November 20 - December 31, 2001

With these acts, terror was ratcheted up to previously unimaginable levels, yet the horror was not confined to the Big Apple. The retaliatory war in Afghanistan, the disintegration of the peace process in the Middle East and the continuation of communal conflict on the subcontinent all brought horrific levels of violence and suffering to civilians who got caught in the crossfire.

These man-made conflagrations have dwarfed the devastation wrought by natural disasters this year and rightfully so. When nature implodes, victims can curse their misfortune and, if so inclined, seek religious remedies to forestall future adversity. But when human beings attack their fellows with total disregard for the rules of engagement, we can only feel engulfed by a sense of hopelessness and impotence.

No matter how much our political leaders promise to fight terror and to restore normality, we know we can never again feel totally safe... For the first time in our lives, many of us are confronting, at least in our imaginations, what the German-American political philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to as "the banality of evil".

...The Tampa affair unleashed passionate opinions about how we ought to handle the issue of asylum seekers that have caused divisions in our society of a kind not seen since the Vietnam War rent families and friends apart 30 years ago. This year at Christmas parties, many people felt the need to be circumspect about their views for fear of precipitating yet another shouting match or causing lasting estrangement with people they believed to be friends.

...Today we see here the kind of irrational hatreds and passions that in other countries ignite into internecine warfare and terrorism. Once I thought these extreme views would never thrive on Aussie soil. Now they seem to be very much a part of who we are. Or who some of us are, at any rate.

...Many people had good things happen, of course. Marriages were made, babies born, years of hard work paid off with good HSC results. The stuff of everyday life goes on, as it must, but all of us know that the context is now different.

How we will deal with this is the unfolding story of our future... Yet if we lose our faith in our collective ability to overcome evil and to create harmony among the people of the world - all of them - then we might as well renounce our humanity.

...Today is a good time to vow that, a year from now, the balance in the world as well as here will have shifted from the banal to the benign.

- Anne Summers - SMH (Dec 31)

Unity: A Modern Idea Gains New Currency
As from New Year's day the citizens of 12 European nations will be swapping their marks, francs, lire, pesetas and so on for euros. Which, to my way of thinking, represents a historic triumph of reason over passion. I am only sorry that our dunderheaded political leaders have chosen to join us up as pseudo Americans rather than as remote Europeans. We have been committed to the primitive rather than the modern.

For more than 2000 years vainglorious proto-Bushes tried to unite Europe by conquest. Caesars, kings, emperors - Holy Roman and others - popes, duces and fuehrers have rolled their armies back and forth across the continent, imposing European union by passionate force of arms. It never worked. It never could, of course.

Then, after the last great military convulsion of the 1940s, the penny dropped. One more war like this would be the end of Europe altogether. The time had come to try something else. Sweet reason.

...Silly, ignorant George the Smaller may boast of American pre-eminence and the fact that it is the envy of the world, but anyone who has taken the Eurostar from London to Paris and the TGV from Paris to Milan, piercing the borders of formerly enemy nations at half the speed of sound, with no scrutiny of visas or passports, knows what modern is. And now, to be able to do it without changing currency from one end of the continent to the other is an advance in human affairs unimaginable 50 years ago. It is to the European star that we should be hitching our wagon.

...America is hot. Europe is cool. America is passionate, Europe is rational. America is religious, Europe is secular. America is puritanical, Europe is erotic. American multiculturalism, like ours, is ersatz. Europe is historically and essentially an amalgam of mutually enriching cultures. America is self-consciously powerful. Europeans know from bitter experience that first comes the power and then come the tears. America is arrogant, Europe is confident.

I will buy a euro and put it up on the wall with an inscription along the lines of: "There is another way of doing things."

- Terry Lane - The Age (Dec 30)

An Unshakable Faith In Old Glory
The cliche of the year was that September 11 - we still don't know quite what to call it - "changed everything".

In the first days after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the emotion was so raw, the shock so awful, that people can be excused for making ludicrous statements. The editor of Vanity Fair, the glossy magazine that, every month, puts a Hollywood celebrity on its front cover, pronounced the age of cynicism over. This month, it has Tom Cruise on the cover, his torso naked, his eyes brooding, publicising another mediocre film.

...American culture is already shaping September 11 as a story of evil versus good. A fractured and complacent nation rediscovers that its real heroes are firefighters running up stairs in burning skyscrapers rather than celebrities and dot.com millionaires.

...Americans are optimists. A Time/CNN poll just released found that 76 per cent of respondents believed September 11 "changed everything forever". Almost 90 per cent thought the country was stronger because of it.

Americans are also self-absorbed. Owen Harries...writes...that the insistence that everything was changed utterly was "nonsense"...The September 11 terrorist acts, which killed about 3300 people, were horrific, but "it should be remembered that they have happened at a time when people who experienced the Somme and Verdun, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, are still alive," Harries writes.

...The surge in patriotism has been commercially exploited, so things must be getting back to a semblance of normal...Harries argues that the world was pregnant with the threat of terrorism long before September 11 and that elite assumptions that had built up after the Cold War were false, particularly the idea that globalisation was benignly leading us all to interdependence and that "traditional power politics had become old hat".

...The US is now unashamedly Jacksonian, identifying itself with the general-turned-president Andrew Jackson. Mead says this view represents a "populist and popular culture of honour, independence, courage and military pride". When forced to war, it wants unconditional victory. There is nothing new about this way of looking at the world, says Harries, and it is "not very suitable for dealing with genuine complexity and ambiguity".

"People of this persuasion and temperament are not necessarily callous or cruel," writes Harries, "but as between humanitarian obligations and the security of their country they have a clear sense of priorities."

