Many newly-popular ideas and newly-adopted policies are held sacred by ABC staff and supporters (the snug and the smug), but not by Paddy McGuinness.
1. “Stop the rot at the ABC,” The Australian, March 9, 1990, p. 13.
2. “Big Brother writes the syllabus,” 17-18/8/91
3. “Bureaucratic zealots rule the policy roost,” 30-31/5/92
4. “Politically correct ABC campaigns for Labor,” 27-28/2/93
5. “Voices of diversity deserve to be heard,” 23/2/94
6. “The Liberals’ media hurdle,” SMH, January 28, 1995, p. 30.
7. “Political correctness: intolerance unplugged,” 13/4/96
8. “‘Our ABC’ under scrutiny,” 18/7/96
9. “Good riddance to political correctness,” 12/7/97
10. “The trouble with censorship is we are two-faced about it,” 8/7/03

1.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Stop the rot at the ABC: divide and rule,”
The Australian, March 9, 1990, p. 13.

What is to be done about the Australian Broadcasting Corporation?

So far during this election campaign there have been many things to criticise in the comportment of the various media, but none more than the consistent bias against the Opposition and its leader, Andrew Peacock, displayed by the ABC. It took a letter from Tim Bowden — who uses the ABC to plug his own book — published in several newspapers to blow the gaff.

Clearly, Mr Bowden and many other ABC staff feel that the election of a Coalition government would present a greater threat to the continuation of the ABC along its present path than would even the financial stringency imposed by the Labor Government. Like the staff of the Commonwealth Bank, they feel that the ABC is theirs — not the government’s, not the public’s — and this comes first in all their considerations.

However, there is more to the problem than simple self-interest. So pervasive is the bias in the ABC that it is clear that many of the reporters, commentators, radio interviewers and so on are not really aware of their own assumptions.

There is a kind of corporate culture which has grown up in the organisation which is shared by, it seems, just about all of its talking heads and which treats what are really controversial and contentious positions as if they were self-evident, and automatically treats Liberal and National Party politicians, corporate chief executives, and people who do not share the unstated consensus as if they were somehow at fault and must be required to justify themselves or confess their errors.

When they refuse to do this, they become fair game for ridicule, discrediting and denigration.

Now, it must be said that in many respects it is difficult not to treat Mr Peacock from time to time as a target for ridicule. He does not have a particularly distinguished record in government, he (as appeared in the television debate between the leaders and the press gallery representatives) is not good at thinking on his feet, and he appears to have a core position on most policy which is solid marshmallow.

Nevertheless, he is leader of the alternative government, and of a Coalition which commands the loyalties of at rock-bottom some 40 per cent of the electorate. As such, he deserves some respect and a fair hearing. This he, and his colleagues, are generally denied by the ABC.

Of course, it is not that the ABC culture is particularly pro-Labor. They really detest the ALP, too, especially when it is in government. The ABC culture is really the aftermath of the kind of middle-class ageing radicalism which infected the youth of the 1960s and ’70s, and still persists as the vague orthodoxy of many who were still children in the ’70s. An example is the very odd use which crops up from time to time of the phrase “ideologically correct”.

This was originally satirical in intent, but has now come to be used quite seriously by those who share a certain mindset. (A variant which appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald recently was a reference to “a genuine person with sound ideals”.) In fact, it has very little to do with any ideals or principles, but refers to a mishmash of vague policy positions. One example: it is not “ideologically correct” to be sceptical about the contribution made by the land rights movement to Aboriginal welfare, whatever the facts.

The latest development in this mindset is, of course, the whole-hearted embrace of environmentalism in an uncritical and propagandistic version, so that most of what one hears or sees on the ABC with respect to environmental issues makes no attempt to achieve any balance or analytical approach.

Any attempt to argue the advisability of any form of environmentalism is greeted with responses ranging from sneering disbelief to sheer incomprehension. The latter is perhaps not surprising, since the intellectual standards and general knowledge of most of the ABC staff are not high.

Now, what is to be done about all this? Of course, censorship is not the answer, even if it were possible. The appointment of a supremo as head of the organisation who, unlike the present managing director, does not come out of the anti-Vietnam War RSL culture, would achieve little. It would simple arouse great resistance and non-cooperation, even stimulating the troops to greater bias and irresponsibility. Remember the fate of Geoffrey Whitehead.

A very large part of the problem is that the ABC is a large organisation in which no mechanism of responsibility exists. Unlike the commercial media, broadcasting or press, there is no bottom line in terms of customer response — there are no financial sanctions involved in an audience’s lack of interest or negative response to anything done by the ABC. It is not responsible to Parliament, and it is not even responsible to its own board in any practical sense. It is not responsible to the Broadcasting Tribunal, nor to any body like the Press Council. No one controls the ABC.

Nor does anyone, it seems, even control any part of it in the way in which an editor controls (in theory) a newspaper. Who is the editor of, say, the AM program? Who selects and supervises? What is the relationship between producer and presenter? Can either of them dismiss the other, or can someone else arbitrate between them?

These are interesting issues for research. The unsatisfactory state of the ABC is not, however, necessarily an argument against the existence of publicly financed radio and television broadcasters. Public service broadcasting, untrammelled by the need to produce short-term results and profits, clearly has an important role in a democratic community. But it needs mechanisms to ensure some form of responsibility.

A beginning in reform of the ABC might be to split it into its component parts. Public broadcasting does not all have to come under the one roof: and the great superiority in quality of SBS television compared with ABC television shows that competition within the public sector can be beneficial. A good start might, therefore, be to split the broadcasting functions of the ABC into three or more parts.

An independent television and radio news service is desirable, but there is no particular reason why this should be part of the same organisation as stations and networks. There is no reason that a national radio network should exist, or if it does, why there should be two of them under the same roof. Certainly, there is no case for a second ABC TV networks in the same organisation.

Ultimately, the cure for media monopolies like that of the ABC is competition and diversity. This is strongly opposed by those of “ideologically correct” bent, who feel that while large commercial conglomerates should be destroyed, large public-sector monopolies are to be encouraged and strengthened. Of course, it is easier to gain a share of power in a public organisation which is answerable to no one outside, whether shareholders, taxpayers, viewers or Parliament.

