Attractive cricket promotion



What the bloody hell does Richie Benaud think of this? The doyen of cricket is joined by bikini babe Lara Bingle - clad in parochial green and gold togs and cricket pads - in Channel 9's new Ashes campaign. "So, where the bloody hell are you?'' Bingle says in the promo, coining her Tourism Australia catchcry to attract viewers to the series. Benaud's thoughts are simple. "Marvellous,'' he says.

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Respect the US, urges Murdoch



Anti-Americanism is on the rise in Australia, fuelled by the unpopularity of the Iraq war among young people, Rupert Murdoch said last night. Speaking in Sydney, Mr Murdoch warned Australians against allowing doubts about the US administration to fester into an irrational antipathy that saw America as a greater threat to world peace than al-Qaeda. "Australians must resist and reject the facile, reflexive, unthinking anti-Americanism that has gripped much of Europe," said Mr Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, parent company of the publisher of NEWS.com.au.

Addressing a star-studded audience, including Prime Minister John Howard, at the inaugural American Australian Association benefit dinner, Mr Murdoch said America had to work to address criticisms that it took Australia too much for granted "and not come calling only when in need". "Australian sentiment is thankfully nowhere near Europe's level of hostility - but it could get there, and it mustn't," Mr Murdoch said. "In the coming century America will find Asia more important than ever - and its alliance with Australia more useful than ever."

He spoke about the importance of finding new sources of energy to avoid the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change and to lessen dependence on oil "whose profits in some instances help to finance terror and prop up hostile regimes".

Political, business and academic leaders joined media and sporting personalities including golfer Greg Norman, designer Collette Dinnigan and filmmaker Baz Luhrmann at the dinner. Lachlan Murdoch and wife Sarah shared a table with family members, while PBL chairman James Packer and partner Erica Baxter sat with PBL bosses. The benefit dinner honoured Mr Murdoch for his contribution to Australian-American relations and launched the new United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Mr Murdoch said the centre, an initiative between the American Australian Association and the Federal Government, would "raise awareness, dispel myths, groom new leaders" and increase ties between the two countries.

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PROBLEMS FOR THE AUSTRALIA-KNOCKERS

One sure way for a columnist to cop a caning is to suggest that on the whole the state of the nation bequeathed to us could have been a good deal worse. This upsets people who think praising any aspect of our history is to deny our ancestors' offences against indigenous Australians and the environment. And it annoys that much smaller group that sees Australian history as a waste of endless economic opportunities to build a prosperous market-based society.

But two new studies detailing the biggest blunders in Australian history inadvertently demonstrate just how well we have done. Because on a 20th-century scale of catastrophes, nothing on either list rates. Not that there is anything triumphalist in them. Some of the contributors to Martin Crotty and David Andrew Roberts's collection, The Great Mistakes of Australian History (UNSW Press), are exceedingly unhappy about the way they see contemporary Australia repeating past racist errors in the way we treat new settlers.

And the list of "Australia's 13 biggest mistakes", in the October issue of the Institute of Public Affairs Review, contains a great deal of Hayekian harrumphing, including a lament at the damage done by the way Australians embraced the protectionist economics advocated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty.

Certainly Crotty and Roberts are careful not to be seen as overly critical editors; they make the point that the transformation of Australia from penal settlement to wealthy democracy is a signal of success, not failure.

But there is no avoiding the obvious, that some of their essays detail superior stuff-ups. Such as Manda Page and Greg Baxter's piece on the introduction of foxes and cane toads to Australia. Their conclusion, that these disastrous decisions were made because people were variously ignorant and arrogant about the nature of the Australian environment and sought to change it to suit their own immediate interests, appears impossible to argue against. Richard Waterhouse similarly points out the way Australians too easily assumed the continent could support large numbers of small-scale farmers earning a living from land ill-suited to intensive agriculture.

And Roberts makes a compelling case that generations of state and community indifference to the rights of indigenous Australians followed from the way the first settlers mistakenly (or maliciously) assumed Aborigines had no connection with their own country worth taking seriously. The anthology also includes interesting, if not entirely convincing, claims such as Clive Moore's argument that in making it so hard to change the Constitution, the founding fathers stuck us with states that no longer suit our national needs. (It isn't clear where Moore got the idea that the American union consists of 45states.)

Other essays use past errors to comment on present politics, as if misplaced policies in earlier ages discredit whatever upsets the author in our own age. Thus Ilma O'Brien writes on the injustices inflicted on Australian residents born in enemy nations, who were interned during the world wars, before suggesting today's anti-terror laws are an echo of this wartime disregard for individual liberties.

