilation, and almost constant lesser attacks from a collection of enemies that would fill a fat phone book, Israel has on at least four separate occasions offered a full state to the Palestinians, who each time rejected it.

It starts in 1947. The last uncontested sovereign power over the land of Israel, before modern Israel was created, was the Ottoman Empire. Ditto for the West Bank and Gaza. After the Ottomans, Britain ruled under a mandate first from the League of Nations, then the UN.

In 1947 the UN decided to split the land between Jews and Palestinians, with Jerusalem belonging to neither state but administered internationally. The Palestinians could have had their independent state right then. Israel would have been much smaller. Instead the Palestinians, plus all their Arab neighbours, rejected the deal. In 1948, when Israel declared independence and was formally recognised by a vote at the UN, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan all attacked, planning to wipe the Jews out of existence.

There was terrible fighting. Several Jewish towns were massacred. Some 750,000 Palestinians left Israel. This had several causes. One is they expected Jewish soldiers to be as savage with them as Arab soldiers had been with Jewish residents. Another is they expected Arab nations to quickly overwhelm Israel. Then they would return. Some Arab leaders advised Arab residents to flee temporarily. Some Palestinians were certainly driven out by Jewish soldiers. Large numbers of Palestinians remained, and today 20 per cent of Israel’s population is Arab. About the same time, 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and North African countries where Jews had lived for millennia, although often as a persecuted minority.

Israel’s Arab neighbours were determined never to accept a Jewish state. In 1967 they were making troop movements preparatory to attacking Israel, and declaring they were about to attack. So Israel launched a pre-emptive strike and in the process took control of the West Bank, which had been in Jordan’s possession, and the Gaza Strip, which Egypt had controlled, and the Sinai Desert, which also belonged to Egypt. Neither Jordan nor Egypt had ever tried to set up an independent Palestinian state in these territories.

Following this war the Arab states declared their policy of “three noes”: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation.

In 1973 Egypt, under Anwar Sadat, and Syria, with a degree of help from some other Arab nations, launched a surprise military attack on Israel that became the Yom Kippur war. At terrible cost, Israel won that war.

Despite his anti-Semitic past, Sadat made a historic peace with Israel in 1979. Critically, Israel returned the vast Sinai desert to Egypt, giving up all the strategic depth it had afforded Israel, and all its mineral resources, in exchange for a durable peace treaty. Israel evicted Jewish settlers who had moved to Sinai. But in terms of the politics of a subsequent Palestinian state, here is the most powerful lesson of all. Egyptian Islamic Jihad, enraged at Sadat making peace with Israel, assassinated him in 1981

The Egyptian peace treaty demonstrated conclusively Israel would trade territory for peace, so long as it got real peace. The US underwrote the peace and it stands today. The Egypt-Israel treaty showed everyone peace was possible. Sadat’s assassination showed everyone it would always carry a high price.

The Oslo peace accords kicked off a process in the 1990s that led to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, under the sponsorship of Bill Clinton, offering a full Palestinian state to Yasser Arafat.

Barak offered 96 per cent of the West Bank, some compensating territory from Israel proper, all of Gaza and the Palestinian neighbourhoods of east Jerusalem. Israel would keep only the large Jewish settlement blocs near Jerusalem, a couple of per cent of West Bank territory, and give territory from Israel proper in compensation. Barak wanted a full guarantee of peace and an end to all other Palestinian claims on Israel.

Arafat refused the deal. He tried to tell Clinton that Jews really had no historic connection to Jerusalem. He couldn’t meet the requirement to end all claims. And he demanded that all four million of the descendants of the 750,000 Palestinians who left in 1948 be allowed to return and live permanently in Israel, not in the new Palestinian state but in Israel itself. This is the so-called “right of return” and it’s an absurdity.

Every other refugee population that goes to live elsewhere is permanently resettled. But, of the neighbouring Arab countries, only Jordan offered Palestinians citizenship. Generally, Palestinian refugees and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were kept as notional refugees so the UN would pay for them in perpetuity, and as a bargaining chip against Israel.

The Palestinians could have had an independent state from Clinton and Barak, flooded with international aid, sponsored by the US, the EU and the Arab world. But had Arafat taken this deal he would surely have been killed by his own extremists eventually, just like Sadat. It’s likely Arafat never remotely wanted a deal. Former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid once told me that Arafat had told him privately that it was his ambition “to throw all the Jews into the sea”.

Barak’s remarkably generous deal, which would have involved uprooting many Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, was improved and offered to Arafat again. But again the Palestinians rejected it, making the third clear time they refused to accept a state.

In his memoirs, Clinton makes it clear Arafat bears responsibility for the failure to achieve a Palestinian state. If we’re sceptical of Israeli sources, we can read the detail in numerous memoirs of US officials intimately involved in the negotiations.

