Australian Super Problems

Superannuation must be built on reality, not stereotypesADAM CREIGHTONFollow @Adam_Creighton
Dangling the carrot of an optional near 10 per cent pay rise for workers or promising a universal age pension would be a significant proposal with plenty of merit.
12:00AM AUGUST 29, 2020

The biggest policy battleground over the next year will almost certainly be superannuation.

The government is sitting on the retirement income review, a recommendation of the Productivity Commission from 2018 that is bound to raise troubling questions for the super sector.

Aware of the political risks of tinkering with super, the government instructed the panel not to make specific recommendations, but the facts alone should make it obvious what needs to be done.

The review will probably show, just as the Henry tax review did a decade ago, that lifting the superannuation guarantee to 12 per cent, as is currently legislated, will cost far more in fees and forgone tax revenue than it could ever save in age pension outlays.

Fees are about $30bn a year, concessions are about $36bn, while age pension savings are, very generously, less than $10bn a year.

Proceeding with a policy that’s a net drain on public finances, especially when budget deficits and debt have ballooned, is questionable. The review will also make it clear mandatory super contributions are paid by workers, out of their gross incomes, rather than by employers. The genius of Paul Keating’s innovation, compulsory super, is that it appears to workers as if contributions are made by their employers.

But the economic incidence is very different from the legal incidence. Employers pay workers’ income tax, on their behalf, yet few believe an increase in income tax would be borne by the boss.

From the employer’s point of view, employees’ income tax and superannuation contributions are the same. The government says what proportion of workers’ pay goes in tax, super and disposable income.

In the short term an employer might choose to absorb an increase in the compulsory savings rate, but in the long run the government cannot dictate how much a business will spend on payroll. It must by definition mean lower take-home pay for workers.

Absent these two arguments, the super industry is likely to fall back on a paternalistic one: people don’t save enough without compulsion. While savings myopia might feel right, it’s empirically wrong. People are simply not spending their accumulated savings in retirement and instead are leaving significant bequests, research shows.

To be sure, uncertainty about how long we will live naturally induces precautionary saving, although this becomes less and less a justification the older we become (and the probability of dying increases).

A major study of 10,000 age pensioners in 2017 found that at death the median pensioner still had 90 per cent of their wealth compared to the start of their retirement. “On average, age pensioners preserve financial and residential wealth and leave substantial bequests,” the authors concluded.

We are hardwired, whether for cultural or biological reasons, to protect or grow our wealth. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does undermine the claim that people aren’t saving enough. On the contrary they might be saving too much.

Grattan Institute analysis of the Survey of Income and Housing conducted by the ABS similarly found retirees typically maintained or increased their non-housing wealth through their retirement.

“Wealth appears to have dipped only because the global ­financial crisis reduced capital ­values, rather than because retirees drew down on their savings,” says Grattan.

“The bottom third by wealth of the cohort born in 1930-34 (aged 71-75 in 2005) increased their non-housing wealth from $68,000 in 2005 to $122,000 in 2015,” the ­authors pointed out.

The government has known this tendency for some time, too. As social security minister in 2015, Scott Morrison pointed to research by his own department that showed 43 per cent of pensioners increased their asset holdings during the last five years of life, and a quarter maintained them at the same level. “Less than a third of pensioners actually saw their ­assets decrease in their last five years,” he said.

What is the point of providing concessions if the savings are not being used to fund retirement but are simply passed on? It would be better to scrap the concessions, pay a bit more in age pension, and use the difference to radically cut income tax rates for everyone.

While the Coalition government is unlikely to propose anything like that, there’s an argument for being bold. The fact around three million Australians have just accessed their superannuation is a massive chink in the armour of compulsory super.

The government could make super voluntary, in effect offering a significant pay rise to any worker who wanted it. Remember, employers don’t care whether workers’ pay is sent to a super fund or the worker’s bank account.

The savings could be used to make significant cuts to income tax, or make the age pension universal, thereby scrapping the means testing that has so twisted the incentives of the over 65s. About 80 per cent of retirees already receive the full or part age pension. A universal pension would remove the significant disincentives to work that pensioners face, dramatically simplify retirement and end the game of retirees’ engineering, quite understandably, their affairs in order to receive a part-pension.

There are powerful political reasons for being bold, too.

Labor will be hoping the government does seek to delay or stop the increase in the super guarantee. That would give the party, rendered irrelevant by the corona­virus, something to fight for, even if it were for the vested interest of the super industry rather than working people. Indeed, a senior Liberal once told me the biggest supporters of compulsory super were older, wealthy Liberal voters, who believed the poor should be forced to save for their retirement so as not to be a burden. The ­median worker, let alone the poor, can never save enough to provide the equivalent of an age pension.

Regardless, facing a hysterical campaign from Labor and the doubts among its own base, it could lose the debate.

The government needs a positive plan rather than promising to stop something from occurring. Dangling the carrot of an optional near 10 per cent pay rise for workers or promising a universal age pension would be a significant proposal with plenty of merit.

The government’s successful early access scheme, which has seen around three million people withdraw almost $40bn, has delivered a body blow to compulsory super. Now is the time to reform it.

Covid-19

IF NEW ZEALAND’S THE ROLE MODEL THEN WE’RE IN STRIFE

ADAM CREIGHTON

There must be a better way to protect the vulnerable without smashing the economy

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

If social media is any guide it is our intelligence, rather than our health, that has been dealt a heavier blow by the coronavirus pandemic and the vested interests that benefit from it. The debate about how to respond to the virus has been undermined by widespread ignorance and the plethora of fallacies that surely call for compulsory teaching of logic in schools.

Top consulting firm McKinsey revealed the extent of the ignorance on Tuesday in survey evidence that found young people in Australia were more than twice as worried about the coronavirus impact on their own health as those aged over 75, who are at far greater risk. Almost 40 per cent those aged 25 to 44 were “very or extremely” concerned about their health. Almost half of that group also said they had been “emotionally affected” by the pandemic, compared with 8 per cent of the over-75s.

In light of six months of data on the coronavirus, such beliefs make little sense. They raise serious questions about the quality of education and the insidious role some of the media have played in fuelling the biggest erosion of civil liberties in our history — without accompanying evidence or cost benefit analysis — and a recession whose long-terms impacts can only be guessed with trepidation.

There are almost eight billion people in the world and six months into the pandemic barely any young have died from the virus.

Based on Swiss data published in respected medical journal The Lancet last month, the infection fatality rate from COVID-19 for under those aged 20 to 50 is one in 10,870, or about the same as being hit by a car.

Young people should be far more worried about the collapse in education, their inability to travel and enjoy their lives, and their highly diminished job opportunities and incomes that the Treasury and Productivity Commission have recently laid out.

For those aged up to 44, the coronavirus is less of a threat than dying from a random accident each year, according to the US National Centre for Health Statistics.

“Population-wide estimates of the infection fatality rate (0.64 per cent) mask great heterogeneity by age and point towards the importance of age-targeted interventions to reduce exposures among those at highest risk of death,” the Lancet authors wrote.

Alas, age-targeted interventions weren’t top of mind in the Victorian government, whose decision to move into stage four lockdown is an incredibly high-stakes gamble. If no vaccine emerges — or no vaccine with side effects mild enough that people are willing to take it — what is the point of another six weeks of draconian restrictions with all the attendant social and economic costs that will last years?

