Letters

 A Certain Frame of Mind

SIR: Hal Colebatch’s very cross review of Malcolm Fraser’s memoirs (November 2010), in which the reviewer spends half his time excoriating the immoral views of myself (in my article “The Realpolitik of Malcolm Fraser”, May 2010), is characteristic of a certain frame of mind—a frame of mind that’s certain—and unanswerable in terms that would convince him of its limitations. This is because we are at opposite poles on such questions as whether black and white can define the colour of human nature or political systems.

Colebatch is a reductionist and evangelist for “the good” in the tradition of George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives, many of them ex-Trotskyists whose attachment to “political virtue” was at least consistent across their changing political fantasies. At every point in their meandering they knew they were right. With such people it’s eternally “us” and “them”, and us is good and them’s bad. Let’s make the whole world over into our image.

As a boy I had one or two left-wing teachers with that frame of mind, and they got nowhere with me because I could see how their hallowed abstractions, disjunctions, dichotomies and certainties belied reality. It’s always somebody else’s evil. They’ve never read Genesis to see how it’s both universal and partial.

Allow me to exacerbate things. To slip for a moment into Colebatch-think: yes, “certainly” Mao was a “bad man”, directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of a million or two landlords in 1950–51, shot in the countryside after trials by peasant courts set up by party cadres, together with a lot of deaths during the Cultural Revolution he inspired, and a bit more. But on the other hand, and whether or not Fraser is correct in his assessment of Mao’s achievements, a claim such as Colebatch’s that Mao was the worst mass-murderer of the last century depends on the assumption that he intended his misconceived Great Leap Forward to be a disastrous failure and result in the deaths of twenty million people by famine (I’ve seen “thirty” claimed, even “forty”—hell, what does it matter? Add ’em in). There’s something wrong here, Colebatch’s gearbox has popped out of logic. His defence of the virtue and benignity of the American empire ignores logic too. Yes, there’s some virtue and benignity there, but he’ll never properly factor-in the firebombing of Tokyo, the carpet-bombing of Vietnam, the scores of thousands of civilian deaths produced by our war in Iraq, the way we taught the world how to use nuclear weapons, and so on—all somehow excusable. He’s a person of admirable simplicities and certainties, situated philosophically in the direct line of Manichean dualism.

Philip Ayres,

Melbourne, Vic.

 

Standing Up for Christianity

SIR: Scott Monk’s article “God Gave You Brains …” (November 2010) left me with decidedly mixed feelings.

On the one hand, it was a pleasure to read another incisive critique of the New Atheists, and, especially, of the kid-glove treatment which they routinely receive in sections of the Australian media. Three of the world’s most prominent anti-religionists—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and A.C. Grayling—visited Australia in 2010. Each was feted like a rock star by like-minded groupies; none of them was questioned with the slightest rigour by any working journalist. None of them deigned to enter into a public discussion with an appropriately qualified apologist for the Christian (or any other) faith. The Q & A program featuring Richard Dawkins on ABC television in March was a travesty, as Monk rightly says; but it sounded like a Lincoln–Douglas debate compared with the sycophantic goings-on at the Adelaide and Sydney Writers Festivals, at which Dawkins and Hitchens respectively made cushy appearances.

Monk is spot-on in his observation that media reporting of the New Atheists “needs to focus more on their claims than on whom they are criticising”. Simply, their claims are trite, unoriginal and, for the most part, beyond the limits of their expertise. Variations on all of their themes have been advanced and refuted by great thinkers down the ages—right up to the present day. Monk named several excellent contemporary scholars; there are literally tens of thousands of others. One of the correspondents in your last issue, Mr Ken Harkness, made an excellent job of summarising a few of the main arguments for the reality of Jesus’s miracles and His physical resurrection.

It is easy to make fun of inarticulate Christians such as Senator Fielding, as Dawkins did on Q & A. Bullies revel in picking on people who cannot defend themselves, and rhetoricians of all stripes are adept at destroying straw-man arguments. In his captivating book There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (2007), Sir Antony Flew points out that Dawkins’s worst sin as an academic is his consistent tendency to distort or ignore both counter-evidence and counter-arguments. Too often, the New Atheists present the case they purport to refute in its weakest forms, which is the opposite of sound intellectual practice.