This year, Americans' clear sense of priorities has shifted, and the rest of the world will have to get used to it.

- Gay Alcorn - SMH (Dec 29)

The Global March Is Slowly Suffocating Melbourne
Many people support globalisation as though it is a universal good. Yet it has already had some negative implications for Melbourne, which has lost much of its financial strength to Sydney.

Melbourne has been gutted as a headquarters of great mining enterprises... Under today's rules, none of this could be prevented. In the name of economy, of market strength, the changes have been inevitable... In this globalised world, the options for middle-ranking countries are significantly diminished, and not only in commercial matters.

We are told that globalisation will benefit rich and poor, both within and beyond countries. But it is not really so. Today the size of global corporations often dwarfs the economies of entire countries. More than 100 of the largest economies in the world are corporations. The sales of Ford and General Motors combined are greater than the combined GDP of sub-Saharan Africa. The economy of the six largest Japanese companies is about the same as all the nations of Latin America combined.

The gap between the richest and poorest 2 per cent has grown from 30:1 in 1960 to 82:1 in 1995 under the impetus of globalisation. Some may find it interesting that the world's three richest men have combined assets equalling the output of the world's 48 poorest nations.

These trends and figures point to an unsustainable world. It is no wonder that there is concern at the feeling of powerlessness among ordinary people. It is no wonder that there are demonstrations when the world's economic entities - the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation - meet.

While globalisation presents great opportunities and challenges to those who can plug into the process, it is now clear that the poor, those who are not sufficiently educated, get left behind. Sometimes the poor are comprised of entire countries.

...The growing inequality between rich and poor as individuals and as nations is unsustainable. It is one of the reasons for the movement of people with which Australia has experienced some difficulty. It is the reason for an increasing migration, which Australia would term illegal, across the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe. While some parts of this world remain very poor and others have great and growing affluence, the attraction is inevitable. Nearly half-a-million such people move to Europe each year.

The war against terrorism makes it all the more urgent to examine anew some of these realities. If we wish to establish a peaceful world we need to act effectively about world poverty. We would have the power to do this; we would also have the resources. So far, we have not had the will or the humanity.

- Malcolm Fraser - The Age (Dec 28)

No Turncoat Of The Empire
Today marks the 60th anniversary of Labor prime minister John Curtin's new year's message to a nervous Australian nation. Published in the Melbourne Herald on December 27, 1941, it contained Curtin's famous plea for US support in the face of a rampant Japanese Imperial Army sweeping down through South-East Asia.

Curtin did not mince words: "Without any inhibitions of any kind," he wrote, "I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship" with the UK.

...In a fruitless quest for the crucial turning point in Australia's foreign relations or the dramatic marker of Australian independence, the statement has been readily woven into a legendary tale of defiant Australian leadership asserting a burgeoning sense of Australian nationhood over British ties.

Yet the message was not as radical as is so often suggested... At the time, however, conservative politicians were appalled by Curtin's sentiments. Menzies labelled the message a "great blunder"... Even US president Franklin Roosevelt told the Australian ambassador in Washington that the words "tasted of panic and disloyalty".

...Curtin was notably quick to assuage his detractors... "There is no part of the empire more steadfast in loyalty to the British way of living and British institutions than Australia," he said. "Our loyalty to his majesty the king goes to the very core of our national life. It is part of our being . . . I do not consider Australia a segment of the British Empire. It is an organic part of the whole structure. But I do not put Australia in the position of a colony. Australia is a dominion."

...Even if Curtin did self-consciously appeal to Britishness as a means of ensuring popular support, surely the logical question that needs to be asked is why he thought such language would appeal to the Australian people?

One way of answering this question is to view Curtin simply as a man of his times. For him, Australian nationalism and British race patriotism were mutually reinforcing, not inherently antagonistic. In his 1941 message, Curtin certainly placed Australian self-interest above imperial sentiment, but it by no means represented the seismic shift in Australia's outlook on the world that some would like to believe.

- James Curran - Australian (Dec 27)

It's Time For Open Doors
But the last straw for many people, anxious to participate in wide-ranging debate, was the appointment of Bob Hawke and Neville Wran as the review team for the [ALP's] organisational review.

They can consult with a reference group that includes women as advisers - not decision makers - and includes factional heavies dedicated to the maintenance of their power in the party ahead of the enhancement of people power.

The reaction was swift and strong. People have great respect for the leadership and achievements of Bob Hawke and Neville Wran, but they wonder if a party that bases its organisational review so narrowly is really serious about either party reform or forming national government.

There is, for example, considerable doubt as to whether leaders who helped fashion the factional system will expose or eradicate the kind of feudal nepotism that recently bedevilled the Victorian preselection process.

...If Labor is to be the mass social democratic party and the government of the future, then we must let a thousand ideas bloom and thousands more people participate in our reform process. Labor must facilitate a new consensus on organisation and policy, through broad participation of the party and the community rather than the powerbroker managerialism of recent years.

The alternative to fashioning a new ideology and a participatory process is a continuing barren harvest for the Labor Party and for the nation.

Labor has a great opportunity to be the party of the future, and has the ideas and the people to do it. It's time to open up the debate, not close it down.

- Joan Kirner - The Age (Dec 26)

What Your Parents Never Told You
By now, you may think you know everything there is to know about Santa Claus. However, what you don't know could fill his bottomless bag of toys. Hardly any of the popular tales about Jolly Old St. Nick have been updated since the 1940's. The world has changed considerably since then, and so has Santa.

