Until recently I taught a unit in Futures Studies. One of the things you learn in such a ‘discipline’ is never to predict.
So here is my prediction: before the year is out, George Bush Jr, Tony Blair and John Howard will all be out of office.
But here’s the big caveat: this will only happen as long as no dramatic new event in relation to terrorism occurs in the US, Britain or Australia, or somewhere else but which directly affects one of these nations in a serious fashion.
The obvious connection between these leaders is the War on Iraq. Bush and Howard are right wing leaders who have played heavily on social division, national security and generally the emotion of fear. Blair is a Thatcherite reformist leader of ‘New Labour’, and the only remaining genuine ‘Third Way’ leader, who chose to align himself with the right wing agenda of George Bush because he thought he could influence the actions of the only global hyperpower.
Blair will go because the War on Iraq, the failure to find WMD, the death of David Kelly and even the Hutton Report (and its assault on that bastion of British culture, the BBC), plus a few other domestic maters, make him look like a cynical liar. The fact that he seems to be such a sincere, moral, even religious man only makes it worse. The British public will want shot of him, and the only real question is whether the Labour Party rids itself of him first or the Tories benefit and claim government. I’d bet on the first scenario.
Bush will go because Americans do remember how the last election was won, the American electorate is split but demographic trends are boosting the Democrats, and mainly because after being appointed president, this man who sold himself as a moderate conservative ran the most right wing political agenda in many decades. In doing so he has rejuvenated the Democratic Party, who even now, in choosing the most ‘electable’ candidate, are showing a new found determination to rid themselves and the US of Bush. Kerry, Dean, Clarke or Edwards can all beat Bush.
The fact is, despite a lickspittle mass media, the American public does not like Bush and given a reasonable excuse (read, Democrat alternative), they will dump him.
And that is just about the story for John Howard too. He has only managed to succeed because Labor has been completely incompetent at the national level, and because of the docile compliance of the Australian mass media.
Labor went wrong when, after a decade of dramatic change due to globalisation, the ALP federal caucus dumped Bob Hawke and made Paul Keating leader. Whatever their actual relative strengths, the electorate did not trust Keating and he only won his first election due to the Liberal Party’s Fightback platform. When Keating went in the next election, he was replaced as a matter of course by the next man in line, the right wing, (in ALP terms) competent and nice but very limited Kim Beazley. When he failed, he was replaced by the next man in line, the slightly less right wing, competent and nice but very limited Simon Crean. These honest plodders, leading a divided, fractious party largely bereft of new ideas, were never any match for perhaps the most dishonest prime minister in our history and a compliant mass media. Some of this was the result of structural effects of the ALP winning national government in 1983, a period of marked global change. Much of it was due to long term problems in the way the ALP works that promoted personal power over the good of the party.
Australians voted for John Howard because they saw no alternative, and that lack of enthusiasm was reflected in the rise of The Greens, Democrats and for a while One Nation as well as independents to form a ‘third force’ in Australian politics.
Now the ALP has a real leader in Mark Latham, the ALP is coming awake again and even the media – who do need fresh content – are paying attention. The ALP, which had become increasingly corrupted by personal careerism – a legacy of the fat years under Hawke – has remembered what it is supposed to do and rallied behind Latham. Latham has so far straddled the gap between old Labor ideals and the need for new thinking sucessfully, and applied genuine personal discipline. Success should asist him to keep at it.
Cynics might assert that Bush or Howard might contrive some sort of national security event to shove their electorate back onto fear mode, but the lies about WMD in Iraq have raised the level of scepticism, perhaps even in the media. Not being cynical myself, I’m fairly confident that something like this is unlikely.
So, with a little luck we’ll have new leaders in the US, Britain and Australia by 2005. And in the US and Australia at least, these men will have been elected with a definite mandate to do things very differently.

The ALP national Conference was always going to be a major test for Mark Latham as new leader. What we have seen so far is Latham the Labor leader as opposed to Latham the ‘Third Way’ theorist.
Like many others, I have not been excited by Latham’s efforts at adapting ‘Third Way’ ideas to Australia, and I consider these notions somewhat out of date anyway. However, I have always appreciated Latham’s attempts to act as an intellectual in a country that does not greatly value this ability. He has at least shown he can think in a sustained way about the big issues, which is an outstanding feat for an Australian politician.