It should be clear by now to the Opposition that they will never get a fair run from the ABC as at present constituted. They might as well start developing a policy of dividing it and subjecting it to the same rules as the commercial media.

***
2.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Big Brother writes the syllabus,”
The Weekend Australian, August 17-18, 1991, p. 2.

Now that totalitarian communism has broken down in most countries it might seem that George Orwell’s famous book Nineteen Eighty-four has lost contemporary significance. But it needs to be remembered that, as Orwell himself pointed out, one of the institutions he had in mind was right where he lived — the British Broadcasting Corporation.

The BBC was, of course, the model for our own Australian Broadcasting Corporation and was the quintessential example of that kind of moralising interfering view of life, replete with the kind of views which today would be described as “politically correct” or ideologically sound.

Education departments are full of the same kind of people, most of them middle-aged or aging relics of the anti-Vietnam war movement, and the products of universities where respect for truth has long fled from history and other humanities departments.

So it is worth recalling Orwell’s account of the Party slogan: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

O’Brien the inquisitor explains to Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith:

You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you.

But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, IS truth.

The ABC, like O’Brien’s Party, also has a penchant for rewriting history, most notably in its Hindsight programs, but generally in its adherence to all the ideologically sound positions on the Vietnam war, the supposed genocidal attacks on Australian Aborigines, and so on.

O’Brienism is also clearly prevalent in the new draft history syllabus for years 7 to 10 in NSW high schools, which might as well have been drawn up by Ms Kirner’s minions in Victoria.

This offers the kids when it comes into effect a hotchpotch of slogans and causes, of tendentious versions of Australian and world history, which fits perfectly into the usually ill-informed world view of the products of the anti-Vietnam war movement (those aging warriors of moratorium marches and anti-Springbok demonstrations, frozen into the crude political views of that era, endlessly reminishing about the great days, who have become known as the AVRSL — the RSL of the anti-Vietnam war movement).

Virtually every “strand” of the syllabus, mandatory or otherwise, displays the ideological agenda of the AVRSL — for example, on Australia, Asia and the World in the 90th Century it lists “concepts and issues” as follows: British Empire, Commonwealth of Nations, conflict and war, immigration, multiculturalism, racism, White Australia, Depression, Cold War, conscription, domino theory, League of Nations, United Nations, nationalism, EEC, diplomacy, foreign policy, refugee, republicanism, superpower, capitalism, communism, fascism, alliances, Third World, patriotism, militarism, imperialism, colonialism, socialism.

There is no doubt that in many respects this has been a pretty horrible century. But it has also been a century of amazing scientific and technological achievement, the spread of vigorous democracy all over the world, astonishing increases in living standards, virtually universal education and literacy in all but a few countries, great artistic and literary achievement, and the rise of Asia to a degree which heralds the 21st century as the Pacific century.

Most of the topics mentioned would be difficult for children to grasp, and together present a dismal and prejudiced view of the world, heavily biased against science and industry.

The strand on “exploring our heritage” includes environmental movements, historic sites, Aboriginal sites, green bans, sustainable development and suchlike, but ignores settlement, development, the growth of agriculture and industry, exploration, mineral discoveries and gold rushes — virtually everything that has made Australia what it is. And on “preserving our heritage” it lists land rights, dams, forests, uranium, military bases and green bans as issues.

Another mandatory strand is “Aboriginal Australian history since contact”. Here is the complete list of “significant concepts and issues”: assimilation, integration, land rights, dispossession, culture conflict, resistance, frontier warfare and resistance, reconciliation, Aboriginal protection Acts, resources and missions, self-determination, sovereignty, civil rights, land degradation, ownership of the past, reconstructing the past, colonisation, racism, discrimination, Aboriginal sacred sites, Aboriginality, apartheid, welfare, segregation, paternalism, alienation, terra nullius, indigenous invasion, genocide.

This reads like a jumbled index from a propaganda tract meant to imply that everything about white settlement of Australia has been bad and disgraceful.

It is also the provision of a vocabulary which will determine thinking about Australian history along the lines preferred, taking every wild claim about maltreatment as historical fact and ignoring the contemporary context, here and in other countries.

This is not about understanding the past in order not to repeat it, but about controlling the future through indoctrinating our children. For example, the infamous Myall Creek massacre is listed for study — but how often do people get reminded that the white perpetrators of that wicked deed were hanged for murder?

And of course, in a non-mandatory strand on early societies, Aboriginal Australia gets listed along with the Minoans, Myceneans, Sumerians, Jews etc as if there were somehow equivalence of values between the cultures. There is not; to pretend that they are comparable is a popular “ideologically sound” piece of nonsense.

Similarly, the strands of British, European and American history 1700-1914, and 20th century studies, are replete with buzzwords such as imperialism, colonialism, revolution, classes, trade unions, and so on.

There is a quite remarkable list of groups for study which will cater to every known form of paranoia — IRA, PLO, Red Brigade, Baader Meinhoff, Tamil Tigers, Mossad, KGB, CIA, MI5, ASIO, peacekeeping forces, Kurds, women’s movements, environmental groups, Jews, Muslims, Armenians and insurgents.

If you did not already know that this list was drawn up by a committee of thoroughly nice people in cardigans, you would be inclined to think the author of this syllabus was as crazy as a coot and dangerous into the bargain.

You have to remember that this collection of mouldy, trendy slogans is to be inflicted on children in the age group 12 to 16. They will not understand any of the real historical problems underlying the great issues of the modern world, nor will they have access to the range of sources which would make it clear that a textbook written along the lines laid down by the draft syllabus will be a bigoted and misleading picture of our past and the world’s past.

Instead, they will be encouraged to believe this is what the world was like, and will be like unless they share their teachers’ political prejudices. Who controls the past, controls the future.

***
3.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Bureaucratic zealots rule the policy roost,”
The Weekend Australian, May 30-31, 1992, p. 2.

The hasty withdrawal of the education kit for schools that treated farmers as vandals attacking the environment has been widely thought to discredit Ros Kelly, the Minister for the Environment who endorsed the kit unread. Or so she says.