New Zealand is held out as a role model, but it’s a small, remote country. Its biggest industry, tourism, has been ruined, and at some point its citizens may want to come and go.

The debate is as rancorous as it is littered with fallacies; beyond trusty ad hominem, the straw man, post hoc, appeals to pity and bandwagon fallacies are the most prominent. No one seriously advocates doing nothing; indeed, individuals naturally take their own precautions, without government having to do anything except provide information.

The question is whether a civilisation that put man on the moon a half-century ago could have come up with a more targeted way of protecting the elderly and vulnerable than causing a downturn so serious forecasting has become impossible.

Indeed, with six months’ more data, reacting in August similarly to how China, Spain and Italy reacted in March — as Victoria has

— surely ignores our improved knowledge and treatment since.

For instance, we now know that herd immunity tends to cut in at 20 per cent, not the 60 per cent feared, and certainly not 100 per cent — the favoured level of fearmongers who mindlessly multiply infection fatality rate by populations. Meanwhile, the belief A causes B simply because B comes after it in time has proved more contagious than the virus itself.

Observing a decline in deaths or case numbers after a government took a sledgehammer to its economy says nothing about the effectiveness. Pointing to New Zealand in rapture proves nothing.

In fact, there’s no reliable relationship between lockdowns and viral trajectories across countries.

“Full lockdowns and widespread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality,” the authors of another recent Lancet study looking at Europe and the US found.

Then there’s good old appeal to pity. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews on Tuesday described the deaths of three people in their 90s and older on Tuesday as “tragedies”. He either doesn’t understand the word or has lost all sense of proportion. It should go without saying, but the chance of dying in one’s 90s is naturally elevated. In any case, what about 1.5 million deaths a year of children in Africa and Asia from vaccine-preventable diseases? They won’t be getting those vaccines in a depression.

That brings us to the bandwagon fallacy, thinking something is correct because everyone else seems to. Perhaps frustrated Sweden’s death toll petered out at 5700 rather than the 90,000 it was warned to expect, proponents of draconian responses say “serious long-term health effects” warrant extreme precaution. The virus has been endemic only since March; how can there be any strong evidence of long-term effects, which by definition mean years?

Economists have been guilty of their own bias, an obsession with gross domestic product - an obsolescent, abstract statistic with little connection to anyone’s life - to determine whether lockdowns have costs.

China has enjoyed strong GDP growth, but many Chinese are incarcerated or worse if they disagree with their government. There’s more to life than GDP.

One could try to work out the dollar value of freedom of movement, physical association, by asking how much people would pay for it. But that somehow defeats the point. Transfixed by the supposedly existential menace of the coronavirus and the “long-term” health costs, not enough are focusing on the long-term costs that aren’t captured by GDP.

If no vaccine emerges … what is the point of another six weeks of draconian restrictions?

TertiaryEducationFailures

US elite betrays the people in its casting of the evil empire

WORLD COMMENTARY

GERARD BAKER

That was quick.

At the end of the 20th century, the US had won World War II and the Cold War, liberated half the planet from history’s most dehumanising ideologies, advanced a freemarket capitalism that had led more humans out of poverty than any economic system ever devised, and given the world the richest bounty of intellectual, cultural and scientific capital since the Enlightenment.

Americans could — and did

— look at themselves and the nation they had built with immense pride.

Twenty years later, much of the country’s political leadership, almost its entire academic establishment, most of the people who control its news and cultural output, and a good deal of its corporate elite view the US as an irredeemably malignant force for enslavement and oppression, a uniquely evil power founded on an ideology of racial supremacy. These Jacobins demand that Americans repudiate most of the nation’s history, tear down the icons of its creation and engage in a collective cultural expurgation of its sins.

Only four years ago, senator Bernie Sanders, a man not noted for a surfeit of patriotic fervour, visited Mount Rushmore and pronounced: “It really does make one very proud to be an American.” On Friday (Saturday AEST), when President Donald Trump made the pilgrimage, we were told that he was appearing, in the words of a CNN reporter, “in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans”.

If the self-image of Americans a generation ago was that of a smiling GI receiving flowers from liberated peoples, today we’re told it’s a police boot stamping on a human face forever. What happened?

We can hope that the present mania is in part one of the baleful consequences of the lockdown lunacy. If you’ve been stuck at home mainlining the distortions of the media for four months, your tolerance threshold for fiction has doubtless been raised.

But the roots of the current insanity are more profound than the inch-deep scholarship of the sophomores now in control of America’s newsrooms.

With hindsight, it’s clear that the US in 2020 was ripe for the kind of mindless Maoism that demands fealty to its gospel of ideological cleansing. The nation has reached a combustive moment. The rot in America’s cultural institutions was spread for more than half a century by a self-loathing cultural establishment. Now it has matured amid a public malaise induced by 20 years of elitedriven political and economic failure that has undermined faith in the system that made America great.

The cultural corrosion has been evident for decades. Perhaps what we should have seen better were its consequences: generations of students fed a steady diet of critical race theory and postcolonial gender studies — all delivered in safe spaces protected by an intolerance of dissent — poured out of college campuses into the world, waving their white-fragility texts like little red books.

But they graduated into an America that has been convulsed by two decades of unaccustomed failure and loss. In 20 years, wars and foreign-policy failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; financial breakdown; and now the pandemic have exposed a hollow political leadership.

All the while the capitalism that had produced so much opportunity for so many has become increasingly a vehicle of power for a few. Megacompanies in finance and technology have grown unchecked. The modern woke corporation publicly disdains and derides the values on which the nation — and its profits — were built, even as it pursues global opportunities at the expense of American communities.

It won’t be enough to reassert America’s great historic virtues. It will require weakening the power of the totalitarians on campus, ensuring fair access for all voices on tech platforms, holding to account the lawless mobs defacing and defaming the nation’s legacy.

But it will also require addressing the rot in American capitalism, reining in the power of bloated monopolies and ensuring that corporations prioritise Americans over their globalist, progressive agendas.

This is personal for me. I came to this country as that great American century was closing. Like millions of immigrants I was drawn by the irresistible allure of a nation forged in pursuit of a universal ideal it had actually succeeded in achieving. Of course, we knew there was a sharp tear in America’s vibrant fabric, a legacy of racial prejudice that mocked the ideals of the founding. But the nation’s demonstrated ability to advance beyond that, to mend and improve itself, makes America even more admirable.

This country hasn’t passed from great to evil in two decades. America hasn’t failed. But Americans have been failed — misled by inept and deceitful political leaders, deserted by predatory and mercenary corporate chiefs, and, above all, betrayed by a parasitic cultural elite that exploited American freedom to trash the country. It isn’t America’s history that needs to be repudiated. It’s its present.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Climate A Change In Alarm

Sorry, but I cried wolf on climate change

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the past 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by the US congress to provide objective testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to serve as a reviewer of its next assessment report, I feel an obligation to apologise for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know: Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”;

The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”;

Climate change is not making natural disasters worse;

Fires have declined 25 per cent around the world since 2003;

The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska;

The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California;

Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany and France since the mid-1970s;

The Netherlands became rich, not poor, while adapting to life below sea level;

We produce 25 per cent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter;

Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change;

Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels;

Preventing future pandemics requires more, not less, “industrial” agriculture.

