I love praise, but is this a bit stiff?

Like any other blogger, I love praise. So when this notification of a new comment turned up in my Inbox today, I was chuffed:

I don’t know if I said it already but … I’m so glad I found this site…Keep up the good work I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say great blog. Thanks! 

Naturally I hit the button to publish the comment. Then I opened Grumpy Old Journo to admire the comment at the end of a post I put up last July. I want to know more about the comment's author, so I click the highlighted link which should take me to the author's blog or website.

Guess what tried to open up? A page advertising generic Viagra. Thankfully, my browser wouldn't open it properly, but it let enough peek through to make me very suspicious of the supposed author of the comment.

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Remembering the republicans' defeat

Where is the passion we felt ten years ago when we argued about becoming a republic? The 10th anniversary of the republican movement's defeat in the November 1999 referendum passed with scarcely a ripple the other day.

That's to be regretted, because it means Australia continues to be headed by monarchs who inherit the throne according to laws which should have no place in a modern nation (even if we do manage to accommodate the idea of an inherited monarchy).

Succession to the English throne is still governed largely by the Act of Settlement of 1701, which specifically excludes not only Roman Catholics, but anyone who marries a Catholic. The monarch must be Protestant, and become part of the Church of England communion.

In addition, the monarch carries the title Defender of the Faith, and is automatically Supreme Governor of the Church of England. This may be appropriate for England, if you accept the idea of an establishment church.

In Australia, our founding fathers were determined not to import sectarian nastiness from the old world, and wrote this into the Constitution:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

No religious test required – except, that is, to inherit the position of King or Queen of Australia.

In another provision which should be anathema in a modern nation, the Act of 1701 bases succession on the rules of male primogeniture. A woman cannot inherit the throne if she has a younger male sibling. (In Britain, this is unlikely to be a practical issue for many years, if ever – but it's still a relic of times when women had inferior status.)

Over recent years in Britain, there have been moves to change these rules but nothing much has happened.

Contrary to monarchists' claims today, a decade ago most Australians did support a republic – but a majority of them wanted nothing short of a republic in which the public elected the president. They declined to vote for the “minimal change” model put to them in the referendum, under which the president would have been elected by a two-thirds majority in a joint sitting of the Federal parliament.

For the then Prime Minister, John Howard – a committed monarchist – it must remain a proud achievement. As Grumpy Old Journo wrote in this post in February last year, Howard used a brilliant “wedge” strategy to halt what appeared to be Australia's inexorable loosening of ties with the “mother country”.

First, he set up a Constitutional Convention which argued for a couple of weeks before agreeing on the “minimal change” model which was put to the electorate. With a small majority, it supported a parliamentary vote to select the President, rather than a national election, because it would not disrupt constitutional arrangements which were working well. And that's where we lost.

Tony Abbott and other Liberal leaders said the position of President would be far too important to be decided by politicians. We should vote no to a republic so we didn't have the President elected by politicians.

It worked. It seemed Australians didn't know that under the existing, continuing arrangement, one person – the Prime Minister, possibly but not necessarily in consultation with a few cronies – chooses the Governor-General. The British monarch must accept the Australian Prime Minister's nomination.

Howard was also able to exploit two weaknesses in the republican cause. As historian Stuart Macintyre wrote in the second edition of his Concise History of Australia:

The first was the very celebrity of the republicans. [Malcolm] Turnbull's movement used prominent writers and artists, recruited television personalities, business and sportspeople. Their enthusiastic advocacy could be dismissed as an example of the estrangement of the elites from the practical concerns of the battlers.

The second weakness was to campaign for the minimal republic.

Their chief argument turned out to be no more than an appeal to national prejudice: Australia should not have a foreigner as its head of state. Since an Australian governor-general already exercised the functions of the head of state, this allowed monarchists to divert the republican debate into an arcane argument over constitutional law.

It also did not help the republicans that Howard also drafted a new preamble to the Constitution, and put it to the electors in the same referendum. The electors duly rejected both questions. As Macintyre wrote:

. . . he produced a preamble of startling banality that invoked mateship, refused to recognise Aborigines' prior occupancy of the land, and took a gratuitous swipe at political correctness.

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Merry makes a tidy Cup profit

A nice triumph for my wife. She backed the third placegetter, Mourilyan, giving me the pleasure of going down to the pub to collect $36.50 for a $5 place bet on the NSW TAB (yeah, we're the last of the big-time punters).

So does that make her a particularly gifted judge of horses? Decide for yourself > > >

Taking the moral low ground – the prerogative of the harlot through the ages

Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Rudd's inspiration?

image from Wikipedia

What a tawdry fortnight in Federal Parliament as our political leaders scrambled to occupy the moral low ground over asylum seekers heading for Australia in leaky boats.


And how easily those leaders fit Stanley Baldwin's jibe against London tabloid newspaper barons – “power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.”