Monk laments the dearth in Australia of “public intellectuals”—men and women outside the clergy—who are prepared to speak up “at the end of a microphone” and defend their faith on rational grounds. I could not agree more that such people need to be heard, but I am frustrated by Monk’s assumption that such people do not already exist. There are quite a number of us—at the least, I would wager, the sixty whom Monk seeks to identify.

Until the age of thirty-three I was an agnostic leaning towards atheism, and a litigation lawyer by occupation. In my mid-thirties I became a Christian, and, a few years ago, after leaving the legal profession, I wrote a book called God, Actually. In essence it is my attempt to explain why, on all the available evidence—science, philosophy, history, sociology, personal experience, sheer logic—God probably exists and Christianity is probably true. The book was published here in 2008 by ABC Books (yes, ABC Books) and has since been released in Britain and North America, though my impact on the creeping secularism which now pervades Australia and the West in general has been, I fear, infinitesimal.

Nonetheless, I have now spoken publicly about my faith on scores of occasions over the last two years—occasionally on radio, but far more often in person at churches, clubs, libraries, festivals, schools and so on. Usually, I invite myself along in one way or another! Earlier this year, I issued a public challenge to Dawkins in the Sydney Morning Herald to debate him anywhere and anytime. His lack of response was unsurprising. (On his official website, I am referred to as a “flea”, the tag applied by his acolytes to pesky, misguided fools who deign to question their hero.) However, what continues to disappoint me is the lack of opportunity to reach my fellow citizens through the mass media.

I welcome Scott Monk’s challenge and humbly put up my hand.

Roy Williams,

St Ives, NSW.

 

The Colonel and the Students

 

SIR: I would like to comment on two matters raised in Hal G.P. Colebatch’s review-article “Australia’s Freedom-Haters” (September 2010), namely the “mysterious army officer, A.W. Sheppard” and the relations between Australian students and the International Union of Students in Prague.

“Mysterious” is not quite the right adjective, though I find it hard to suggest alternatives. Alec Sheppard’s life and career have received much attention. His obituary appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, June 14, 1997. Wendy and Allan Scarfe wrote No Taste for Carnage: Alex Sheppard: A Portrait, 1913–1997, published in 1998. Google has three significant references to Alexander William Sheppard, army officer and writer; one of these is an interview lodged in the National Library. I make six references to him in Radical Students: The Old Left at Sydney University, writing that “a non-communist, anti-Catholic Christian radical but sympathetic to communism, he had served in Greece in April 1941 and in 1945–46 as a control officer for United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and then as a member of the British Economic Mission. He later wrote political booklets, bought a bookshop in Sydney, and went into publishing.” He was a leading figure, with other leftists, in the League for Democracy in Greece (which supported the communist side in the civil war) and the Australian-Yugoslav Cultural Association (which supported Tito after his split with Stalin in mid-1948).

Although Colonel Sheppard (honorific title) supported anti-religious moves in the communist regimes in Hungary and Bulgaria, the Communist Party became suspicious of his friendly attitude to Tito’s Yugoslavia. Sheppard had enrolled in Law in 1949. At the end of September he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to a request from the rebel communist government in Greece to present their case for a negotiated settlement to the United Nations. By the time he reached Europe the rebel regime had been crushed. To save his Law course Sheppard asked two fellow students (both destined to achieve judicial status), Bill Fisher and Jim Staples, to answer for him should the roll be called. Then one morning the ABC announced Sheppard’s arrival in Paris. The lecturer in Legal History called the roll that day. When one of Sheppard’s friends replied “Here” the lecturer paused, then meaningfully called Sheppard’s name again. This time there was no answer. The lecturer remarked drily, “Reception from Paris seems to have faded.” Sheppard subsequently abandoned his course.

Early in 1950 Sheppard reported on his European activities to the League for Democracy in Greece. Some members demanded that he repudiate his acceptance of the closing of Yugoslavia’s frontier with Greece in mid-1949. He refused, and was expelled “for traitorous actions”. Bill Fisher was also expelled and Jim Staples resigned. Sheppard entered the book trade, purchasing Morgan’s Book Shop. He also developed his interest in attending racecourses.