Australia is obsessed with the physical. Our heroes are sportsmen (sic) or sometimes soldiers. You know, action men. If we notice academics at all it is usually the physical scientists – after all, they actually make physical changes. To claim to be an intellectual in Australia is a risky thing, especially if you are expressly focussed on that strange art, politics. So I think we always have to recognise the courage that goes into such an effort, an attempt only made by Latham, Lindsay Tanner and few others in this generation of political leaders. After all, they could have been busy getting on the phone with their political mates to shore up personal support or organising jobs for their relatives.
But with this intellectual legacy, which took plenty of hard work, it was always going to be interesting to see how Latham responded to being ALP leader. So far, it seems like he has shifted to a more traditional Labor position of defending core principles, and constituencies, while promising progressive changes in controversial but structurally less important areas.
Thus, he says Labor will take a more independent foreign affairs line, return to a more explicitly social justice based approach to fundamental needs like health and education, and return to a more negotiated mode of industrial relations, including revamping the arbitration system. As for that hot topic of asylum seekers, he is opting to treat the asylum seekers better while going after the actual people smugglers. This is all remediation more than some sort of genuine reform program, like his hero Gough Whitlam introduced, but times are different, and it is a start.
It was particularly interesting seeing Latham take on the ultra-conservative Howard view of Australia head on. He talks about a ‘big Australia’ and the need to confront fear. I have written in ‘Online Opinion’ on Howard’s reconstruction of Australian society into one based on selfishness and fear (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/2003/Jan03/McMahon.htm). This is a cornerstone of Howard’s intent to follow the American model of socio-economic development, as opposed to a continental European or Asian version (let alone an Australian one). The twin pillars of this approach are to isolate individuals (or at best nuclear families) who must depend on their own sustained efforts to compete within various markets (employment, health, education, retirement funding, etc) and who can expect decreasing support from public institutions. This in turn allows and is strengthened by a xenophobic national identity reliant on US protection in what is assumed to be an intrinsically hostile world. This is Howard’s own mindset, and he has endeavoured, with some success, to impose it on the national psyche.
Any Labor government has to confront this development and give Australians something better to believe in (I’ve also written on this, see: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=712).
There are big contests ahead, about so-called ‘free trade’ agreements for instance, but so far Latham is treading a middle road between responsible Labor leader and fiery intellectual with some degree of success. We’ll see if Prince Hal does in fact turn into King Henry, but so far the signs are good.

Bird flu – it doesn’t have the apocalyptic sound of SARS or AIDS or any of the other acronyms that made you wonder if this is what Nostradamus was on about, but it might just be the disease that makes us face the new realities of the 21st century.
SARS was beaten by unprecedented cooperation between national authorities to coordinate action affecting a number of crucial global systems, including those related to health and air travel. Even China, perhaps the last relatively independent nation of any worth left, got with the script, fessed up and took appropriate action. A disease with a kill rate of around 10% and that could have potentially wiped out millions was stopped in its tracks – for now.
Underlying the problem of SARS, bird flu, BSE and whole host of other nasties is the problem that we treat animals like industrial commodities. The constant and intense interaction between animals and humans in unhygienic conditions is not new, although it is clearly exacerbated by population pressure, but the capacity of the resultant diseases to travel and instantly infect multi-millions instead of just thousands is. We have to rethink these practices or we face a perpetual threat from this sort of disease.
There are real lessons in these diseases for humanity: indeed, there is something fundamental going on right now that receives minimal public acknowledgment but that will shape how we live in the coming century as much as anything else. We are now to all intents and purposes a genuine global society. These diseases are just confirmation of that increasingly obvious fact.
But there is a growing disjuncture between physical reality and our social formations. The problem is that authority still lies with nation-states which are naturally secretive. Such secrecy has been a cornerstone of national security, to bluff international rivals and contain domestic dissent. For centuries good old ‘reasons of state’ have justified any lie or obfuscation.