Thanks largely to some disenchanted elves whose contractual nondisclosure agreements recently expired, we now have firsthand accounts of what it is like to work for the world's most reclusive toy mogul. Their testimony paints a vivid picture of Santa's fierce struggle with modernity and helps to translate the myths of holiday magic into a less romantic, yet more realistic, portrayal of Santa's workshop. What follows is not suitable for children.

Myth: Santa Claus comes down the chimney to deliver toys to good girls and boys.

Reality: Santa Claus hasn't entered houses through chimneys since the late 1950's. Due to quantum improvements in garage-door technology and home security systems in the past 20 years, Santa has been forced to find more creative ways of getting into your home. The pitter- patter so familiar to children everywhere is no longer reindeer hooves on rooftops but the sound of Santa furiously typing away on his laptop computer, trying to hack the access code for your alarm keypad.

Myth: Santa Claus sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake.

Reality: Although it is amazing that Santa Claus can deliver so many toys in such a short period of time, he is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. Santa plays the odds just like everyone else, and with each delivery risks criminal prosecution for breaking and entering. For this reason, Santa delivers toys primarily to young children with early bedtimes, not to teenagers and college kids who stay up all night watching dirty movies on pay cable.

...Myth: Santa's elves make all the toys that Santa delivers.

Reality: At last count, approximately 40 percent of Santa's toys are made by gnomes, which are similar to elves but work much longer hours for much cheaper wages.

- Kevin Doughten - New York Times (Dec 24)

100 Years Of Federation, And Racism
Even at the end of the centenary celebrations Australia...remains the kind of country that requires a national advertising campaign to try to help us remember the name of our first prime minister. It is not, however, a country where history has no weight. For me at least the most surprising discovery of 2001 was the undertow of history, the extent to which Australia remains imprisoned by the darkest dimensions of its past.

The most important political event this year was the Howard Government's decision in August to refuse permission for the 400 mainly Afghan asylum seekers on the Tampa to set foot on Australian soil, and the associated decision to rush through Parliament legislation which would allow asylum seekers approaching Australia by boat to be repelled by military means.

...With an almost uncanny precision, this year's ruthless border control legislation passed through the Federal Parliament exactly 100 years after the same parliament passed its first substantial piece of law, the Immigration Restriction Act, the basis of the White Australia Policy, which shaped Australian political culture for the next 70 years.

...The arrival of boats of Middle Eastern refugees from late 1999 seems to have triggered some deep collective anxiety in the Australian psyche, some ancient British settler nightmare about losing through alien invasion what had been so recently acquired. It was no accident that of all the words spoken in the 2001 election campaign, Howard's "we decide who comes here and the circumstances under which they come" struck by far the deepest popular chord.

...Only the wilfully blind could fail to see that the history of the Europeans in Australia has been shadowed by disturbing questions connected with the politics of race - by the dispossession of the Aborigines and the exclusion, until recent times, of all non-Europeans from our soil. Over the past 30 years a struggle has been conducted to create reconciliation with the indigenous people and to build an open, cosmopolitan society here. Some thought this struggle had been won.

During the year we celebrated the centenary of Federation it gradually became clear that this was not so. The old historical ghost of race returned to haunt our discussions about ourselves. It was genuinely sobering to discover how quickly the once apparently solid consensus in favour of a nondiscriminatory migration policy and the construction of a multicultural society began to fall apart.

- Robert Manne - SMH (Dec 24)

Never Back A G-G With A Weak Constitution
...The dismissal began a constitutional crisis that continues, and it is beginning to look as though the appointment of Peter Hollingworth as the monarch's representative may have initiated a crisis of a similar kind.

...a chorus of voices argued that the appointment of a cleric to the office was a dangerous blurring of the boundary between church and state. This line of argument was disputed by the Anglican Primate of Australia, Archbishop Peter Carnley, who maintained that since there was no established church in this country, clerics should be no different from any other citizen so far as eligibility for public office was concerned. This seemed a disingenuous argument at the time, and now seems even more so.

...On the rare occasions on which it becomes necessary, governors-general act as a so-called constitutional umpire - the role that John Kerr played so divisively in 1975. And, much more commonly, they are required to take on what one of Kerr's successors pompously called the role of representing the nation to itself. In other words, they are supposed, in what they say and what they do, to represent shared values, and, thereby, to express the unity of the nation.

...But Carnley was being evasive in maintaining that there was no particular symbolism in appointing an Anglican prelate as governor-general. Did anyone believe that John Howard might seriously have considered offering the job to a Catholic bishop, or to a rabbi or an imam? So why offer it to a leader of a church that just happens to be the Prime Minister's own, and the monarch's, too?

That much was apparent even in April. And now there is the awful mess created by the fact that a pastoral disaster Dr Hollingworth left behind in Brisbane has caught up with him in Canberra. He remains a bishop forever, and he will carry the legacy of that pastoral disaster about with him for the remainder of his term as governor-general. The best thing he can do to salvage the reputation of the office is to cut that term short by resigning. And, as citizens, the best thing we can do is to hasten the day when the person who is supposed to symbolise the unity of the nation is no longer a prime ministerial appointee.

- Ray Cassin - The Age (Dec 23)

There's a landslide ready to roll - if it could be bothered
It's been a big few years for the disillusioned, disenchanted and embittered in Australian political life as One Nation recast the political landscape, giving fresh voice to those fed up with mainstream parties and contemporary political debate.

Policies have been remade and attitudes rethought. Governance has been reinterpreted and new esteem given to the views of "ordinary Australians". Politicians are being told they must listen rather than lead. Millions of dollars have been thrown the way of the grumpy, especially in the regions.

