Jeez, I go away for a few days off, pick up a paper on Friday driving back to Perth, and find the ALP leadership issue back on the front page. Sometimes I think politicians will do anything for a headline, even eat their own leader. All that phoning around and the clandestine meetings, it makes them feel like they’re doing something. For the electorate, however, it increasingly looks like they’re just spinning in circles.
There is this tendency in people to change the things they can, as opposed to the things they should – you know, like the deckchairs on the sinking ship. The real problems with the ALP are much deeper than leadership, and the poor quality of leadership is a direct result of these problems. Frankly, the ALP is like a creaky old car with increasingly essential bits falling off and running out of petrol, so changing the driver has minimal impact. Irony is, Crean may have got the boot because he was at least trying to fix the radiator leak. Some people in the ALP seem to think it is a brand new sports car motoring along nicely, except they should be driving.
But I am unable to resist commenting on the leadership fun, so here goes:
I have expressed in print my view that Mark Latham is the best hope the ALP has, seeing as Lindsay Tanner, for whatever reasons, remains off the radar. And although Kim Beazley is a nice man (you always have to say that), he is, as Barry Jones noted, the most right wing leader the ALP has had. His history in the party is that of a reasonably capable but hardly outstanding minister pursuing a right wing agenda.
But here we have Latham, who will owe the left if he gets the leadership, talking about tax breaks for the rich and Beazley arguing that any budget surplus should go to education and health. No doubt Kim has learned from the small target fiasco, but would he just revert to his old ways if elected PM? And will Latham remember who actually votes Labor and send a little their way?
As for Kevin Rudd, who has enjoyed a meteoric rise, where does he stand out side of foreign affairs? I mean, who is this guy really? We know a bit about Latham and a lot about Beazley, but Rudd looks like a ring in by people who just don’t like the other two.
And one last point: trying to catch up on events I snatched up the West and the Oz to absorb the info and views from our savvy national political journalists, and learned almost nothing. They write a lot, but rarely actually seem to have any real idea of what is going on under the surface froth and bubble. When I worked in the old Parliament House it seemed to me they were basically a lazy, herd-driven bunch. When serious political issues emerge, I could wish they worked harder and read each other less.

It takes a lot of guts to sit around and wait for markets to go about their self-regulating business, especially when there is a moral panic around. Today’s moral panic is housing affordability and the latest sign of hysteria is the HIA Commonwealth Bank Housing Affordability index which has reached new lows.
Apparently it now takes 45 percent of average income in Sydney to service the typical first mortgage on the average first home. No wonder as it costs $488,000. In the rest of the country it is only 28.4 percent. This is good news for all of us.
Think about it this way – why do we all envy Sydney? Because it’s an exciting, beautiful, cosmopolitan city where people earn a lot more money than they do in the rest of the country and where more big businesses have their head offices than anywhere else, so there are more jobs. So we’d all like to get a share of Sydney, but we can’t afford to move there.
Well, very few people can, which means one thing – Sydney is going to have to move to us. A lot of businesses now situated in Sydney are going to have to think about shifting out to areas where living costs are lower and there are more workers at reasonable wages. High house prices, particularly in Sydney, are the best regional development policies the country could adopt.
They’re also good for the population problem that Premier Bob Carr keeps complaining about. Sydney is the city of first choice for migrants. More of them land there than anywhere else in the country. Migrants are all first home buyers, at least so far as Australia is concerned. So with housing affordability figures like this, it won’t take long before migrants start thinking of Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart (possibly in that order) as alternate destinations.
HIA economist Simon Tennent is quoted as saying that “in the longer term, interest rate rises will help cool house prices”. Yes, but they’ll only do that by making housing even less affordable in the short-term, and if they are successful in regulating house prices they won’t make them dramatically lower for quite some time. What we need is a policy that makes housing more affordable and reduces its cost simultaneously.
That policy requires the Reserve Bank to do nothing. By allowing prices to stay naturally high and keeping interest rates where they are it will encourage developers to bring more supply onto the market. In fact, if we are really lucky, they will do that so enthusiastically that there will be such a flood of new stock on the market that it will reduce prices quite dramatically. Then all the Reserve needs to do is to ensure that there is enough liquidity in the system to allow new borrowers to enter the market at bargain basement prices and mop up the oversupply.
