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

Israel history

 Open letter an exercise in distorting history HENRY ERGAS 

Late last week, a “Letter from journalists to Australian media outlets” urged newsrooms to “adhere to truth” rather than “bothsidesism”, including by “providing historical context” in reporting on the Middle East. As a prime example of the “important contextual references” which “it is the media’s responsibility” to provide, the letter cited “the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their native lands in 1948 to make way for the state of Israel”. That now endlessly repeated claim clearly implies that the founders of the state of Israel deliberately provoked the refugee outflow. But far from accurately portraying the historical context, it grotesquely misrepresents, in a manner exemplary of the letter’s “one-sideism”, a complex reality. Thus, when a majority of the UN General Assembly endorsed a partition of the British mandatory territory of Palestine on November 29, 1947, the major Zionist forces reluctantly accepted the proposed plan, despite its draconian conditions. But the Arab states not only rejected the plan; they launched what the Arab League described as “a war of extermination” whose aim was to “erase (Palestine’s Jewish population) from the face of the earth”. Nor did the fighting give any reason to doubt that was the Arabs’ goal. At least until late May 1948, Jewish prisoners were invariably slaughtered. In one instance, 77 Jewish civilians were burned alive after a medical convey was captured; in another, soldiers who had surrendered were castrated before being shot; in yet another, death came by public decapitation. And even after the Arab armies declared that they would abide by the Geneva Convention, Jewish prisoners were regularly murdered on the spot. While those atrocities continued a long-standing pattern of barbarism, they also reflected the conviction that unrestrained terror would “push the Jews into the sea”, as Izzedin Shawa, who represented the Arab High Committee, put it. A crucial element of that strategy was to use civilian militias in the territory’s 450 Arab villages to ambush, encircle and destroy Jewish forces, as they did in the conflict’s first three months. It was to reduce that risk that the Haganah – the predecessor of the Israel Defence Force – adopted the “Dalet plan” in March 1948, which ordered the evacuation of those “hostile” Arab villages, notably in the surrounds of Jerusalem, that posed a direct threat of encirclement. The implementation of its criteria for clearing villages was inevitably imperfect, but the Dalet plan neither sought nor was the primary cause of the massive outflow of Arab refugees, which was well under way before it came into effect. Nor was the scale of the outflow much influenced by the massacres committed by Irgun and Lehi – small Jewish militias that had broken away from the Haganah – which did not loom large in a prolonged, extremely violent, conflict that also displaced a high proportion of the Jewish population. Rather, three factors were mainly involved. First, the Muslim authorities, led by the rector of Cairo’s Al Azhar Mosque, instructed the faithful to “temporarily leave the territory, so that our warriors can freely undertake their task of extermination”. Second, believing that the war would be short-lived and that they could soon return without having to incur its risks, the Arab elites fled immediately, leaving the Arab population leaderless, disoriented and demoralised, especially once the Jewish forces gained the upper hand. Third and last, as Benny Morris, a harsh critic of Israel, stresses in his widely cited study of the Palestinian exodus, “knowing what the Arabs had done to the Jews, the Arabs were terrified the Jews would, once they could, do it to them”. Seen in that perspective, the exodus was little different from the fear-ridden flights of civilians that have always accompanied wars, including the vast population movements associated with the collapse of the Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian empires, the capitulation of Nazi Germany and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. And it pales compared to the suffering caused (at almost the same time as the war in Palestine) by the partition of British India – a blood-soaked catastrophe, displacing tens of millions of people, which the distinguished Indian judge and essayist G.D. Khosla recalled as “an event of unprecedented horror”. But while the mass outflow was not unusual, its sequel was. In the other major cases, refugees were ultimately absorbed into their country of refuge. By 1960, the 12 million ethnic Germans who, after centuries of settlement, fled or were forcibly deported at the end of World War II from central and eastern Europe had fully merged into West German society. Equally, the illiterate Hindus who flooded, entirely destitute, into East Punjab underpinned the Indian Punjab’s momentous transformation into the country’s breadbasket. And the 750,000 Jews – a number slightly greater than that of Palestinian refugees – brutally expelled (and comprehensively expropriated) during and after 1947 by the Arab states eventually became an integral part of Israeli society. Moreover, in none of those instances, or even of the vast population transfers between Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria, were there durable revanchist movements, much less any expectation of a “right of return”. Not so in respect of the Palestinian refugees, who became permanently homeless. That was, at least in part, the UN’s fault. As many studies have shown, a central element in the remarkable success of the Turkish- Greek population exchange of 1922-23 was the tying of all international resettlement assistance to the unfettered integration of refugees into the country of refuge. The Refugee Settlement Commission (1923-1930) was therefore explicitly based on the principle that help would never suffice unless refugees were “forced to prosper”. Operating under a strictly time-limited mandate, the RSC depended entirely on loans that could be repaid only if the refugees, rather than devoting their lives to terrorism, were productively employed. But instead of heeding that precedent, the UN established the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, a bloated, grant-funded bureaucracy whose survival depended on endlessly perpetuating the Palestinians’ “refugee” status, regardless of the fact that they and their parents were actually living in the land of their birth. Yet the UN was merely doing the bidding of the Arab states, which increasingly relied on the issue of Palestine to convert popular anger at their  abject failures into rage against Israel and the West. Terminally corrupt, manifestly incapable of economic and social development, the Arab kleptocracies elevated Jewhatred into the opium of the people – and empowered the Islamist fanaticism that has wreaked so much harm worldwide. Of course, none of that matters to the open letter’s signatories. Flaunting their keffiyehs, these armchair warriors, who are far removed from any risk of being butchered by terrorists, have convinced themselves that they are the guardians of the truth, and that anyone who calls out their grievous errors is in bad faith. To say they are one-eyed would be wrong; drenched in bias, ignorance and self-righteousness, they are no-eyed. The tragedy is that anyone would follow them in their blindness.

Moral Equivalence

 17/11/2023, 07:38 The Australian

Calling out Hamas evil demands moral clarity - HENRY ERGAS

Growing up in the shadow of the Second World War, I knew what an existential battle for survival meant. That war had been no ordinary contest. It was a struggle against an adversary so monstrous that the consequences of its final victory were literally beyond calculation. The laws of war required the suffering on the two sides to be constantly weighted – painfully, dreadfully, as the bombing of Dresden and the use of the atomic bomb brought home with stomach-wrenching force. But the enormity of the horrors that would have accompanied the Allies’ defeat ruled out easy judgments. There were no ready scales for comparing the harm a military decision could inflict on innocent civilians against the overbearing significance of freeing humanity from regimes that were the very embodiment of radical evil. When those regimes’ complete destruction finally wrenched a chance of peace out of the rubble of broken cities and the misery of broken lives, the world thought it had drawn the lessons. 