We just can’t afford this approach any more. To deal with global problems, like infectious disease and climate change, humanity as a species must be sovereign, not some entity called Thailand or China or Australia. If we want to make sure any country adopts practices that minimise the risks of potentially pandemic disease, we must know what is happening everywhere and we must be able to intervene anywhere. This inevitably leads to the need for constant intervention in some areas to eradicate unsafe practices, and this means support for the development of alternatives. Suddenly, the busy street markets of southern China are as important to everyone as the need to abolish weapons of mass destruction.
So there is a new principle at work. Previously we needed international cooperation to prevent nations from going to war with each other. That is, information exchange and collaboration were necessary to prevent the action of war. Now we need constant communication and collaboration between nations to prevent the rise of diseases which will inevitably appear otherwise. Thus we need to be pro-active in safeguarding global health. This will require cooperation between governments and other organisations of unprecedented sophistication.
Which brings me to Mark Latham and the Tasmanian old growth forests. Latham will clearly make some kind of gesture to the Greenies on this issue, and to some extent at least re-enact the Federal intervention by Prime Minister Hawke to save the Gordon below Franklin River, also in Tasmania.
In the light of the comments above, this raises interesting questions about sovereignty. When is it suitable for a wider authority to intervene to overcome the actions of a smaller authority? For instance, the south west of Western Australia is an extraordinary reserve of unique genetic resources, including a large percentage of the world’s wild flower species and unique old growth forests. WA governments have always been development focused and treated this region as valuable land for farming and more recently holiday housing. Although this approach is changing, it could just as easily go back to the development at all costs approach under certain circumstances.
So, would it be reasonable for a global authority to step in and demand better management of this unique global resource to guarantee its survival, as Hawke did and Latham may well do in Tasmania? If so, who would pay for it?
Of course, that global body the IMF intervenes and radically transforms the economics of certain countries as a matter of course. This intervention is justified on economic grounds. How long before such actions occur on the grounds of global health or rare global resource protection? And will the possible global genetic resource protection authority demand enhanced quarantine measures to protect genetic variety just as the global trade authority (the existing WTO) demands their cessation?
Interesting times ahead, folks.

I live near the Swan River where each Australia Day there is a ‘sky-show’ of fireworks at night. It is mostly an advertising stunt by various Perth media, but it regularly attracts some 300,000 plus people on the night. Nothing else approaches this kind of crowd in Perth.
I missed the show as usual, so I strolled down to the riverside to check out the aftermath. It looked just like a battlefield with mounds of detritus, a carpet of glittering glass shards and plenty of bloodstains, but no actual bodies, and this is after the initial clean up. Rubbish litters the river and branches were torn from trees and bushes.
Apparently there was a near riot, with the media claiming about a thousand people involved and many injuries including cops. The cops claimed they were going to crack down on the public drinking that characterises the night. Yeah, right.
So what does this display of popular participation tell us about Australia and Australians?
Well, we like to be entertained – no way else you’ll get all these people to turn up – and preferably for free. We don’t give a toss about the environment. And we are a bunch of junk food scoffing drunks who don’t mind a bit of biffo.
It isn’t quite that bad, but surveying the truly impressive amount of junk – including lounge suites and various other large items of furniture – and blood left behind, you’d never guess it.
Oh, and everything not moving was plastered with stickers by the local right-wing nationalist bunch trying to make a comeback. We’ll see if the council prosecutes them for littering. I will say that their posters are the least aesthetic I’ve seen in ages. No colours, no eye-catching logo, dull slogans – these guys need serious help from an advertising agency.
Speaking of Oz Day and out dubious self-perception, I think this is why David Hookes’ death caused so much consternation. Hookesy was how Australians like to think we are – blokey, bit of a larrikin, easy-going, risk-taking but also really talented. The fact that we are more and more nothing like this is why we feel his going so much.
It’d be nice to think his stupid death will generate a debate about the strong violence of Australian male culture, let alone the inherently violent character of the burgeoning ‘security’ business. Hookesy played cricket like it was a game, fun, and it would be good to see this spirit re-enter the increasingly business-like character of sport. And violence, especially when people train to perfect their skills at it, has minimal place on the field and none off.

