Letters to the Editor

Dominion of the Nerds

SIR: David Alexander’s “By the Nerds, For the Nerds” (September 2009) is a welcome breath of fresh air for any consumer, actual or potential, of government services. Perhaps, however, he could have emphasised somewhat more the role of the nerds in job creation and status enhancement for the nerds themselves. The 500 per cent growth in Canberra’s population over the past forty years tells its own story. In government circles, more staff means more authority and status. It could be instructive to explore departmental budgets over any given period to determine what proportion of their expenditure is devoted to administration.

Canberra is not the only offender. Once upon a time any organisation wishing to employ people, either paid or as volunteers, to work with children had to undergo a police records check, a simple and inexpensive procedure with its own paper trail should questions arise later. This is no longer the case at least here in Victoria. Now such employees or volunteers must be issued with and carry a Working with Children card, issued after a police check but validated in the Department of Justice bureaucracy following completion of a complex form, provision of a tightly defined photograph and accompanied by sixteen pages of instructions on how to complete the form. The net has been further expanded to collect anybody who works with children, even the volunteers for junior sporting teams.

Note that no further checking is carried out. All that happens is that a small army of bureaucrats is employed to administer a system which cannot work any more effectively than the one it replaced. But the senior officers of the department have gained in authority and status by employing more people. Bear in mind, too, that the police check is valid only for the date on which it is issued. Thus a conviction on the following day for a child abuse offence would not invalidate the police check until it is renewed three years later. Why three years? Because even this vast new bureaucracy cannot conduct checks and issue certificates for the tens of thousands of such subjects any more often. But they get away with it because no one—ministers, parliamentarians or journalists—bothers to think through the implications in such a sensitive area as child welfare.

Meanwhile, the government’s own Human Services department is under fire from the Ombudsman for its failure to protect children in its care. In many cases, the required checks were not carried out because that department’s staff did not know how to do it. 

One can only wonder how many of those thousands of volunteers, actual or potential, simply declined to subject themselves to the demands of the nerds and took what was left of their civic enthusiasm elsewhere. In my own case as a volunteer mentor in a state secondary college, I left for other compelling reasons but I had intended to refuse to fill out their complicated and unnecessary paper work.

Perhaps Quadrant could introduce a new column detailing other readers’ experiences with the dominion of the nerds.

Michael O’Connor,

Gisborne, Vic.

Rogue History

SIR: Rogue history indeed! Michael Connor’s seething article (September 2009) on historical errors in the ABC two-part series Rogue Nation struck a chord with this avid student of our early colonial history.

My eyes popped when I saw the Rum Rebellion of January 26, 1808, being staged outside Old Government House at Parramatta. Wrong house! Wrong location! Of course the producers will probably claim budgetary restrictions for their decision to use this location instead of building a special set for the exterior scenes, but it can only exacerbate the ongoing public confusion between Old Government House and First Government House.

The latter residence, the official headquarters of the early New South Wales governors, then at the top of Bridge Street, Sydney, was the scene of the Rum Rebellion. Today it is still possible to picture the scene on that hot January day of 1808 outside the “Museum of Sydney on the site of First Government House”. Buildings in Bridge Street have changed significantly; the route taken by the New South Wales Corps is much the same.

An official 200th anniversary re-enactment of our only military uprising was staged on the original site on Australia Day 2008. Her Excellency the Governor, Professor Marie Bashir, gave a history-charged speech, and author and historian Thomas Keneally was MC. Citizens jammed the site to join a somewhat cash-strapped re-enactment, but at least it was in the right location. The crowd-pleasing event should be a feature of every Australia Day.

Images of First Government House were successfully staged in the SBS drama series The First Australians. For the sake of authenticity, this technique could have been used in Rogue Nation, with Old Government House, Parra-matta, the perfect setting for the indoor scenes.

Dawn Moss,

Vice-Chairman,

Friends of the First Government House Site Inc.,

Sydney South, NSW.

J.L. Mackie

SIR: I very much enjoyed reading James Franklin’s piece on philosophy at Sydney University (October 2009). However, and as much as I have enjoyed reading one of philosophers Mr Franklin mentioned, namely David Stove—how many philosophers can make a reader laugh out loud after all—it seems to me very odd that someone can give a history of philosophy at Sydney University without mentioning J.L. Mackie, who was not only a Sydney native but was a professor of philosophy at Sydney University in the early 1960s. My bet is that Mackie will be remembered long after the others are forgotten. One is remembered by what one writes, and Mackie wrote a masterpiece in the philosophy of religion with The Miracle of Theism. And in moral philosophy his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong is superb, and also likely to stand the test of time. His stuff on Hume is top-notch too.

I know the version printed was an edited version of a speech, but still, painting out of the picture the man most likely to be remembered in a hundred years time seems wrong-headed. Sure, Mackie may only have been at Sydney University for four or so years before heading to the United Kingdom and soon Oxford University. But a man who can write as lucidly and persuasively about morality and the existence or otherwise of God is someone any university would be glad to claim for its own. Certainly the last university at which I worked before moving to Australia, Otago University, is happy to claim Professor Mackie as one of its own. That’s where he started his career before moving to Sydney University at the very end of the 1950s.

James Allan,

Garrick Professor of Law,

University of Queensland,

St Lucia, Qld.

Kipling, Ardrey and Me

SIR: I was an infant of Welsh-Cornish extract in Port Pirie, South Australia, when in the hard times of 1930 my family took me to the UK. Things turned out little better, including spasmodic schooling which later might even vanish overnight, courtesy of Hitler’s bombers. Having no piece of parchment to proclaim my universal worth, I grew up in hard labour in time to be conscripted to Malaya to meet its postwar People’s Liberation Army of the Chinese Communist Party which wanted to fill the current vacancy without asking the Malays.

In 1948, the year I quit via Singapore, an Australian, name of Lance Sharkey, rumoured to be a leading communist, arrived to give aid and advice to the local breed. Was it his mob that refused to load war supplies on Australian docksides? If so, it was fortunate that we never met!

In the years following, higher education seemed out of reach of the young and impecunious in a land fit for heroes (but perhaps I was kidding myself). However, the handicap eased if one was prepared to work in places where no better qualified person would go. Thus, apart from India, Malaya, and bits of Burma in times before, my real education continued by working in British East Africa, later in the South Arabian Federation (Aden), back to Australia, and then on to Papua New Guinea. Not only my education but also my attachment to firearms continued.

I had long ago found Kipling not only entertaining but true—read his poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”. Then, comparatively recently, I found just what I wanted—Robert Ardrey’s four very fine books, African Genesis, The Hunting Hypothesis, The Territorial Imperative and The Social Contract. I read them in succession and was no longer in any doubt about my empiric views and thus, quite possibly, my own identity (and if I’m wrong it doesn’t matter now). Truly, as Ardrey wrote, “People not only lie to each other but also to themselves.”

The wonderful thing about Ardrey (once a playwright) is that he wrote such simple and clear, yet elegant English. It is something that bureaucrats and many academics today seem to find so difficult. Or do they not want any change?

I often wondered what Ardrey looked like; does anyone know?

Murray Mitchell,

Bairnsdale, Vic.