Australian Politics
Early days among the Aborigines
Alice Duncan-Kemp is a 20th century writer but her early experiences of Aborigines were extensive and go back to the beginning of the 20th century when much of the original Aboriginal life and customs were still alive.
Her memoirs are however much too late in time to constitute an account of pre-contact Aboriginal behaviour and customs. They are an ethnography of a time and place when white contact and influence were already extensive. Attempts to see therefore in her work confirmation of Bruce Pascoes's unusual claims about pre-white Aboriginal life are simply anachronistic. Her memoirs just cannot do that. They are simply sentimental tales of her own youth in the early 20th century
I must however sound a cynical note about the claim that one pre-settlement Aboriginal group manufactured grindstones by the thousands which they traded nationwide. That Aborigines traded with one-another is not in dispute but where are the findings of similar grindstones in thousands of former Aboriginal sites? They should have been very durable but seem to have vanished into thin air. There should be one in every museum if the claim were true
It’s hard not to be enchanted by the lost books of Alice Duncan-Kemp when they resonate so deeply with the nation Australia would become. A photograph of her, on a winter’s day 90 years ago, shows her tapping out tales of her childhood on Mooraberrie station, a speck in the red dirt of southwest Queensland’s far-flung Channel Country. The story of boom and bust in the bush, of hope given over to despair, of cattle dying of thirst one day and drowning the next in a frothing flood, is as old as the Outback itself. We know it by heart.
What sets Duncan-Kemp apart – and why the rediscovery of her work is causing a stir in academe and out in the field where scientists use it like a “road map” to unlock the secrets of how the First Australians lived – is the detailed and partly disputed account she provides of the contact era. A voice like hers was rarely heard at the time: admiring of the tribal Aborigines she grew up with, heavy of heart for a way of life in its death throes. Recalling the Aboriginal nanny who helped raise her on the family beef run, 1200km west of Brisbane, she wrote in 1933:
The seed of my knowledge, of that corner of sand-hills, was implanted within me as a mere babe straddling Mary Ann’s hip, or toddling with little black mates after the billy-cart. In later youth the seed grew and fruited. The secret lay in a profound respect for the aborigines (sic) and their customs. In return, these trusty folk taught me to read, with wonder and pleasure, in Nature’s Infinite Book of Secrecy, the reading of which was as simple as ABC to them.
Duncan-Kemp’s name and oeuvre – running to five out-of-print volumes and many more unpublished manuscripts – was forgotten by all but her family until a new generation of Australian historians dusted them off. Tom Griffiths, of the Australian National University, was 14 when he chanced across her second book, Where Strange Paths Go Down. He loved it, inspiring a lifelong passion for her work. Decades later the W.K. Hancock Professor of History would extol “the exciting truthfulness of her memoir – one tinged by innocence and nostalgia and prey to the glitches of memory, but faithfully told. A precious possibility emerges that Alice’s books comprise one of the richest ethnographic sources Australia possesses”.
University of Queensland archaeologist Michael Westaway began tracking down the scenes and places she described. There were dead-ends, of course. (“Alice was a bit airy-fairy on distances,” her grandson Will explains.) But in instance after instance, 21st-century technology and old-fashioned legwork confirmed her observations. Traces of sizeable Indigenous villages were found where she said they had been; a thriving trade in the narcotic pituri leaf did indeed span the length of the great inland rivers, from northwest Queensland to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, just as she described it; the jarra-jarra millstones she saw Aboriginal women sweat over to grind grass seed and other bush “grains” came from vast quarries dotted across the nearby desert; rare medicine plants continued to flourish in the out-of-the-way spots she had documented.
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News flash: not everyone who voted No to an Indigenous voice to parliament was a racist
Albo tried to pull a swifty but the people smelled a rat
By STEVE WATERSON (Steve Waterson is a senior writer at The Australian)
As the 20th century was drawing to a close, an elderly Jaru man guided me deep into the desert of the East Kimberley, where his people had lived for hundreds of generations.
His English wasn’t fluent, but it was good enough to give a curious reporter a glimpse of the bounty he saw in what was to my dull eye a flat, featureless and inhospitable spinifex landscape.
While he pointed out useful plants and animal tracks, the places where water might be found and the subtle signs that marked safe passage across the land, I remember being struck, unexpectedly and quite shockingly, by the realisation that he and his descendants could have prospered there, unaided, for another 10,000 years, whereas everyone I had ever known, no matter how tough or savvy, would have been dead by the weekend.
The lesson has stayed with me ever since, a humbling reminder that our Western civilisation doesn’t always know as much as we think it does; although it does know democracy.
That Jaru elder is dead now, as is, sadly, much of his ancient lore. I’m grateful for my brief contact with both, and lament their passing. He was very different, but not alien, to me; go back far enough and our heritage merges: all our ancestors had similar knowledge until it was supplanted, for good or ill, by what we define as progress.