It looks increasingly likely that Senator John Kerry will win the Democrat nomination for President of the US. Senator Joseph Lieberman and General Wesley Clark will test their chances in New Hampshire, and Senator John Edwards is still around the mark. Congressman Dick Gephardt is out, and the other Democrat candidates already look dead in the water.
Early hope ex-Governor Howard dean is in trouble. Supposedly hurt by his primal scream after losing in Iowa and his negative and ‘angry’ character, he is apparently perceived as being ‘un-presidential’. His biggest mistake was probably showing real emotion on TV, footage that can be endlessly replayed by his rivals, and then Bush if it came to that, to present him as unbalanced. Dean forgot that, as Marshall McLuhan put it, TV is a cool medium; rant all you like on radio (in fact, that’s about all shock jocks do), but stay cool on TV.
Edwards is selling himself as a kind of southern JFK, or maybe a cross between JFK and Clinton. Kerry, otherwise seen as a worthy but dull Washington insider, is now painted as being this strange thing, ‘presidential’.
But wait, the current US president is – as ex-Treasury Secretary O’Neill has just confirmed – a dull, passive and inarticulate second-rater. So is this what ‘presidential’ means?
No, of course what ‘presidential’ actually means is whatever the mass media decide it means. If they wanted to the media could have interpreted Dean’s primal scream as a cry from the heart by a genuine human being frustrated by the political system, allowing him to continue playing the role that almost all presidents since at least Carter have tried to claim, that of the uncorrupted political outsider. Now Dean’s minders are in damage control mode trying to make him seem more in control, more competent in a typically political way, and thus ‘presidential’.
It is all a complete crock run by and for by the American mass media. A highly concentrated mass media run by explicitly right wing billionaires like Rupert Murdoch or core US corporations like GE and Viacom.
Interestingly, an Internet–based organisation called ‘Move-On’, understanding the dominance of the mass media in US politics, raised some $2 million to place an ad in the Super Bowl TV coverage, that most important ad slot of all. But CBS declined to run it, calling it too political. The ad criticised Bush’s growing deficit, a position taken not only by a majority of the Democrats but also by a growing number of Republicans in Congress. Not to mention just about every reputable economist in the world. Coincidentally, CBS is owned by Viacom who happen to be involved with delicate negotiations with the Bush administration right now.
So, the space for political discourse, increasingly created and then filled by the mass media, is not available to all, even if they have the cash.
The most salient thing about all this though is the way the Democrats themselves are endeavouring to make sure an ‘electable’ candidate challenges Bush. They can hardly rail against the pro-Bush media because they are trying to make their candidate as near to the media determined criterion of ‘electability’ as possible. In this sense, the Democrats are doing the job of removing any serious political difference themselves.
In TV-style politics it is important to not push controversial policy and to look OK. Thus telegenic and young Senator Edwards has a chance, and dull but tall and big-haired Senator Kerry does too.
The trouble is that under Bush, who initially ran for president as a moderate conservative and then acted as a truly right wing president, the political environment in the US has lurched to the right. The current assumption of ongoing tax cuts in the face of growing debt is a case in point. So if the democrats want to make any genuine inroads into this right wing project, sooner or later they will have to take risks.
In Australia, Labor faces similar problems. Their big advantage is Mark Latham, already installed as unchallengeable (for a while) leader who the voters will expect to do things and not just talk. Latham is already acting more like a leader who acknowledges Labor’s social justice heritage and his previous ‘third way’ ideas have not surfaced. His position on asylum seekers is at least an alternative to the government’s, although he still has work to do within the ALP on that one. Latham’s prior ideational activism, even if it is controversial in terms of ALP ideology, is a benefit in the sense that people expect him to engage in a contest of ideas. He is, by Australian political standards, an intellectual.
Latham faces the same big problem the US Democrats do – the mass media. I’m not sure he did enjoy much of a honeymoon, but his very outspokenness will attract media attention, which could easily go bad. But if he can draw Howard out of his smug ‘I am Australia, so I don’t need to explain anything’ role to actually debate where Australia is heading, he has a real chance of toppling the government.