It's a grand phrase, although (as pointed out later) it doesn't stand up to too much analysis. It is, however, apposite when we look at the attacks by Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull and the Opposition's immigration shadow minister, Sharman Stone, on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's removal of the more brutal elements of the previous Liberal government's treatment of asylum seekers arriving by boat from Asia.


Turnbull and Stone both went for the throat in their attacks on Rudd's policy. Turnbull, as is his practice, took up a glib phrase – Rudd had “rolled out the welcome mat” for “illegal immigrants” – and repeated it ad nauseam. On ABC radio, Dr Stone attacked Kevin Rudd but refused to answer when asked if she would go back to the old rules.


And that, essentially, is the prerogative of the opposition politician through the ages – to attack government policies, to sneer and jeer but refuse to say how they would do better. Power to attack, no responsibility to offer a solution.


More disgraceful was Kevin Rudd's apparent repudiation of the Christian values he espoused so publicly a year ahead of the 2007 Federal election in which he ousted Liberal Prime Minister John Howard.


As Rudd joined the auction for the moral low ground – dog-whistling the message, I'm treating the boat people just as brutally as they would – this angry old journo wanted to shout: “You're a Christian, for Chrissakes.”


Grumpy Old Journo acknowledges Christianity is a broad church, or collection of churches (as demonstrated in the past week when the Catholic church welcomed misogynists and homophobes who want to quit the Anglican communion – a move which should help both churches achieve their goals). Without any insincerity, Christians may adopt very different views across the political spectrum.


But Rudd, in his landmark essay in The Monthly in October 2006, was emphatic in his admiration for Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Rudd left us believing he sought to emulate the German theologian. In the second paragraph of his long Monthly essay, Rudd wrote:

And above all, he was a man of action who wrote prophetically in 1937 that "when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." For Bonhoeffer, whatever the personal cost, there was no moral alternative other than to fight the Nazi state with whatever weapons were at his disposal.

Three weeks before the end of World War II, Bonhoeffer was hanged by the SS because of his complicity in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Rudd also said this in his essay:

I argue that a core, continuing principle shaping this engagement [of church and state] should be that Christianity, consistent with Bonhoeffer's critique in the '30s, must always take the side of the marginalised, the vulnerable and the oppressed.

Provided, one assumes, they're not in leaky boats headed for Christmas Island.


One notes, too, from Wikipedia that when the SS raided Abwehr military intelligence and uncovered the Resistance cell plotting to assassinate Hitler, they also found documents proving Bonhoeffer was involved in an Abwehr scheme smuggling German Jews into Switzerland.


A people-smuggler! “Vile”, if we use Rudd's word for people-smugglers.


Is it unworldly, appealing for moral leadership in our top politicians? What use is a politician of moral integrity when voted out of office?


Kevin Rudd is a cautious man. He remembers how John Howard won the 2001 “Tampa election” with his brutal treatment of the 438 asylum seekers rescued from a sinking boat – treatment which attracted votes from some blue-collar Labor and One Nation supporters.


But I believe times have changed, and Rudd could afford to risk a little of his remarkable political domination of Turnbull and accept the new mood.


Although most Australians still want strong border protection, few yearn for a return to the John Howard days. Most Australians now understand that almost all boat people held on Christmas Island are genuine refugees seeking asylum – and as such, it's incorrect to label them illegal immigrants.


Not only that, anyone who reads newspapers knows most illegal immigation problems are with people arriving on commercial airlines, not boat people,  as yesterday's Sydney Sunday Telegraph explained.


Should we abuse the boat people as queue-jumpers, then?


Last April, Grumpy Old Journo argued that we should prefer refugees who “jump the queue” over those who wait passively in refugee camps waiting to go to whatever country they're allotted:

I believe most of those asylum seekers who turn up at Ashmore Reef or Christmas Island on leaky boats, especially those who've brought their families, have shown fitness to live in Australia and eventually become citizens.

As an amusing diversion, you might like to read what the British Journalism Review said about “prerogative of the harlot” a few years ago.

So the famous phrase, grand as it sounds, has no foundation in sense. Its actual author, Rudyard Kipling, clearly had not appreciated the economic and social situation of the average harlot, presumably being unacquainted with them. But when he was needed he was happy enough, as a journalist whose career had started on an Indian newspaper which supported the local government and was supported by government printing contracts, to lend his eloquence to the Prime Minister. Baldwin, after all, was not only his friend but his cousin.

And you may think of Malcolm Turnbull's repetitive phases – “cash splash” comes  to mind – if you press on to read this:

There may be no kinship quite as close as that among the politicians of the present day and the people, paid or voluntary, who help to promote their policies. Nevertheless, the party in government and the parties in opposition can call on large numbers of such people, even if none of them has the facility of Kipling with persuasive words. Their purpose, as we are constantly reminded, is not to explain honestly and completely the problems the politicians face and the logical methods by which they are earnestly striving to solve them. It is to repeat and repeat whichever slogan the politicians want the electors to believe represents the most important issue of the day.