I know the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism. In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this, imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s co-operatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

Green beginnings
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $US90bn into them. Over the past few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions

But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilisation, and called it a “crisis”.

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke Jr, a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favour of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse. But then, last year, things spiralled out of control. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “climate change kills children”.

Turning point
The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilisations”. Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world”, and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence. And so my formal apology for our fearmongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialisation, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

› Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress.

› The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land.

› The most important thing for reducing pollution and emissions is moving from wood to coal to petrol to natural gas to uranium.

› 100 per cent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5 per cent to 50 per cent.

› We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities. › Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4 per cent. › Greenpeace didn’t save the whales — switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did. › “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300 per cent more emissions. › Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon.

› The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants.

Why were we all so misled? In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable”. And status anxiety, depression and hostility to modern civilisation are behind much of the alarmism.

Reality bites
Once you realise just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavoury motivations, it is hard not to feel duped. Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it. The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop. The ideology behind environmental alarmism — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.

A real crisis
The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, COVID-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicisation of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform. Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.

The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilisation is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilisation that climate alarmists would return us to.

The invitations from IPCC and congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment. Another one has been to the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science, Tom Wigley.

“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love’: a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”

That is all I hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist and progressive felt the need to speak out against the alarmism. I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.

Michael Shellenberger is president of Environmental Progress, an independent research and policy organisation. He is the author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, published by Harper Collins

Once you realise just how badly misinformed we have been … it is hard not to feel duped

DeathsInCustodyFacts

GEOFFREY BLAINEY
No point in ignoring facts and history

1:55PM JUNE 14, 2020

On New Year’s Day, no major economist, no famous medical scientist and no political leader had predicted that this would be a tumultuous year.

At first the coronavirus was the world’s feared enemy. Soon it turned into an economic crisis, and now in many nations it is a looming threat to law and order or the sparks of a cultural revolution.

That the campaign against statues is occurring especially in England is a shock. On reflection it should not be puzzling because the British Isles have enjoyed such political continuity, having suffered no invasion since 1066 and no civil war since the 1640s. Therefore it has centuries of statuary and art still standing in public places.

While some Australians publicly applauded the events in Bristol this week, most probably watched with surprise and even apprehension. The statue of Edward Colston was attacked by a small crowd consisting of protesters and — judging by the media illustrations — spectators who seemed more intent on taking photos. The deputy governor of the British company that once held a monopoly for transporting slaves in British ships from West Africa to the West Indies, Colston could be denounced as partly responsible for the 19,000 slaves who died during those voyages. Yet Colston was also a benefactor of Bristol, helping to found schools in an age when education was a luxury.

Why should a mob and not an elective assembly reach this sudden decision that Colston’s statue be heaved into the harbour? A civic statue is a work of art. Don’t works of art merit some protection, or do we allow the statue-thugs to break into an art gallery and cut the nose off a portrait of a long-dead person? As for the city library, why not set fire to offending books?

You might excuse this censorship of the enemy’s culture during an all-out war, but this is not a war. Or perhaps it is already a culture war.

In the eyes of moderate radicals living in Britain, their nation’s most admired prime minister in the 19th century was William Ewart Gladstone, for whom we once barracked when studying history at school long ago. Yet he was the son of the wealthiest owner of slaves in the West Indies, and as a member of the House of Commons the young Gladstone indirectly helped his father’s income from slavery at the time when the slave trade was being abolished.

Now the statue-breakers in Australia, invisible for years, have emerged with their hammer or paint-splasher. James Cook is already a target. A discordant band of Western Australians have rediscovered governor James Stirling. South Australian rebels have turned on CC Kingston in a glaring display of ignorance. They are shattering the reputation of the politician who, perhaps more than any other, took the steps by which Australia became the world’s first nation to give to women both the right to vote and the right to stand for parliament. The long-dead Kingston is now vulnerable because he was one of the legislators who voted for the White Australia policy. Another offence — he should know better — is that his statue stands near an Aboriginal flagpole.

While this month’s Australian marchers were provoked by the dreadful death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, they were stirred equally by our history of Aboriginal deaths in custody. Many of the marchers tried to publicise these deaths not only to fellow Australians but to people around the world.

Australia has its faults and failings, past and present, but by today’s world standards it can hardly be singled out as racist. It has never tolerated slavery.

Even in the era of the White Australia policy, Australians’ attitude to exotic migrants was little different to the attitudes of most European nations.

In the past 30 years we have, measured by the size of our population, admitted more refugees than almost any other nation, and usually afforded them housing ahead of our own homeless Australian-born people.

It is easier for a new migrant to gain voting rights here than in any nation in Asia or the Middle East. But some Australian universities display a tendency to be servile rather than independent. Beijing, and Uluru at times, must not be offended. The anti-statue crusade found instant supporters here.

The essence of studying history is that, as best we can, we try to wear the shoes and put on the spectacles worn by people of the past. We try to see the obstacles and dilemmas they struggled against or evaded. We also hope that the future will try to understand why we made blunders, and learn from failures and achievements of our era.

The statue-topplers, however, have no time for debate. Those who have just banned the once-prized film Gone With the Wind have no time for discussion. In the US it is almost taboo to ask questions publicly about the campaign Black Lives Matter.

In Australia those critics who doubted whether crowded street marches should be permitted when the coronavirus was still at large were reminded that the fight against racism — an enemy loosely defined — was as crucial as the war against a deadly virus. Those painful minutes in Minneapolis were a timely reminder of painful decades in Australia.

This burning topic was already entangled with another. In 1987 the Hawke Labor government, in a courageous gesture, set up a royal commission to investigate Aboriginal deaths in prison and in police custody.

The belief then was widespread that there the Aborigines had suffered an exceptionally high death rate. It was agreed that this exhaustive inquiry would probably harm our international reputation, but might also find a way for reform and prevention.

Learned judges, and many witnesses from every state and territory, met in a variety of courtrooms.

More than three years later the official verdict surprised most mainstream citizens. In short, the typical indigenous prisoner had been no more likely than the typical non-indigenous prisoner to die in custody. They were just more likely to be arrested and to end up in prison.

The Australian Institute of Criminology assiduously began to count and monitor, year after year, the total of deaths in custody, but their observations and statistics are not familiar to most people who, in good faith, marched last weekend. Their findings were not familiar to the television reporters who courteously questioned the marchers.

I heard no mention, saw no slogan, that proclaimed the truth that non-indigenous prisoners were more at risk than indigenous prisoners of dying while in police custody or prison. Expressed another way: the death rate for each 1000 prisoners is lower for the indigenous than for the non-indigenous.

Prison deaths probably cause more concern among the Aboriginal public. Many of their relatives die in prisons far from home and close relatives. Many commit suicide.

Since the early 1990s one-third of all indigenous deaths in prison have been the result of suicide, usually by hanging. Moreover, half of those prisoners had previously attempted suicide.

Fortunately, strong attempts have been made by governments and prison officials to lower the suicide rate in recent years. The main cause of death of indigenous prisoners, especially after 2004, is natural causes: heart troubles predominate, but they might well be a result of earlier living conditions.