In terms of the national political process Australia is heading in the same direction as the US, and there are explicit parallels between Labor and the US Democrats. But our political system still allows political identities, as opposed to media creations, to gain political leadership. If we can regenerate and maintain a culture of sustained political debate in this country, we still have a chance to avoid the US example which more and more presents political stereotypes instead of concepts. The mass media won’t help, so it is down to alternative media operations (like Online Opinion, Crikey.Com, etc), the political parties themselves and the public to keep the discussion of content in politics alive.
So debate – messy as it is – is intrinsically good, and if the major parties close it down, new parties and people will have to rise to revitalise it.

PC stands for political correctness, but in the culture wars now hotting up in the western world, and particularly in the US and Australia, it is taking on a much wider meaning. Increasingly it means, or signifies, anything that does not support the ever-narrowing views of leaders like George Bush and John Howard.
A brief history of how and why this ideological tool arose: as modern western society emerged for the millennium long dark ages, when arbitrary religious and aristocratic power dominated, several different principles of social organisation vied to replace the old ideational order. Among them were newly invented ‘science’ and newly reinvigorated ‘capitalism’, both underlaid by a new humanism and acceptance of the need to ask questions and seek new answers (sometimes called ‘the enlightenment’) about the world and society.
Due to the immense power struggle between different civilisations and regions, exacerbated by the growth of industrialisation and then mass industrialisation, a hybrid social form known as nationalism emerged which best balanced the somewhat contradictory needs of social cohesion, economic development and defence. Nationalism reconstructed humans as being members, citizens, of particular nation states, as opposed to Catholics or Welsh or working class or women. This was very effective in promoting economic growth and relative social stability, but also generated catastrophic warfare.
States, which had become very important under nationalist systems, maintained social cohesion through a balancing of freedom and control. Eventually this balance became more liberal as control was more and more guaranteed by rising living standards and political legitimation through democracy, so that eventually even the state could be criticised.
However, in the last few decades we have seen the rise of a new social order, potentially global in scale, which is replacing nationalism. Built on techno-economic growth it also embodies an increasingly global mass culture, mostly American in flavour. George Bush and John Howard, although national leaders, represent one form of political manifestation of this logic. Being extremely authoritarian in approach, they are less tolerant of dissent, including criticism. Bush, Howard and the people behind them have understood that intellectual thought of any depth, and certainly any sustained criticism, are a problem for their program of socio-economic development. Based on increased liberal globalisation and US dominated global security, it is in actuality totalitarian in its attempt to reconstruct all human society as maximally productive in economic terms, and with the rich ever richer and the rest in trouble.
They thus find it necessary to undermine alternative viewpoints, or stories, of any kind. As such they are trying to re-interpret history and marginalise a whole series of alternative ways of seeing society, like socialism, feminism, environmentalism and even non-fundamentalist religion. So the point is that now almost any criticism of the prevailing mainstream position (markets are good, US military power is good, wealth is good, and life is simple) as enunciated by leaders like Bush and Howard, is seen as problematic. In particular, any consideration of the cost of this whole project, in human or environmental terms, is unacceptable. Since any substantive criticism is unacceptable, a term which rejects the idea of criticism itself is needed. This is what the term PC actually means.
Being called PC is then becoming the equivalent of being labelled communist or pacifist or feminist in the past. It is the overall catch term that is code for ‘at best misguided, but probably actually malevolent’. It never has to be properly explained or justified, or evidence provided to support assertions made. The term becomes the reality.
PC actually means nothing, but it is coming to mean anything the people who like to use it want it to mean. ‘Politically correct’ is etymologically meaningless. It is just a label that means ‘disagrees with the current dominant ideology’. This denial of the right to criticise, of course, takes us back to the bad old days when any deviation from the all-encompassing doctrine was persecuted and suppressed as heresy.
And of course this is not about left V right, feminist V patriarchy, development V conservation, religion V secular society, etc. It is about having one big unquestionable idea or a diversity of ideas about the world works and how it can be made better.

For years now the pundits have been predicting the end of office work and a migration of work to the suburbs. The advent of high-capacity computers and the Internet has supposedly made it possible for information workers to work at home now, so-called teleworkers.
Well, this trend has been slow to develop for various reasons. One reason is that workers do not want to turn their home into a workplace. Often work is stressful, and they want to be able to physically leave it behind at night. Another is the constant distraction of children or partners, or chores that they could be doing instead. And another is the loss of status that comes with working in an office.