It may indeed by true that she did not read it; a busy minister does not normally check every detail in a relatively routine operation such as this, depending rather on her department and her personal office staff to carry out such checking and to act with reasonable responsibility and sensitivity.

But it is not a matter of a bungle that discredits Mrs Kelly, as such things tend to be treated. If the story is as she tells it, she is blameless; it is a minor slip-up, embarrassing but of no significance as far as her performance as a minister is concerned.

However, I wonder if she would have objected to the content of the kit even if she had read it. On reports, it contains the kind of crude environmental propaganda and biased presentation of issues that would entirely match her own approach.

I have a strong suspicion that without noisy complaints from the National Farmers Federation and criticism from the Minister for Primary Industry, Mr Crean, she would have seen nothing wrong in the kit.

Nor, apparently, did anyone in her department who was responsible for its production, or any of her numerous staffers who may have seen it.

What this incident points to is far more important than any question relating to Mrs Kelly’s competence. It points to the total politicisation of environmental policy-making within the bureaucracy, and a lack of distance between the political aspects of policy and the process of bureaucratic advice.

The kit was prepared by the department (or, rather, those sections of the ragbag Department of Arts, Sport, Environment and Territories concerned with environmental propaganda and policy) in collaboration with environmental lobby groups. A large proportion of the funding of such environmental groups comes, of course, from the Government on the recommendation of the department.

It is pretty clear that the bureaucrats are no longer nonpartisan policy advisers but are strong proponents of current environmentalist orthodoxy, working with the advocacy groups rather than keeping an arms length from them. They are the governmental extension of environmentalism.

This suggests that Mrs Kelly may not be getting very good policy advice, delivered by apolitical civil servants who keep their personal views and prejudices separate from the process of policy-making. They seem to have become true believers.

The politicisation of this section of the Public Service will make it difficult for it to be seen as a source of independent advice by an incoming Coalition government.

Indeed, the Coalition would be well advised to pay particular attention to sorting out its bureaucratic, and indeed its scientific, advisers on environmental policy.

Of course, there will be many people in the department and other sectors of the Public Service who will have resisted this process. But the fact that such crude material could have been prepared for distribution to school children indicates that there are some who cannot tell the difference between their own beliefs and reality.

It is obvious that the Earth Summit which begins next week in Rio de Janeiro will be an expensive stunt, a response to pressures from green lobbies all over the world. Because it will not produce really ridiculous conclusions such as recommending the immediate close-down of most industry and the abandonment of conventional farming, it will be bitterly denounced by the eco-fascists.

But it has been organised only to appease them — the meeting should never have been allowed to go ahead. Nor should Australia be participating or encouraging the kind of nonsense which will flow, as wide as the Amazon, through Rio next week.

It is not just the bureaucracy which has been captured by the true believers. It is also the case that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation sees itself as a partisan advocate for environmentalism, and either sneers at or suppresses evidence contrary to any of the current fashions.

Far from being a corrective to this unscientific use of science, the Science Show is one of the worst offending sections of the ABC.

But back to the kit which was sent out to schools. This is only one of many examples of the kind of extremely unbalanced material which is distributed to the schools by those who, if they were doing their jobs properly, would know better.

A recent example in another field was a kit about parliament and the kinds of issues which come before it, distributed by the Parliamentary Education Office. In this case, those responsible for preparing the material alleged that it was not biased. One can only come to the conclusion that there are many people, in the teaching profession, in the bureaucracy and in the media such as the ABC, who are so imbued with the orthodoxies they espouse that they do not know the difference between bias and balanced presentation of issues.

Effectively, this kind of material is intended to influence the beliefs and political views of kids in the schools in the direction seen as right and proper by the people who prepare it. The fact that there might be others in the community who see things in a different light escaped them, and they are so wedded to their own views that they are unable to comprehend evidence to the contrary.

It is not just in matters of the environment or politics that this happens. Health policy these days is dominated by people who have a mindset with respect to habits, diet, exercise, smoking and drinking, which, while some aspects of it make sense, is overall a quasi-religious orthodoxy which often leads to total contempt for actual evidence.

Thus the Australian Bureau of Statistics recently published survey figures indicating that smokers might be healthier in some respects than non-smokers. (For example, 14 per cent of smokers suffer from hypertension against 22.6 per cent of those who have never smoked; of all long-term conditions surveyed, 11 per cent of smokers had none compared with 8.2 per cent of those who had never smoked and 6.6 per cent of ex-smokers.)

Instead of seriously discussing this, the anti-smoking lobby merely denied its validity, and then proceeded to celebrate a jury decision to award damages to a person who claimed passive smoking had damaged her health — as if a jury is fit to make decisions as to scientific truth, any more than a judge!

In all these areas, we are seeing not only active lobby groups spreading their views in the community, which they are entitled to do, but clearly influencing, perhaps converting, the thinking of the bureaucracy.

Indeed, in many areas such as health, welfare policy, education, science, media policy, the environment and conservation — wherever soft science flourishes, often in the hands of ideologues — there has emerged a new breed of bureaucratic zealot, ardently supported in the universities and in the lobby groups, puritanical, intolerant and determined to get their way, making policy on the basis of wild speculation about what is and what might be the case in the future.

Irony of ironies, these are the people who attack the supposedly dominant orthodoxy of economic rationalism.

***
4.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Politically correct ABC campaigns for Labor,”
The Weekend Australian, February 27-28, 1993, p. 2.

The coverage of the federal election by the newspapers, television and radio so far has been pretty fair. Everybody agrees there is an even chance of a change of government and many agree it is really a choice between a Government that deserves to lose and an Opposition that does not clearly deserve to win.

One of the paradoxes of the campaign is most of the Canberra press gallery (with some important exceptions) has for years treated the issues in Canberra as essentially matters of personalities, treating major issues of policy as relatively unimportant.

How many leadership beat-ups, shark-attacks on particular individuals such as Graham Richardson or Leo McLeay, complaints about staying in expensive hotels of the kind journalists habitually stay in on international trips and accounts of silly little encounters during Question Time have there been in proportion to serious analyses of policy? A hundred to one?