Colebatch is correct in stating that Australian communists worked in the International Union of Students but wrong in stating that “federal and state governments were compelling students to finance its local subsidiary through compulsory student guild fees”. The National Union of Australian University Students was (briefly) an affiliate but not a “subsidiary” of the IUS. The statement that when Julia Gillard was elected president of the AUS in 1983 “Soviet influence of the IUS was quite obvious” is irrelevant. The AUS was not affiliated to the IUS.

Many Western student unions, including the British, American and Australian, left the IUS in 1949–50 because of its failure to take action over the suppression of a student uprising in Czechoslovakia and its expulsion of the Yugoslav Union of Student Youth following the Stalin–Tito dispute. After the National Union of Australian University Students withdrew from the IUS early in 1949 the Prague body accepted the affiliation of the Australasian Student Labour Federation (encompassing the communist-dominated Labour Clubs of various universities). Henceforth the Australian communists in Prague were delegates of the ASLF. Some of them became disenchanted when they saw how the Soviet representatives lorded it over the communist delegates from other countries.

Australian governments did not force students to finance the AUS. The universities, themselves self-governing, allowed Student Representative Councils, Union Boards or guilds to make their own decisions, though the universities did collect the compulsory membership fees on their behalf. The various representative bodies decided whether they would join the NUAUS. In the 1960s ALP supporters came to dominate the National Union. After the growth of colleges of advanced education in the late 1960s their student councils were admitted to the NUAUS, which became the Australian Union of Students in 1971. Radical students (“the New Left”) became influential in the AUS until 1975–76, after which their power declined. The leftists split; Jewish students were alienated by the Union’s pro-Palestinian stance. Three student unions disaffiliated in 1979. The AUS Student Travel Company collapsed in 1979. ALP Clubs took over the AUS in 1982, but students at Sydney and Macquarie refused to rejoin the AUS, which collapsed in 1984. A National Union of Students was formed in 1987.

Thus when Gillard was president of the AUS it was failing. It was certainly not affiliated to the IUS.

Alan Barcan,

Charlestown, NSW.

 

Dancing into Australia 

 

SIR: Laurie Hergenhan’s evocative memoir “Dancing on the South Coast” (October 2010) reminded me of my own dancing years which had their genesis fifteen years earlier in a Tatura internment camp. Having arrived in Britain from Berlin as a fifteen-year-old in December 1938, I thank my lucky stars that I was interned there in June 1940 and shipped to Australia to spend seventeen months in Victoria behind barbed wire.

Those months did me a lot of good. I had the time to read, attend talks, learn bridge, prepare for the Victorian Leaving Certificate and observe the great variety of Homo sapiens around me. But of all my elders and betters who contributed to my social development, one man stands out: Herr Mayer, who taught me dancing.

It had always been my ardent wish to be able to steer the girl of my choice through gyrating multitudes to the tune of a snappy foxtrot. In my hostel in Sutton, Surrey, I had been one of about a dozen teenagers from Germany and Austria. We were occasionally invited to a Saturday night social by one of the local youth clubs. This invariably meant dancing. Alas, the best I could hope for was to be led gingerly to a corner of the floor by a young lady who would then try to teach me the steps while I looked down at her feet wondering which way they would move next.

One day in a Tatura internment camp, someone thought something should be done to prepare the young men in the compound for life outside the wire. Herr Mayer was approached. He had been running a School of Etiquette in Melbourne before he was interned. Could he organise a course of ballroom dancing? Our compound held males only.

In the spacious Tatura mess a couple of dozen internees, arranged in pairs, formed a circle around Herr Mayer. Mayer, a monocle clamped into one eye and a buttonhole in his lapel, had us moving around him anti-clockwise, to the strains of a German hit which eventually became a Bing Crosby evergreen, “In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madame”. Each pair had a designated “lady”. After ten minutes Herr Mayer would clap his hands, the gramophone operator would take the needle off the revolving record, there was a shuffle of hands, “ladies” became “gentlemen” and vice versa. Those who had led were now going to be led by their partners. And so it came about that when I was actually let loose in the antipodes, I entered that new world schooled in the two major dance steps of the time: foxtrot and waltz.