The fourth clear offer from Israel of a Palestinian state came at the end of the prime ministership of Ehud Olmert, in 2008. A year later, Olmert gave me his first and most extensive interview on this peace plan. Everything he said to me was later confirmed in the memoirs of Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state at the time.

“From the end of 2006 until the end of 2008, I think I met Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas, then and now the Palestinian president) more often than any Israeli leader has met any Arab leader. I met him more than 35 times. They were intense, serious negotiations,” Olmert told me.

“On 16th September, 2008, I presented him (Abbas) with a comprehensive plan. There would be a territorial solution based on the 1967 borders with minor modifications on both sides. Israel will claim part of the West Bank where there have been demographic changes (by this Olmert meant the three biggest Jewish settlement blocs).

“In total it would be about 6.4 per cent (of the West Bank, with Jewish settlers outside those blocs forced to leave the West Bank). In return there would be a swap of land (to the Palestinians) from Israel as it existed before 1967. I showed how this would maintain the contiguity of the Palestinian state. I also proposed a safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza. It would have been a tunnel, fully controlled by the Palestinians but not under Palestinian sovereignty.

“Jerusalem was a very sensitive, very painful, soul-searching process. While I always believed that historically, and emotionally, Jerusalem was always the capital of the Jewish people, I was ready that the city should be shared.

“Jewish neighbourhoods would be under Jewish sovereignty, Arab neighbourhoods under Palestinian sovereignty, so it could be the capital of a Palestinian state.”

The area of the holiest sites, sites holy to Muslims, Jews and Christians, Olmert proposed, should be administered by five nations – Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinian state, Israel and the US. On the right of return, Olmert offered a symbolic return of 1000 Palestinians a year for five years to Israel itself and an international fund to recognise Palestinian suffering.

By then the descendants of all the Palestinian refugees, living in many countries, numbered five million. It’s insane to imagine Israel would invite five million Muslim Arabs to come and live in the state of Israel itself. The only purpose of the right of return is to give Palestinian leaders an excuse to reject a state. There would also need to be some security guarantees, such as the Palestinian state not acquiring conventional military weapons.

Rice in her memoirs says she was thrilled by this offer. She found it breathtaking and incredibly generous, the most that could ever be imagined. There was no absolute guarantee Olmert could have delivered this deal, but if the Palestinians had said yes, and the Americans had backed it, it would have been unstoppable. Except, perhaps, by a new wave of Palestinian terrorism.

Olmert told me: “I said this is the offer. Sign it and we can immediately get support from America, Europe, all over the world. I told him (Abbas) he’d never get anything like this again from an Israeli leader for 50 years. I said to him, do you want to keep floating forever, like an astronaut in space, or do you want a state?”

Abbas said he would come back next day with experts and advisers. But his office rang and said he’d forgotten a pre-planned trip. He’d come back to Olmert the next week. But Abbas never responded to the offer at all.

That was a fourth clear chance for a Palestinian state, clearly rejected by the Palestinians.

Later, even Netanyahu for a time would commit himself to a two-state solution, which he now rejects, but for many months the Palestinians refused to negotiate with him. The offers from Barak and Olmert involved immense courage, huge concessions and rare social and political strength. They meant Israel would trust a Palestinian state not to launch terrorism or worse against it. One part of the West Bank looks directly down on Tel Aviv airport. The whole of Israel could be paralysed if a neighbouring Palestinian state launched any attacks.

But every time an agreement looked possible, Islamist extremists would launch terror attacks on Israel designed to derail the peace process. They want conflict. That was a key reason Hamas was set up. Even with security guarantees, it’s now all but impossible for Israelis to trust a Palestinian state.

So in the meantime there are serious efforts to make life better for Palestinians in the territories. Netanyahu allowed Qatari aid to flow to Gaza and hundreds of Gazans to work in Israel proper. The aid was misused for weapons and tunnels and some of the workers supplied Hamas terrorists with detailed information regarding Israeli targets for the October 7 atrocities. How can Israel now trust any Palestinian state?

Further, what evidence is there a generation of Palestinians, raised on hate-filled anti-Semitic indoctrination in their schools, would ever accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state next door? There would always be incentive for Islamist extremists such as Hamas to assassinate any Palestinian leader who made peace or declared an end of claims on Israel.

This is one of many reasons the Albanese government was so ill-advised in changing to calling the West Bank and Gaza “illegally occupied Palestinian territories”. If Israel’s occupation is illegal, it must withdraw. Who then does it hand the territories over to? Hamas?

All the while Iran funds and co-ordinates the extremists: Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, militias in Syria and Iraq. Under Biden, the US has lost influence in the Gulf, so it’s more difficult for everyone to resist Iranian money, guns, threats and influence.

Eventually, a two-state solution will have to come back, but eventually is a long time. The Israeli government, not unreasonably given everything, sees no prospect of it in the near future. No doubt Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong know better.

GREG SHERIDAN 

 FOREIGN EDITOR