The United Nations, US president Harry Truman declared at the organisation’s founding conference, would “provide the machinery which will make future peace not only possible but certain”. And empowered by a newly established International Court of Justice, international law would be given the means to hold those who committed “crimes against the peace” accountable, removing the need for individual countries to wage punitive war. But the god of our dreams is also the god of our nightmares. From the slaughter fields of Ukraine to the charnel house that is Syria, those aspirations have gone up in flames. As the UN descends into irrelevance, the laws of war, which were intended to protect the innocent, are being used to shelter the terrorists who deliberately place them at risk. 

Hailed as a triumph of civilisation, they have become a tool facilitating barbarism’s relentless advance. That leaves the people of Israel once again facing the fearfulness, the sense of danger, the perception of the struggle’s ultimate character, which pervaded the memories in which I was raised. Like Hitler, Hamas has never hidden its genocidal intentions: the opening passage of its Covenant says “Israel will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”. And in one of his most authoritative texts, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, its recently deceased spiritual leader, wrote: “The latest punishment of the Jews was by Hitler; the next, with the help of Allah, will come from the Muslims.” Those goals have been there for all to see; what Hamas proved on October 7 was that for so long as its military capabilities remained intact, it would relentlessly pursue its interpretation of the Koran’s command to “plant terror in the heart of the enemies of Allah”, eroding, to the breaking point, the viability of Israelis’ daily lives. None of that implies the Palestinians have no grievances; but the Germans had their grievances too. It was, for example, undeniable that there were large German majorities in both the Sudetenland and Danzig, the crisis points of 1938 and 1939. When the Nazis demanded those territories, their claims were, much like Hamas’, couched – and this was the pretence – in the respectable language of self-determination. The London Times, in endorsing appeasement, had no difficulty in describing them as “justified by ethics and policy”. 

It was, however, a grotesque illusion to believe – as the appeasers did – that because no “government with the interests of its own people at heart would expose them to the horrors of war”, a territorial concession here, a bit more power there, would avoid “the ultimate evil of a general conflict”. For the Nazis’ goal was never a greater share of the pie; it was, exactly like the Islamists, to inaugurate, over the charred bodies of their adversaries, a new millennium. Moved not by want but by hate, they had no real interest in agreements, regarding them as mere tactics, all the better to subjugate the enemy. Hamas, which believes “Jews, who are by their nature liars, cannot keep a contract”, has felt free to breach every agreement it has ever entered into; the Nazis’ ethics, if one can call them that, were no better. Confronting them required moral clarity – the moral clarity to distinguish radical evil, which endangers everything that is decent in this world of ours, from ordinary enmity. Instead, the appeasers, by conjuring a moral equivalence between victims and executioners, sowed the confusion that  made the cataclysm all the more certain. 

Today, moral confusion yet again fills the air. And our government, far from correcting the confusion, compounds it – by repeatedly claiming, for example, that Israel, as a democracy, should be “held to a higher standard” than its adversaries. It is, however, surely obvious that the demands of morality do not depend on the nature of a regime: to believe the Holocaust was any less of a crime because it was committed by a dictatorship is so plainly contrary to moral principle and international law as to be absurd. But the “higher standard” claim was never intended to withstand intelligent scrutiny. A weapon disguised as a platitude, it smuggled in a double standard: one for Israel, another for Hamas. And by transforming the virtue of being a democracy into a vice, it served to justify the singleminded focus on Israel, which obscures, if it does not entirely occlude, the atrocities Hamas commits day after day, including by indiscriminately shelling Israeli homes, schools and hospitals. The babies in the hospitals of Gaza, who are the unintentional victims of a legitimate military operation, count; those in the hospitals of Israel, who are the intentional victims of terror attacks, don’t. No less egregious is the constant pairing of vicious anti-Semitism with the taunts some Muslim women have experienced for wearing hijabs. Those taunts are utterly despicable; but an abyss separates their severity from the menaces that have forced the Jewish community to guard creches, schools and synagogues from potentially deadly attack. To pretend otherwise is not merely foolish: by placing murderous rage on a par with ordinary stupidity, it trivialises – and hence excuses – the Jew-hating fury that disgraces our streets. 

The government argues that it is being even-handed, so as not to deepen current divisions. But its lack of clarity has the opposite effect: by relentlessly blurring the line between right and wrong, it gives Hamas’s supporters a legitimacy they do not deserve, fuelling the radicalisation that is tearing us apart. In the end, national unity demands moral direction, not moral equivocation. So too does our ability to face the future, for the unhinging of the nation’s moral compass doesn’t merely extinguish the courage to speak the truth: it erases the courage needed to see it. In a world that is far from being at peace, and where devastating cataclysms are not simply the painful memories of the old but looming threats to the young, that doesn’t just blind – it kills.

EV issues

 Subsidies for electric vehicles are a huge mistake. 