But now policy does not matter, now we are in the midst of an election campaign about the credibility of the parties, and the central issue of which side can be trusted to govern well and abandon its election promises the day after the election, we get continual niggling about the minutiae of policy. The only important issue of this campaign is the personalities of the leaders and the quality of the frontbenchers. Yet there have been few analyses of the people who will constitute the next government, of whatever political colour.

Then there is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Some of the employees of this gigantic publicly financed entity have made valiant efforts to be even-handed — but the message comes over very clearly that the ABC is hoping for the Government to be re-elected. This is not just a matter of the trivial 10 per cent cut of its half-billion-dollar budget which the Coalition has promised.

Nor is it a matter of interference in its internal decisions. For example, when the Opposition suggested the ABC might be directed to maintain or extend its rural services, this was presented as interference. Yet when the Prime Minister endorsed the ABC and all its works and guaranteed an extension of the broadcasting facilities of its pop station, 2JJJ, there was no such complaint.

Indeed, the message that comes over very clearly especially from ABC radio is the network is desperately campaigning for the re-election of the Labor Government.

There is much more to this than merely a matter of budgets. This was brought home to me by a copy of a staff memo on Equal Employment Opportunity that appeared on my fax machine a couple of days ago. Its author was Mr Paddy Conroy, ABC director, television — I have spent the past couple of days trying unsuccessfully to contact him on the subject.

This memo makes it quite clear the ABC is turning itself into an organisation totally dominated by “politically correct” attitudes. Do you wonder why so many incompetent young women have been appearing on the screens of ABC television and cropping up all over radio in recent times? Do you wonder why, increasingly, male employees of ABC radio and television are nerds and SNAGs (sensitive New Age guys) who can be trusted to echo every politically correct, especially feminist, piece of nonsense? Read on.

The memo to all staff, dated July 10, 1992, reads (and I will not bother translating the jargon and acronyms):

We are now at the halfway point of the 1990-1993 EEO program and many of our goals have not been achieved, nor will they be achieved unless strong action is taken. A number of strategies are being put in place immediately to give the impetus our EEO initiatives need at this time.

What Television will be doing:

  • Short term hda vacancies for senior management positions will be filled by women, in all but exceptional cases: including controllers, branch managers, department heads, executive producers, series producers, editors, supervisors of production, etc.
  • All future casual, fixed term and on-going positions and work in Production Operations/OB Operations to be targeted for women.
  • Three trainee TOPO positions will be offered in 1992-93 for women currently employed in the TV Division.
  • All available on-going technical positions in BTD to be targeted for women.
  • The field of suitable people of non-English speaking background for editorial positions (producers, journalists and researchers) will be canvassed.
  • A demonstrated understanding of cultural diversity issues will apply to all selections for editorial positions.
  • Potential to meet the required skills/experience level with a reasonable degree of familiarisation and/or training will be a criteria in all of the above instances.
  • EEO performance will be a key criteria at selection interviews for all management positions and on-going management performance appraisals.

The thrust of these strategies is to focus on areas where there is under-representation of designated EEO groups and where recent progress has either been slow, at a standstill, or in some instances there has been a backward trend. The aim is to increase the pool of skilled and experienced people from the designated EEO groups to assist the Television Division in achieving its targets.

There’ll be a full review to assess the effectiveness of these strategies in six months’ time. I urge you to give these positive action initiatives your full support.

We now return to normal use of the English language.

As you can see from the above, the ABC has totally abandoned any principles of non-discrimination and equality of the sexes, or other groups in the community. It is in the process of transforming itself into a feminist enclave, regardless of the relative competence of male and female employees or applicants. What is more, it is selecting even males for their political commitment to the ideology of affirmative action. (That is why they are mainly nerds and SNAGs.)

What has been happening is the ABC is being transformed into an outpost of a particular ideology that will disseminate and extend that ideology at the expense of both men and women who believe in genuine equality of opportunity. That is why, of course, the ABC is so desperate to be allowed to get away with a continuation of this process and why, if there is a change of government, reconstruction root and branch of the ABC will be an urgent priority.

***
5.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Voices of diversity deserve to be heard,”
The Australian, February 23, 1994, p. 11.

There is a strange attitude which has become common in the Australian media, that traditional conservatives are somehow not entitled to representation and a vote, whether in the Liberal Party or the Labor Party. The National Party is of course written off completely, usually with a jibe or two about rednecks or rural socialists: while NP politicians are a favourite butt of ridicule for the residents of Canberra and the inner suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne who are the overwhelming majority of media employees.

The Liberal Party has always embraced a very wide range of political attitudes from what might be described as extreme conservatism (whatever that might be) to “ultra-liberalism”, or libertarianism. The Labor Party similarly covers an extremely wide spectrum which includes social conservatism on the one hand, and both extreme libertarianism and a multitude of special groupings who think of themselves as radical on the other. There is much common ground between the parties.

Media discussion of the preselection of Tony Abbott for the northern Sydney electorate of Warringah has largely centred on the notion that he is yet another conservative, foisted on the voters by the ageing conservatives of the NSW Liberal Party. But this really is just a result of the fact that the commentators involved cannot understand that there is a very substantial proportion of the electorate which simply does not share most of their assumptions.

The political bias of the ABC, for example, is more a matter of an unconscious commitment to a set of beliefs fashionable among the contemporaries and peer groups of the people who work there. They continually reinforce each other through their pattern of socialisation (dinner parties with like-thinking people, and so on) and avoid or minimise contact with those who think differently.

The result is that they have very little understanding of the composition of the electorate as a whole, and often enough very little sympathy with the feelings of those they disagree with. Thus it comes as an immense surprise to them when people think they are politically biased, since they think of themselves as espousing opinions and social values which are self-evidently and obviously true and “progressive”. The reality is of course that there are numerous voters, both Liberal and Labor, who want their socially conservative views represented in the parliament.

It is simply not true that the world view of the majority of Liberal, or even the majority of Labor, voters is anything like that of the “enlightened” members of the media. (There is plenty of research establishing this.) The term “silent majority” has been much abused, but it is generally true that many of these people feel themselves deprived of a voice or of representation.