An unexpected trend is for the indigenous prison population now to increase at the faster rate; they now constitute 30 per cent of all prisoners.

The high Aboriginal incarceration rate has been the topic of numerous reports and was the message on many of the handwritten notices held aloft by protesters last weekend. It has given Australia a burst of unfavourable publicity, and China this week subtly exploited it.

To solve the prison problem will not be easy. Money alone has failed to solve it. In my eyes — I could be astray — the prison dilemma now seems far more urgent than the question of whether the Constitution should be altered as to embrace or favour the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

The global surge of unrest in the past fortnight had another surprising effect. The British history of this land began as a kind of prison. How to reform that prison was a major debate in the middle of the 19th century. Unexpectedly the prison debate is back again.

Historian Geoffrey Blainey’s latest book is Captain Cook’s
Epic Voyage.

Integrating indigenous

If separatism is such misery, do we try integration
We cannot ‘pin the repeated failures on anyone but ourselves’.
12:00AM JUNE 12, 2020

Henry Ergas

That indigenous Australians, who make up 3 per cent of this country’s population, account for 30 per cent of its prisoners is a national disgrace. That by the time they reach the age of 23, 75 per cent of young indigenous people in NSW will have been cautioned by police, referred to a youth justice conference or convicted of an offence in a criminal court — compared with just 17 per cent of their non-indigenous counterparts — makes the disgrace all the more searing.

And the fact that just in the past five years nearly a quarter of the indigenous male population has been arrested and more than 10 per cent jailed, while one indigenous child in five has, at some stage, lost a parent to prison, raises that disgrace into an outrage.

However, the worst of it is that the fault does not lie in the criminal justice system. After all, were these shocking outcomes due to racial bias, the path to a solution would be straightforward.

But indigenous Australians are not imprisoned at such appalling rates because our system of law enforcement treats them unduly harshly.

Rather, they are disproportionately represented in this country’s jails, and in the deaths that occur in those jails, because they are far more likely to commit violent offences. Nor is that seriously in dispute. On the contrary, as Don Weatherburn, perhaps Australia’s most eminent criminologist, concludes in a recent paper with Hamish Thorburn, “the overwhelming weight of evidence” confirms that “differences in rates of offending (and reoffending) account for most, if not all, of the difference in imprisonment rates” between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

And with indigenous women being nearly 40 times more likely to be hospitalised for intentionally inflicted violence than are Australian women generally, it is also beyond dispute that the harm those offenders inflict falls most grievously on indigenous Australians themselves.

Yet none of that lets non-indigenous Australians off the hook. It was not indigenous Australians who destroyed thousands of Aboriginal jobs in country areas by suddenly raising the wages of cattle station labour in 1965; it was the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.

Nor was it indigenous Australians who decided, just as the commission’s judgment was having its devastating effects, to massively subsidise remote Aboriginal settlements, condemning generation after generation to inadequate housing, an education scarcely worth having and a future shorn of jobs and hope; it was the Whitlam and Fraser governments.

And it was not indigenous Australians who removed the prohibitions on the consumption of alcohol by, and the sale of alcohol to, Aboriginal people that had been in force throughout Australia since 1929.

It was state and territory governments that, in keeping with the 1960s zeitgeist of self-determination, repealed those controls and decriminalised public drunkenness, plunging fraying Aboriginal communities into a spiral of alcohol-fuelled violence and helping to ensure that indigenous offenders are nearly three times more likely than non-indigenous offenders to be intoxicated when they commit their crimes.

The result, as one Aboriginal community after the other succumbed to the epidemic of substance abuse, was that indigenous incarceration rates, which had been falling since World War I, began to soar.

Far from slowing that rise, the explosive growth in welfare outlays that followed the onset of the crisis perpetuated the pathologies by allowing dysfunctional communities to survive. And instead of frankly confronting the root causes, successive governments relied on grandiose statements of good intentions and on torrents of cash in an increasingly futile attempt to paper over the cracks.

Had the thousands of Australians who marched last week learned from that history and drawn its lessons, one could only have cheered them on.

Of that, however, there was no sign. Epitomised by the participants’ slavish imitation of the ritual gesture of kneeling — which has clear resonance in America because of the prominence of the kneeling slave in the imagery of the abolitionist movement, but which lacks those associations in Australia — the rallies were copycat protests at which self-proclaimed representatives of indigenous people could vent imported rhetoric in tones of punitive hysteria.

No doubt the slogan-mongering went down well with the crowd, many of whom had been chafing at the bit to return to protesting, regardless of the health risks that imposes on the community as a whole.

And it would have been mother’s milk to the young Australians who had been taught since childhood that Europe’s expansion was a plague on the skin of the earth, that its civilisation was a monstrous imposture and that its arrival on these shores 2½ centuries ago heralded the destruction of a Garden of Eden.

But demeaning the past does nothing to heal the present. Nor, for that matter, does setting ambi­tious targets that we do not know how to achieve, as the government seems intent on doing.

Rather, what is needed is honesty and clear-sightedness. And the starting point must be to confront some uncomfortable realities. It is, to begin with, clear that much-touted nostrums, such as diverting juvenile offenders from the court system, have been tried and largely found to fail, with most studies concluding that they do not decrease the risk of reconviction, the time to reconviction, the seriousness of further offending or the number of reconvictions.

And it is equally clear that while those approaches are not a viable solution, imprisonment does reduce the extent and incidence of serious offending, as well as shielding, at least for a time, the victims of violence from their tormentors.

That hardly implies we should simply accept the dreadful costs mass incarceration imposes on indigenous Australians and on the moral fabric of the nation.

What it does mean, however, is that we face an alternative. We can salve our conscience by retaining the unstated premise that has led to the current calamity: that indigenous Australians are essentially a separate race, who should be funded to live at enormous expense in places where there are no viable jobs, where supplying basic services is prohibitively costly and where alcohol and drugs are the only antidote to squalor, boredom and despair.

If that is our choice, today’s pathologies, and the mass incarceration that is their symptom, will persist for decades to come.

Or, while recognising the deep and enduring scars, we can reconsider the whole notion of racial separateness, reaffirm our commitment to the ideal of integration and begin the transition to a country whose principles, policies and ways of life are genuinely colourblind.

The one thing we cannot do is pin the repeated failures on anyone but ourselves. They are a tragedy of our own making. And more than ever, they are our responsibility to repair.

Woke PC World

WOKE MOBS RISE UP IN WAR ON THE WEST

BRENDAN O’NEILL

The new cultural revolutionaries are on the march against the past
The West is in the grip of a cultural revolution. Modern-day Red Guards have declared war on the past. The Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in response to the police killing of George Floyd have morphed with staggering speed into a frenzied assault on history, liberty and reason.

No statue, no monument, no bust is safe from the woke mob’s frantic urge to purify the public square and erase all trace of people they disapprove of.

During the past week these right-on vandals toppled a statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in England. They cheered and jeered as Colston fell, then stomped on his head before throwing the statue in a river. It was a disturbing, almost medieval spectacle: a mob exacting some inexplicable vengeance against the likeness of a man who has been dead for 300 years.