These cars are conceptually the same battery and motor as a fourth-grade science project—not a great innovation. And given high prices for EVs, subsidies are mainly a giveaway to the already welloff. If you add up carbon emissions from manufacturing, daily use and end of life, EVs have total life-cycle emissions 30% lower than gasoline-powered autos. In Silicon Valley, something is considered truly transformational if it’s 10 times better, not a third. And now there’s a glut of them. Ford is losing billions, and Honda and General Motors have scrapped plans to build affordable EVs. Instead of throwing taxpayer money at EVs, President Biden could have been a hero and helped bring autonomous vehicles to the market faster. Why? Start with the 42,795 traffic fatalities last year. Costbenefit analysis involves something called the Value of Statistical Life, and the Transportation Department uses $12.5 million per traffic death. Lowering annual crash fatalities to 10,000 would be worth $400 billion to the U.S. economy every year. Technology seriously reduces driver error, a cause of many accidents. Another reason? With fully autonomous vehicles, the U.S. would need only half of its Autonomous Cars Beat EVs nearly 300 million cars. Most sit around doing nothing. Transportation as a service would become reality—no need to own cars; simply click and a driverless one shows up when you need it. That would mean way less emissions and no parking hassle or road rage. So what’s the problem? Tesla’s Full Self-Driving capability, priced at up to $300 a month, still runs stop signs. The company uses simple CMOS image sensors, like those in an iPhone, instead of more-expensive Lidar pulsed lasers. Teslas get confused and sometimes run into emergency vehicles with flashing lights. I recently rode in a Model 3 in self-driving mode that botched a simple yield. It has been a bad few weeks for autonomous driving. Selfdriving taxis from Cruise and Waymo in San Francisco halt at unexpected construction barriers. Or at least they used to. GM’s Cruise cars had their California driverless permit revoked last month after a pedestrian hit by another car was pinned under a driverless Cruise. A rare case, but it did happen. But, even with their problems, a joint study (albeit a very early one) by Alphabetowned Waymo and the insurer Swiss Re showed 95% fewer injuries and 76% less property damage from autonomous driving vs. humans. That’s a preview of 10 times. Auto insurance may force an autonomous shift. Imagine $500 a year for autonomous-car insurance, but $2,000 if you want to drive. The Society of Automotive Engineers defines basic cruise control as Level 1 autonomous. Tesla’s FSD, which still requires human attention, is Level 2 autonomous. Last month, Mercedes announced Drive Pilot, which uses Lidar and is currently the only Level 3 “conditional driving automation” system approved in the U.S. and Europe. Drivers can take their hands off the wheel and eyes off the road, even surf the web, but only while driving less than 40 miles an hour and following another vehicle in dry conditions during the day. What’s needed for an economic transformation is Level 4: autonomous driving at all speeds in clear weather. Level 5 is self-driving even in rain, snow and fog. What can government do? Help the imaging systems in cars, which will never be totally accurate, by actively letting them know where things are. Stop signs could emit signals with their GPS locations. Traffic lights could digitally broadcast red, yellow and green. Digital signal transmitters in highway markings— dotted line, solid line, etc.— would digitally paint the road. Car sensors could see the real signs or paint and confirm them digitally. Ambulances and police cars could broadcast their locations and warn others to slow down and stay away. Construction barriers and traffic cones could broadcast their location and indicate how long they will be there to help cars update their maps. Cars could even negotiate who gets to go first at a four-way stop sign. Encrypted signals would prevent hacking. Don’t confuse this with smart cities or smart roads, the dreams of central planners. The Silicon Valley adage works here: Intelligence moves out to the edge of the network. Make cars smart, and roads dumb but digitally visible. Expensive? Back-of-the-envelope math: There are 4 million miles of road in the U.S., with perhaps 10 to 25 signs per mile. So we need to update 100 million metal signs and 300,000 traffic lights. I’ll assume the cost of sign transmitters is $100 and roadmarking transmitters to paint the lines digitally is $10 for every tenth of a mile. Even if I’m off by a factor of 10, the government could spend less than $400 billion to save 32,000 lives a year, reduce emissions, lower capital costs of transportation, and transform the U.S. economy. That sure beats subsidizing the EV purchases of climate-smug rich folks. The cost of EVs and batteries was going to fall anyway without handouts. It would have been better to spend that money making autonomous driving viable. What a waste. Write to kessler@wsj.com

Anti-Semitism

Irrational evil marks history of Jew hatred

GREG SHERIDAN

It’s the oldest hate of all, and the most terrible.

A few weeks ago, long before the Hamas atrocities and the inevitable Israeli response in Gaza, I attended a modest suburban function. I couldn’t believe the security, the twostage vehicular entry, the multiple guards. Even in peaceful, cheerful, law-abiding Australia, a Jewish community centre needs perpetual guarding.

Anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews, is deranged, but widespread.

It’s the most difficult hatred of all to understand, partly because it’s irrational, evil and nourished from wildly divergent sources.

Today, several main strands of anti-Semitism disfigure our world. It’s to be found in the conspiratorial swamp fevers of the far left and far right, casually among cowardly universities (what’s the collective noun for vice-chancellors? a “lack” of principles), inferentially and unconsciously in countless media reports. It has a strong identity in the Arab world and in Islamist movements.

But let me say straight away the biggest source of anti-Semitism throughout history is Christianity.

These are hard words to say. I’m someone who believes Christianity is true, and that it’s been overwhelmingly a force for good. But the inheritance of anti- Semitism is a blight on Christian history.

It comes from faulty theology surrounding the idea that the Jews killed Christ. Of course, Christ was executed under Roman authority. The New Testament has remarks critical of “the Jews”. Properly understood, these refer exclusively to the temple authorities in Jerusalem at the time. Today we might say the Russians decided to invade Ukraine. Moral culpability resides only with the Moscow government, not the whole Russian people, or Russians in perpetuity.

John Barton in his absorbing treatment of Bible translation, The Word, recounts a proposal to substitute “Judaeans” to make clear the New Testament references are to a specific group of individuals at a specific time. Most modern bibles refer to “the Jewish authorities” rather than to the Jews.

In any event, it’s all 2000 years too late. The overwhelming majority of anti-Semitism today is not Christian. But it draws on centuries of images, stereotypes and lies perpetrated against Jews by some Christians.

Many of these images were propaganda inventions and fevered fantasies. In medieval times there grew up the idea that Jews killed Christian children to mix their blood in ritual bread. This was an imagined mimicry of Christ’s suffering and death. It was obscene, completely untrue.

This “blood libel” was condemned as a lie by popes, but it held an evil grip on popular imagination.

Much anti-Semitism was Catholic, though many Catholics understood the Jewishness of their own religion and admired the Jewish tradition. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval theologians, drew on Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed.

The Reformation didn’t help Jews, and Protestants did their share of Jew hating. Martin Luther was a formidable theologian, but at a certain point he turned against Jews and authored some of the most savage anti-Semitic abuse. Over centuries, Jews were expelled from one European nation after another.

This, then, is religious anti- Semitism. It’s been denounced now by every Christian denomination.

Pope John Paul II apologised for Christian sins against Jews, saying: “We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood.”

There’s religious anti-Semitism in Islam as well. The Koran, like the Christian New Testament, contains disparaging passages about Jews. Islamist extremists conflate this with political disputes involving Israel.

Much popular Arab media discourse is now frankly anti-Semitic; so is a portion of school curriculums.

Each new iteration of anti- Semitism has drawn on earlier iterations, especially the negative imagery and stereotypes. This is how evil lives on. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Russian secret police concocted an epic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This purported to recount the proceedings of a group of Jewish elders plotting world domination, not least through finance power. Though everything about the Protocols was a lie, they are one of the most successful acts of black propaganda in history.

The Nazis combined the global domination lie of the Protocols with a racialised version of religious anti-Semitism. Because Jews had rejected Christ, they were seen as alien to Western culture.

The Nazis detested Christianity, as they detested all religion. But they knew they needed some kind of ersatz Nazi Christianity as part of their ideology.

Like some arms of Palestinian propaganda today, the Nazis thus decided Christ wasn’t really Jewish. They reserved special hatred for Paul, who with his universalism – “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, but you are all one in Christ Jesus” – had severed the link between blood and nationality, between ethnicity and citizenship.

The far right today continues with all the tropes of traditional anti-Semitism – Jewish global dominance, Jewish cultural otherness, and so on. If the Jews dominate the world, how did the Holocaust happen, you might ask. Just shows how fiendishly clever they are, is the demented right-wing conspiracy response.

Arab anti-Semitism always had its virulent side. The mufti of Jerusalem met Hitler in 1943 and the two were as one in their hatred of Jews. During the war, the mufti lent his support to Nazi SS recruitment campaigns.

The communist left always had a strong element of anti- Semitism. But popular left anti- Semitism really took off in the Cold War, during the alliance of Israel with the US. Leftist ideology grants no rights of indigenous identity to the Jews of the Middle East, casting them as a colonial, racist power acting on behalf of, or manipulating, the West.