In the meantime there will be a net transfer of wealth from highly leveraged developers and some banks to the rest of us, so you effectively get redistribution of wealth from some of the capitalists we all love to hate without having to get interventionist about it.
Iif you own a home or if you rent; if you own a business or would like to own a business; if you are employed, or would like to be employed, send an email to Ian MacFarlane urging him to spend more time with the cellar at the Reserve Bank and less time fiddling with the monetary levers. It should keep him out of harm’s way and help him with the requisite amount of liquidity and tightness.

Kevin Rudd is my local member and as a local member I reckon he’s great, no matter how I vote. He’s also very effective as a foreign affairs spokesman. But if Labor wants to get ahead, making him leader would be the least optimal choice. (I struggled with the phrase “least optimal”, but I couldn’t use “worst”. When you’re talking depth of talent the ALP can sink pretty low, and Kevin’s much closer to “best” than “worst”). In fact, if the ALP wants to get ahead they should be sacking him as foreign affairs spokesman.
The reason for both these opinions is the same. If the ALP wants to win the next election it has to stop fighting the war. Every time Labor spokesmen talk about terrorism, security, Iraq, Afghanistan, or indeed anywhere north of (and including) Melville Island they lose votes. These are Howard’s issues and it is Howard’s agenda. Not that the majority of Australians wants to vote on these issues, but when they think about them they think of Howard as being reliable and Labor as being a divided rabble that couldn’t even deliver sandwiches in the Parliamentary canteen, let alone policies.
Rudd’s problem is that his strength, and it is a considerable personal one, is Howard’s agenda, which makes it a political weakness. Each time he diligently elevates a foreign affairs issue to front page or prime time he loses votes for Labor. Rudd of course is measuring performance in terms of column inches and air time – that’s the proxy politicians use between elections – but these are not good indicators of how well you are really doing.
If Labor wants to win the next election I think it should leave Simon Crean where he is and put Rudd into Health or Education. If it runs on these issues it can win the next election.
There is no doubt that Howard will be campaigning on national security. If you want a preview of his key campaign ad, click here. What we are seeing in Australian politics today is a 50 year cycle. Menzies won election after election on the basis of the divisions that the Cold War caused in Labor. Howard looks set to do the same. The left cares more about its views than it does about the views of the people it wants to represent. As long as Howard and Rudd can keep debate focused on foreign affairs, the left will lose Labor the election. Crean and Labor need to make Howard fight on issues where the views of the left and most Australians coincide, and that’s health and education.
John Howard would probably share my views on this. He knows that the biggest risk to him in the next election is that people will expect him to win and so might just vote ALP out of sympathy. If Labor could get its act together just a little more, not so many people would laugh at Howard whenever he tells his troops (slang word, but on message when it comes to security) Labor could win the next election. And that would be a plus for Howard. Anyone for snooker?

Joh Bjelke-Petersen famously couldn’t explain to the Fitzgerald Commission what the doctrine of separation of powers meant, and the whole country laughed. What would you expect from a hayseed “banana bender”? From some of the media comments that followed it was clear that most of those snidely sniggering had no idea either.
After his comments reported in yesterday’s Courier Mail you can probably add Chief Justice of the Family Court, Alistair Nicholson to that list. It is wrong for a judge to be telling the government what to put in its legislation. How much confidence can the public have in a judiciary that has lobbied against the very legislation that it is supposed to be applying? Judges have a duty to be, and appear to be, impartial.
And you would also hope a judge would apply better logic than this: “Justice Nicholson…said a recent study found 64 per cent of separated fathers had contact with their children, while 25 per cent of mothers in the study believed their children had insufficient contact with their fathers.
“If 25 per cent of mothers believe children don’t have enough contact with fathers then that points to fathers not wanting the contact,” he said.
No it doesn’t. What it points to is that somewhere between 64 and 75 percent of fathers do want to have contact, and that’s without exploring the possibility that some of the 25 percent of mothers are exaggerating.