Woke mobs also beheaded a statue of Christopher Columbus in Boston. Yes, they yanked off the head of one of the greatest explorers in history, the discoverer of the New World. It brought to mind the way in which wild-eyed Taliban and Islamic State members would hack with hammers at the heads of ancient statues they considered haram.

The new Red Guards also dragged down a likeness of Columbus outside the Minnesota state capitol. Anyone who watches the clip of this act of infantile philistine vandalism will surely be shocked by the hysteria of the crowd.

“I want everyone to come up and kick him in the head!” yells one of the fevered attendees. Thank god they’re only attacking statues. For now, anyway.

If a statue can’t be toppled, it is abused. The Winston Churchill monument in London had the word “racist” spray-painted on it during a Black Lives Matter protest last week. A statue of Queen Victoria in Leeds also was targeted. The mob spray-painted “murderer” on the base of the statue. They sprayed pink paint on the statue’s breasts and genital area. What madness is this?

Even the statue of Abraham Lincoln in London was targeted. Lincoln fought an actual war to end slavery. But he’s white, and American, and therefore bad — right?

Like good little Maoists, the PC vandals are now circulating lists of other statues to be dragged down. In the US they want to erase all trace of Columbus and sweep away Confederate monuments too.

In Britain they’re targeting the colonialist Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University, a bust of Columbus in London, and even William Gladstone, the 19th-century Liberal prime minister.

Yes, this is how deranged the violent assault on history has become: they’re now raging against one of Britain’s most liberal PMs on the basis that his father was involved in the slave trade.

This week, under pressure from snowflake students, Liverpool University agreed to remove Gladstone’s name from the students’ halls of residence. Gladstone expanded democracy in the UK with the Third Reform Act in 1884. He was the first prime minister to propose Home Rule for Ireland. He was so popular he was referred to as “The People’s William”. And yet now he, too, must be erased, shoved down the memory hole, because a tiny gang of noisy historical illiterates has found him guilty in its kangaroo court of the things that his father did.

In these dark, intemperate times, the sins of the father shall be visited upon the son. Now that even Gladstone is being targeted, surely the politicians and media people who foolishly cheered the mob who dragged down Colston in Bristol will reflect on what they have helped to unleash. Because it’s pretty clear now that this is not some righteous uprising against racism or the memorialisation of slave traders.

No, it has become a mad, undemocratic crusade against anything and anyone who offends the politically correct lobby.

These neo-Maoist efforts to cleanse the public square of people and ideas the woke elites disapprove of is a continuation of what has been happening in our universities and elsewhere in society for two decades now. This mad moment represents the bursting forth into public life of all the backward, illiberal, identitarian ideas that have been growing and festering in the academy.

That’s why the events of the past week are so important.

This no longer has anything whatsoever to do with Floyd. Rather, we are witnessing nothing less than a power grab by the politically correct machine; an attempt by the new intolerant elites to export their eccentric ideologies into every street and square and corner of the public sphere.

It really does echo the Cultural Revolution. The original Red Guards likewise targeted “offensive” monuments. There was a “frenzy of smashing”, as one historical account describes it. They especially hated statues of Buddha. They would tear them down and throw them on to bonfires.

Such destructive behaviour was repeated in Richmond, Virginia, this week when a woke mob pulled down a statue of Columbus, set fire to it, then threw it in a lake.

The Cultural Revolution was a war against the “Four Olds” — old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. Today’s Woke Guards also rage against old ways of thinking that run counter to their own ideology.

They are remorseless. Culture that offends them must be banned. People who disagree with them must be cancelled. Re-education is their aim, as it was for the original Red Guards.

So during the past week it isn’t only statues that have been torn down — so have “offensive” entertainment and dissenting thinkers. Netflix and the BBC have pulled comedy classics such as Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen and all of Chris Lilley’s shows on the basis that they feature white actors occasionally playing black characters.

A radio presenter on the Isle of Man was suspended for daring to question the idea of “white privilege”. A Welsh journalist was ditched as a judge for a literary prize after he criticised Black Lives Matter.

In the US the new cultural revolution has exploded into newsrooms during the past week. Stan Wischnowski, executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was forced out for the speechcrime of using the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” on a piece about why the riotous destruction of buildings is bad.

In these dark, intemperate times, the sins of the father shall be visited upon the son

At The New York Times, opinion editor James Bennet resigned after publishing a piece by Republican senator Tom Cotton calling for troops to put down the rioting.

This scandal at The New York Times is probably one of the most important events of the new cultural revolution so far. For what has really taken place at this key liberal institution in American public life is a woke coup.

Younger staff members staged a “virtual walkout” over Bennet’s publication of Cotton’s piece. They denounced him, like jumped-up little Joe McCarthys, and accused him of wrongthink.

It was incredibly symbolic: the old liberal guard being swept aside by intolerant younger people, by the Woke Guards, who are utterly hostile to difference of opinion and open debate.

The New York Times essentially has been captured by the ascendant new elites. Given the role that newspaper traditionally has played in upholding the values of American liberalism, this could prove to be the most significant shift in the past week’s march of the culture warriors from their campuses into politics, the media and the public square.

These unforgiving woke elites have been waiting for a moment like this. For years they have been honing their ideologies and their neo-Maoist tactics. And now they are exploiting the anger over Floyd’s death to enforce their writ across society.

Their deadening and divisive world view is spreading fast. They spent decades developing “critical race theory” — the idea that racism is ingrained into modern societies such as the US, Britain and Australia. This theory, foisted on students at every opportunity, presents racism almost as an original sin, a stain Western societies will never wash away.

It reduces black people to permanent victims of the virus of racism and depicts white people as the “privileged” beneficiaries of slavery and other historical crimes. All blacks suffer, all whites are complicit: that’s the nasty message of this eccentric ideology.

And now this nonsense, this world view that patronises blacks and demonises whites, is running riot. Literally.

It has spread through society. In recent days we have witnessed middle-class whites on their knees begging for forgiveness for historical events they had nothing to do with. We’ve had the Archbishop of Canterbury telling white Christians to “repent” for their racial sins. We’ve seen Nigella Lawson saying “white people” are “complicit” in racism.

The deranged assaults on historical monuments is critical race theory in action. Welleducated youths are constantly told by their professors that Western society is a racist, rotten, patriarchal entity. So the fact these youths are now whooping wildly as they throw paint and insults at historical monuments is not really surprising. They are the footsoldiers of a new ideology that is profoundly anti-Western, which views Western history as little more than a litany of crimes.

Witness also the mainstreaming of the gender lunacy that has been rife in higher education circles for years. The cult of gender fluidity, which preaches that you can be any sex you like, is now rampant in political circles and popular culture. It is striking that during the past week we have witnessed not only the march of the cultural revolution against the history and monuments of Western society, but also a demented witch-hunt against JK Rowling for committing the thoughtcrime of believing that people with penises are not women.

Yes, courtesy of the transgender ideology, even expressing biological truths is a risky business these days. The religion of gender fluidity is now in classrooms, in change rooms and all over popular culture. There is no faster way to signal your decency, to advertise your virtue, than to utter the woke mantra: “Trans women are women.”

Many events from the past week echo the stifling culture that has been gaining ground in educational institutions. The “calling out” of anyone who fails to take the knee — that is, bow down — to everything BLM represents speaks to the cancel culture that has been a key feature of woke agitation for years.