Thus Jews are hated on the right because they are allegedly alien to Western culture, and they are hated on the left because they are allegedly exemplars of Western culture. The left’s antipathy to Israel, and its ignorant idealising of Islamist hatreds as “resistance”, have led to an irrational, hysterical hostility to Israel which is antiSemitism by another name.

All the different strands of anti-Semitism seem weirdly happy to link up and crossfertilise, to draw on the images and insults of their contradictory conspiracy theories and serially monstrous misunderstandings of the world.

In truth, the Jewish tradition is one of the most sublime, profound and beautiful the world has produced. Spend some time in the Old Testament if you don’t believe me. Read as your commentary the works of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

It’s also the case that the Jewish contribution to the arts, to science and to all branches of culture is magnificent. The world owes the sure knowledge of one God, the essence of monotheism, to Jewish experience and tradition.

The Old Testament in many ways is a continuous song of protest against the barbarities of ancient paganism.

Perhaps that’s the real cause of anti-Semitism. The Jews brought the Ten Commandments to the world. And the spirit of evil has never forgiven them.

The Voice Real Truth

 REAL TRUTHS THAT SHOULD BE TOLD GEOFFREY BLAINEY 

It must be hard for a prime minister to admit that he has been crushingly defeated in an electoral contest that he originally expected to win with ease. In one segment of his speech last Saturday night, Anthony Albanese praised himself as a bold man of conviction – as if he had actually won the referendum. 

Many viewers who at first sympathised with the Prime Minister on television regretted that he did not directly congratulate the two Aboriginal leaders who especially defeated him. Only one sentence was needed. He failed to speak that sentence. Yet in our long political history this probably was the most significant public victory yet achieved by Aboriginal campaigners. Moreover, they had fully digested and then condemned the controversial Uluru Statement from the Heart, but Albanese had not even digested it. 

As a political leader he has his merits, but command of crucial detail is not yet one of them. Alongside him on election night was Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney. She offered no congratulations to Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the talented senator by whom she had been overshadowed and outgunned this year. In the past 60 years there were notable victories in achieving Aboriginal goals but they owed more to mainstream or white Australian political leaders The victories also owed as much to High Court judges. 

Here was a unique event – a national triumph for two true-blue Aboriginal leaders, Nyunggai Warren Mundine and Price. Crucial to the national debate is the health of Indigenous people. It is often proclaimed to be a matter of urgency, almost of shame, that they have a “life expectancy eight years shorter than non-Indigenous Australians”. But that fact, standing on its own, is misleading. The life expectancy of us all, Aboriginal people included, has improved dramatically since 1788. Nearly every country in Africa has a much lower life expectation than Indigenous Australia. Even the EU displays more than an eight-year gap between member nations. There is even a wide gap between north and south England. Today Aboriginal Australians have a life expectancy equal to that of Bulgaria and rural Romania. Their life expectancy is higher than that in Russia and Ukraine. It is about the same as the average citizen of the world. Indeed, it soon would be improved if those Aboriginal men aged 40 and older were not heavy smokers. 

Of course we in the Western world – my generation included – taught them to smoke. Ownership of land remains another divisive topic. Federal departments some years ago should have investigated what proved to be right or wrong, sensible or misguided, in the way vast areas of land were transferred to Indigenous people. Should these new possessors of the land be exempted from paying taxes on this new but erratic source of income? Moreover, should the families who lived on native title lands be able to build a house and own the land? Instead, most of such land is held collectively, almost in Soviet fashion. 

Here is one of the most remarkable ventures in Australia’s modern history, indeed in world history, but some of the key effects are blanketed in silence or dispute. In all, an area of land twice as large as Indonesia and eight times as large as France has been transferred to Aboriginal Australians since 1975. The supporters of this transfer tend to excuse it or apologise for it by asserting that it is largely desert or semi-desert, but in fact it embraces or borders one of the main mining regions in the world. It also contains mini-regions with high rainfall and a potential for tropical agriculture as well as large expanses that are reserved for environmental reasons. 

Gary Johns, a minister in the Keating government, later became an alert investigator into Aboriginal affairs. In The Burden of Culture he is brave enough to conclude that the introduction of native title has proved to be a dubious reform: “The benefits are few and fitful; the costs are high; the disputes are many; the system will need to be propped up forever on the pretence that native title holders can contribute to the ‘north’ of Australia, or indeed, the remainder of Australia.” In Johns’ opinion, these unique kinds of land tenure that now occupy a little more than half of the nation are based on the faith that all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a spiritual affinity with their tribal lands, to which their spirit or soul, on death, must return. But most Indigenous people even in the Outback no longer cling to the religious faith that underpins the concept of native title. 

The censuses of 2016 and 2021 make this clear. I believe most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are far, far better off today than if they were living in 1788. Price, after recently expressing a similar belief, was flayed by critics who had faint idea what daily life ashore was like before the coming of the First Fleet. Unfortunately, a minority of Aboriginal people still have to struggle with two different values and ways of life. This land is infinitely more fruitful than it was in 1788, and most Aboriginal people are now the gainers. The whole globe gains too. In some years Australia produces enough food to sustain probably 100 million people in the world as a whole. In the past decade it has produced for at least one billion people the minerals with which to build aircraft, railways, motorways, ships, cars, power stations, schools, stadiums and city apartments. 

Likewise, here in this continent arose a democratic society that, for all its imperfections, offers liberty in a world where liberty is not normal. The idea that Aboriginal people could have remained, even today, the only occupiers of this huge expanse of land is fanciful. How can the 1000 or more Aboriginal towns be helped? Have such tiny and remote towns a future? The question has to be asked again and again. It is an experiment rarely conducted in modern history – the creation of isolated towns that grow little of their own food, rely heavily on subsidies and social welfare, are mostly too small to attract a capable nurse, police officer or teacher, and provide few jobs for their poorly educated children. Most of these Aboriginal towns are too far apart to share amenities. They are also marred by family violence. The Uluru statement laments the high numbers of Aboriginal men in jail but does not mention that so many are there because they bash the women of their own race. This message Price has emphasised. Without saying so too loudly, she knows the so-called Stolen Generations were often Aboriginal children who had to be rescued for the sake of their own safety and welfare. 

Such remote and tiny towns can exist only in a nation that is wealthy enough to subsidise them on a generous scale. Yet many are eyesores, viewed by their few visitors as blots on the nation that allows them to exist. One argument in their favour is that the older people wish to retain their own culture and to oppose assimilation by an alien culture. On the other hand, the recent censuses reveal that Christian pastors – mostly Aboriginal – are more influential here than in most suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. A simple, short and accurate statement of the rival Yes and No cases is required for every referendum. This year, small but rival groups of federal parliamentarians had each summarised the arguments to be printed, side-by-side, in Your Official Referendum Booklet. The Australian government then printed millions of copies. Translated into many Indigenous and foreign languages, it reached more households than any bestselling novel in our history. At the front of the booklet, readers are assured they will find valuable information on where and how to vote if they turn to page 21. But the editors had forgotten to number the final pages. 