That's all very well for the disillusioned, but what about the voters who ask (if they ask anything), 'What nation?' The people who wondered out loud during the election just passed whether Beazley v Howard was a fight for federal or state power; those who wait plaintively for someone to explain the difference between Labor and Liberal; those millions of adults whose only role in the national poll was their non-participation?

Their number includes the 5per cent of people who, a staffer for the Deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson, once told me, cannot identify a photograph of John Howard.

The figures are profoundly disturbing. Despite the strictures of compulsory voting in this election, 2.26 million - one adult in six - either did not bother to turn up on the day, was unable or unwilling to cast a valid vote or is not even on the electoral roll.

Anyone who could organise, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, the "disengaged" would effectively control a new political landscape.

If he could reach out to the disillusioned as well, he could almost start thinking about forming government.

...There are 15,000 of the disengaged in every seat, enough to create their own form of landslide, should they ever decide to vote. They are greater in number than the margin of safety in all but 20 of Australia's 147 electorates.

...Why does politics mean so much to so many? Does it change our lives, improve our material, psychological or emotional wellbeing?

Probably rarely, but the belief that it can remains an article of faith for active citizenship.

But how to spread that belief to those to whom politics means so little? Some of them might have chosen deliberately to opt out, but I think Thompson is right. This is the underclass - jobs, money, food, housing and drugs may be far more pressing issues in many people's lives.

The sad fact is that if they grew up not believing politics to be relevant, it is hard to imagine anything - or anyone - on the contemporary political stage convincing them otherwise.

- Andrew Stevenson - SMH (Dec 21)

Keating Anniversary Overlooked?
This week marks the 10th anniversary of a political milestone that has passed by without notice.

On Thursday, December 19, 1991, just after 6.30pm, the 47-year-old Paul Keating became the leader of the Labor Party and subsequently, the 24th Prime Minister of Australia.

On that evening, Keating had defeated Bob Hawke in the ballot for the ALP leadership by 56 votes to 51. It was the first time a sitting Labor Prime Minister had been challenged.

...Keating's greatest political triumph was winning the un-winnable 1993 election for the ALP's true believers who had kept the faith in difficult times.

...Keating's leadership style was his greatest attribute and equally his greatest weakness.

The corollary of his strength and decisiveness was the perception that this was merely a manifestation of his arrogance. The makeover from bovver boy Treasurer to a visionary statesman never washed with the public. The voters still saw him as the sneaky, snake-oil salesman with a quick wit and fiery temper who played "bad cop" to Hawke's "good cop".

...For a political fighter who had seldom lost any battle, he departed public life not the way that he had always wanted - as a winner leaving at a time of his own choosing.

Keating had more luck in persuading ALP members that he was the personification of the "great man" theory of leadership.

...At Kim Beazley's campaign launch a few months ago, it was Keating who got the biggest cheer from the faithful apparatchiks.

So why has there been no commemorative dinner?

- Troy Bramston - Financial Review (Dec 20)

Workers' Party On March To Oblivion
In the fullness of time, the federal election of 2001 will prove to be a decision of the Australian people every bit as defining in our history as the federal polls of 1901, 1910, 1949 and 1972, when Australia changed its government and the country changed direction, or 1934, 1943 and 1966, when the Opposition of the day recognised that accustomed ways and accustomed governance would serve that party no longer.

No one pretended that anything for Labor would ever be the same. This was the federal election where the world changed. But a Labor Party that fails to change – that is, if it remains as organised and controlled as it is today – won't be competitive.

...The rump of trade unions affiliated to the ALP is an ever-diminishing proportion of the trade union movement which is itself an ever-diminishing proportion of the Australian workforce. Members of unions affiliated to the ALP now constitute fewer than 10 per cent of the Australian electorate; that is, nine out of 10 Australians are excluded from the governance of Australian Labor.

...The ALP excludes and will continue to exclude the emerging workforce in the information industry, shared work, permanent part-time work, telecommuting, consultancy, partnerships, employee-owned enterprises and experimental forms of equity participation. The crowning glory of this debasement is making members of the Labor Party a minority to a majority interest that actually voted for the Liberal Party, National Party and One Nation in 1996 and probably again in 2001.

...The model of ALP governance post-1916 has elevated a dwindling proportion of the workforce to iconic status as if some workers are the true blue and the rest – regardless of their relationship to capital and the means of production – are not. This is the way of madness. It is also the route to oblivion.

...The Australian Labor Party will reclaim the votes of huge numbers of workers once it sheds the notion of affiliated unions.

Both the union movement and the ALP will be winners. So will parliamentary democracy. The only losers will be the officials of unions affiliated to the ALP and their clientele in the political class presently running the ALP on their behalf.

...No ruling class gives up its power without a struggle, Mao observed. The prospects of a gracious ceding of control are not good. Without the ALP, union officials would attain a political relevance commensurate to their social relevance.

Which is not to say that Labor is doomed or will not win if control remains external to its ranks. Gifted leadership and a decline of the Tories will provide the blue smoke and mirrors which disguise the egregious truth that the Australian Labor Party is one of the most undemocratic and unrepresentative parties in the world of parliamentary democracy. After all, Labor governs in five states and will doubtless win re-election in most if not all.

...Will the Howard Government move beyond traditional attempts to curtail industrial power and strike at the root of union political power? Will it introduce legislation that will require affirmative plebiscites prior to affiliation, opt-in clauses for individual members when they renew their membership and, most deadly of all, amendments to the election funding laws that require a party seeking registration to demonstrate that it is democratically controlled by its membership?