The erasure of allegedly offensive comedy springs from the fervour for de-platforming that has defined campus life for a long time. Right-wing speakers, un-PC comics, people who question the gospel of climate change, anyone who believes there are only two sexes — they have all run the risk of being noplatformed by the self-elected moral guardians of the ivory towers, and now such PC censorship is taking hold in society at large.

And the desire to re-educate the masses about the West’s evil history and the reality of racism also comes from the PC elite’s longstanding desire to cleanse people’s heads of wrongthink and fill them with right-on blather.

Celebrated identitarian author Ibram Kendi has said we need a “radical reorientation of our consciousness”. This is fancy lingo for re-education, for forcing the dim throng to buy into the woke view on everything from race to sex, from history to comedy.

They have had plenty of practice in this authoritarian enterprise. For years many campuses have been holding diversity-training exercises, mandatory race-awareness courses and lessons in sexual etiquette. Now this Orwellian urge to wash away impure thoughts and replace them with the gospel truth of political correctness is a feature of everyday political life.

The new cultural revolution looks and feels like a war of the young against the old. Or rather, against the Four Olds. Against the ideas, culture, customs and habits of yesteryear that fail the purity test of today’s Woke Guards and the PC police.

There is unquestionably a generational dynamic at play. Millennials and Generation Z were brought up in safe spaces, overprotected by helicopter parents, and educated to believe their self-esteem should take precedence over everything else

— even over the right of other people to say things that one might find challenging or offensive.

But it strikes me that the true problem today is not so much blue-haired youths and 20-something lefties with more PhDs than sense, even though such people seem increasingly shrill, censorious and sometimes ruthless. No, the problem is the failure of adult society and of key Western institutions to say “No” to the youths and chancers of the woke cult. From churches to the social media giants, from the BBC to the police, too many institutions are caving in to the 21st-century speech police.

During the past few days we’ve seen cops running away from BLM activists in London, church officials repeating the divisive mantras of the BLM movement, Netflix, the Beeb and others dutifully cancelling “problematic” TV shows, and a school in Sussex in England reneging on its plans to name one of its houses after Rowling simply because she thinks men are men and women are women.

Every capitulation to the mob emboldens it. Who will stand up to the imperious ambitions of the PC brigade? Someone has to. Failure to do so will put liberty, free thought, reason and social solidarity itself at even greater risk than they already are
.

No Slavery in Australia?

Slavery had no place in the founding vision
PAUL KELLY

Australian nationhood in 1901 was driven by powerful ideas in the public’s mind — that of an egalitarian, racist, democratic polity that had learnt from the mistakes of our two great exemplars, Britain and America.
Integral to this vision was a complete repudiation of slavery. This was a deliberate and calculated decision. It had overwhelming support from the Australian public at Federation. Australia’s founders were deeply aware of the catastrophic history of slavery in the US and were determined that Australia would not follow this disastrous path.
One of the key figures in Federation and the most influential of our early prime ministers, Alfred Deakin, enunciated the position of virtually the entire political class: “No slave is to be allowed to tread Australian soil at all. The mere suspicion of the taint of slavery is leading to the prohibition of the Pacific Island labourer.”
The Federation generation took ruthless steps to outlaw slavery in the cause of racial white egalitarianism, the essence of Australian nationalism. Their conviction was absolute: our nationalism would not tolerate slave or cheap coloured labour.
But this sentiment long predated Federation. It was critical to the vision of Governor Arthur Phillip in his conception of the colony of NSW. Phillip wrote: “The laws of this country will of course be introduced in NSW and there is one I would wish to take place from the moment His Majesty’s forces take possession of the country: that there can no slavery in a free land and consequently no slaves.”
This was the founding governor’s core vision of Australia. It was a path-breaking vision, far in advance of Britain and America. For Phillip, the settlement he was founding would be free; it would have convicts but no slaves. And this was written many years before slavery was abolished in Britain. Phillip’s vision revealed his intentions far transcended a mere convict colony.
It was also a sharp departure from the American narrative.
The American paradigm was a nation half built on slaves carried from Africa; the Australian paradigm became something different — a nation built on Aboriginal dispossession. Exploitation of Aboriginal people was ruthless and brutal.
Like many visions, Phillip’s was impaired in delivery. But when in history’s name has this not occurred? It is true there were many departures from Phillip’s vision. It is misleading, therefore, to think there was never any slavery or trace of slavery in Australia.
Indentured Aboriginals worked for farmers and squatters, some were forced to work in the west’s pearl industry, others in agricultural labour, yet others were victims of forced labour or prison gangs. The pictures are horrific. The moral vacuum at Federation was the plight of the indigenous peoples assumed to be a dying race and left with no role in the formal political, economic and constitutional structure.
In 1901 there were nearly 9000 Pacific Islanders working the Queensland cane fields, the legacy of about 50,000 who had been brought to the north or kidnapped in the last 40 years of the 19th century.
But Queensland sugar interests were subjugated post-Federation under the legislative power of the new Australian nation. Despite their heartfelt pleas to stay, the government was resolute. Many of the Islanders were Christians with established families and desperate to stay but more than 7000 of them were repatriated between 1904 and 1908.
These workers, many of whom were not paid, were sent home and the government and unions enforced a policy of exclusive white wage justice in the industry. Deakin, in effect, was delivering Phillip’s vision.
These facts suggest Scott Morrison was misleading in his remarks this week that “there was no slavery in Australia”. But Morrison was more right than wrong. His remarks were correct in reflecting Phillip’s vision at the founding of NSW. There is no disputing the point Morrison was making: the conception of the Australian nation had no place for slavery.
The entire impulse from the federated nation was to remove the remnants of slavery that had existed. Those critics of Morrison who ignore Phillip’s conception and the deliberate campaign from Federation to create a new nation devoid of slavery have violated and distorted the history far more than Morrison.
Both sides need to get the story right. Telling the truth to history is no one-way street, yet this is how it is presented and that project will assist nobody.
In truth, many of the critics fail to comprehend the forces that created the Australian nation. These were also embodied in the first laws passed by the new parliament, the Immigration Restriction Act, giving effect to the White Australia policy, followed by the Pacific Islands Labourers Act to remove the Islanders.
The idea, in the language of the day, was that Australia was to have no coloured labour, no paupers and no poor houses. This position was held most tenaciously by the Australian Labor Party. Deakin, as acting prime minister, said of the removal of the Islanders, known as Kanakas: “It has been universally admitted that the introduction of the Kanaka reflects no credit on Australia.”
The two remarkable features of the White Australia policy were its near universal support and its longevity. It prevailed until the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was supported by every prime minister until Harold Holt.
Judged by today’s standards the policy was deeply offensive but if you choose to act upon that offence you will need to pull down every statue to every politician for our first 66 years as a nation, from Deakin to Billy Hughes to John Curtin to Ben Chifley to Bob Menzies, as well as burn the paintings and torch the archives and Hansard for twothirds of the past century.
The founding fathers were also desperate to avoid the southern African as well as the American experience. The first prime minister, Edmund Barton, repudiated any notion of slave or cheap labour in the mines and plantations, saying, if that happened, “the whole civilised world will be the losers”.
You can deplore the racism at its heart but the companion to that racism was Australian equalitarianism, and that egalitarianism has evolved and survives today devoid of its racial dimension.
For too long that egalitarianism excluded indigenous peoples, an omission the nation still struggles to put right.
It is surely ironic — perhaps beyond belief — that Black Lives Matter activists in Australia this week are appropriating or linking to this country the American experience of slavery that ran for centuries, that was based upon the transportation of Africans to America, that became pivotal to the Southern economy, provoked a civil war and represents today a legacy far different from the challenges faced by indigenous Australians.
The most comfortable response to historical sins is to purge them from sight and memory. But such policies merely reflected the values of the time. Racial equality did not exist in the 19th and early 20th centuries when much of Africa, Asia and the Middle East was under colonial rule.
Trying to destroy the past is an excuse for not coming to grips with it — in its flaws and achievements. True history is complex, not simple. But conclusions are needed — and any notion of Australia as a nation built or dependent or organised on slavery distorts, not illuminates, our history.
The companion to (historical) racism was Australian equalitarianism, and that egalitarianism has evolved and survives today devoid of its racial dimension