I recount this memory not to pretend I have some mystical communion with our Indigenous compatriots, because I don’t, but to explain where my respect and admiration for them, bolstered by numerous subsequent encounters, was first inspired.
It’s not something I would normally think to mention, but the vitriolic accusations of casual racism that have been, and continue to be, directed at those of us who have popped our heads above the parapet warrant a word in our defence.
Your skin is thickened over decades in journalism, particularly if you’re impertinent enough to comment on current affairs. But underneath, some of us remain delicate flowers who are wounded to be told a dispassionate objection to a constitutional amendment signifies the poisonous rejection of a whole section of the population.
Many on the Yes side of the ledger insisted this was a matter that needed to go above parliament to be decided by the unmediated vote of the Australian people.
Regrettable and ever so slightly hypocritical, then, that they were so swift to fire up their social media accounts last Sunday morning to express their shame and disgust at living in a country where those same people turned out to be a bunch of benighted troglodytes who had the audacity to disagree with them.
There was no concession that some of their neighbours might have given the matter conscientious consideration; no acknowledgment of the shrewd, articulate advocates who questioned the lack of detail on the reach, composition or mechanism of the proposal: just a petulant refusal to accept the verdict without ascribing sinister motives to actions that didn’t align with their blinkered world view.
Even our miserable politicians seem intent on ignoring the electorate, but I suppose if you regard 32 per cent at the federal election as giving you a mandate, 39 per cent must feel like a stonking great majority.
Short of conducting another exhaustive series of referendums (perhaps including one on whether that should be referenda), it’s impossible to explain what determined people’s votes on the voice last Saturday.
‘I’ll concede I might be stupid, but it was hurtful to have my reading of a million words on this topic so casually dismissed.’
No one can speak on behalf of the 60+ per cent who voted against it, but I am confident most of them share the nation’s goodwill towards Indigenous people and reject the suggestion that their objections to the voice were born of contempt for them.
Of course there are buffoons who have paid no attention to the elevated discussions and disagreements over the past year or so, but we can’t really complain about them; unlike most countries on earth we compel them to turn up at the polling stations where they cast their ballot without a moment’s reflection.
Doubtless too there was among the No voters a vile cohort of racists and white supremacists who really do harbour anti-Indigenous hatred and resentment; but remember, in a referendum there are no lunatic-fringe political parties for them to support, so they have to end up on one side or the other. It doesn’t mean the No camp wanted them there.
For myself, I outlined my reasons in some (OK, too much) detail two weeks ago; but essentially I feared the constitutional change risked unanticipated harm out of proportion to its promised benefits, including, if not especially, to those it was designed to help.
Some of the disappointed Yes advocates wilfully refuse to comprehend how any decent person could have said No to what they insisted was a modest, respectful, generous invitation. But saying something doesn’t make it so.
As a starting point, changing the Constitution is self-evidently not a modest step. It is a momentous action but was never acknowledged as such, nor treated with the gravity it warranted.
Instead it felt like a rigged competition, where many of the potential winners didn’t look like they needed any more prizes. The average person doesn’t see angry professors, condescending MPs, insulting TV personalities, musicians, writers and film stars, Aboriginal or otherwise, and view them as victims.
People are suspicious when they are shown something whose description doesn’t match the reality in front of them. Those contradictions accumulated as the campaign progressed, the shrillness of the activists daily more disconcerting. If it’s nothing for us to worry about, why are you making such a fuss? Why are you losing your tempers – in some cases, your minds – over it?
Rather than engage with and attempt to disarm the serious and troubling arguments against the voice, in their arrogance many of the “elites” (I’ll be delighted to retire that word from my vocabulary later today) defaulted, with complacent laziness, to allegations of bovine stupidity against thoughtful, concerned people who were not persuaded by an amorphous appeal to their better natures.
I have some friends (the old contact book might be in need of revision) who, despite knowing my position, were pleased to inform me that a No vote was indisputably a product of ignorance, the province of the uneducated.
I’ll concede I might be stupid, but it was hurtful to have my reading of a million words on this topic so casually dismissed. I was put in mind of legendary English barrister FE Smith, who was famously chided by a judge who complained after Smith’s lengthy closing argument that he was “none the wiser”.
“No, my lord,” said Smith, “but you are certainly better informed.”
The readers of this newspaper have been kept better informed than most Australians about this debate, whatever the kneejerk whining from the dress circle about “the Murdoch press”.
I was impressed by our diligence in presenting all sides of a sometimes rancorous debate. No doubt someone sulking out there will make a dubious “gotcha!” accounting of the articles we ran and thereby condemn us; but as one of the editors who managed the enormous influx of submissions I don’t believe there was anyone of substance in either camp whose opinion pieces we declined to publish. Indeed the most vicious criticism I’ve received for some time came from a leading No campaigner unhappy with our supposedly “racist” bias towards the Yes camp. I will treasure that phone call as a foul-mouthed testimonial to our even-handedness.