With almost 50 per cent of marriages ending in divorce these days, the family law courts are the part of the legal system that many of us are having the most to do with, and it is one of the worst administered. Before trying his hand at legislation the learned judge might like to give administration a go. From my experience the commercial courts run much more smoothly and efficiently than the Family Law jurisdiction. It’s partly because the Family Law Courts try a touchy feely approach to dispute resolution, and it’s partly because they never do basic things like awarding costs against parties that lose. One of the best mediators is the thought that you might have to pay the other sides bills as well as your own.
This isn’t the first time that Nicholson has stepped outside the permissible bounds of judicial activism. No wonder that so many separated and divorced parents and their lawyers tell me that so many others in the family law system, including those in the Child Support Agency, appear to think they can do better than the legislature as well.

In a short biog I once described myself as an “inside observer” of the Liberal Party. While the term hadn’t been invented then, I thought of myself as being in some respects an “embedded” journalist. As we have recently seen, embedding brings its ethical challenges. One of those challenges is to ensure one’s integrity as a writer is not compromised, at the same time as one does not compromise the ultimate security of the organization that one is reporting.
One stream of advice to me at the moment is that I should stop writing about the Liberal Party for the duration until my case is finally decided. That’s not possible. From the point of view of the accusation, if I thought I should stop commentating it would be an admission that I shouldn’t have commentated in the first place. From the point of view of my readers it would be a complete breach of faith because it would indicate that I do not call things as I see them and that party and personal advantage can compromise me.
I have always accepted that there were limitations to what I could actually write about. I couldn’t write about matters that I knew courtesy of any privilege conferred by an elected position I held in the Liberal Party. On the other hand I could write about things that I came across in a way that a non-member or a journalist could have. The only elected position I have held in the party for the last two years has been branch treasurer, and in that time I haven’t been to a branch meeting, so there was nothing that I came across through privilege.
The other issue is what one carries in one’s head that is privileged information from a time when one did have privileged information. That is a delicate question that all those who chronicle parts of their own life and times have to confront, and I think the general rule is that the further you get from the event the less privileged the information is. Again to date I have rarely had to answer that question because my analysis has seldom relied on decisions to which I was a party.
Of course, sometimes events take on a life of their own which you cannot avoid but which do not necessarily help your position. Yesterday in the Queensland Parliament Peter Beattie used this issue to throw a barb at the Queensland Libs. This is predictable, not something I can do anything about, nor something I caused. However the people who have created this situation will no doubt blame me for the fact that they gave Beattie an opening and use it to press their case further.
They’ll also be interested to read John Mickel’s comments posted to this blog yesterday – apparently he’s using my plight to try to flog copies of a book he is having printed up on the misdeeds of the Queensland Liberal Party. I can honestly say that I am jealous of John Mickel. He’s a Labor MLA, but with all my natural “embedded” advantages I often have to read his speeches to get up to speed on what is really happening in the Queensland Liberal Party. But it would be a pity for the party if the only material the public could read about it was written by its enemies, just as it would have been a pity in Iraq if we had been forced to rely on “Comical Ali” for reports of what Coalition forces were up to. Or for that matter even Tommy Franks.

What is it about film people? Of all the possible concerns about the proposed Free Trade Agreement with the USA the last one that has any legs is the complaint that the government won’t protect local content from the Yanks on yet to be invented technological platforms. Looking into the past I can just see Hammurabi doing deals to protect the local clay tablet cunieform industry against the possibility that the Egyptians might invent papyrus scrolls in a couple of thousand years. You can’t legislate for that which you can’t know.
Of course, it’s not the yet to be invented technologies that these people are really worried about – it’s the internet and its uses – and here they show a stunning lack of understanding of new technology. Either that, or they are trying to con the Australian government into the Chinese approach to the web, just so they can prop up their profits. Can you imagine it? We might have to replace all the “www”s in our address bars with “aaa”s so as to operate on our very own national internet to the glory of the father land.