Even enthusiastic citizens must have been bored or even bamboozled, except for the occasional short quotations from lawyers speaking with some authority. Alas, the booklet did not even print the one-page Uluru Statement from the Heart. As this referendum involved more factors than any other in the past 100 years, a lucid source of information was vital. The booklet failed. In contrast, at the 1999 referendum on the proposed republic, a committee of four lawyers and historians – presided over by Ninian Stephen, the former High Court judge and governor-general – had issued a readable and careful assessment of the rival arguments. The present government seemed unwise to ignore such a precedent. Australia is one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world. Democracy is government by debate. The federation and the commonwealth were born only after long and extensive democratic debate extending from 1889 to 1900. In contrast, the present government has shunned or tried to minimise debate. 

We can now see that the debate conducted during the past year was indirectly a clash about two conflicting views of this nation’s history. Albanese’s view is of an Aboriginal Australia that was – for 60,000 or more years – a form of utopia. His vision owed much to historian Bruce Pascoe, an engaging speaker who by pretending to be Aboriginal tended to convince young people, and their teachers too, that he possessed an insider’s knowledge. Pascoe claimed the Aboriginal people invented democracy and that they lived in peace and prosperity until the Europeans invaded. The present government and its leader can hardly be attacked when the heads of the University of Melbourne, RMIT University and other universities actually promote a similar black-armband version of Australia’s history. Albanese was captivated by a heroic version of history even before he won the federal election last year. Persuaded that such a version had been deliberately hidden from us all, he announced that since 1788 our nation had provided largely a history of brutality – until the era of multiculturalism arrived. 

One day his project – though defeated in last Saturday’s referendum – may provoke or inspire a total rewriting of Australia’s history. Its official names will be Truth-telling and Makarrata, for they are embodied in the short Uluru statement: a document containing highly vulnerable accusations against mainstream Australia as well as several sobering statements about Aboriginal distress today. There are two different Australias. Admittedly, many Aboriginal Australians live in unsatisfactory and even appalling conditions. Also true is that a larger number in urban Australia have become important ingredients of our success as a modern nation. They are often overlooked. On election night we often gathered from commentators the idea that most Aboriginal Australians lived in the Northern Territory or in remote tropical outposts to the east and west. 

In fact, NSW, especially Sydney and its far western hinterland, is the nation’s stronghold of Aboriginal people. More live there than in any other state and territory; and an update from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows the surprising advances they have made in the 10 years from 2011 to 2021. Their life expectations are higher than the referendum booklet dismally reported. Of their houses, the overwhelming numbers are not overcrowded. More than 40 per cent of these houses are owned outright or with a mortgage. The proportion of their students who pass year 12 or attend university and other tertiary institutions has soared. Successful Aboriginal leader Mundine, originally a tradie, was reared in one of these towns far west of Sydney. The Uluru statement, compiled by the leading large group of Indigenous activists, concludes that a revolutionary new era is beginning: “We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country.” But hosts of Aboriginal people have little need to leave their base camp in the big towns and cities and go trekking. They belong to the 21st century and share in its opportunities. 

Historian Geoffrey Blainey is the author of more than 40 books. His recent memoir is called Before I Forget (Penguin)

Bridging the Gap

 

Remote living won’t bridge gap in life expectancy

CLAIRE LEHMANN

For almost all of human history, life expectancy hovered around just 30 years. Of course, many people lived into old age. But because so many children died in infancy or early childhood, average life expectancy remained low. This persisted for millennia, until something remarkable happened.

During the Enlightenment, and the industrial revolution that followed, increasing knowledge about disease combined with technological innovation, meant average life expectancy started to climb.

In 1900 it reached 42 years, and by the 1950s, it reached 62. Today, global life expectancy sits at 71 years, and in rich countries such as Australia it has reached 84.3.

This achievement of modernity is rarely acknowledged, let alone celebrated. This achievement did not occur by magic. It occurred because men and women created the intellectual tools to understand and treat disease, and successive governments invested in public health.

Recently, discussions about the upcoming voice referendum have highlighted a paradox. On the one hand, there is a widespread desire for governments to preserve traditional Aboriginal culture – which includes remote living – as much as possible. On the other, there’s a passionate drive to Close the Gap between the Indigenous and general population in life expectancy and other outcomes.

In an ideal world, these two goals could coexist harmoniously, but it would be dishonest to suggest they are not currently in tension.

And it is unlikely any real progress will be made until this tension is resolved.

At the heart of the Closing the Gap mandate is the significant life expectancy gap between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. From 2015-17, Indigenous males had a life expectancy of 71.6 years and females 75.6 years. Compared to the rest of the Australian population, an average gap persists of around eight years.

The life expectancy gap is often blamed on the effects of colonisation and institutional racism. Of course it is necessary to consider these factors. But they do not explain everything. For example, a gap in life expectancy exists between people who live in the regions, and those who live in our major cities – regardless of Indigeneity.

And Indigenous people who live in the city are arguably more likely to experience institutional racism. Yet on average, they live longer lives than those in remote communities.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has found that Indigenous people in remote areas are 4.3 times more likely to be hospitalised for preventable conditions than the Indigenous living in major cities.

The reasons there is a life expectancy gap between those in the cities and those in remote communities are not hard to comprehend.

In any emergency, geographic distance from a hospital will increase the likelihood of preventable death. Indigenous Australians also have a higher prevalence of chronic diseases.

Without regular monitoring – which is challenging in remote areas – such conditions worsen. A lack of specialist services coupled with inadequate infrastructure, such as clean water and sanitation, compounds the disadvantage.

“The consequences of past wrongs have transcended generations – they can still be felt today,”

Linda Burney told the parliament in 2020. “We can see it in the child who doesn’t have a safe roof to live under. I have visited remote communities where the town has literally run out of water – let alone clean water. I have seen dams empty and children given soft drink instead of water.”

There is no question that historical trauma can influence present circumstances. Yet living in remote areas presents deep challenges, regardless of historical context. The reality is that before industrialisation, all traditional cultures had poor life expectancies.

It didn’t matter if you were a rice farmer in China, or a tin miner in Cornwall. The evidence shows that right across the board life expectancy was low.

Historical records from the 18th century in Sweden show 40 per cent of children did not live past the age of 15. In Bavaria, 50 per cent of children were buried before they reached adulthood. In England and Wales in the 1850s, only 70 per cent of children reached their 10th birthday. Children died from smallpox, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, dysentery and pneumonia. When the British colonists settled in Australia, their life expectancy was half of what it is for Indigenous Australians today.

Many people who live in a modern society, furnished with hospitals and flushing toilets, romanticise traditional cultures and pre-modern ways of living. Such cultures are imagined to be tranquil and balanced with nature.