Early in 1942 I was released to pick fruit in Ardmona and then joined the army. As an “alien”—the law forbade naturalisation in wartime—I was put into a labour company. The following four years were spent in tents, sometimes in the bush and sometimes in a city. But if I was on leave and went to a dance, I could now approach any of the ladies with a minimum of trepidation and without apologising in advance. On army leaves in Melbourne, there were dances somewhere every night. It was unusual for single girls to live anywhere but with their parents and, occasionally over the years, an obvious newcomer to Australia, I was invited home by girls to meet their parents. They remembered my birthdays, borrowed a second bike, asked me to help with the washing up, and have a weekend with them. Once I spent five days’ leave near Mildura with the parents of a student teacher I had met at a dance. They were “blockies” in Red Cliffs.

After the end of the war, the army gave me a priority discharge to enable me to board a ship at British government expense which was to take me back to Britain—to which I had always wanted to return. Four days before boarding I decided I couldn’t go. I had grown too fond of the place. And it wasn’t the climate or the wide open spaces or the beaches. It was the people. And the primary person responsible for this state of affairs had been Herr Mayer, my Tatura dancing teacher.

Bern Brent,

Farrer, ACT.

 

The Navies in the War

 

SIR: Harry Gelber claims (Novem-ber 2010), “In 1942 the Royal Navy was helpless to prevent the fall of Singapore and the Dutch East Indies to Japan … In the same year it was the US Navy that defeated the Japanese, in the Coral Sea and at Midway.”

The US Navy was free to operate in force in the Pacific for one reason only: the British and Canadian navies were doing the work in the Atlantic. Further, both the Coral Sea and Midway may have been won by America because the Japanese had lost many highly-trained and irreplaceable carrier pilots to the British in the Indian Ocean.

One hoped that this anti-British mythology had departed from the scene with the unlamented Mr Keating and it is a little tiresome to have it endlessly repeated. The war at sea was a global effort by all the Anglo-American navies.

Hal G.P. Colebatch,

Nedlands, WA.

 

Muslims and Dogs

 

SIR: The article by Andrew Lansdown (September 2010) concerning the Muslim aversion to dogs and its wide-ranging consequences, reveals an infantile level of religious perception on par with belief in the Tooth Fairy. But for the fact it is such a serious matter, the anecdote regarding the Muslim woman and her seeing-eye horse and the story regarding the angel Gabriel and the puppy could be episodes from Fawlty Towers.

The United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states in Article 18, paragraph 3: “Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedom of others.”

The Muslim taxi driver who refuses a service to a blind person with a seeing-eye dog is culpable on all counts as above and if fines do not result in a change of behaviour then governments should take appropriate action to bring this hurtful and discriminatory expression of religious belief to an end.

Peter Gerard,

Guyra, NSW.

 

The PNG Campaign

 

SIR: Peter Ryan’s account of the PNG campaign (October 2010) can be recommended. During my stay in PNG from 1969 to 1979 one of my workmates, Charles, was an interesting sight without his shirt. He had a small crater just under the collarbone and a very large one above his shoulder blade. As he said, he and mate were lying prone alongside the track “up at Kokoda” awaiting the enemy. A bullet took his friend dead centre and had Charlie not rolled over to see what had happened he might have died too. As it was, the expanded exiting bullet took a large piece of his shoulder muscle with it.

When I questioned Charlie as to why the Japanese did not succeed in their advance along the Track, he said they ran out of supplies. Reading Ryan you can guess why.

Other literature on the campaign mentions that early in the war an Australian officer of a local volunteer company was sent to explore the Moresby end of the Track but couldn’t find it. Neither could I although I spent a lot of time hunting in the area.

Murray Mitchell,

Bairnsdale, Vic.

 

Identity, Survival and Boat People

 

SIR: How Australia deals with boat people claiming asylum must be observed with some amusement and real interest by Asia. To return rejected refugee claimants to their “home” country is often impossible. It may not be known where they come from or, if it is, their country may simply refuse to take them back unless return is voluntary, relying somewhat cynically on the Western concept of the “human rights” of the refugee.