What they are arguing about is not subsidies to the movie industry – the US and Australian governments have decided that they can stay – but local content rules for the broadcast media. Their quandary is that the government can easily regulate a one-to-many broadcast model where the government creates the distribution systems by granting exclusive rights to private companies to commonly owned property, like broadcast spectrum. They can’t do the same with a many-to-many broadcast model which works on privately owned telephone lines and optical cables.
That means that, given enough bandwidth, sometime in the future I may be able to log on to a website and download a movie on demand – the internet version of a video store. Given the choice on cable and free-to-air plenty of people are likely to take advantage of such offers, and you can be sure most of them won’t be downloading Australian product. At least not on the basis of the decisions they make in our video store.
The only way that you could enforce local content rules on video on demand is to regulate what websites consumers could use. Technically this is pretty difficult – ask the Chinese. In fact you don’t have to ask the Chinese as the Australian government has already had its own adventures in this area producing technically impotent laws banning Internet pornography and Internet gambling. But it would be worse than these sorts of laws because you would be trying to enforce some sort of a sharing arrangement – three Indiana Jones movies, plus five Arnie blockbusters on condition you download (but not necessarily watch) one Lantana. How do you enforce a partial prohibition when you can’t enforce a total prohibition?.
I’m sure there are ways of doing it, but they either involve what I would hope we would see as totally unacceptable infringements of civil liberties, or loading ISPs up with absurd responsibilities for what their customers do, thus driving up the cost of our internet use. The music industry has already thought about the second alternative, and those interested in free speech should be watching the case of the Australian Recording Industry Association v Cooper.
In this action ARIA is suing the directors amongst others of an ISP because it provided an account to a man who downloaded pirated music. Their rationale is that apparently up to 20% of total Internet bandwidth is absorbed by downloads of pirated music, therefore the ISP business model is predicated on allowing pirates to do this. You might as well sue Xerox because a substantial proportion of photocopying is in breach of copyright, or Sony because people use VCRs to record videos. In fact, someone tried the latter a couple of decades ago and lost. Hopefully the same will happen here too.
Much of the moaning of the film industry has been carried by the broadcast media, particularly the ABC. Now a funny thing is happening to broadcast and it is called convergence. When researching this piece I wanted to listen again to a couple of radio broadcasts. You can listen to them too by clicking here or .hereSo can people in Iceland. If you wall the world off from Australia as some of these people seem to be suggesting you also wall Australia off from the world. At the moment for example Phillip Adams, one of the proponents of this idea, has a nice little export market ’netcasting Late Night Live internationally to people who have yet to go to bed. If we follow his prescription for the Internet and he’ll be restricted to a domestic audience.
On Line Opinion also has an international following and it is one way for our public intellectuals to get involved with the world. Under the film industry prescription this would be no more.
Instead of worrying about the new world Australians need to be out there exploiting it. Some of us are and are even starting to make a living out of it. Unfortunately the film industry isn’t. One of the reasons that Australian product sits in our video shop is because it doesn’t meet the needs of our customers. What’s the point of rules favouring an “Australian” film industry if that industry can’t even make films that Australians want to watch? Get out of the way guys. There are plenty of other types of content and some of us who are manufacturing it are coming through.

The Queensland Liberal Party State Council yesterday referred me and Marion Feros to the Liberal Party’s disciplinary committee under Clause 21D of the party’s constitution.
As Chief Editor of On Line Opinion, I have been a pioneer in internet journalism. Marion Feros, a partner in Victor Feros Townplanning, was a candidate for Liberal Party State President at this year’s convention. Although she lost Mrs Feros still scored 40% of the vote.
I have yet to receive official notification of the decision but on the face of it there appears to be no case to answer.
It is a pity that the Liberal Party would choose this moment to launch this action given that all of its resources should be devoted to fighting the three elections due next year. Queensland voters could be forgiven for believing that the Liberals are only interested in internal matters. They might also ask what the Liberal Party’s commitment is to free speech.
Clause 21D provides that a member may be subject to disciplinary action for “gross disloyalty to the Liberal Party”, “breach of confidentiality”, or “conduct bringing the Liberal Party into disrepute”.