Anyway, for some years I’ve been grappling with the pluses and minuses of working at home, first as a PhD student, then as a part time academic, and now as a full time writer.
The main comment I have to make is the noise levels in suburbs these days. I have often lived in high rise units, which now have very high noise levels, thanks mainly to the wonderful technology of new stereo and TV sound systems. This is especially true the base notes, which are transmitted largely unattenuated though the very structure of the building. They now have this thing called a ‘subbie’ which will literally vibrate your teeth.
Another problem has been building sites. There is a building boom going on in my suburb. In my street a four-story house was built that took a whole year to build. The size of the new houses and the length of time to build them means that it is quite common for there to be at least one nearby building site at any time.
The problem is not so much the noise of work, although that can be distracting to say the least. On one site the demolition began at 6 AM on a Sunday and went on all morning; contractors regularly work on Saturdays and Sundays now. So, unlike the workers, you can at times get no break for weeks on end. Mostly workers keep to the rules, like not starting work before 7 AM. But if they don’t, there is stuff all you can do about it.
Nope, the worst problem is radios. These days site workers mostly have their radios on to work to. Sometimes they have big ones, in boom boxes or in their cars, so they can entertain the whole site.
Th point about radios is that they go on all day, and the whole content is designed to keep you listening. So you get one different song after another (or if you are unlucky, some rabid shock-jock), and frenetic talk in between, not to mention the ads. All this has been carefully designed over decades of practice by radio programmers and advertisers to make sure the listener does not switch the noise into ignore mode in their head. Which raises interesting questions about worker productivity while listening to radios (not to mention TVs), but that’s another issue.
So, there I was a few years ago, just about finished my doctoral thesis when building sites sprang up all around me. I tried asking the workers to turn their radios down (so only they could hear them, not the whole street). Some complied, most didn’t, and on occasion they turned them up to show me who was boss. Building workers, especially tradesmen, are on the whole very macho types and don’t like changing their ways for anyone. These guys are the last of the rugged individualists. I know, I’ve worked as a brickie’s labourer.
Even if you get on to the builder, which I did, they do not discipline the many contractors who turn up on site.
Anyway, thinking there must be some relevant noise pollution laws, I tried the state government, who told me it was a council issue. They in turn tut-tutted, but basically they could do stuff all, the laws on sound pollution are so weak. The most sympathetic council officer I spoke to regaled me with truly horrifying tales of building workers taking massive speakers to work so they could hear the radio over the noise of the cement mixer or tile cutter, and how there was nothing the council could do about it. I became disillusioned.
So, eventually, I moved, and completed by PhD.
And so now I sit in my unit listening to the lawn mowing contractors with their roller mowers, rotary mowers, edgers, whipper-snippers and blowers, and the profusion of mobile carpet cleaners, pool cleaners and mechanics with their power generators who now prowl the suburbs, and the automatic sprinkler systems, pool pumps, and air conditioners, and of course the house and car burglar alarms (they mostly seem to cut off after about twenty minutes, but not always) and in between I get some work done.

Muslim women the world over are marching in protest against the decision of the French Government to ban the wearing of the hijab in schools. Why aren’t Christians marching as well? The French government decision doesn’t just ban Muslim headscarves, but Christian symbols such as cross and crucifix as well. It equates suppression of the expression of a whole class of ideas with preserving an environment where people are free to make up their own minds without coercion. But how do you make up your own mind when you are denied a proper knowledge of the alternatives? Enforcement of a secular worldview precludes the understanding of anything but that world. This decision oversteps the mark and gives us a glimpse of the grey secular future to which the unthinking promulgation of liberal values can lead.
Not that we should be surprised. It is happening in France, a country with a tradition of anti-clericalism which, despite its reputation as being one of the two great homes of European thought, saw large segments of its population fall prey to fascism during World War II. Even now Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front is a more enduring, popular and blatantly fascist organization than Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.
While the struggle in the Middle East is portrayed by people like terrorist Osama bin Laden and politician Mahathir Mohamad as a struggle between religions, in truth the Christian religion in the West long ago stopped struggling and inverted self defence into self deference. Now Christians are more likely to stand up for the rights of other religions than stand up for their own.