For those who can’t relinquish the idea that the No voters acted out of ignorance, it’s worth considering that one of the most precious attributes of the glorious democracy that underpins our political system is its simplicity.
The result shows you don’t need to be blessed with a sophisticated formal education to grasp the principles of fairness and equality that govern (or should govern) our society, however imperfectly they are sometimes applied; nor do you have to be a constitutional lawyer to sense when those principles are being circumvented or diluted, regardless of the nobility of the reasons advanced for doing so.
For despite the squawking of the embittered few, I do believe most Yes voters were driven by genuinely noble ideals. It’s now vital to convince all those decent and honourable citizens that even though the voice to parliament is lost, its purpose is not.
I hope once their disappointment subsides they will agree to join forces with the other side, who should have the good grace not to gloat about the result.
After months of division, there was no real victory to be celebrated last weekend. That will come when we have conquered the inequity that inspired this unnecessary referendum, and that long battle needs to start now.
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Audit reveals that Australia's universities are now little more than Madrassas for the Left
The century of spin has arrived. Today, the battle for the minds of the people is a battle for control of the narrative.
Universities have been at the forefront of this battle, and free speech on campus is a significant but overlooked casualty.
By 2016, a censorious culture was already evident on university campuses, undermining the battle of ideas. In 2023, the social and political narrative on campus is increasingly being controlled by universities that are adopting ideological positions as institutional goals.
According to the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) Free Speech on Campus Audit 2023, over the last six years, Australian universities' hostility towards free speech on campus has more than doubled.
It is no coincidence that the rise of the “activist university” has occurred simultaneously. Right across the tertiary sector, there has been a marked shift in focus away from education and towards ideology.
Activism and hostility towards free speech usually go hand in hand. The former tends to give rise to the latter
This shift in the debate recalls George Orwell’s famous words, “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Spinning the narrative one way will redefine, influence, and ultimately limit thought and speech.
Of Australia’s elite Group of Eight universities, seven received the lowest rating for free speech on campus due to having hostile policies.
The total hostility score across all institutions, as measured by the number and severity of university policies that are hostile to free speech, increased by 117 percent between 2016 and 2023.
Just How Controlled Is Speech?
The 2023 audit found that Western Sydney University (WSU) was the tertiary institution most hostile to free speech in Australia.
From a policy perspective, WSU epitomises the activist university perfectly. Its bureaucratic web of policies infiltrates every aspect of university life. No problem is too great, or too small.
This is a university with tentacles in both the minutiae and the overarching meta-narrative.
WSU has policies on “Indigenous Australian Education,” “Indigenous Australian Employment,” “Environmental Management,” “Gender Equality,” and “Respect and Inclusion.”
The University’s Bullying Prevention Guidelines define bullying as “name-calling,” “sarcasm,” and “teasing.”
Its Environmental Management Policy requires the university to promote an “understanding of and responsibility for environmental issues both within the University and the community.”
While Western Sydney University represents the worst of its kind from a policy perspective, most other Australian universities are not far behind.
The IPA’s 2023 audit shows across all of Australia’s 42 universities, there are now 77 policies pledging allegiance to one of three ideologies: sustainability, indigenous issues, and gender equality.
The activist university is inherently opposed to debate because it promotes only one side of an issue, attaching a value judgment to it and suggesting it is the superior position to hold. This closes debate and crushes viewpoint diversity.
Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at New York University, noted that a university cannot be dedicated to an ideology and simultaneously open to challenging perspectives.
Excessive policies, guidelines, and regulations contribute to this culture by censoring speech or undermining viewpoint diversity.
Some examples include the University of Wollongong’s Inclusive Language Guideline which instructs students to avoid words like “man,” “ladies,” “mothering/fathering,” and “wife.”
Central Queensland University's protocol for Engaging and Communicating with First Nations People says, that “direct verbal confrontation” and “expressing disagreement” with Indigenous people should be avoided, in order to “preserve consensus.”
Bond University forbids posts that “can be interpreted to portray” content that is “injurious or objectionable” to the university.
Previous Attempts at Guaranteeing Free Speech Have Fallen Flat
The federal government's attempts to strengthen protections for free speech by requiring universities to adopt a free speech policy have been relatively ineffective.
In the case of the University of New England (UNE), the new policy arguably hindered rather than helped free speech on campus.
Not only did UNE leave out key provisions in the free speech template policy provided by the government, known as the French Model Code, but it also included provisions that detract from free speech, such as the humiliation provision.
This provision was included within the French Model Code’s definition of “the duty to foster the wellbeing of staff and students” which includes “speech which a reasonable person would regard, in the circumstances, as likely to humiliate or intimidate.”