Sometimes a country will agree to take its people back even when they do not want to return, for example, Sri Lanka, but involuntary return is probably not as common as people think. In fact it is probably extremely rare. Western governments blur or simply suppress the issue. It appears that Australia sometimes pays “resettlement costs” to the asylum seekers or their governments, to allow for voluntary return when Australia does not classify the people as refugees. The government is now discussing the return of Afghan asylum seekers, though what the issues are is not clear.

I became aware of “boat people” as refugees when Vietnamese people started arriving by boat on Australia’s shores. The arrivals were uncontrolled and the Australian government seemed to negotiate a cessation of these arrivals by talks with the Vietnamese government. Usually there is a hint of some agreement, but the terms as received by the public are vague. The government was “in control”. After this there were many other boat people, with some treated as of more concern than others, for example, the Chinese and Laotians. If my memory is correct the Laotians voluntarily returned home with the promise that they could reapply and would then get permanent residence. The Chinese were returned on the basis of “resettlement costs” being paid. Asian countries have been confronted with the same issues. Their answer seems to be to stay on your boat; they apparently assume that once landed the people will not be leaving. Malaysia has been confronted with these issues recently when it tried, apparently mainly unsuccessfully, to force non-citizens to return to their home countries (Indonesia took some or all of their people back, but it was a fellow Malay country). Europe is now confronted with the same problems on a very large and unsettling scale.

The ability of Australia to control entry to it is crucial to Australia’s future. It will need to survive within the sphere of Asia. The next 100 years will be important. We need Asia to respect our borders and more specifically, us, yet we request Asians to delay boat people seeking refugee status in Australia (whatever their real status) when those same people, unlike most Australians, share identity and cultural beliefs with Asians. It does not look good, and in any case the people will be expected to be eventually accepted here. Asia will ensure that. Asian countries want to survive, to protect their identity groupings and their security. Many Australians criticise their blunt unsympathetic attitude to people seeking refuge, but if we feel threatened or are threatened we will be confronted with the same questions.

For Australians it is difficult to tell who are political as distinct from economic refugees. For Asians it must seem academic—the people want to come to places that provide a future, not live in their impoverished homelands or in tents along their countries’ borders. Asians are hardened by the pressures of survival and population, and if they perceive that Australians do not look to their own identity and survival they will make their own judgments on a country they already do not particularly like.

Social ideology has nice people ignoring the unfairness of boat people “pushing into the queue” of people waiting to come here, thus prejudicing the chance of government-selected migrants coming to Australia—and in doing so they deny the need for social order, equity or values. Their goodness is unlikely to be perceived as this for much longer; the old may die feeling holy, the young may only feel the sting of that which cannot be controlled. The kind and the good, politicians or otherwise, say that the refugees coming by boat are few compared to those coming by air, yet the people coming by boat appear to pay thousands of dollars more than the cost of an airfare and do not always have or need proof of identity.

People are not stupid in being concerned about boat people—their effect is long-term and this will force change. For now would it not be wiser to give refugees, other than those selected for migration to Australia, temporary refuge until they can return to their homelands? The boat people are not going to be concerned about us, for they too look to survival.

Finally, to publicly degrade and humiliate people who fear for the loss of what is at the heart of humanity, that is, identity and security, by publicly degrading them as “racist”, or displaying “fear”, “hysteria” or “xenophobia” is, beyond being an easy way of conveying meaning in private conversation, simply ignorant, self-indulgent and stifling of what might be truth. Sometimes self-regarding virtue may more accurately be self-indulgence or, with some irony, alienation from others.

John Oliver,

Albert Park, Vic.

 

Compulsory Voting

 

SIR: Chris Curtis (Letters, November 2010) states that it is “the duty of citizens in a democracy to choose who governs them”.

It is a right, not a duty. And that right should extend to refraining from voting. Compulsory voting involves a significant “donkey vote”, by which I refer to the folks who, being disillusioned with both major parties, resort to “we’ve always voted Labor”, and do just that merely to avoid a penalty. One significant effect of this is that the conservatives have to offer socialist incentives in order to attract such disillusioned voters.

Frederick Auld,

Midway Point, Tas.