Then the Labor party has to choose between the money or the box.

- Rodney Cavalier - Australian (Dec 19)

A Tragically Silent Governor-General
When John Howard announced Peter Hollingworth's appointment as Governor-General last April, he provoked a level of controversy that must have taken the Prime Minister by surprise.

Numerous commentators were alarmed about the impact of the appointment of the then Anglican archbishop of Brisbane on the historic separation of church and state in this country.

But within the Anglican Church itself, there was a rather different concern. Both publicly and privately, many Anglicans asked how Hollingworth could reconcile his new role with his lifelong ordination vows. Now, barely six months into the job, Hollingworth is facing exactly the kind of dilemma those cautionary voices feared.

A Brisbane court has awarded $835,000 in compensation to a woman sexually abused by a paedophile boarding-house master at an Anglican prep school in Queensland 11 years ago. More cases arising from the actions of the same man, who committed suicide after he was charged with the offences, are expected to come before the courts. Witnesses in the trial have claimed that Hollingworth failed to act when he was first alerted to the situation in 1990.

...Regardless of the legal advice the archbishop may have received at the time, with the trial concluded many are now calling on Hollingworth to make a public statement. He was chief pastor of the diocese when the disturbing case came to light. It is his regret, his sympathy, if not also his admission of some responsibility, that many in Queensland and elsewhere now seek.

...But, so far, there has been no comment from Hollingworth. He has refused to speak, although Government House said yesterday he would make a statement soon.

...For Hollingworth himself, who first rose to notice in the Anglican Church as a fearless champion of the poor and marginalised, these must be dark days. In the vows he took as a bishop, he committed himself - for life - to "show compassion to the poor and the stranger", to "be gentle with the abused and needy", and to "defend those who have no helper".

How can the advice of lawyers and insurers to remain silent take precedence over these sacred vows, in 1990 or now?

...At the time of his appointment as Governor-General, Hollingworth said he would be withdrawing from all controversy and refraining from any criticism of the government, prompting speculation that this might have been a condition of the job.

While other church leaders have spoken out, he has remained resolutely silent through the successive moral crises of the Tampa incident, the asylum-seekers debate, and the war in Afghanistan. With the example of Sir William Deane's wise leadership still fresh in the national mind, Hollingworth's silence has been disappointing.

- Muriel Porter - The Age (Dec 18)

Born From The Politics Of Us And Them
An Australia whose guiding principle was possibility, and which valued intelligence and skill more than it has in recent years, might actually revive the sentiment last uttered a century ago - that, with America, it was the hope of humankind.

The same kind of Australia would also return to the position of just a few years back when it maintained a healthy friendship with the United States while engaging vigorously with the countries of Asia. Our security does not appear to be more assured in proportion to our retreat from that policy, but our horizons do seem to be lower, and with them our sense of possibility less tangible.

And as night follows day, timidity becomes fear and fear becomes hostility and, with so much feeling pumping in our own veins, suddenly we can't or don't imagine what's happening in others, even though their distress is obvious and much greater than ours. Acts unconscionable to generous, confident and brave people - that is to say, people more like Australians four or five years ago - become justifiable and necessary.

Emptiness is the great danger. Possibly we are headed for mediocrity and have no hope of delivering on our promise. Perhaps we can feed our souls with stockmarket shares and new technology and Gatorade, but there are signs that both sides of politics now sense that something more is needed.

This sense may have arisen from the experience of tramping around the fading provinces and towns, hearing people repeatedly state their need to be useful as individuals and as communities. It was one of the lessons of politics: how a prevailing ideology shuts out the oldest, most rudimentary observations about society and human nature, and even when they are clearly pointed out will not permit them to enter.

After years in denial it transpires that there is such a thing as a need for recognition after all, and also a need to be useful to one's fellows or at least to oneself.

Individual and community effort is undoubtedly the key to meeting these needs, but governments that want to build a bridge back to the people will find a useful part to play. For those who do, the possibilities are almost infinite.

- Don Watson - SMH (Dec 17)

People's Choice
When New Year's Day dawns, a conversation waits for us. It is a discussion that we self-satisfied and happily isolated Australians have resisted for a long time. We now need to talk about whether the present population of Australia is adequate. Whether, for economic and cultural reasons, we need more people, and whether, as a responsible global citizen, we are obliged to take more of the world's dispossessed. It is necessarily a conversation about immigration because of our radically declining birth rate, and because our ageing population has not saved enough money to look after itself. But as the politicians have acknowledged so cleverly, we'll call it a talk about population because that's the only synonym that a defensive and in part xenophobic nation will cop.

...Now can we mention the dreaded word immigration? As a country made up almost entirely of immigrants and their offspring, how can we be frightened by this term? Here's one way to calm nerves - establish a proper, thorough and rigorous immigration policy. No more bulldust about asylum seekers "queue jumping" - let's finally admit there is no front door and set about constructing one. Then we can pick and choose the skilled immigrants, the family members and the simply needy enough that we need to crank this country up a gear. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry is right behind this idea. The BCA believes that present immigration levels of around 80,000 per year are "little better than placing us as a nation in a holding pattern".

The participants are already stepping carefully. After the smack in the mouth that traditional Labor voters gave the party in the federal election over its copycat asylum-seeker policy, newly minted immigration spokesperson Julia Gillard is choosing her words. She talks of the need for a discussion of "population policy" - a term ambiguous enough to give comfort to those who rejected the party because it appeared too soft on illegal entrants and to those who demand some compassion.