Humiliation is an inherently subjective term that can be interpreted broadly. This caveat ironically means the code restricts the very speech it was designed to protect.
While all 42 universities have managed to produce a free speech policy, only a third have adopted the six essential pro-free speech criteria identified by the IPA in the French Model Code.
The only way universities can appropriately protect free speech is to acknowledge that the only legitimate restrictions are those that apply generally to all people and institutions; namely laws relating to defamation, the incitement of violence, and racial vilification.
There is no basis for universities to limit free speech beyond this.
The bottom line is when the feelings of others, no matter how misguided or fragile, can put a stop to the dissemination of facts or genuinely held opinions, there is no meaningful right to free speech.
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Don't blame capitalism for Australia's economic dysfunction
A lot of young Australians have become disenfranchised by the economic status quo and understandably so. It has become all too easy to get your proverbial pitchforks out when home ownership has become more out of reach than ever, inflation doesn’t seem like it’s departing us any time soon, and an increasingly precarious job market has become the norm.
A survey of 18,000 Australians aged 15-19 by Mission Australia revealed that half view their futures in a negative light. Testament to these attitudes is the especially worrying response of 27.7 per cent of respondents reporting elevated levels of anxiety and depression.
As a 20-year-old university student, I’ve witnessed too many of my contemporaries externalise their frustrations by subscribing to radical movements aiming to tear the system down in its entirety instead of making greater efforts to better understand current circumstances.
Yes, there are structural flaws embedded within our current market composition, but more often than not people will attribute these issues to the ostensible failures of free markets. Misguided advocates of free enterprise don’t respond accordingly and will instantly equate an anti-corporate stance with one interested in deposing capitalism altogether.
The truth is that we no longer live in a free and open-functioning marketplace. Our generation is characterised by a private sector filled with operatives who are not at all in favour of competition and who would traditionally have been described as anti-capitalists.
In fact, the so-called father of capitalism, Adam Smith, extensively warned of the dangers of allowing anti-competitive sentiments to fester and negate the ability of the invisible hand to deliver the best outcomes for society.
‘A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufacturers.’
Australia’s economy, along with many other Western economies, is now ridden with what can be overtly perceived as conduct that is anti-capitalist in nature.
Take Qantas for example. The national carrier’s stakeholders were no doubt overjoyed at the revelation that Qatar Airways was unsuccessful in its application to fly an extra 21 services into Australia’s major airports. Former CEO Alan Joyce himself proclaimed the application’s success would ‘distort the market’.
The Qantas-Virgin duopoly controls 95 per cent of the Australian airline market. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in June said the duopoly has made the sector ‘one of the most highly concentrated industries in Australia’.
‘The lack of effective competition over the last decade has resulted in underwhelming outcomes for consumers in terms of airfares, reliability of services and customer service.’
Indeed.
In no esteemed capitalist manifestos or doctrines exists the idea of government-induced monopolies as a characterisation of free enterprise.
The banking sector is another example of one rife with anti-competitive sentiments disseminated by incumbents. For decades, the Western World’s largest banks and financial institutions have enjoyed an oligopoly on the supply of credit up until very recently when the credit market started to proliferate with companies like Afterpay and Wisr stealing their fair slice of consumers.
A ‘Global FinTech Survey’ conducted by PWC in 2016 found that the financial technology industry alone may have the potential to steal up to 70 per cent of the banking sector’s share of the credit market.
This is of course great news for everyday consumers. Neo-lenders base their business models on undercutting their nations’ biggest commercial banks, placing tremendous downward pressure on interest rates for you and me. According to a recent Mozo survey, six in ten Australian borrowers would now consider neo-lenders over banks.
Yet, some aren’t so chuffed with the trend. Have a guess who.
In an interview with CNBC in August, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon chastised efforts from US regulators to level the playing field and proliferate his sector, warning that the industry would cede more products to nonbank players. This is of course not really a warning. It’s terrific for the average punter, just not so great for JP Morgan.
Another unique characteristic of today’s private sector and another reason the prevalence of ‘capitalism’ can be called into question is the trend of common ownership. Research undertaken by the Institute of Labour Economics in 2021 found that around 31 per cent of firms now share a substantial owner with a rival company. This is borne out by the sharp trajectory in M&A deals experienced since the start of the 21st Century, allowing countless entities to usurp one another.
This wasn’t the case in earlier generations when firms didn’t fall under the same network of conglomerates and truly did compete with one another.
My overarching point is that it is a puerile stance to lump all private enterprise into the same category of ‘oppressive capitalist overlords’. A very clear distinction must be made between the big and small ends of town. It is too shallow an analysis to classify one economic system as good and another bad. We must carefully identify the flaws and trends evident within today’s private sector to maximise societal welfare
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/economic-status-woe/
************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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