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When it's deadly, it's outstanding

"That's a blackfella word. It's the ultimate praise anyone can give you"  – performer Leah Purcell defines "deadly".

With this month's awards for top Aboriginal achievers, most Australians now know the word. But no-one seems sure where it came from.

. . . > more

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Read all about it . . . but not in our leading newspapers

It's an old tradition in newspapers, and I guess none of us would expect anything different. I'm speaking of articles on the news pages which boast of the paper's success in winning awards.

But now I'm on the other side of the fence – someone who pays for his newspapers, rather than being paid to help produce them – I'm beginning to wonder whether editors owe their readers something better.

"Eleven journalists writing for The Australian are finalists in this year's Walkley awards, including two vying for the Scoop of the Year." That was the Oz's intro to its Page 2 lead story (above) on the success of its people  in Australia's major journalism awards.

The Oz ran colour headshots of all 11 finalists over eight long pars. And it added one final sentence naming two journalists from the rival Melbourne Age and The Sydney Morning Herald who were also finalists for the Scoop of the Year.

At least the Oz was more gracious than the SMH, which reported that "A large number of Herald journalists have been recognised . . . " and named them, but failed to mention any finalist from its rival.

To see the full list of finalists, go to this Walkley Foundation web page (which did not seem right up to date today) and scroll down till you see a link to a PDF file and click on it.

Interesting, isn't it? At a time when media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch are claiming the moral high ground against internet companies like Google, anyone wanting an unbiased report on the Walkley finalists found they'd wasted their money buying his flagship Australian newspaper. Or, for that matter, its rivals.

To get the facts, it was necessary to turn to the internet. And to find the information there, most would have used Google.

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While we're arguing about blackface . . .

Most Australians couldn't see what the fuss was about when a nostalgic revival of the Hey Hey, It's Saturday television variety show ended in a bitter debate.

So what's wrong with five performers wearing fuzzy-wuzzy wigs and vaudeville blackface in a skit where the sixth performer wore whiteface to sing and shuffle a Michael Jackson number? And those bloody Yanks – what right have they got to be so angry at a bit of good old fashioned humour on television?

Political correctness gone mad? Well, not really.

Imagine an Australian shirtmaker advertising its products by putting them on an Aboriginal man who's saying, “Mine tinkit they fit.” Even the letters page of The Australian would be full of angry protests (I'd hope).

The long-running “Mine tinkit they fit” campaign began with a depiction of two indigenous Australians wearing what may be mission hand-me-downs, but later ads depicted the black Australian as a more satorially elegant.

I've taken the images of the Pelaco shirt ads from this history web page. The page is worth a look – historian Richard Broome describes how he tracked down these images, which were familiar to my generation of Australians in our younger days, and also how he discovered the identity of the indigenous Australian, "Mulga Fred",  who was the model for the ads.

As a young man, Fred was a successful buckjumper – a rodeo competitor who tries to stay on an angry, bucking horse – and he must have been a dashing and athletic figure. This photo, and the information on the history web page, suggest he became a fringe dweller in white-dominated country towns.

Today, any journalist would be wary of jokes based on racial or ethnic stereotypes – Abo jokes, Ikey jokes or Paddy jokes, or, if you're Indian, Sardarji jokes. I do, however, regret the disappearance of this hard-drinking layabout from our newspaper comic strips:

Today, it seems few would run Reg Smythe's Andy Capp cartoon strip, drawn for the London Daily Mirror since 1957 and syndicated in newspapers around the world. (Although political correctness did get to Andy – the cigarette stub perpetually on his lower lip disappeared in 1983 and he became a non-smoker.)

The image is from here and you'll find a brief history of the cartoon strip here.

Perhaps I read a better class of newspaper, so I felt most journalists had a good understanding of why blackface skits are offensive to Americans and should be to Australians too.

But if the letters and blogs I read were a fair sample, the journalists didn't carry their readers with them. Most Australians appear to have a limited contact with world opinion and still cling to some resentment of Americans from World War II – “two things wrong with them, over-paid and over here”.

Use an American expression, such as Kokoda “trail” instead of “track”, or “railroad” instead of “railway”, and someone will disapprove.

So we tend to overreact to criticism from Americans. But surely we can understand why blackface skits are offensive to Americans. The best explanation I saw was posted by intern Melanie Mahony on Crikey.com yesterday. Mahony also ran a Q and A interview with Kamahl in which the well-liked black Australian entertainer explained  why the skit was offensive. The Australian's media diarist Amanda Meade posted this, and in this morning's Sydney Morning Herald David Dale posted this in which he called Hey Hey host Daryl Somers an idiot.

Also on Crikey, Red Symons – the "nasty" judge on Hey Hey's Red Faces segment – had this to say: "As one who is guilty by association . . . I’m now in the odd position of seeing the segment defended by people that I don’t want in my corner."