Perhaps I should declare a connection. When Tony Abbott decided to enter the preselection contest, he asked me as a former colleague whether I would write him a testimonial; he of course made the same request of a number of other people. The guts of what I wrote was:

I am not a member of or supporter of any political party, but I do care deeply about the health of our democratic parliamentary system in Australia, and of the parties which play such an important role in it. And of course I have good friends on both sides of politics, whose commitment and work I admire.

I do not necessarily agree with Tony Abbott on many issues. But I do admire his firm principles, his positions on many current issues, and his ability and willingness to debate them in a free, open and friendly but strong and forthright fashion. In particular, though I tend to favour the republican view in the debate as to the future of our political system, I believe Tony has played an enormously useful role in supporting the monarchist position, and ensuring that there is a genuine, balanced debate on this important matter.

He seems to me to have exactly the qualities that any political party most needs in its parliamentarians as we approach the new century. He is young, hardworking, energetic, highly principled, intellectually well equipped and a natural parliamentarian. He is ambitious, not in a narrow self-serving sense, but as someone who has a sense of public duty and of his own abilities and who wants to achieve in the world.

I believe that the Liberal Party of Australia at this time desperately needs people like Tony Abbott, who can represent it and the electors well into the next century. The party need rejuvenation, and people like Tony Abbott are well equipped to return the Liberal Party to its original status as one of the major parties of our democracy and a natural alternative government.

It was for the Liberal preselectors of the Warringah electorate to decide what they wanted in a candidate, but it seems to me that within the wide spectrum of beliefs and opinions compatible with the Liberal Party, they did well to choose someone who was clearly one of the best candidates available. This choice showed imagination, openness to innovation and willingness to recruit talent. (Not that I have anything against any of the other candidates, some of whom I esteem highly, such as John Dowd.)

It does not worry me at all what Abbott’s views are, provided they include a deep commitment to democracy and a tolerance of other views.

But even here he is being widely misrepresented, as well as ridiculed (“the mad monk”, etc) by those who have nothing to say of any value. I know he is a Catholic, married with two or three young children. His wife is a former schoolteacher, who, far from being committed to a lifetime barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, has just gone back to full-time work (for a merchant bank). They are, in fact, a youngish modern couple who happen to believe in the traditional values of church and family. I fail to see how this puts them out of touch with the electorate.

Categories such as “New Right” or “conservative” are usually epithets rather than useful descriptions. Abbott is probably best described as a Tory wet, rather than a dry; he is not committed to market-oriented policies. (I am afraid he is not even an economic rationalist.)

But the point is that there should be a diversity of parliamentary representatives reflecting the diversity of views of the electorate. The do-gooders in the media should not try to act like a branch of the thought-police, and still less as agents of the Government or the Labor Party.

***
6.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “The Liberals’ media hurdle,” The Sydney Morning Herald, January 28, 1995, p. 30.

Will the Liberals under John Howard as leader really unite and work together to win the next federal election? Not if the Labor Party has its way; quite appropriately Paul Keating and Labor will be exploiting every weakness of their opponents that they can find. But as Alexander Downer, and his wife Nicky, made clear at the announcement of his resignation of the leadership, there is a feeling that the Labor Government has been given a rather excessive amount of help by the media.

This is not a matter of crude partisanship in most cases, but the way in which many in the media, and especially in the ABC, reflexively or deliberately set out to deny the legitimacy of Liberal and National party views. This is done by an attempt to establish a framework for what is acceptable to the community, and to define anything which does not fit this framework as somehow extreme, old-fashioned, not legitimate, or peculiar and laughable. But in fact the framework simply represents the orthodoxy of the baby-boomer generation and the politically correct.

Consider the use of the term “moderates” in speaking of what might more accurately be called the left wing of the Liberal Party. The implication of this term is that anyone who is not a moderate is an extremist. A moderate in the Liberal Party, on this view, is someone who espouses the standard views on the necessity for a republic, the desirability not just of tolerance and privacy for homosexuals but also the recognition of homosexual “families”; who opposes privatisation; who opposes “economic rationalism”; who believes in a large arts bureaucracy; who believes that Indonesia committed genocide in East Timor; who fears media monopolies (no matter how many of them there are); who believes that any economic activity is a threat to the environment; who subscribes to anti-vilification legislation, supports affirmative action, loves the ABC … In other words, someone who subscribes to the current orthodoxies of the chattering classes. The rest are dries, economic rationalists, rednecks, conservatives, neo-fascists and so on.

Of course there are plenty of genuinely moderate proponents of all views within the Liberal Party. The South Australians like Robert Hill and Amanda Vanstone are among the genuine moderates. But also within the Liberal Party there is a fairly amorphous group who might be called “extreme moderates”. These include some of those who have most determinedly disrupted the Liberal Party and destabilised its leadership for some years.

They play a role somewhat similar to the old lefties in the Labor Party, who are far more interested in factional activity and the pushing of ideological agendas than in the difficult issues of policy-making and government. They are the equivalent of Victoria’s Socialist Left. The Liberal Party also has its share of thugs, who are everywhere but chiefly in the West Australian branch. It has a few extreme right-wing ideologists, who are influenced by the lunatics of the League of Rights and its ilk, but most of these find their way into the National Party. They do not, however, dominate that party, and Senator Ron Boswell of Queensland has conducted a courageous campaign against them for some years.

But it has to be realised that the “extreme moderates” of the Liberal Party are not at all moderate, but really belong to what would be considered to be the fringes of the Labor Left, and the various faries-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden organisations like the Greens or the Democrats, but stay in the Liberal Party because they also want to enjoy power, parliamentary salaries and the possibility of office. Like the Labor Left.

There is another rather peculiar group in or close to the Liberal Party, now largely centred on the magazine Quadrant and former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who have much in common with the old Left, and believe — like 18th-century Tories — in massive government intervention, the distribution of largesse without analysis of “cui bono” (who gets the moolah and who pays), irrational economics, protectionism and rigid social stratification. Some of them even have the appalling bad taste to invoke the Jewish Holocaust in support of their intolerance and dislike of free speech.