While some aspects of this mythology are true (traditional

huntergatherers eat a healthy diet, for example), the historical data shows us no traditional culture has ever had life expectancy outcomes that were not terrible.

The romanticisation of the premodern past is perhaps one reason why the Whitlam government encouraged Aboriginal Australians to leave towns to live on outstations in remote locations in the 1970s. This push has led to a variety of unintended consequences. One of these consequences is that preventable illnesses such as rheumatic heart disease are more common in Aboriginal children than they are for children in Sub- Saharan Africa.

When populations in China, Japan and various regions of Africa have modernised, large numbers of people have migrated from rural areas to cities. They leave some of their cultural traditions behind in the process. But what they get in return is better health, economic opportunities and a better future for their children.

Of course, the government cannot compel those living in our remote regions to move to the city.

To do so would be reminiscent of historical assimilationist policies that are now widely considered harsh and discriminatory. And it is also true that retaining traditional customs and heritage may have benefits far beyond what can be measured in health or in longevity statistics. To attempt to Close the Gap is itself a Western concept.

At the same time, however, governments shouldn’t financially support decisions that hinder the progress of a vulnerable population based on misguided nostalgia.

If they wish to get serious about making change, policymakers must decide what’s more important: preserving the remote lifestyle or closing the gap.

Claire Lehmann is founding editor of online magazine Quillette

Aboriginal Facts

 The weekend Australian 1stJuly2023

BEFORE WE VOTE, LET’S GET ALL OUR FACTS IN ORDER

 GEOFFREY BLAINEY 

The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a vulnerable document. It is sometimes silent when Aboriginal failures are visible, but vocal in condemning Australian people for misdeeds that never happened.

 Without doubt, the Indigenous people have had many legitimate grievances about their sufferings and slights ever since British convicts and marines arrived in 1788. Hosts of Aboriginal people were killed in frontier conflict, though the historians’ statistics of death tend to contradict each other. Most Indigenous people died from diseases to which they had no immunity, and such deaths far exceed those suffered in warfare since 1788. 

Countless Aboriginal people died from the excessive consumption of alcohol: rum and brandy rather than beer and wine were their temptation. Moreover, most Aboriginal people preferred novel foods such as sugar, flour and mutton rather than the plants they had skilfully gathered during an ingenious way of life that also kept them fit. The sight of so many overweight Aboriginal people today would confound their lean ancestors, if by chance still alive. 

The loss of their lands, their “dispossession”, of course created resentment. But Aboriginal leaders tend to think they were the world’s only such sufferers. In fact, the ancestors of most mainstream Australians painfully lost their lands in some faraway era and received no compensation. 

Thus in 1066 the Norman Conquest of England and the actual killing or enslavement of so many people, and the raping or castration of others, was probably as devastating as the British conquest of Australia. In contrast, no Aboriginal people were turned into slaves. English people who suffered severely from the consequences of the Norman invasion in 1066 must have outnumbered the Aboriginal people who suffered severely from the conquest of Australia in, say, the 70 years after 1788. 

Likewise, ancient Aboriginal people themselves were champions at dispossessing their neighbours, and one day that fact should be taught in Australian schools. In every known part of the world the semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers had been deadly in their tribal warfare. 

Inside the Uluru statement, two major accusations are expressed in one pithy sentence: “In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard.” The Aboriginal leaders who met at Uluru believed their kinsfolk were not even deemed worthy of being counted – until the referendum of 1967 raised their political status. Anthony Albanese himself, while understandably basking in his political honeymoon, affirmed this accusation, and continues to do so in parliament. If true, the accusation is a serious blemish on the Australian nation during the past century and a half. 

But it is not true. In his many overseas trips Albanese has performed calmly and courteously. But at home, on the question that is now his very first priority, he seems sometimes to be at sea. It is fair to say he went overboard when in the Marrickville town hall on October 14 last year he told a packed gathering that Australia since 1788 had a “brutal” history, full stop. We all make unwise or sweeping statements from time to time. 

Albanese’s favourite message is that Australia is “the world’s oldest living culture”. But New Guinea was occupied by human beings at about the same time as – or earlier than – Australia, and accordingly it also might be the world’s oldest living culture. Aboriginal people on the whole now have the higher quality of life, but wide is the gap between most city and big-town residents and that minority struggling in the outback communities. Closing the Gap has several meanings. 

We learned how determined Albanese was when he affirmed, alongside the Uluru statement, that Aboriginal people were crippled by “powerlessness”. Now he is scaling the Mount Everest of Australian politics by seeking a drastic change to Australia’s Constitution. Thereby he will empower Indigenous people and simultaneously reduce the power of the great majority of Australians. But what if the Uluru statement, with its errors and omissions, does not justify an upheaval in Australia’s democratic system? 

The Uluru statement is militant. It offers no sentence of respect or gratitude to the Australian people. Yet it is hailed by Albanese as warm hearted and generous. He even announced in a memorial lecture in Adelaide recently that it was an invitation extended “to every single Australian in love and grace and patience”. 

A disciple of Bruce Pascoe, Albanese admires his nonsensical Dark Emu theory. Pascoe believes Aboriginal Australia was the first real democracy in the world and for 80,000 years a haven of peace and prosperity. Albanese believes this utopia – in fact, it never existed – can in some ways be honoured if Indigenous people are compensated with special powers and rights. 

Parliament in its recent debate did nothing to validate the Uluru accusation that mainstream Australians had refused for generations even to count Aboriginal people. In fact, these proud people were being counted before any one of us was born. 

We can appreciate the sense of hurt in young, politically active Aboriginal people when they hear the myth that they, their parents and grandparents had not been deemed worthy of being counted in a census. More insulting, the young are led to believe that the sheep had been counted regularly – as undoubtedly they were – but not the Aboriginal people. 

In parliament last month Tanya Plibersek mistakenly announced, in an otherwise informative address, that in 1901 the “Aboriginal people weren’t counted in the census or commonly allowed to vote”. Her ministerial colleague Catherine King told parliament that Aboriginal people – in the words of one informant – were powerless “simply because we were never identified as humans”. That can’t be true.

 Day by day, all shoppers at Coles supermarkets receive on their printed receipts a highly selective message based on Uluru. The directors of Coles Group do not seem to realise that, through the years, their own executives – in recommending places where the next dozen stores might or might not be opened – must have known where most Aboriginal people lived. 

Linda Burney, born in a small Riverina township, is deservedly praised for making her way from a humble Aboriginal home to become a cabinet minister in Sydney and now in Canberra. But she has mistakenly insisted that as a young girl she was never in a census. “The notion that you weren’t worthy of being counted was very painful,” she exclaimed in July 2017. She once misinformed parliament that until the age of 10 she was not even a citizen. Instead, she claimed she was merely ranked under “the flora and fauna act” of NSW. Such a policy did not exist. 

