Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Barbarians hold the line as our last civilised man checks out

Yet another win to our glorious Prime Minister. Telstra may be a bit of a problem and the government parties room looks like New Orleans on a bad day, but the war against terror is going simply splendidly - like a bomb, in fact. A survey has found that Australians are more scared of the terrorist threat than any other people on earth.

At first glance this may appear about as credible as another survey, which has found that our social attitudes have actually become more liberal (that's a small l) under John Howard - that society has moved to the left. But consider. While there have been no actual terrorist incidents on Australian soil, the propaganda has been unrelenting, if a trifle bizarre at times.

Only last week we were told that essential measures to counter extremist Islamic violence included arresting people who left their luggage unattended and tagging suspects like migratory birds, not to mention holding people for a fortnight without charge or trial if the authorities felt like it. One can picture Osama bin Laden throwing up his hands in despair; what chance will his operatives have against strategic genius like this?

And the timing of it: the grab bag of bills was introduced just before September 11, and then, surprise surprise, came the release of a video on which an improbable American identified Melbourne, of all places, as an improbable target. And to cap it off, when Muslims who were not invited to Howard's summit meeting held their own in Canberra to condemn terrorism, Howard sniffed that he had already heard from the mainstream and he was not interested in extremists - implying that any Muslim not personally endorsed by the government fits into that category.

No wonder we're quaking in our thongs. A bloody good week's work from Little Johnny, and if it just happened to distract us from the Telstra sale, well, that's no more than a fortunate coincidence.

Ah yes, the Telstra sale. Once it was just another free market policy; then over the years it developed into an ideological obsession. Now it has become a desperate political imperative, a test of the government's will and unity.

But it is rapidly descending from high drama into knockabout farce; the latest crisis came from a casual remark made by the stand up comic Barnaby Joyce at the Toowoomba Debutantes Ball about the drafting of the bills; and even after the government spent a frantic weekend hosing the man down, Joyce is still asking reasonably: What's the rush?

Well, the rush is to get rid of the bugger before Joyce and his fellow hicks and those crazy Americans appointed to run the bloody thing by the idiot board selected by that moronic cabinet headed by, er, our beloved and infallible Prime Minister, do any more damage.

Political terrorists, the lot of them. Bring on the legislation.

Trying to make the best of the catastrophic administrative failure which threatened to develop into a political disaster, President George W Bush commented last week with more hope than conviction that adversity always brought out the best in the American people. Well, if what happened in New Orleans is the best, we'd hate to see the worst.

The initial reaction of most to the wreckage left by hurricane Katrina was one of sheer helplessness; they seemed to believe that they were part of a B grade movie in which the heroes (themselves) would be rescued in the nick of time and that, as always, they could look forward to a happy ending. When the awful reality started to dawn the helplessness morphed into a brutal selfishness; those who did not already have guns grabbed them and anything else they could get their hands on and prepared to defend their patch against all comers, including their would-be rescuers and indeed anyone who represented authority.

This was virtually the only sign of initiative; as for altruism and concern for their fellows, if there was much of this present the media missed it. Perhaps they were too busy reporting that white people were finding food while black people were just looting it.

When the administration finally lumbered into action it was basically to complain that it was not to blame - well, not really; as always, the buck stopped somewhere else. And throughout it all the most constructive thing Dubya could find to say was to repeat the desperate mantra: God Bless America.

He'd better; it's painfully obvious America can't look after itself.

They say no one is irreplaceable. But it is hard to see anyone around, or even on the horizon, who will fill the gap left by Donald Horne.

Since the death of the great historian Manning Clark, Horne has been Australia's foremost public intellectual - a title he embraced with pride, since unlike so many in the Gump-ish Howard years, he saw the word as a term of respect, not of derision. He was fascinated by ideas of all kinds, but particularly those relating to the Australian identity; he lived and died certain that we could be a lot better than we are.

During his long and productive life Horne moved across the political spectrum from right to left, but always as a persuader, not a combatant. At a time when political discourse is becoming increasingly strident and ugly the vigorous but always courteous style of Donald Horne will be sorely missed. It could almost be argued that Australia has lost its last civilised man.