We need outspoken supporters of a more humanitarian immigration program, such as Greens Senator Bob Brown, to also tackle the environmental effects of a substantially increased population. Will we necessarily create more greenhouse gases if we have a higher population? The contrary and somewhat eccentric views of historian Geoffrey Blainey reflect the ideological clash as he notes that the rise of the environmental and land rights movements have matched a decline in the "populate or perish" argument. There needs to be a middle path, and this will be the hardest step - for those with conflicting beliefs, for those with dearly held preconceptions to somehow square off competing interests with care and to do it truthfully.

Few can forcefully argue against the need to do this. The voices - conservative and liberal, environmental and economic - are clamouring for a rational discussion of our need for more people. The fact that it occurs at a time when the world has never seen so many homeless, outcast and unhappy people only adds urgency. We can look after our own national interest and extend a hand to those needing help. These two positions are not mutually exclusive: we can do two things at once, clever country that we are.

- Virginia Trioli - The Bulletin (Dec 12)

Howard Scorns Menzies' Legacy
[The Senate must] force the government to return to the model of multilateral cooperation that greatly reduced the number of hazardous journeys by boat people during the Fraser government. All decisions were made humanely and as quickly as possible. They were made in the spirit of Sir Robert Menzies.

The Howard Government's failure to adopt a similar approach will haunt Australia domestically and internationally for at least a generation. It will also become one of the bleakest chapters in our history.

Without government leadership, we must, as ordinary Australians, begin a grass-roots movement to return our nation to one of tolerance. We must celebrate the equality of humankind and help educate our fellow Australians in correcting misinformation so shamefully dissembled by our government.

What would our response have been had it been possible for Jews to escape from Hitler's Nazi concentration camps and bribe their way to Australia on leaky boats?

Would we have rejected them and sent them to Nauru? Would we have placed them in jails in the desert reminiscent of concentration camps from which they had fled? We were fighting Hitler as we are now fighting the Taliban from which others are fleeing to our shores. The parallel is real.

We took those able to flee Pol Pot. But that was during the Fraser years. That was then. But these are The Barren Years.

- Ian McPhee, former Liberal Minister - The Age (Dec 11)

At 25pc The Interest Rate It Still Too Low
A historic, yet so far unremarked upon, milestone was reached at the recent election when the number of women in the House of Representatives passed the 25 per cent mark. Despite the fact that the size of the House increased by two, and although several women including high-profilers such as Cheryl Kernot lost their seats, there was a net increase of three (one Liberal, two ALP) bringing the total number of women in the lower house to 38 (18 Coalition, 20 ALP).

The Senate has long been the chamber that welcomed women and there their numbers are approaching 30 per cent - and the numbers look likely to increase from 22 to 23 of the 76 senators when counting is finalised - but it is the House of Representatives that produces prime ministers and where the major political contests occur. It is there that women need to make their mark if they are to move up through the political system.

Therefore it is disappointing to see how underrepresented women are on both the Government and Opposition front benches... Consider this: only two of the 17 members of John Howard's new Cabinet are women, a paltry 11.7 per cent. His outer ministry of 13 includes another two women, 15.3 per cent of the total. When combined, the ministry comprises just 13.3 per cent women.

...Both Government and Opposition have 11 parliamentary secretaries (and their shadows); six of the Government's are women (54 per cent) while only two of the Opposition's are (18 per cent).

If we combine these figures with those of the ministry, Howard's leadership team comprises 24 per cent women - a pretty good approximation of their actual representation in the lower house. Crean's team, however, is a pathetic 16.6 per cent women.

...Twenty-five per cent sounds like a lot. In reality, it looks more like a smokescreen.

- Anne Summers - SMH (Dec 3)

Wake Up America
It is the broadest move in American history to sweep aside constitutional protections. Yet President Bush's order creating military tribunals to try those suspected of links to terrorism has aroused little public uproar. Why? Because, I am convinced, people do not understand the order's dangerous breadth - and its defenders have done their best to conceal its true character.

The order is described as if it is aimed only at Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders... But the Bush order covers all noncitizens, and there are about 20 million of them in the United States... And the order is not directed only at those who mastermind or participate in acts of terrorism. In the vaguest terms, it covers such things as "harboring" anyone who has ever aided acts of terrorism that might have had "adverse effects" on the U.S. economy or foreign policy. Many onetime terrorists — Menachem Begin, Nelson Mandela, Gerry Adams — regarded at the time as adverse to U.S. interests, have been "harbored" by Americans...

But George W. Bush would never let his order be abused, one of its defenders said the other day. It was a profoundly un-American comment. From the beginning, Americans have refused to rely on the graciousness of our leaders. We rely on legal rules. That is what John Adams meant when he said we have "a government of laws, and not of men."

The Framers of our Constitution thought its great protection against tyranny was the separation of the federal government's powers into three departments: executive, legislative, judicial. Each, they reasoned, would check abuse by the others.

There is the greatest danger of the Bush order. It was an act of executive fiat, imposed without even consulting Congress. And it seeks to exclude the courts entirely from a process that may fundamentally affect life and liberty. The order says that a defendant "shall not be privileged to seek any remedy . . . in any court," domestic or foreign.

I do not doubt that leaders of Al Qaeda could properly be tried by a military tribunal. But the Bush order cries out for redrafting in narrower, more careful terms. Under the Constitution, that is the duty of Congress. Its leaders have so far been afraid to challenge anything labeled antiterrorist, however dangerous. It is time they showed some courage, on behalf of our constitutional system.

- Anthony Lewis - New York Times (Nov 30)

Detaining Children Is Immoral
The inquiry into the detention of children at Australia's immigration detention centres by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission will not add a great deal to what most right-thinking Australians already know: that putting children who have not committed any crime into detention is immoral and should be unacceptable in Australia.