The first census to be conducted by commonwealth officers was in 1911, and the federal attorney-general instructed them to count “full-blood Aboriginals”. Understandably, the officers had to retreat when they reached remote areas where local inhabitants had seen no white person or heard a word of English. But tens of thousands of Aboriginal people were actually counted, often with enormous effort, in the accessible regions. 

For a logical but slightly complicated reason, they were not – after the actual counting – included in the final tally of population. For instance, in apportioning a share of the federal customs revenue to each state, the smallish Aboriginal populations were not “reckoned” when finalising the payments to each state. Helen Irving’s book To Constitute a Nation neatly explains the reasons and the practice. 

Today, visitors to the National Museum in Canberra are informed that not until 1971 were “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples counted in the Australian census”. On the contrary, they had been counted in every federal census since 1901, and counted moreover in the face of obstacles confronted by few other national statisticians. Thus the state officials then in charge of that 1901 census specifically counted them. They set up a special category that comprised “full blood Aboriginals” and those “nomadic half castes” who were living with them. In the five mainland states they totalled 41,389. An even larger number could not be counted, being nomadic and too far distant. 

There were precise censuses even before 1901, thus contradicting Albanese and the Uluru leaders. For example, South Australia, holding a census on Sunday, April 2, 1871, recorded the exact districts and towns where more than 5000 Aboriginal men and women lived. 

Eye-opening was the census held on the same Sunday in gold-rich Victoria, where 731,528 people of all races were counted. Conducted by Henry Hayter, the census commanded respect from leading overseas statisticians. The main results were in the hands of parliamentarians barely two months later – a feat that is unimaginable in the age of fast computers.

 Of those Victorian officials who took part in the detailed census, 918 went on horseback and 650 on foot. They investigated remote townships, huts and tents where only one or two Aboriginal people could be found. That the tally of these people had fallen since Victoria’s previous census in 1861 was evident, and it would continue to fall. 

Four out of every 10 of the Victorian Aboriginal men said they were following a paid occupation; and that was a higher proportion than can be found in many remote Aboriginal settlements today. In Victoria, two of every five Aboriginal children of school age could read but fewer could write. Five Aboriginal adults were recorded as blind, and seven were over the age of 70, according to the census teams. 

Hayter was meticulous. In the big printed edition of the census report he added a minor correction to the tally of 61,000 “Chinese and Aborigines” who had been separately counted: please “take 1 from the males and add 1 to the females”. Generally, the Aboriginal populations had considerably more males than females. 

Across the globe most people alive in 1871 had not yet been counted officially. It is therefore remarkable that Aboriginal people in various towns and regions of Australia were systematically counted. 

Other of our censuses were held before 1871, the year Albanese’s own ancestral land of Italy held its first nationwide census. One generation later, in 1897, the initial census in Russia’s vast empire at last enumerated famous individuals such as Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. 

Unfortunately, the allegation – “a people not worth counting” – is now endorsed by some of the biggest business houses, by the football leagues and even by universities that are world-ranked for their research. 

The leaders at Uluru insisted that their people had been powerless for generations This lament is also far-fetched. 

In stressing the “torment of our powerlessness”, they did not know that in the late 1850s, in the three populous Australian colonies, most Aboriginal men were allowed to vote. This was a momentous event: most of Europe’s tens of millions of men had not yet won the right to vote. Indeed, a forgotten man of Aboriginal and convict ancestry won the rural seat of Young in NSW in 1889. 

Another landmark – unknown to Uluru – was a general election held in 1896 in South Australia. This was probably the first government in the world to allow women not only to vote but also to stand for parliament. New Zealand women already had the first right but not the second. 

In this same 1896 election in South Australia, even more revolutionary was the sight of Aboriginal women attending the polling booth. Martin Luther King might well have shaken his head in surprise if he had known of it. 

Just pause and ponder for one minute: South Australia’s innovation occurred when 99 per cent of the women in the world did not have a vote. In renowned cities such as Paris, Berlin, London, New York, St Petersburg, Tokyo and Beijing, not one woman had the privilege now exercised by female Aboriginal voters in South Australia. Five years later in the first federal election various Aboriginal women must have voted – an election in which no white woman in the four eastern states was entitled to vote. These triumphs contradict the Uluru manifesto. 

Indigenous people hope to gain a major say in shaping a beneficial treaty with the Australian nation; they demand a truth-telling tribunal dominated by the Indigenous; and they call for the right at times to influence vital spheres such as foreign policy. They will also break the golden rule of democracy: one person, one vote. 

Meanwhile, their cry of “powerlessness” is a kind of crocodile tear. In the past half-century Aboriginal groups have been handsomely recognised by their acquisition – under the Fraser and Keating governments – of ownership or certain rights and interests in 55 per cent of the Australian land mass. Few Australian voters know this fact. It constitutes one of the largest peaceful transfers of land in the history of the modern world.

 Historian Geoffrey Blainey is the author of more than 40 books. His recent memoir is called Before I Forget (Penguin).

StayingConservative

The Weekend Australian 24thJune2023

STAY CENTRE-RIGHT COURSE TO WIN POLITICAL ARGUMENT

TONY ABBOTT

What has gone wrong with centre-right politics: is it our leaders, or our beliefs, or has the world changed? It’s a bit of each, as I will try to show, but there’s no reason it can’t be fixed.

Consider the Reagan, Thatcher and Howard governments. They each had a point, a program and a purpose. There was a fundamental point that each was trying to achieve, a clear program to bring it about and a moral purpose to what they were trying to do.

The Reagan administration’s objective was to erase the humiliations of the Carter years, by restoring the economy, rebuilding the military and staring down the old Soviet Union, because America was a “shining city on a hill”, the “last best hope of mankind”.

The Thatcher government’s objective was to overcome decades of decline, to stop subsidising businesses going broke, to turn renters into owners and to lift the dead hand of the union movement, because the country that had given the world its common language, the mother of parliaments, the industrial revolution and the emancipation of minorities had become the sick man of Europe.

The Howard government’s objective was to end its predecessor’s culture wars, to reform the tax system to reward earning over spending, to end the something-fornothing mindset via work for the dole and to privatise inefficient government businesses so that it could truly be

said that anyone with the right to live in Australia had won the lottery of life.

Contrast the Anglosphere’s more recent centre-right governments. All of them have had their successes and strengths but in all three countries it has been hard to sustain the centre-right’s traditional claim to be better economic managers given the political turmoil, or to discern the centre-right’s traditional commitment to sound finances and personal and economic freedom amid the lockdowns and the spending sprees. In Australia, and even more so in Britain, the centre-right’s usual scepticism about utopian schemes degenerated into ruinously expensive and technically dubious measures to achieve net-zero emissions.