Marion Feros is to be referred for public comments that she made on the 13th September, 2003 to Channels 7, 9 and 10. These comments were made in response to journalists’ questions to her after she lost the election for State President.
I am to be referred for articles that I have written for the Courier Mail and On Line Opinion. They include an article written on the 16th September, 2003, and republished in On Line Opinion which can be read by clicking here Qld Liberals must stop the internal battles and focus on winning seats.
Other articles in the Courier Mail are referred to but they are not available on my site.
The charge also refers to articles published on On Line Opinion on “many occasions in 2002”. I only published one article on the Queensland Liberals during that year – Liberal tussle for control cements Beattie in place.Read the articles for yourself and see whether they fit the charges.
Under the party’s constitution the matter will now be referred to the Disciplinary Committee for “investigation and report”, which it must do in accordance with the principles of natural justice. The committee then reports its findings to State Council which may then take disciplinary action by a two-thirds vote. That action can be to expel, suspend or censure the member.
As a party member for 26 years I will vigorously defend myself against these charges. I believe in the principles of the Liberal Party and the duty of all Australians to involve themselves in the political process. In a democracy it ought to be possible to work as a political commentator and journalist at the same time as holding party membership.
My Liberal Party Involvement
· Joined 1977
· State Vice President and Campaign Chairman 1994 to 1997 (During this time Liberal Party had best campaign success in its entire Queensland history)
· State Candidate Greenslopes 1989 and 1992
· FEC Chairman Griffith 1992
· Eastern Metropolitan Zone Chairman 1988 to 1989
· Federal Young Liberal Vice-President 1982
· Federal Candidate for Griffith 1983
· State Vice-President Young Liberal Movement 1979 to 1982
· Young Liberal Magazine Editor 1978 to 1979

I usen’t to be classed as a baby boomer at all. That explosion used to end in 1955. Now it has crept up a notch and spreads to those born as late as 1960. In truth, these things cannot be defined with mathematical precision. When you look at my habits and expectations I am as much a Gen Xer as a boomer, but there is one thing that does define a genuine boomer – they can tell you what they were doing when they heard that JFK was killed. I was in the Caribbean.
Sounds exotic, and it is, but not as exotic as it sounds. I was a migrant in the days when people migrated through things, not over them, because the usual mode of transport was ship, not aeroplane. As a five year old I and my family traveled to Australia from Canada through both of the greatest canals of the world – the Panama and the Suez – working against the spin of the earth. Before my sixth birthday I had only the Pacific Ocean between me and my first circumnavigation of the globe when we arrived in Sydney.
On the deck of the P & O Liner The Oronsay (model in the Queensland Museum)) people were talking quietly in huddles on the 22nd November 1963. I was too young to know who Kennedy was, but not too young to recognize significance. That was the end of “Camelot”, as it came to be called – that brief romantic (and in my view illusory) vision of a renewed New World where concepts like right and wrong still counted, framed by a handsome democratically elected King and Queen. The King now lay in his own blood. Not slain by the hand of his bastard son in the gothically convoluted manner of the Arthurian legend, but nevertheless slain and with enough flavours of the failings of the human condition for it not to be completely dissimilar.
Camelot was also the Lerner and Lowe stage musical, based on T H White’s novel The Once and Future King. It first played in December 1960, almost synchronously with Kennedy’s election. The novel, not the movie, was complex, exploring the balance between idealism and human frailty. Human frailty Kennedy had in aces. But he also inherited the fundamental paradigm shift of the novel. He inherited a world where might was still tenuously right, and attempted to change it to one where “right was might”. This was the Rooseveltian America, and the spirit behind the foundation of the United Nations, and more importantly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document at this stage still only twelve years old.
Camelot didn’t die with Kennedy, nor did he invent it. It infuses the United State view of the world, particularly its popular culture and is the basis of what some call “American Exceptionalism”.