Nonetheless, the inquiry must be welcome. For a start it indicates that Australia, as a pluralist, liberal democracy, is not run on the basis that whomever wins government gets its way, no matter what. The Executive Government of the Commonwealth is just one of many sources of power. There are the states, the judiciary and the Parliament, and the statutory bodies created by it, and there are media organisations that can report the dealings of these other heads of power to change public opinion.

... The inquiry will air matters that the Government has done its best to conceal. It has created immigration detention centres far away from population centres. It has prevented media coverage of what goes on in those centres. It has made it difficult for migrant support groups and other charities to get access to those detained, particularly children. Despite that, complaints have still trickled through to the commission, sufficient for it to set up an inquiry.

On balance, the evil of imprisoning children who have committed no crime must far outweigh the mantra of ''border protection''.

What as a nation are we doing here: imprisoning children in the name of protecting our borders? We need protection from our own xenophobia more than we do against these desperate people.

It is shocking that we even need an inquiry to tell us the obvious. It is shocking that the inquiry to tell us the obvious will take until the end of next year. Bail hearings of people on the most serious charges get more expeditious treatment.

These 582 children should be freed at once. Every day they stay in detention is to this nation's shame.

- Canberra Times - Editorial (Nov 30)

Rise Of Brown's Greens May Be Birth Of The Blues For Labor
Lynton Crosby picked it when he said this election was for conviction politicians and that meant John Howard and Bob Brown. Howard's third term win transformed him into the comfortable and relaxed Prime Minister only victory in the culture wars can bring. The equally elated Greens face a huge cultural aftershock.

Pauline Hanson electrified the disaffected Right - Labor and Coalition - and became the biggest obstacle to John Howard keeping power, despite the irony that his and her cultural outlooks were so similar. The debate sparked by Hanson moved both major parties to the right on social/identity issues, climaxing with bipartisan support for the demonisation of boat people and the Pacific solution. This seismic shift in the norms of mainstream political discourse saw a disenfranchised progressive vote - a mixture of well-off Keatingites and lower-paid humanitarians - hive off to the Greens.

... Howard has ended One Nation's fragmentation of the Coalition vote (provided he keeps delivering on the fear and loathing).

It took a huge policy and principle shift to do that, and on the evidence to date, Labor has no intention of doing the same thing to win back progressives.

This puts Howard in the fantastic political position of being able to keep moving right, throwing new wedges into Labor's voting base as it goes with him.

... So, a grassroots party of young leftie activists, teachers and nurses with a global focus on the environment and human rights and an essentially anti-globalisation, socialist economic agenda, is suddenly supported by many people who support the GST and are true believers in global capitalism.

... We have entered an era unsuited to the Democrats. Mediating deals with the majors presupposes a significant gap in outlook between the two and a sensible middle ground. In a political climate where the things which divide Australians are more important than those which unite us, they could be squeezed out of play.

... All of a sudden, Labor has replaced the Coalition as the party facing a debilitating fragmentation of its vote. Such was, and is, the explosive, unpredictable power of the Pauline Hanson phenomenon.

- Margo Kingston - SMH (Nov 29)

Anxious Oz: A Dark Thread Through History
D'Hagé says Australia is a deeply insecure nation. He says military courage displayed at Gallipoli and elsewhere is not in doubt and that, at home, the nation has been forged courageously out of adversity.

Yet, he says: "In August, when a few hundred desperate Afghans hove into view, we were suddenly fearful they would lock up our women, make beards and burqas compulsory and somehow imperil the family barbecue. We asked the master of the Tampa to pick them up. We then forbade him to enter Australian waters and, when he did, we stormed his ship with our elite special forces. What followed has caused many of us to question what sort of a country we live in."

D'Hagé says: "Our first response to this invasion was to wonder whether they could be sent to East Timor, the planet's newest nation. One wonders which group of mental pygmies in the departments of foreign affairs or immigration fixed our gaze on East Timor. After decades of fighting, what little infrastructure there was left had been set alight by departing Indonesian soldiers. A country in the middle of its very first election, struggling to maintain law and order and even feed its own - but deeply insecure Australia thinks about dumping them there."

- Adrian D'Hage - SMH (Nov 28)

Dream Team Is Made Of This
The Australian political party that generates policies to broaden economic opportunity will dominate this first decade of the 21st century. This is recognised by Simon Crean's new frontbench. The politics of the small target has been superseded by the politics of promoting ideas and measured risk in change.

The ALP has also moved from an overwhelming focus on its electoral strengths, such as education and health, to preparing to challenge the Government on the latter's perceived strong points, such as economic management. Although education and health remain critical, as is reflected in the appointments of Deputy Leader Jenny Macklin to the employment, education, training and science portfolio and Stephen Smith to health and ageing, Crean is seeking to carry the fight to the Government on a range of issues.

Crean has rewarded consistent performers - such as new defence spokesman Chris Evans and environment and heritage spokesman Kelvin Thomson - while elevating a new generation of MPs who show promise. In all, this mix probably represents Labor's best frontbench in a decade, balancing skills and experience in a fresh portfolio allocation, introducing new elements such as stakeholding, innovation and population into the national political discourse.

Another element of the frontbench is difficult to define but is of critical significance. Paul Keating was always fond of telling young people who were considering careers in public office that they should not seek election unless they hungered for the office with every fibre in their bodies. Hunger is evident on this frontbench, which will be apparent in policy aggression.