The Liberal Party, therefore, like the Labor Party, embraces a wide spectrum of beliefs, ideologies, policy preferences and vested interests.

The term “moderate” can be applied correctly to some members of every one of these elements. These are the moderates, the pragmatists, to whom John Howard (certainly a moderate conservative and dry) and Peter Costello (who committed the cardinal sin of winning a case against the Industrial Relations Club, but is otherwise much closer to genuine moderates than, say, Jeff Kennett) will have to appeal. It is one of the optical illusions suffered by the media who, after all, are generally lower middle-class types who socialise with the lower quasi-professional strata like schoolteachers and bureaucrats, that the Liberals who do not share their world view are on account of that fact alone extremists. It is what might be called the Petersham world view.

In fact, as the so-called Right of the Labor Party realises (not counting the thugs), the general attitudes of the Australian community are best described as tolerant conservative. The real moderates of the Liberal Party are like the moderate wing of the Labor Party — those who want to adopt ameliorative reformism, and implement social policies rather in advance of the baser popular feelings (like the taste for capital punishment and Draconian treatment of young offenders) but not totally out of touch with them. That is, unlike the Left of the Labor Party, they do not see it as proper to undemocratically implement social policies repugnant to the great majority of the community.

While John Howard, like Alexander Downer, will have plenty of legitimate complaints about the way in which the Liberal Party and the Liberal policies and views are presented by the media, there is not much point in their complaining about it. Nor should Howard plan to do anything about it when in office. It is a matter of fashion and generational change. Even the ABC, corrupt as it is, should not be purged, but simply split up so as to allow a genuine plurality of views to emerge, rather than the 57 varieties of smelly little orthodoxies which infect it as present.

The present media mindset is, for a politician, simply one of the facts of life, one of the barriers to be overcome. Like the old gerrymanders in favour of the country voters, it is not fair, but will change with time.

But we should not forget it is one of the reasons why the media, and in particular the print media, are held in such low esteem and are treated by so few as a reliable source of information.

***
7.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Political correctness: intolerance unplugged,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, April 13, 1996, p. 34.

Political correctness is a term that has been bandied around almost to the point of meaninglessness, and there is a growing attack on its use now it has been employed by the Prime Minister.

For quite some time there has been a campaign, rather inconsistently, to establish that it is a smear invented by the political Right to discredit enlightened tolerance and description of a phenomenon that does not exist.

But while the term is often misused, and overused, it does describe an attitude that has real significance and policy implications. Nor is it just an American invention, though it is true enough that it is strongly influenced by the fashions of the United States. In Australia, the term that used to be heard more often was “ideologically sound”, applied to every aspect of life from the words used to describe minorities to the use of cosmetics and dietary habits. “Politically correct”, or PC, is indeed an American coinage — as are many of the notions about gender, race, minorities, and so on that are one form of US cultural imperialism.

Those who protest about the use of the term often claim that in any case what it embodies is nothing but what every civilised person does. There is an element of truth in this, in that what in earlier times used to be called good manners is now subsumed in the rhetoric of PC, even though when it comes to the treatment of their adversaries good manners are quickly forgotten. Indeed, the concept has become twisted, since rather than leaving it to parents and school teachers to instil good manners in their offspring, it is now something that is allotted to the law to enforce by bullying and penalties, or to the persecution of supposed offenders, as in the Ormond College affair about which Helen Garner wrote in The First Stone.

It is the very intolerance and punitiveness of the fashion of political correctness that distinguishes it from good manners and the kind of behaviour that everyone wants in a civilised society. This goes hand in hand with abusive dogmatism directed against anyone who strays from the mainstream of agreed PC. The recent controversy aroused by an English academic sociologist, who argued that there was a substantial proportion of women who would prefer to stay out of the workforce and be full-time homemakers if only they could, and who preferred part-time to full-time employment even at the expense of prospects for promotion, is a case in point. Like much sociology she was of course merely documenting the blindingly obvious, but by doing so she has brought down the wrath of the PC feminists on her head.

Similarly, John Howard, when he used the term, was doing so to describe the attacks that he knew were coming from PC circles as a result of his questioning of the Aboriginal policies of the former government. There are may Aborigines who have for quite some time been describing the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders Commission as a dismal failure, a body unrepresentative and unpopular amongst Aborigines, one that is riddled with waste and misappropriation, like many of the Aboriginal legal services. The voting figures for ATSIC as published by the Electoral Commission are clear evidence of its unrepresentative nature. But the reporting of this has been sparse and infrequent, since so many people are afraid of being described as racist for doing so.

Effectively, political correctness has become a movement, often built into the view of the world of its adherents so that they do not even realise how deeply prejudiced they are, that is mainly directed at the suppression not just of insulting speech, but of any serious discussion or analysis of social ills which do not lie within narrow boundaries. To every problem there is entertained just one solution, and any other policies or solutions are proscribed. While expressing high-flown sentiments about the importance of tolerance, the reality is that PC is deeply intolerant.

Of course it is true that it is not as firmly rooted here as in the US, since we can still joke about it and deride its practice while agreeing with many of its better intentions. But in the universities especially, and quite commonly in the media, especially the locus classicus of PC, the ABC, it is the dominant ideology.

Any dissident is freely misrepresented and held up as some kind of monster of reaction or villainy. Not that this is confined to PC, of course.

The vilification by some of the media of the Paxton family in recent times has been extremely distasteful and unfair, quite as much so as the treatment of politicians such as Graeme Campbell or Pauline Hanson.

They are merely two sides of the same coin, the love of witch-hunting which, far from being discouraged for the sake of tolerance and fairness, is shared by the PC movement with the fanatical Right.

Those tribunals or commissions that have been set up to defend human rights and assert the claims of particular minorities have frequently done more to fan the flame of intolerance than any of their nominated opponents.

Given the opportunity, they act like Star Chambers.

While it is true that many of the critics of political correctness do have their own unsavoury objectives, especially in the US, the phenomenon does exist and it is comparable in every respect to the worst manifestations of McCarthyism in its heyday. Fortunately, neither that nastiness or its present day equivalent has an unshakable grip on public policy — and political correctness has now lost political power at the Federal and State level, except in NSW.