When George Bush first used the term “crusade” I doubt he had a lexicographer’s sense of where it had been. I bet he was using it in the way you might refer to “caped crusaders”. But of course the word has a wider provenance than that and in fact plugs into the heart of the Arthurian myth. Not only does it refer to the quest to retake the Holy Land, but it refers to a quest for spiritual purity, and it refers to the journey of the individual soul. It is ultimately Nietzschean and Promethean – individual, self-motivating man against the rest, but with a recognition of ultimate human fallibility and decline. What makes “caped crusaders” ultimately no more than comic book is that there is never any possibility that they will do other than prevail. Real crusaders live with the reality that only through death can they meet perfection.
Bush is the heir of Kennedy. He even draws many of his votes from the same areas and the same demographics. And Kennedy was the heir of many before him. Bush is not truly a conservative, because, again to some extent like Kennedy, he lacks a sense of mortality and inherent human weakness, which is the mark of the true conservative, and the true King Arthur.
Today the opposite of Camelot is not Mordred. Today the opposite of Camelot is Sherwood Forest. Where Camelot is the belief that grace can descend from on high and be bestowed on us by our betters, Sherwood Forest is class solidarity. It is the belief that taking from others can be right if by doing so we lay claim to our own equality with anyone. That our poverty and powerlessness are caused by others’ exploitation and we have a right to redress it. Sherwood Forest legitimizes acts of violence committed against those only tenuously connected to the oppressor.
When it comes to Iraq what we are seeing in Western Countries is a debate centred around the two paradigms of our civilization – Camelot and Sherwood Forest. We in Australia generally fall on the Sherwood Forest side of the divide. Along with many Australians I winced at all the Nolan Ned Kellies stepping out of their dunnies at the opening of the Olympics, but I am a Camelotian minority in this country which sings Waltzing Matilda, a story about an itinerant thief, as its unofficial anthem.
I am surprised that more of us aren’t out there covertly barracking for Saddam Hussein. Certainly the arguments over Iraq are not about the pragmatics of what has happened. Instead, we are using Iraq as the latest backdrop for the ceaseless arguments between the individualists and the collectivists. There are those who say that the US brought it on itself, as they might justify Robin of Locksley’s rape and pillage of a friar on the basis that he once said mass for King John. Then there are those who believe that laying a lance in rest and slaughtering a few dragons can bring peace not just to Iraq but to the whole Middle East.
In fact, neither side is right. Nor should either side be right. Political reality is held in tension by these two sets of beliefs. At the end of The Once and Future King Arthur is strapping on his armour to go out and fight his last battle. Ominously the sound of the new fangled cannon is heard in the wind. Sometimes it is more noble to have tried and died in the event than not to have tried at all. The Kennedy legend tells us that this is true. Bin Laden, Hussein and their fatwas say this is true. What they do is ask of us the question – what is it you are prepared to do for your country, and what does it stand for anymore?

For some reason best known to them the Courier Mail and the Sunday Mail tend to use NFO Australia for their opinion polling, and the results are generally not right. The weekend after Hanson’s release this organization had One Nation polling 12 percent, Labor 30 percent, Nationals 8 percent and Liberals 17 percent. Now we have some credible polling. The Roy Morgan organization (yes I know they called the last Federal election wrong, but they were within a permissible statistical margin of error), polling the two weekends after Hanson was released got the following results: Labor 59.5 percent, Liberals 20.5 percent, Nationals 9.5%, One Nation 6%, Greens 5% and Democrats 2%.
Morgan seems to me to be much closer to the mark and it shows that the National Party has got more serious things to worry about than the strength of the One Nation vote. How can a party that is the choice of less than one in ten Queenslanders pretend that it is in a position to run the state after the next election? And how could the Liberal Party allow them to evenly split the seats they are contesting between them?
Speaking about contesting seats, Adrian Schrinner the Liberal Candidate for the city council ward of East Brisbane where I live has been very active putting out material, but I have yet to hear from the state candidate, even though a state election is likely to occur before a council one. This is because they haven’t preselected anyone. No-one wants the job.
Both the ward of East Brisbane and the state seat of Greenslopes are seats you must hold if you are going to form a government. Obviously the Libs are serious about town hall, but not about the state. Well, if they decide to start expulsion proceedings against me tomorrow at their State Council, as threatened, maybe I should run as an independent!