When Christian groups protest against works of art such as the “Piss Christ” or the film The Exorcist they are ridiculed as being intolerant and small-minded, just as often by other Christians as by secular groups. Many Christians seem very comfortable defending the rights of other rligious groups, and even suggesting that they have equivalence with the Christian tradition, and uncomfortable defending their own. What is the point in these people’s Christianity?
The latest assault on Christianity, or at least one of its denominations, arises from the sins of a Catholic Priest, Fr Michael McArdle who apparently confessed 1500 times to acts of paedophilia but was never once reported to authorities by any of the priests who heard his confession. A legal maxim holds than hard cases make bad law, and this is self-obviously a hard case. This has been written up by the press as a failure of the church. This analysis completely misunderstands the church’s position as well as being a failure of logic.
The Christian tradition from which I come doesn’t recognize confession to a priest. Protestants believe that they can and should confess their sins directly to God without the need of a mediator. Catholics also believe that this is possible, but confession (the rite of reconciliation) is one of the defining sacraments of Roman Catholicism. Partly due to a lack of priests, and I suspect partly due to the largely “protestant” disposition of contemporary society, many Australian Catholics have been avoiding the confessional and using what Catholics call the “general rite”. This is essentially a formal part of the service where they personally and privately confess to God on their own, without confessing to a priest. When this practice was brought to the papal attention it was banned as being contrary to Catholic teaching.
Even so, in some respects the two are virtually identical. When a Catholic confesses to a priest, the priest is “in loco Deus” (my phrase so apologies if it isn’t good Latin). When I confess to God, it is between me and God. He doesn’t fill in civil paperwork and he dispenses justice in his own way and to his own timetable. Given my materialistic approach to Christianity, it is really not much different from me talking to myself. A Catholic priest is no more ready or bound to fill-in civilian paperwork and report sinners than God. And in a way the confessional is the sinner talking to himself with the priest providing an objective and external check. The justice that may be meted out for the sin is certainly not of this world, and while the priest is believed to have the ability to forgive sin and can prescribe certain acts of contrition, he can’t enforce them.
A confessor must find himself at times in an extremely emotionally taxing situation when he knows because of a confession that someone has committed a crime and may do so again, but he cannot do anything about it because his role is not to become an arm of the civil authority. In fact, were he to do so, he would breach the faith put in him when the confession is made. His position is the unavoidable consequence of believing in a spiritual authority which is all-knowing andall-powerful. Catholics ought to be prepared to assert that spiritual authority in this debate.
However, the argument doesn’t even need to hinge on that. Those who say that the confessor should be obliged to report the sinner neglect one salient fact. A confessor under that obligation would not be given the confession in the first place. Whatever priests like McArdle say now, if they had wanted to tell someone who would report them, they could have – there are police stations in most towns. They chose to only tell their confessor because self-preservation, not absolution, was their highest motive.
Logically, in the case of paedophiles, forcing confessors to tell all wouldn’t lead to more arrests because paedophiles just wouldn’t confess in the first place. What it would lead to is the perpetrators having fewer external checks on their behaviour and perhaps committing ever more crimes as a result. They certainly wouldn’t stop committing crimes. It is simplistic and mere populism to suggest otherwise.
It’s hard to believe that this sort of illogical intolerant attack could occur if Christians were prepared to defend and explain themselves. 9/11 and its aftermaths had some obvious lessons, but there are less obvious ones as well. One of these is that whatever else Muslims have, some of them have a passion for what they believe that is more virile and potent than our passion for tolerance. For our civilization to fulfill its promise there must be room for the irrational just as much as there is room for the rational. We all ought to be out there on the streets protesting for the hijab. It is a symbol for what should be good in our society just as much as the cross or the crucifix.

After a brilliant start, the current one day cricket series is heading south (or is it north in the southern hemisphere?). Zimbabwe have been crushed in the last three games, putting up as much of a fight as my local grade team would (South Perth).
Of course, this Zimbabwean side was hit hard by the desertion of two of its best players for political reasons. That is an interesting precedent. Will we see the scrupulously honest Adam Gilchrist – who is trying valiantly to revive ‘walking’ when the batsman knows he is out, and embarrassing the hell out of all the other batsmen – quit over his national leader’s predilection for the big blowie?
