Letters: The Debt Trap

Sir: Professor Wolfgang Kasper’s wide-ranging article on China (December 2020) avoids finance. In late 2020 China owned over US$1,000,000,000 in Treasury securities. China’s dollar reserves have been recycled into US debt. These surpluses were built through trade, not money printing. They embody the work of the Chinese over decades. The risk to those surpluses from default or hyperinflation brought on by US money printing warrants a rethink by any Chinese government. Adverse observations about the CCP explain little.

Professor Kasper mentions Gorbachev, but, once again, he avoids finance, a central factor in the collapse of the USSR. The Soviet debt trap opened during the détente era when industrial productivity decayed. Under Gorbachev the malaise worsened when the energy sector experienced several crises.  Unable to finance perestroika without cutting living standards to levels that would have guaranteed Polish-style social unrest, Gorbachev sought further loans from Wall Street. He was refused. The failed coup later provided Yeltsin with history’s stage-call.

Today it is the US that is in a debt trap. China is decoupling from the US. Xi’s decision is simple: the senior leadership of the CCP is determined that there will never be a Chinese Yeltsin. As for the wider context, the Han have a saying: “Reversal is the way of the Tao.” 

Phillip Hilton  

Police Improvement

Sir: According to its Blue Paper, A Vision for Victoria Police in 2025, Victoria Police’s strategies include “a focus on continuous improvement, evaluation and evidence- and experience-based best practice sharing”. This is not mere managerialist jargon. Look how the sleuthing capacities of Victoria Police have recently improved: after insisting for years that there were no African street gangs in Melbourne, Victoria Police were recently able to find them and agree that they were a problem.

In their continuous improvement in ferreting out crime, Victoria Police have also been able to scrutinise the Facebook posts of Zoe Buhler, a private citizen in Ballarat, and detect in them evidence of her inciting a protest against one of the Andrews government’s COVID-19 lockdown directions.

This improvement in the detection of crime by Victoria Police compares favourably with the success of the Stasi in detecting thought crimes by citizens of East Germany. For it is very like a thought crime that Zoe Buhler has been charged with: incitement is an indictable offence and is committed upon completion of the inciting conduct, even if the incitement fails to persuade anyone to commit any offence. It can attract a maximum penalty of fifteen years’ imprisonment. Incitement is the perfect crime for politicians keen to crush dissent and the perfect tool for their compliant police.

Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius has defended the officers who arrested and charged Zoe Buhler. He added that police, like the virus, don’t discriminate.

However, there still needs to be quite a bit more continuous improvement in Victoria Police’s understanding of non-discriminatory policing. In late August, Melbourne AFL celebrity Sam Newman used a social media post to call for a quarter of a million Melbourne residents to protest against the Stage Four lockdown. The police response? No handcuffs, no arrest—just a visit by Victoria Police officers and a reminder of the guidelines surrounding lockdown protests. Newman claimed his words were “hyperbole” and cancelled his call to protest. He added on Facebook that the “very pleasant” officers “left a sheet with the official guidelines”.

In her social media post a day or so after Newman’s tweet, Zoe Buhler called for a peaceful protest in Ballarat against the same lockdowns that attracted Newman’s interest. She too received a visit from Victoria Police. She didn’t admit to hyperbole but told them she didn’t realise she was doing anything wrong and offered to delete the post. No courteous reminder of lockdown guidelines for a non-celebrity like Buhler or acceptance of her offer to delete her offending post. Out came the handcuffs and the arrest for incitement. Her fate is now in the hands of the Victorian judiciary.

Only three of the organisers of the Black Lives Matter protest that attracted thousands of marchers through Melbourne’s CBD last June were fined. No one, no inciter and no marcher, was arrested or prosecuted, although the march contravened the lockdown guidelines. In September the anti-lockdown demonstration by a few hundred protesters at Victoria Market attracted a massive police presence that included the armoured black shirts of the Public Order Response Team. Seventy-four arrests were made and 176 fines issued.

The virus may not discriminate. It’s quite a stretch to claim that Victoria Police don’t either.

Douglas Drummond

Law versus Mob

Sir: The importance of Keith Windschuttle’s book The Persecution of George Pell rests in its thoroughness and truthfulness. Nowhere did I feel the bias and hysteria that I found so troubling and unsettling during the progress of the events that led to the High Court and “the near-run thing” of the concluding paragraph of the book. All the questions I had wanted to ask throughout the media coverage were answered. The readability of the book came through the way the details of the “persecution” reinforced my own observations, and became credible through the inclusion of facts and fallacies central to any investigation of this kind.

When “righteous men cease to be people” and become a baying, unthinking mob out for the hunt is an idea often portrayed in literature and nowhere more forcefully than in Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, from which this quotation comes. I have also come across the idea in a poem by Les Murray, “Demo”, where, though he understands the reasons behind hatred and revenge, he entreats us to “conscientiously object” to their practice.

As the accusations against George Pell began to gather momentum, I was deeply troubled by what I perceived as a collective belief in a crime so out of character, from what I had observed of the man, and so improbable a story, as to be laughed at. Well, it would have been if this belief had not been instilled in the consciousness of the public by the “we see you and hear you” platitude which has the potential to convict any accused person. Another aspect of this “witch hunt” seemed to spring from a collective dislike for aspects of the Cardinal’s personality expressed through his religious beliefs and practices.

Well before the events which are recorded with such clarity in Keith Windschuttle’s book unfolded, my curiosity about the man had been aroused. As a non-Catholic attending a celebratory Mass with school students in my care, I had been told it was appropriate to join others who were receiving communion, if I so wished, by lowering my head and crossing my arms in front of my shoulders to indicate I had simply joined the throng to show respect and also receive a blessing at the same time. At this Mass at St Patrick’s, Melbourne, I chose to join the procession of those lined up before Cardinal Pell, becoming increasingly nervous as my turn approached to appear before him in this way.

It must have taken a few seconds, though it seemed much longer to me, for my intention not to take communion to be noticed. It was noticed, however, in a way that dispelled any feelings of awkwardness. Contrary to everything I’d heard about Pell’s manner, he stopped in his tracks and bestowed a blessing with a degree of care and solemnity that seemed entirely natural and spontaneous. His whole manner, combined with a certain warmth in his eyes, put me at ease and summed up his character for me. It is a story that has travelled with me and generally is howled down when I tell it. Nevertheless, I have kept on telling it.

I couldn’t help but wonder, if this anecdote had been presented as evidence, would it have had the same effect as Louise Milligan’s witness evidence where she describes the “victim’s” eyes as “big chocolate-dropped eyes framed with curling lashes”? On a Four Corners program recently, a journalist and presenter said that Milligan “puts her heart on the line” when she goes in search of a story—as if to say her selective compassion is, as in George Orwell’s famous line, more equal, and her tears more heartfelt, than that of others.

The Persecution of George Pell reminds us that whatever instincts we have in such cases should not get in the way of all the facts of the case or the rule of law; or the assumption of innocence until proved guilty; nor should we feel intimidated by, or submit to, ideologies or ideologists of any kind when matters of our own conscience are at stake.

Patricia Wiltshire