Western Liberalism

WESTERN LIBERALISM STANDS FIRM ON CHRISTIANITY’S ROCK

GREG SHERIDAN

But identity politics threatens to unravel the threads of a universal tolerance
The horrible death of George Floyd at the hands of a brutal policeman in Minneapolis is producing very diverse reactions. One is a wholly good sense of human solidarity across racial lines. Such a response, that race is incidental to humanity, of no consequence in determining a person’s worth, has no power to diminish human dignity, is a wonderful response, and expresses traditional liberalism. This requires the law to have no consideration for race, which means justice for every human being regardless of race. Seeking that authorities live up to this is a necessary ambition.

But a good deal of reaction is heading down the destructive road of identity politics. Identity politics attacks the universalism which is the heart of liberalism.

Rejecting this universalism for an ideology which elevates race, gender, sexual orientation or some other features into the central organising principle in politics and culture is a disastrous wrong turn.

One reason we are in danger of taking this doleful path is the decline in Christianity as the animating inspiration of public culture.

It is worth understanding that the universalism of liberalism, indeed the whole of Western liberalism itself, is entirely a subset of Christian moral thought and development. One thing our culture rightly does is elevate and revere the experience and testimony of victims, especially powerless victims. This was not the way in the pre-Christian, ancient world. The humiliation and death by crucifixion of Jesus, both man and God, put a divine face on human suffering. It gave the suffering an unimagined dignity.

The Jewish scriptures of the Old Testament had already introduced a novel universalism. God created humanity in his own image. This elevated the status of humanity to a level it had never known. It was also a statement of the universality of humanity.

The Old Testament is assuredly the story of the Jewish people and the nation of Israel, but it is also the story of God’s relationship with all humanity, beginning with creation.

God does not create one race or another. He creates humanity. Throughout the Old Testament, there are many statements of the universality of God and the universality of the human condition.

It is worth noting that African slaves in America took great inspiration from the experience of the Jewish people when they were enslaved in Egypt. The great black spiritual songs emerge in part from this inspiration.

The most radical statement of Christian universalism comes from Paul, in his letter to the Galatians: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

The Christian concept of the natural law over time became universal human rights. At every step of history, many Christians have dishonoured their teachings with their behaviour. But equally many Christians have lived out their beliefs.

My point though is the intellectual and political development of liberalism. Everything we like in modern liberalism is a direct expression of Christian teaching and thinking. The idea of humanity changed fundamentally after Jesus. Instead of being primarily considered as a member of a family, or tribe or nation, each individual was seen to have been created individually in the likeness of God, to possess an immortal soul and to be in a personal relationship with the living and eternal God. This meant that individuals had rights and obligations: the rights of nations and tribes were of a much lesser order.

The most important book in understanding the basis of modern Western society is the work of Oxford scholar Larry Siedentop: Inventing the Individual, The Origins of Western Liberalism. He writes: “The Christian conception of God provided the foundation for what became an unprecedented form of human society. Christian moral beliefs emerge as the ultimate source of the social revolution that has made the West what it is.”

Siedentop argues that by the later parts of the Middle Ages Christians had thought through and begun to try to implement all the foundations of modern liberalism. It was a long and conscientious process. Third-century Greek theologian Origen confirmed the free will of every human being to choose between good and evil. Another thirdcentury theologian, Tertullian, in Carthage, affirmed religious liberty. Christianity produced a pro-woman sexual revolution. Marriage became for the first time an institution of mutual love and mutual consent. Christians didn’t kill their female babies. Benedictine monasticism, when it came round in the sixth century, was radically egalitarian and democratically self-governing — the monks chose their abbot.

Some Christians owned slaves but there were always fierce Christian voices, including popes, denouncing slavery. A fourthcentury bishop, Gregory of Nyssa, denounced a man who had bought slaves. He thundered: “For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth the price of this human nature? God himself would not reduce the human race to slavery since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, recalled us to freedom.”

Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century developed a full understanding of the sovereignty of human conscience. The church, seeking independence from princes and the state generally, gradually divorced the concepts of sin and crime. The church could pronounce on sin, the state on crime. Internal church government, which had to be universal among church members, led governments of states to also became universal in their jurisdictions, rather than leaving power, often absolute, in the hands of local lords.

Liberalism was not invented in a minute and the Enlightenment thinkers often given credit for it were mostly Christians and used Christian moral categories and concepts. The question now is whether liberalism can survive the total severing of its connections with its Christian roots. I have the most serious doubts. Liberalism survives for a while because the first generation or two are imbued with Christian moral concepts and traditions. But eventually it goes crazy, as it is demonstrably doing now.

Without Christianity, there is nothing absolute for liberalism to anchor itself to, so its very practice of tolerance can easily morph into intolerant ideological demands. The various impulses of liberalism always need to be integrated in a genius of balance. But when there is no overarching transcendent belief, there is nothing to provide this balance. Each impulse runs to extreme, often absurd, excess, which is why so many notionally liberal commentators have endorsed violence in the recent protests.

This crisis of liberalism is a crisis in the heart of our civilisation. It is a vacuum where there should be belief.

Some Christians owned slaves but there were always fierce Christian voices denouncing slavery

SomeInterestingFacts

The Australian

WITCH-BURNING CURE WILL BE DEADLIER THAN THE VIRUS

RJ SMITH

We should focus on protecting those truly at risk, without a rush to economic suicide
We are in the midst of the strangest event of our lives. Societies have shut down. Families and whole nations face financial ruin. Walking the streets is now a crime from Paris to Sydney to Mumbai. And all of this has occurred not despite the will of the people but because of it.

The reasons are well known. There is a virus on the loose. It is transmitted by humans and is killing tens of thousands. It is an existential threat at which all resources must be thrown and all energy expended.

This is the popular mantra. And if true it would justify the incredible events we are witnessing. The problem is that it appears not to be true, a fact few are willing to entertain amid the hysteria that prevails. Yet its falsity is suggested on a cursory review of the best available data.

That data is provided by Italy, an early epicentre of the virus with many deaths.

On March 26, the country’s peak health organisation — the National Institute of Health — published a report with details of the 6801 deaths the country had recorded to that point. This is a considerable sample size, and the figures are revealing.

