Letters to the Editor

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Just Say Yes or No

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SIR: The Electoral Commissioner, Ed Killesteyn (Letters, September 2011) has responded to my article “The Electoral Commission’s Referendum Lottery” in Quadrant (June 2011) by quoting from a judgment in the Federal Court in Benwell v Gray, Electoral Commissioner. The applicant in this case claimed that the Scrutineers Handbook issued by the Electoral Commission to officials conducting the ballot for the 1999 referendum on the republic was not in accordance with the requirements of the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984. 

As the matter only came before the Court on November 3, 1999, and the judgment was handed down on November 5, the day before the referendum, the judge found that “the balance of convenience lies against the grant of interim relief to the applicant”. Understandably, His Honour could hardly find against the Electoral Commission on that day and throw the conduct of the referendum into confusion. However, before coming to that conclusion His Honour also traversed the nub of the case—did section 24 of the Act mean what it said, or did section 93(8) of the Act mean that section 24 actually meant whatever a voter or an electoral official wanted it to?

Section 24 of the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984 reads: 

24. Manner of voting

The voting at a referendum shall be by ballot and each elector shall indicate his or her vote:

(a) if the elector approves the proposed law—by writing the word “Yes” in the space provided on the ballot paper; or

(b) if the elector does not approve the proposed law—by writing the word “No” in the space so provided. 

(The space so provided on the ballot paper is a small rectangle just big enough for the word “Yes” or the word “No”.)

Subsection (8) of section 93 of the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984 reads: 

93 Informal ballot papers …

(8) Effect shall be given to a ballot-paper of a voter according to the voter’s intention, so far as that intention is clear. 

One might think that Parliament had made its intention clear in precise and unambiguous language in section 24, and that section 93(8) was intended to protect voters whose writing of the words “Yes” or “No” was less than perfect, but the High Court, the Court of Disputed Returns, and the Federal Court have decided that section 93(8) means that a voter may write the word “Yes” or the word “No” by using whatever words, phrases or sentences they please. Do I hear the word “activist”?

On the other hand, Mr Killesteyn has ignored other aspects of my article, and I await his explanation for accepting a tick on its own, when his own website states that a symbol on its own without the addition of words constitutes an informal vote; for allowing a spoilt ballot paper to be overwritten, when the Act requires that a spoilt ballot paper should be returned and a new one obtained; and that most extraordinary ruling that allows the question on a referendum ballot paper to be answered “in a language or symbol the person conducting the scrutiny understands” (emphasis added). Has the use of foreign languages or symbols, but only if by chance there is present a scrutineer who understands the language or symbol used, been sanctioned by a court ruling, or is that just an extra frolic on the part of the Electoral Commission?

Finally, if the courts’ rulings and the Electoral Commission’s interpretations of the legislation allow voters and scrutineers to ignore section 24 and make full and imaginative use of the carte blanche apparently given to them by section 93(8), why on earth does the Electoral Commission persist with the farce of quoting section 24 at the top of the ballot paper and in the information it provides for voters on its website? If the courts’ rulings trump the very precise and specific language of section 24, surely they should be quoted if the voter is not to be misled.

Perhaps Parliament should remove section 93(8) from the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act so that section 24 would stand on its own as an unambiguous expression of Parliament’s intentions, and the words “Yes” and “No” would mean just that.

David Smith, Mawson, ACT.

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Some Facts on the Live Cattle Trade

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SIR: I have long experience in the management of grazing lands and the animals living there. Therefore I believe I can offer a different perspective on the live animal export debate than has so far appeared in the media, and this may be of interest to your readers.

The live cattle trade with Indonesia has developed because there is a neat fit between Australian supply and Indonesian demand. The trade services needs in both countries that cannot be satisfied otherwise because of clearly defined differences both environmental and economic. If it were possible to value-add the product before export by fattening the cattle, slaughtering and processing in Northern Australia, then the opportunity would have been addressed long ago.

Control of animal welfare standards is maintained by some of the larger cattle breeding enterprises through the development of vertical integration from farm gate to feed lot and slaughter in Indonesia and there are joint-venture arrangements with Indonesian businesses which can do the same. For most cattle producers, however, control is lost at the point of sale.

The ABC Four Corners program revealed an appalling lack of animal welfare standards in some Indonesian abattoirs and blame has been attributed to our cattle industry and in particular the Meat and Livestock Authority for failing to resolve the issue.

In response the government overreacted and imposed an immediate and total ban on live cattle exports, severely damaging the livelihoods and jobs of thousands of innocent people in both countries and putting at risk the welfare of some 10,000 cattle stranded along the delivery pathway.

It should be obvious that the Meat and Livestock Authority has no authority to interfere in the domestic arrangements of a foreign country and enforce compliance with international standards of animal welfare. Such matters can only be addressed at government level. That is why we have a Minister for Foreign Affairs and a diplomatic service. The government knew of the problem well before the Four Corners program but did nothing.