***
8.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “‘Our ABC’ under scrutiny,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, July 18, 1996, p. 13.

At last there is some hope of real reform of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. That is clearly the intention of the Federal Government and will necessarily arouse a violent storm of opposition from those who have some stake, material or ideological, in the ABC in its present form.

The proper thing for the ABC itself to do, of course, would be to absent itself from this argument. Apart from straight reporting of Government policy and criticisms of it, it simply is not proper for a taxpayer-funded organisation to devote the resources voted it to campaigning to defend its own funding base. Not that this is now unusual — one of the most extraordinary developments in public life in this country has been the increasing use of public funding to harass public authorities and demand still more funding.

From the environment to the welfare lobbies and the various media and “public interest” ideological campaigners, there has developed the view that minorities and pressure groups have the right to public funding for advancing their own demands; some of them also actively campaign to prevent other interests from devoting their own money to advancing their own case. The ABC has become the most important conduit for this kind of thing.

Far from being “our” ABC, that organisation has been captured by the idea that it should have a corporate view on a number of major issues of social policy. It acts as propagandist for what it sees as the correct views on all of these. The Prime Minister was perfectly right when he applied the term political correctness to the ABC. While there is every reason to advocate the dissemination of all views, except perhaps the most repellent — not many people outside the groves of academe would endorse the views of the Marquis de Sade — the real failing of the ABC is that it fails to attempt any balance when it comes to its pet agendas. It has, for example, never promoted any genuine public debate on Native Title policy — instead it sees itself as a proponent of official Aboriginal industry views. Its views on anti-discrimination policy, affirmative action, and so on are not only a matter of public advocacy but of internal policy.

Of course every person in the organisation is entitled to his or her own political beliefs and opinions. But there is a uniformity of view which makes the ABC quintessentially the representative of that tiny minority of the Australian community which is best characterised as the “chattering classes”.

In the debate on the future of the ABC the organisation itself will be assiduously pushing the case for its continuation in its present form, size and funding — for despite bitter internal conflicts there is a general agreement that nothing should be reduced, altered in direction, or promoted except as a result of its own internal political processes.

Properly, the views of the ABC as a body should be those of its managing director and editor-in-chief, Brian Johns. He is the person who should argue the ABC’s case — and he can do so effectively and with conviction.

But it will make an interesting exercise to calculate the proportion of the ABC’s broadcast time, including news bulletins, which from now on will be devoted to campaigning against the Government, while of course there will be no balanced presentation of the case for reducing its funding, changing its direction and introducing genuine diversity into its coverage of social policy issues.

For the truth is that the ABC is out of control and is run, editorially at least, as a collection of local fiefdoms united only by their general direction of bias. Remedying this should be part of Brian Johns’s responsibility. It is a virtually impossible task. The role of the new chairman of the ABC board, Donald McDonald, will be as difficult.

Together with Mr Johns he will have to look to budgetary supervision and effective management at a time when the fiscal constraints and the internal resistance will be exacerbating all the chronic problems of the corporation. It may be that these two will become bitter enemies, as has often enough happened before. They may instead become allies — they are both proven in their commitment to the arts and to cultural excellence.

But it is proper that they should concern themselves with the ABC as it is, in a situation of financial crisis. It is neither unnecessary nor superfluous that there is to be a separate inquiry into the future of the ABC, in terms of its structure, activities, core functions and directions.

Bob Mansfield, former chief executive of Optus and of John Fairfax, is an interesting nomination for this review. He could not be called an expert on the broadcast media in this country and perhaps that is all to the good. He clearly has not too much ideological or historical baggage to take with him into the job.

There is no reason to think that he will conclude, or that the Government expects him to conclude, that there should be no public broadcasting in this country.

There is an overwhelming case for some forms of public broadcasting. Nevertheless, there is no open and shut case for any present specific aspect of it. No aspect of the present organisational structure of the ABC ought to be treated as sacrosanct.

It is however clear that there are many people who will fight bitterly to defend “our ABC”, that is, the ABC as the possession of the assortment of propagandists, elites and cheer squads who have captured it over the last 20 years.

***
9.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Good riddance to political correctness,” The Sydney Morning Herald, July 12, 1997, p. 41.

Is political correctness dead in Australia, is it dying or did it never exist? Or was it at worst merely a matter of good manners and the use of non-racist and non-sexist terminology designed to protect the human rights and sensibilities of others?

The concept of political correctness, or PC, seems to have originated in the United States, and there has been some controversy over the strength and even the reality of the phenomenon there. Some of this has resulted from attempts to discredit critiques of this often intolerant orthodoxy — rife in academic institutions and prevalent in some parts of the media — by those who, while embracing it, want to avoid its identification. In this they are merely extending the stifling effect on open public discussion which it involves.

It has now passed its high point in Australia, and as always when the pendulum begins to swing back, there is a danger that it will go too far. While the racism of Australians has been exaggerated by the PC propagandists, it would be a great pity if reaction against their extremes should lead to a climate in which insulting and repellent racist language became acceptable in civilised discourse. There is no reason to think that it will, since few of the articulate critics of the PC movement incline that way — but there is always the danger that repression of open discussion will lead the ignorant or inarticulate to resort to slogans. Indeed, it has.

On the nature and reality of PC in Australia, especially in relation to the writing of history, consider the following remarks:

Political correctness did become a disease of the Australian history curriculum. It also became a disease of the Public Service. It infested language and institutions like borer, which meant that the effects might hang around after the disease has passed. It stifled talent and, in some cases, justice. Worst of all, it debilitated thought and action.

Politically correct thought is conservative thought. It is instruction by cliche and mantra. It is thought divorced from its provenance.

In history we see it in anachronistic judgments and polemical overkill, particularly when the subject is Aboriginal Australia, but in other areas as well. Political correctness is silly, hostile to imagination and inimical to the interests of both history and social improvement.

It will be very good for the country when it is gone. And it will be just as good when its opposite has gone as well.