The first statistics of note are those about the average age of casualties, which is 78. The median is

79. A little more than 95 per cent of victims were over 60, and zero deaths were recorded for people under the age of 30.

Then there is the method of designating the virus as the cause of death, which includes anyone who had tested positive for it before dying. In other words, many were said to have died from the virus when in truth they merely died with it.

Third, 98 per cent of casualties of a random sample of patients had a pre-existing chronic illness, or comorbidity, at their time of death. About 21 per cent suffered from a single comorbidity, 26 per cent from two, 51 per cent from three and just 2 per cent with none.

Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s Health Minister, recently reported: “On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus.”

The overwhelming majority of Italy’s deaths involved chronically ill and elderly patients.

This is not to diminish these tragedies. But the questions arise: why are we surrendering our hard-won civil liberties and committing economic suicide when this virus poses a danger to only a small portion of our society? Why do we not pour all of our resources into protecting the vulnerable?

The answer is that a 24-hour news cycle, with its morbid tallying of deaths, images of corpses and sensationalist reporting of outlier cases has whipped the public into a frenzy that politicians have had to take extreme measures to appease.

And anyone who questions the collective unreason is denounced on social media as a bloodthirsty mercenary who favours the economy over human life.

History shows time and again the reaction to a perceived crisis becomes the true catastrophe. Like the execution of witches until the mid-18th century or the scapegoating of Jews for poisoning wells during the Black Plague, evidence and logic are of no use to us now. There is an existential threat, and anyone who denies it is not just a denier but the cause.

None of this is to say this virus is not dangerous. It is. But the level of threat it poses is being exaggerated, and the response to it exaggerated as a result.

This is especially true in Australia, where infection rates appear to be relatively low and the government containment methods are among the most draconian worldwide.

If the government has compelling data to support this strategy, it should release it. But there seems to be no correlation between the scale of the threat and the economic and social damage we will suffer responding to it.

There is a disaster afoot. But it is not the COVID-19 virus. It is the putative remedy, a fact we will not appreciate until it’s too late.

RJ Smith teaches law at Paris universities I (Pantheon-Sorbonne) and X (Nanterre).

PublicHealth

The Australian

THE WEST’S CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE – IT’S A TREND TO DIE FOR

GREG SHERIDAN

For 50 years, popular culture in Australia and the West has mocked authority, glorified rebellion, sanctified the individual’s quest for ever deeper self-realisation and told us that Western governments are dishonest, corrupt, wicked and primarily act as agents of racism, colonialism, sexism, economic exploitation and environmental despoliation.

All this is reinforced by academic culture, which sheets all these sins home not only to Western governments but to Western civilisation generally.

Is it any wonder that these societies are having so much trouble in the coronavirus crisis responding to essential lifesaving directions from their respective governments?

The most successful societies in tackling COVID-19 through social distancing and similar suppression measures are Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea. The widespread elements of their success are well known — large-scale testing, contact tracing, tough travel restrictions, strict social distancing, strict isolation for those infected or possibly infected, and above all co-operative societies that take what governments say seriously.

These four are all deeply Confucian societies. You have to be careful about cultural generalisations but Confucianism is a powerful influence across all Northeast Asian societies (plus Singapore), just as the Judaeo-Christian inheritance used to be the most powerful and pervasive influence in the West.

The Analects of Confucius stress proper relations, family fidelity, respect for elders, respect for authority, personal morality and acting with some decorum. They esteem formal education, sober wisdom. You should respect and obey your parents, you should respect and generally obey your government.

Confucianism is not all bottomup obligation, for it also requires governments to justify “the mandate of heaven” by acting decently for all citizens.

Today, citizens in Confucian societies are able to work out that government edicts to practise social distance or self-isolation are more important than edicts such as “don’t litter” or “pay attention in class”. But having grown up in a culture in which they obey directions that say don’t litter and pay attention in class, they are more likely to follow lifesaving directions.

I am not arguing here that Confucianism is better than the Judaeo-Christian civic tradition. Nor am I arguing the reverse. It’s more relevant that Confucian societies have maintained their traditions. Their governments, even their education systems and parts of popular culture, reinforce this. In contrast, we have mounted a socially suicidal and nearly insane attack on our own traditions for at least the past five decades.

Christianity and Confucianism sometimes seek to approach similar civic virtues but get there in different ways. There is nothing in Confucius more pro-authority than the famous passage in the New Testament’s first letter of St Peter, which says: “For the Lord’s sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him …”

Confucius and Peter were saying different things. Both are open to interpretation, but both understood that the good life requires submission to authority.

Yet popular culture in Anglo-American societies, and in most of Western Europe, demonises every traditional institution and demonises government itself, while glorifying the existential rebellious individual who makes a heroic stand, typically against a designated set of pantomime villains: government agencies, corporate greed, property developers, organised religion et cetera.

Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, told me this week it was important that a government enter a crisis with some “social capital” and people believe the government and its key agencies, and the mainstream media, tell the truth in a crisis.

But Australia, like the West generally, has been on a determined path of destroying all that vital social capital.

Hollywood, and its Australian imitators, and the British film and television industry, are almost (not entirely but almost) incapable of making a production that deals with security issues in which the ultimate bad guys don’t turn out to be one or other of the Western security agencies.

In the Cold War the villains were always the Russians. In the postmodern world the villains are always us, our government and our institutions.

In the digital universe, every conspiracy theory you can imagine flowers in wild profusion. But many of these wacky ideas get a very good airing in mainstream entertainment. I haven’t yet seen the ABC TV series Stateless but I’ll bet you a hot Chico roll it portrays the Australian state as the agent of unique wickedness. What else would it do?

Beyond popular culture is the deep academic conviction that all Western civilisation is inherently based on evil — racism, sexism, economic exploitation, colonialism — without any positive affirmation of the magnificent achievements of our own tradition.

Beyond popular culture, online conspiracies and the deep madness of much of the humanities in Western universities, there is a trend in psychology and culture, certainly in that bloody crossroads of popular psychobabble, to elevate the individual, and the individual’s infinite curation of their own identity, as the defining ambition of human life.

In a brilliant piece in this month’s Atlantic magazine, David Brooks describes how the American family has collapsed in the past 70 years. Its collapse doesn’t hurt rich people too much because they can buy replacements for family

— therapists, carers, tutors. And they can buy assistance to keep their own small families functioning. But it has been a disaster for poor people, who are left with nothing. Brooks argues that over the past 70 years life has become freer for individuals but more unstable for families, better for adults and worse for children. The move from big extended families to ever smaller nuclear and sub-nuclear, so to speak, families has meant the poor have fewer people to help with bad economic times, rough psychological passages, the ups and downs of childhood. Rich folks buy this assistance. Families are also sources of authority and social capital. When they go, the authority and social capital go.

One difference with Confucian societies is that their governments do everything they can to support families and to promote traditional family structures. Both sides of politics make this impossible in societies such as Australia. The left hates tradition and works to destroy it, the libertarian right can’t stand anything that smacks of government social engineering.

I am inexactly connecting an immediate crisis with long-term cultural trends. But the inability of large numbers of its citizens to accept and yes, obey, simple government directions that are literally lifesaving is a sign of a relatively recently acquired, grave weakness in our culture.

In the digital universe, every conspiracy theory you can imagine flowers in wild profusion