In contrast to John Howard, Crean has sought to be inclusive. While the PM has minimised the roles for prominent supporters of Peter Costello, such as Joe Hockey, and left others on the Siberian backbench - such as Julie Bishop and Christopher Pyne - Crean has opted to bring the spectrum of opinion in the caucus under the umbrella. The Labor frontbench has an opportunity to prove itself by resetting Australian public policy options. There exists a blank sheet, as Crean has made it clear that the policy platform on which Labor will fight the next election will be radically different from those of 1998 and 2001.

- Stephen Loosley - Australian (Nov 27)

Moderates Left On The Shelf
According to well-placed sources, Howard did not consult with deputy senate leader Richard Alston at all about his line-up. He hardly consulted with senate leader Robert Hill. Both are moderates and would have been pitching for Senator Ian Campbell – also a moderate – to go into the ministry.

These same sources say Howard only conferred with Costello very late in the piece. According to the moderates this lack of generosity reveals much about Howard's likely attitude to a leadership transition to Costello.

Surely, they ask, if Howard were serious about a seamless baton change at or around his 64th birthday, he would have asked Costello who the Treasurer would like in the cabinet he will eventually run.

Instead, two of his most senior backers, Rod Kemp (formerly assistant treasurer) and Joe Hockey (formerly financial services minister) have been stripped away from around him. Although, to leaven the conspiracy theories, it was actually Costello's idea to put prominent Howard supporter Nick Minchin into Finance, after Minchin rejected Health.

Costello also believes it's part of his job as the senior Victorian Liberal to maintain his state's ministerial representation. With that in mind he has a lot of time for Patterson (a Victorian). He's also a fan of Coonan.

Much has been written about Coonan's appointment as Revenue Minister, in charge of taxation, being a slight to Costello by Howard, reflecting the Prime Minister's concern at the implementation of the GST. In fact it was Costello's proposal.

- Glenn Milne - Australian (Nov 26)

Howard The Healer Minds His Back
Howard's new ministry acknowledges the power of two key Labor election themes - education and aged care - and the need to heal wounds and improve policy in both areas. It also indicates that the Coalition will harden on the environment, perhaps as an early wedge play against the opposition...

Kemp has moved to environment. He seems to be Howard's attack dog, his job to move in to a portfolio, shake-it almost to death, and move on. This appointment indicates to me that he will bring his usual small-government, user pays, privatisation-mad ideological chainsaw into the field, politicise and outsource the bureaucracy and in general break the culture. Kemp replaces Liberal moderate Robert Hill, who resigned himself to small, grass roots victories for the environment in the face of government's opposition to big picture issues like greenhouse and forests.

The disaffected left deserted Labor for the Greens at the election, and Kemp's appointment could be designed to make it even harder for Labor to bring together its progressive left and blue collar wings.

- Margo Kingston - SMH (Nov 23)

How To Revitalise Labor
From an ALP perspective, there are two ways of considering the 2001 election: optimistic and pessimistic.

The optimistic view is that, considering the appalling political impact of the weeks leading up to election day, the result was relatively close, with the ALP gaining about 49.5 per cent of the two-party-preferred votes. Beazley was regarded as having won the three set-piece engagements of the campaign: the debate with Howard, the policy launches and the National Press Club speeches. Labor's advertising was generally more effective.

From this perspective, Labor's "small target" strategy of remaining virtually invisible until a few weeks before polling day might be considered surprisingly successful - and, if three voters in every 200 had changed, it would have been a winning strategy.

The pessimistic view is that Labor's primary vote has fallen to its lowest figure (38.2 per cent) since 1934. There is serious questioning in the ALP about what policy direction needs to be taken. The ALP has, for practical purposes, become a party of the centre right. Many Labor supporters felt alienated from the official line on the refugees and defected to cast primary votes for Greens.

... Many traditional Labor voters disliked the "small target" approach and felt the party had gone missing on many major issues, such as education, health, the environment and immigration, since the defeat of the Keating government in 1996.

The whole political process - not just Labor - was locked into two rigidities:

That every budget must be in surplus, whatever the circumstances, and if not, then the whole economy is threatened. (Ross Gittins, on this page, roundly attacked this as "rubbish". In our own lives, we recognise that major investments - such as a house or car purchase - cannot be met from the current account.)

That Australia's security was at risk from invading boat people - and that there was an absolute upper limit for refugees of 12,000 a year. (Under Malcolm Fraser we had a 100,000 intake after the Vietnam War, and Bob Hawke allowed 20,000 Chinese students to stay after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.)

Howard has also been masterful in employing the techniques of wedge politics, emphasising immediate self-interest, the familiar, the obvious, the short-term, and discounting or ridiculing complex, long-term issues requiring intellectual input - such as constitutional reform, Aboriginal reconciliation, the republic, Knowledge Nation, the environment, or appropriate population levels. "What's in it for you and your family?" may be a useful tactical approach, but strategically it is bankrupt.

Labor's election slogan - "Jobs. Education. Health." - would have changed few votes. Employment, schools and hospitals are classic examples of what I have called spectrum issues. The political divisions are about how best to achieve the goals - after all, nobody is in favor of unemployment, ignorance or poor health.

Unfortunately, the word values was never used in the campaign. Labor conveyed little sense of vision or courage - witness the sidelining of Knowledge Nation and the major issues, such as population, ageing, soil and water, that were central to it.

The great task for Labor is to unite two major groups: traditional blue-collar workers and their families, and radical professionals. It can be done, but it will require more heavy lifting on policy matters than was shown at the past three ALP national conferences.

- Barry Jones - The Age (Nov 20)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------