A Cultural Problem

A Cultural Problem

Sir: Our country does not have an economic problem. It has a cultural one. Look everywhere and anywhere and you will not see any significant engineered or electronic product manufactured in Australia. Cars, lifts, bicycles, demolition machinery, planes, helicopters, pathology analytical equipment, whitegoods, polished gems, watches, computers, optical equipment (and these are just ones that come to mind now)—essentially none are manufactured here. And any idea that does sprout from an inventor’s pencil moves offshore as soon as it has any potential.

All we do in any commercially significant quantities is dig rocks out of the ground and sell them, plant seeds and sell the shoots, and encourage animals to procreate and sell their progeny. We are a Neanderthal economy.

As a lesson for how it is done, we should look at Israel, a tiny seventy-year-old country that is 70 per cent desert, with virtually no natural resources, forced to spend a crippling proportion of its GDP on existential defence, which has become the world’s leader in technological innovation and start-ups.

Why can’t we do what Israel has done? We will not dig ourselves out of our economic hole until we confront ourselves and answer that question.

Peter R. Clyne
Darling Point, NSW

Crime Against Children

Sir: No praise can be too high for Mark Latham’s “The Heavy Cost of Education’s Failed Experiments” in the March edition. A single phrase sums the whole matter up: “Postmodernist and identity politics in our schools are trying to engineer a very different type of society, based on progressive ideology rather than on the learning needs of students.”

Happily, back in the distant past my education was entirely traditional at an English Anglican boarding school, where I was a scholarship boy. In the school holidays I worked in the studio of a professional painter. I taught painting in a London art school where I tried to maintain the importance of traditional skills in the face of every conceivable kind of hostile fad, and maintained this stance on the Art Working Group for the National Curriculum for English and Welsh Schools (1990–1991) and when writing art criticism for the Spectator (1984–1995) and the Australian (1995–2001).

When Mark Latham writes, “The decline in the New South Wales education system is a crime against our children”, he does not exaggerate. Children and their parents should be offered the alternative of a rival system based on traditional lines, but the problem would be: Who could any longer teach it? Ironically, art education in fully communist countries such as the USSR and Yugoslavia was infinitely more traditional and skilled. I saw this first-hand for myself.

Giles Auty
Echo Point, NSW

A Shoddy Documentary Coming Up

Sir: I understand the ABC is planning a documentary series this year that includes pre-colonial Aboriginal history featuring the historian Bruce Pascoe. As Quadrant has documented, there is now credible, sourced, published evidence that disputes the accuracy of the pre-colonial Aboriginal history as portrayed by Pascoe in his book Dark Emu. For some time Dark Emu has been a mandatory inclusion in the curriculum in our schools.

Since Australians will soon be asked to change the Constitution in favour of Aboriginal Australians, surely the ABC must not broadcast the proposed documentary unless Pascoe’s version of pre-colonial history is confirmed independently. To broadcast a false history would mislead Australians and almost certainly distort the outcome of the forthcoming referendum. Would this be an offence under Commonwealth law? Wetherall

J. Weatherall,
Nedlands, WA

Soothsayer Scientists

Sir: Despite our high levels of education, human beings still want a soothsayer to give them some glimpse into the future. The modern soothsayers are those climate scientists who are trying to convince us all of a dire future climate if we don’t immediately reduce our carbon emissions.

The idea that a qualified person, even with complex modelling, can accurately predict the climate in fifty years time is soothsayer stuff. Science can only pronounce on the past and the present. And as with any projection, there is the standard variation from the mean so that in terms of predicting future climate the longer-term the prediction the greater the chance of error.

There is no sound evidence to suggest the planet is experiencing or will experience a climate emergency, there is no pressing need to decarbonise the economy. Why should this country squander billions on a futile exercise of attempting to control something that can’t be controlled? Remember the obsequious courtiers of King Canute?

Alan Barron
Grovedale, Vic