David Day similarly describes the way Australian defence doctrine in the inter-war years was anchored on unlikely assurances that a British fleet would sail to Singapore to save us from Japan. It is a scathing piece, which concludes that we have still not learned the lesson that great and powerful friends are not always to be relied on. But why the circumstances of 70 years ago are a sure guide to foreign policy now is not explained.

Other essays are just unfair in attributing mistakes specifically to Australians, notably Crotty's piece on "naive militarism" before World War I. For a start, aggressive nationalism was far from an Australian phenomenon, being common across the combatant powers in 1914. Nor did a taste for death or glory last long once the shooting started and everybody realised there was going to be a great deal of the former and very little of the latter. The rush to fight in 1914 was less a mistake, with people who had obvious options picking a policy that was not in their interests, than it was a tragedy following from Australians taking what seemed an unavoidable decision to fight for the British Empire.

The IPA came up with a different set of examples. Where Crotty and Roberts's contributors are more interested in issues of ethnicity and minority rights, the IPA focused on economics and public policy. But its mistakes are also mild, at least compared with some of the obvious catastrophic errors of the 20th century: the way enough Germans voted for the Nazis in March 1933, or the way leaders of the Chinese Communist Party did not understand the insanity of the Great Leap Forward, for example. Compared with such catastrophic errors, the creation of Canberra, on the IPA list, does notrate.

Other bad but less than ruinous mistakes the IPA identifies include two of the foundations of the Australian Settlement, White Australia and centralised wage fixing. And acts of the centralising state, federal funding for schools, Canberra's takeover of income tax and government regulation of new media technology all get a guernsey. While both studies include the introduction of the cane toad, it speaks volumes that it is left to the IPA to deplore the political damage done by the Labor split, an undoubted error the academics ignore.

As with some of Crotty and Roberts's contributions, there are examples in the IPA's list that look as if they are there to make a contemporary point: such as the award of the Nobel prize to Patrick White, which the IPA argues encouraged a grants culture in Australian literature. Some other suggestions are outright eccentric. To list the defeat of the free-trade Reid government in 1905, which established protectionism as a bipartisan policy for 70 odd years, as our worst error demonstrates how easy Australia has had it.

Without disputing the importance of the mistakes cited in both these projects, while the issues involved restricted economic growth or individual rights, they did not put our democracy at risk. For all these errors, Australia has escaped invasion and economic collapse. Aside from the tremor of 1975, our democracy has stayed rock solid. And for all the prejudice succeeding generations of migrants have endured, we have always attracted more settlers than we chose to accommodate. Big-noting is not the Australian way. If anything, many of us are keener to find fault in our past. But for good or ill, Australia's failures, as they are measured by these two lists, are a mark of our success.

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The great Patrick White massacre is about to be unleashed

Australian homosexual author Patrick White got a Nobel prize for literature. Most people who try to read his novels wonder why. The satire below by Alex Dobes refers to a recent discovery of some of White's unpublished work

The discovery of Patrick White's rough drafts just shows that there's a good and bad side to everything. The five people in the world who actually read Patrick White novels will be pleased, but spare a thought for the English literature PhDs toiling away in the essay factories of India. The last time the English department at Sydney University set a Patrick White essay topic, the whole student body hopped on the internet and desperately offered their credit card numbers to anyone who could take away the pain. The Indian essay mills happily took up the offer.

The only problem was their burnout rate was horrendous. The essay companies tried to outsource the work to Burma, but the military censors there refused to believe that anyone would seriously publish such tripe, and assumed that the text must contain secretly coded instructions on how to overthrow the regime. Twenty PhDs had to make a dash for the Thai border.

Once across the border, the Burmese PhDs applied for refugee entry to Australia. The Minister for Immigration applied the "Patrick White clause" of the immigration regulations. Just as former employees of the Australian Army in Vietnam are given special consideration for entry to Australia after their release from Vietnamese prison camps, the minister is able to grant indulgence to foreigners who have read a Patrick White novel, particularly if they did this in a professional capacity. They, too, have suffered for Australia. (According to the same regulations, anyone who has read more than eight White novels is considered unsuitable, and shipped straight back to whichever mental home they escaped from.)

Naturally the 15 refugees didn't want to go anywhere near a literature faculty. Nor could they work in a bookshop, because there was always the danger of reading about Patrick White by accident - he even crops up in a Barry Humphries poem. So they went into advertising but, their minds still damaged, the Burmese could only produce gibberish like "Carlton. The beer that's made from beer."

So this Patrick White rough draft discovery could turn into a massacre. English departments will discover a rich source of essay topics, and the poor Indians will not know what hit them. Think of reading not just a Patrick White novel, but a Patrick White novel with diatribes against Malcolm Fraser, misanthropic asides about former friends, and complaints about traffic noise in Centennial Park. I am setting up a foundation to aid victims. I am happy to forward your donation, after deducting a small administration fee.

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