Ah, how I recall the great debate in the mid 1960s over walking. It was, looking back, the beginning of the end of cricket as a game for gents, as opposed to a profitable business.
As I said to Denis Lillee the other day (I have to get my mileage out of a chat down the laundrette with the world’s greatest fast bowler, who has hopefully worked out Brett Lee’s annoying no-ball problem and got him back to something like full pace), there is no game I know of where a player can be so easily out of the game as a batsman in cricket. Sometimes you get another go in the second innings, but not always. So judging a batsman out is inordinately important to the game and of course to the batsman.
This is why cricket is such a psychological game. People talk about golf in these terms, but at least in golf you keep getting more shots to work it out. In cricket you make one mistake, maybe a matter of millimetres, and that’s it, out.
But back to the one day series. There is simply no contest at the moment from Zimbabwe. Even these feats, like Gilly’s huge innings, are suspect against such weak opposition. After all, Mark Waugh made his record total against the West Indies. So watching the Australian and Indian batsmen rack up huge scores and their bowlers whip through the Zimbabwean top order is not really entertaining. It just gets ridiculous. Will Satchin Tendulkar kill a close in fielder with a well-timed pull shot on his way to a triple century? Will Jason Gillespie take five for nought before Heath Streak shows the Zimbabean top order how to bat? Streak should be collecting about half the Zimbabwean match payments right now. Too bad he can’t keep wickets as well.
I know Zimbabwe need experience, but they have been on the international scene for years now – they even beat Australia in a World Cup game decades ago. Furthermore, their weakness is to a certain degree due to domestic politics. This point has been made by WA batsman Murray Goodwin, albeit focussing on the race issue, who was then silenced by the ACB for speaking out. Interestingly, this denial of basic human rights by the ever authoritarian ACB has gone unchallenged as far as I know.
So, if the ACB wants to have these triangular series, it has to come up with three teams that can compete. Each of these Zimbabwean games lets the excitement generated the India-Australia games dissipate.
Perhaps in this day of commercial cricket and mercenary international coaches, Australia could hire out a few of the fringe players to Zimbabwe. Actually, Murray Goodwin is in good form right now…

M S Lawson
What madness drives us to have holidays? Why was I dragged away from my computer games and made to sit in the sun on a beach and be semi-drowned in the surf?
As for theme park rides, why is it considered fun to wait around for perhaps more than half an hour in one’s bathers and lug inflatable rafts up hills, just for the privilege of being terrified for one minute, then soaked, on an overgrown slippery dip?
There was a lot of holiday fun I could have done without but the low point was definitely the white Whitney Houston I encountered in a wax museum. I was out pricing boat hires with my five year old son when, very close to our hotel, we
found a wax museum.
It was hot, the museum was air conditioned, but when the women on the door wanted $28 for the two of us to go in (a tour of the “horror” section was extra) I should have walked away. The facility could not have been much larger than an average surburban house, and that did not add up to a lot of wax models to view for $28. But I was on holiday, I paid up.
And I was disappointed.
The models varied from okay to ordinary, to questionable. I did not like the model of Elizabeth Taylor – a beautiful women rendered ugly in wax. Then there was the model of Whitney Houston, who was shown as being white.
I checked the name again, looked at the face and scratched my head. I am far from knowledgable about the entertainment or music industry but I was under the distinct impression that Whitney Housten was a black singer and actress. (There was also a model of Michael Jackson which was also white, but that’s defensible.)
I am not one to demand my money back or even complain but the White Whitney Houston was so odd that I mentioned it to the receptionist on the way out.
“Umm – your model of Whitney Houston is white?”
“Oh yes sir, when she appeared at…” (I did not catch where; it was somewhere close by) “because of the lighting and make up in the photographs she appeared white. Do you know about such things sir?”
The explanation was so ridiculous that I just walked away. Serve me right for raising the issue in the first place, after paying $28. Next time I will take my computer games, rent a lap top, and may be watch the kids in the water while sitting under an umbrella, and definitely not go near a wax museum.