But there’s a further difficulty here. For Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the big task was to defeat the Marxism embodied in the old Soviet Union. For today’s centre-right leaders, the big task is to counter the cultural Marxism that permeates vast swaths of our institutions and makes good government more difficult than ever; in some ways a more dangerous foe because it’s internal.

When Reagan famously said government was not the solution, government was the problem, many people believed him, after several decades of higher spending, more bureaucracy and crushing rates of tax. But what if “postmaterial” voters’ concerns are less insufficient family income than a supposedly imminent climate catastrophe; and less to protect the democratic way of life than to atone for intergenerational racism and colonialism? To such voters, more government is indeed the solution rather than the problem.

How do political parties whose program has been to advance freedom, to protect institutions and to strengthen the country flourish then, when more and more of their onetime voters think economic growth hurts the environment and that the country is fundamentally shamed by the dispossession of its original inhabitants?

Having it so good for so long hasn’t made us spiritually content, just sent us down the burrows of trying to solve ever more First World problems. While the Marxist left failed to persuade voters that unfairness meant the state had to control the economy to promote equality, it has never abandoned its goal to destroy liberal-capitalism, just changed tactics, trying to subvert the culture via a long march through the institutions.

The neo-Marxist left has turned out to be much better at persuading people the planet needs to be saved than that the economy needs to be nationalised. So now it’s not socialism but environmentalism that requires vast government controls over how our electricity is produced and how we warm our houses, and soon how we feed ourselves and how we move around, to combat climate change.

Likewise, the left has been good at exploiting our humane instincts to undermine our cultural practices so that ending discrimination no longer just means treating everyone the same, it means taking coercive measures against white privilege and male privilege. It’s no longer enough to treat minorities with respect; there have to be pride weeks, and the pretence that biological men are really women if that’s what they say they are. And the societies that were the first to abolish slavery and to empower minorities, and to become essentially colour blind, are now thought to be those that are the most guilty of racism and oppression. Naturally, the further people are from having to deal with real disadvantage and real injustice, the stronger are these misconceptions.

So along with patient reiteration of the economic facts of life, that lower taxes and less regulation are the key to economic growth and greater prosperity, there’s now this further key challenge for the centre-right: to counter the climate and identity obsessions that are weakening our economies and sapping our societies, and that our strategic competitors – such as communist China, imperialist Russia and Islamist Iran – occasionally may pay lip service to but don’t share. Indeed, their cyber propaganda units cynically

whip them up, knowing that it makes the West more polarised, fragmented and divided.

There’s no conspiracy here, just generations of students, fed a pervasive diet of leftist propaganda, that because Anglosphere societies were once somewhat exploitative and prejudiced they’re basically illegitimate, even though they’ve also pioneered human freedom and social justice.

At least in the Anglosphere, higher education once correlated with voting right. Now it’s the opposite. Richer voters have been shifting left while poorer voters have gone in the other direction; hence the Republicans’ success in the flyover states, and the Tories’ success in the red wall, and the Australian Liberal Party’s sudden loss of its up-market, socalled teal seats to pseudo-greens.

Australia’s most successful living leader, John Howard, often characterised the centre-right in our country as “economically liberal and socially conservative”.

But in this new era, it’s said, we should stop being economically liberal to win poorer seats and stop being socially conservative to hold richer seats. Even though repeated experience teaches that governments can’t create wealth, although they can redistribute it; and there’s a point at which redistributing wealth away from the individuals and the businesses that have generated it just starts to make everyone poorer. And even though repeated experience is that evolution is far better than revolution at bringing about lasting beneficial change.

In Australia, nominally Liberal-Nationals governments and oppositions – defying the Howard dictum – have lately tried to be economically conservative and socially liberal, only to end up aping the centre-left, usually disastrously, because why would voters go for the fake left rather than the real one? Instead of shifting to the left, where they can’t credibly compete, on the grounds that it’s needed to win elections, centre-right leaders need to understand the roots of this

leftward drift, often fostered by their own unwillingness to call it out.

As someone who brought our party out of opposition in record time, I know something about creating a contest and winning a political argument by turning climate change from a moral issue about saving the planet to an economic one about soaring power prices, and by insisting that the most humane action was to end the deadly people-smuggling trade.

Because that’s what political parties need to succeed: a purpose to sustain them and a credible program to advance it. For a centre-right party it’s not enough to be slightly less spendthrift, slightly less overbearing and slightly less politically correct than our opponents because it’s impossible to win where there’s hardly any fight. No one knew this better than Thatcher, who declared “I am not a consensus politician; I’m a conviction politician” because she knew it was conviction and courage that created leaders’ political character.

For the centre-right, a way to win would be refusing to close down any fossil-fuelled power stations until there’s a reliable alternative; and getting to net zero (if we must), without putting the lights out and killing heavy industry, via emissions-free, proven, reliable nuclear power.

It would be reducing the regulatory burden on business, especially small business, because that’s the best way to boost productivity, wages and people’s ability to pay their bills.

It would be giving young people more chance to own a home of their own, via tax advantaged savings schemes, because there’s a moral quality to owning something rather than just occupying it.

It would be giving parents more control of their children’s education, in schools that have better teachers and more academically rigorous teaching, savouring the great books as much as critique-ing them.

But it’s one thing to win government, it’s another to hold it and to make something of it.

Thanks to the left’s long march through the institutions, centre-right governments, despite winning elections and having mandates, must expect sabotage at every turn.

The established media will be hostile; the bureaucracy will be sullen; the legislature will be obstructive; and the unions will be bolshie; so the internals will be difficult too. Hence the importance of strong leadership, which sees politics as a calling rather than a career or a vanity project, to draw likeminded people into our parties and our governments.

A party that hopes to win an election must be a broad church, but not to the point of being endlessly elastic about its beliefs. Labor-lite Liberals, for instance, those who want the Liberal Party to be Labor without the unions, might even be better off in another party, working to make that better rather than the Liberals worse.

There are lots of people who have every right to be in public life but no entitlement to identify as centre-right; yet paradoxically, at least in Australia, the only people conservative parties ever seem to expel are the conservatives!

When the migrants who flood into Western countries are much more positive about them than their own leaders, and when the cultural heritage that created the West is neglected and even derided by those who should be its guardians, it’s easy to be glum and to fear our civilisation might have entered the decadence prefiguring its collapse.

Yet we’ve been here before and always come back.

As Thatcher once observed, the facts are conservative. Come the next serious recession, people will rediscover the importance of wealth creation. Faced with military aggression, they’ll realise our society is not quite so unjust after all. When the lights start to go out, they’ll realise having reliable power is more important than cutting emissions. And when the lawsuits proliferate, they’ll realise

telling young people they’re trapped in the wrong body wasn’t such a smart idea.

My sense is that peak insanity on climate and identity already may have passed. I have no doubt that our best days are yet to come if we can but fight the good fight, stay the course and keep the faith.

This is an edited version of a speech former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott delivered to the Danube Institute in London on Thursday night.