This comes not from some scion of the academic Right, but from the Melbourne historian Don Watson, one of the chief advisors and ideological gurus of the former Prime Minister, Paul Keating. Watson is doing some rethinking now that he, like his mentor, is clear of the political hurly-burly.

As for this statement, there is nothing in it with which I could disagree and his last sentence is in effect a request for cessation of hostilities between those who have in the past participated in the debate about PC. It will indeed be very good when we can return to a more conciliatory and fruitful debate conducted without doctrinal orthodoxies or abuse hurled at those who disagree.

It has always been known that white settlement of Australia involved brutal treatment of the Aborigines and it is true that in official histories this was all too often passed over; there had to be a movement to recognise and face up to the reality. But it is possible to discuss the nature of this reality without having to subscribe to every cliche and mantra relating to reconciliation. Geoffrey Blainey had written much sympathetic to the Aborigines before he felt compelled to depict the reaction against the old official history as “black armband” history. To write history with a black armband on your mind is just as foolish as to write it waving a triumphant flag.

But Watson’s rethinking, it seems, began before the defeat of March 1996. In her blow-by-blow account of the 1996 election campaign, The Victory, Pamela Williams describes the agreement by the two Dons, Watson and Russell, of Keating’s office that Labor should follow the slide to the “Right” of Bill Clinton in the United States — especially with respect to welfare and a tougher approach to eligibility for the dole. In effect, they persuaded Keating without any difficulty that he should make a “lunge to the right” — that is, Labor very nearly fought the election on the same kind of “work for the dole” rhetoric which it so bitterly opposed after it lost the election. In the event, it was decided that it was too late in the day to do so.

But the preparedness to abandon the PC rhetoric which marks Keating’s former advisers is not generally apparent among those who are still mourning their expulsion from the citadels of power, and the leftist rhetoric which, William’s account indicates, they had realised characterised the isolation of the Keating Government from the mass of the electorate. The unacceptability of the PC slogans to the Australian electorate is still a significant political fact.

If the Labor Party is to rebuild itself as an electoral force it will have to realise that it has to move back towards the centre of politics, which for the present has been taken over by the Liberals. Like the Liberals, it will have to repudiate both the extremism of the Hansonites and that of the militant Left fascists who are mounting violent demonstrations against them. And it will have to recognise that there is need for a rethinking of what seemed so obvious to the supporters of the Keating Government so recently.

***
10.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “The trouble with censorship is we are two-faced about it,” The Sydney Morning Herald, July 8, 2003, p. 11.

Censorship always seems to bring out hypocrisy in public discourse, and not just from the would-be censors. If anything, the film buffs are the worst hypocrites of the lot. They claim the right of adults to see anything legal depicted on film or conveyed by other media. Fair enough. But almost in the same breath they express support for censorship in virtually all matters other than sex.

The latest crew of censors is attacking the advertising of alcoholic drinks in part, they say, because it encourages under-age drinking. But doesn’t the widespread sexualisation of the media encourage under-age sex? And what about sex education lessons in schools which treat all kinds of sex as equally legitimate, including anal or other “deviant” forms of the sex act?

The only honest answer to this comparison is to argue that under-age sex in any form is not harmful to the community — at least an arguable proposition, but one which is inconsistent with the current witch-hunting hysteria about any allegations of child sexual abuse.

Tobacco advertising is already subject to heavy censorship. This is because tobacco use is undoubtedly harmful to health and increases the chance of suffering from a range of diseases and disorders. So does excessive use of alcohol. However, it has now been pretty convincingly established that some use of alcohol is beneficial to health; the anti-tobacco lobby, however, continues to deny that there can by any minimum level of smoking which is not harmful, nor any benefits to the use of nicotine. Yet there is considerable evidence that nicotine can have beneficial effects, from enhancing mental concentration to fending off Alzheimer’s.

This distinction between the chemical nicotine and its means of delivery is made only by those who make a fortune from nicotine delivered by patches, chewing gum, and so on, ostensibly as an aid to giving up smoking, and advertise freely even on TV broadcasts at times when children may well be watching.

Why should someone who dislikes the physical aspects of smoking not be persuaded by advertising to use the other forms of nicotine so easily available?

Fast food, junk food and other undesirable forms of food which are widely advertised are also up for censorship. Everybody agrees that the problem of obesity, especially in children, has two sides — one the food itself, the other the lack of physical activity. Yet when a federal minister, Dr Brendan Nelson, puts forward a practical proposition for increasing children’s after-school activity, the teachers condemn it while state governments demand yet more federal money. Clearly, they want censorship but no responsibility.

Political censorship is widespread. Not censorship by omission or selection, which is what governments or the commercial media (the ABC, of course, never censors, even by omission) are usually accused of, but censorship by law — racial vilification, for example.

It is difficult for any sane person to object to sanctions of some kind against lies and abuse directed against sections of community, but these all tend to be interpreted one-sidedly to favour political fashions. It is OK to slag off “stupid white men”; it is unacceptable to suggest that traditional Aborigines, like indigenous populations in many other countries, find their extended family obligations conflict with the proper management of money.

The most recent controversy around political censorship involving film is, of course, the proposed screening of a video by David Irving, who thanks to his own defamation action against his critics has been convincingly found by a court to be a liar and falsifier of evidence relating to the Holocaust. But there are plenty of films and books peddling lies available in Australia. Irving is, of course, the proponent of particularly loathsome views — but why is this meant to make him more subject to censorship that someone who makes cynically exploitative films about under-age sex?

Let’s be honest about it. All the fuss about censorship is a smoke-screen. Censorship is good if it prevents the dissemination or the promotion of views or matters which all right-thinking people agree are bad and harmful. Censorship is bad if it prevents the same people from seeing anything which they feel like, regardless of any possible harmful effects.

By all means, let us screen any kind of pornography offered.

But then why not let the forces of tobacco, alcohol, fast food, racism, sexism and homophobia loose to speak just as freely?
__
Appendix for Economics.org.au readers
— Neville Kennard, “Unconventional Wisdom,” Economics.org.au, October 28, 2010.
— And click here for more by Paddy McGuinness on the ABC and other issues.