If live animal exports are banned, how will that help the cause of improving animal welfare? Countries who import our livestock will seek alternative sources. Is it then not likely that welfare standards will deteriorate rather than improve? Or are those demanding permanent cessations of the trade serving a larger agenda and the welfare issue is but a step along the way? That is, the ultimate goal is to put an end to human exploitation of animals and we are forced to become vegetarians.

There is nothing wrong with being a vegetarian, but if the motive for becoming so is to stop the killing of animals for human consumption then the motive is invalid. Think about the billions of plague locusts aerial poisoning programs destroy in order to save crops. And all the heavy machinery sowing and harvesting as it trundles across the countryside crushing countless beetles, frogs, ants, mice, lizards, fledgling birds and so on. Every mouthful of muesli is a monument to the massacre of millions.

James Litchfield (via e-mail). 

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A College Where They Read Livy 

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SIR: In his otherwise admirable article in the August edition, Paul Monk makes the following observation: 

So much is this so that, were I a lecturer in ancient history at a good university—or a liberal arts college of the kind this country conspicuously lacks—I would be guiding my students this year through a close reading of Livy’s Rome and the Mediterranean and Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution.  

It seems that Campion College has not been conspicuous enough to catch Mr Monk’s eye, so may I use your columns to draw his (and your readers’) attention to our existence, and to our purpose, which is to offer a “specialist” BA in the liberal arts to students wishing to obtain a broad education in our core subjects—literature, history, philosophy and theology—before going on to professional studies elsewhere. The Campion BA is coherent and integrated—not a smorgasbord but a table d’hôte of Western civilisation for those students who want to keep their options open as long as possible, while acquiring high levels of skill in thinking and communicating. 

Finally, Campion has a surprisingly large and vibrant classics department for its size. Livy and Syme are more likely to be read and appreciated here than at many older and larger universities. 

David Daintree, President, Campion College, Old Toongabbie, NSW. 

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Like, Milton 

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SIR: Dr David Daintree’s article “The Case for Latin” (September 2011) makes the valid point about the speech of the media to the “hapless young”, in which “goes” means “says” and “like” can mean virtually anything. A written example of this phenomenon is given, no doubt unwittingly, later in the article when reference is made to “men like Milton, Donne, Herbert and Landor”. I feel sure Dr Daintree meant “men such as Milton, Donne …” rather than men merely “like Milton, Donne …”

Hector Macdonald, Pullenvale, Qld. 

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The Values of the Left

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SIR: Dr Bendle’s thorough piece on 9/11 (September 2011) reminded me of an astonishing comment on that event that came from the Canadian left-wing intelligentsia a few weeks after the attack on the USA. A professor of political science at the University of British Columbia opined on a website that, for him “as a Canadian”, October 4, 1988, was more significant than 9/11. October 4, 1988, was when Canada ratified the Free Trade Agreement with the USA and Mexico, of which the Canadian Left heartily disapproved. To my further surprise virtually no one else on the website seemed to think that the professor’s comparison was ridiculous. Common sense does seem to have been suspended when many of the intelligentsia analyse 9/11.

John Furedy, Sydney, NSW. 

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The Question of Aboriginality 

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SIR: I was very disappointed to read your article “The Trial of Andrew Bolt (II): Real Aborigines versus Phoneys” (December 2010).

In the article Windschuttle questions the Aboriginality of Sally Morgan, Jill Milroy, Helen Milroy and their mother Gladys Milroy, quoting heavily from a paper by Huggins (1993) which asserted that genetic inheritance was not sufficient to make someone an Aborigine.

Having worked with the Milroys for nearly twenty years I can testify to their outstanding commitment and performance in improving education and other outcomes for disadvantaged Aboriginal people. 

It is very inappropriate for you to write, “Today Morgan and her family are prominent members of the Aboriginal establishment and make six-figure earnings from their identity”. Sally Morgan, Jill Milroy and Helen Milroy were all appointed through advertisement and the same procedures as for all staff at the University of Western Australia. All three have made major contributions to the West Australian community.

Alan Robson, Vice-Chancellor,University of Western Australia, Nedlands, WA. 

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Keith Windschuttle responds

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Dear Professor Robson,

Thank you for your letter, which I will publish in the October edition of Quadrant. I’m afraid you overlook the main point of my article, which was not concerned with the help the three Milroy sisters have given Aboriginal people. I wrote about the decision of a group of Aboriginal activists to sue journalist Andrew Bolt in the Federal Court for racial vilification because he questioned the authenticity of their Aboriginal identity. My article provided a number of examples, from the 1960s to the present, to demonstrate that many Aboriginal people have long questioned the identity of others claiming to be Aborigines. My intention was to show that, while Aboriginal people can question others’ identity with impunity, when non-Aboriginal Andrew Bolt did the same he found himself in court. In short, there is a racial double standard on this issue.

As you note, one of my examples was an article by Aboriginal academic and political figure Jackie Huggins challenging the identity of one of the three Milroy sisters, Sally Morgan. In a review of Morgan’s book My Place, Huggins complained that the author did not grow up in an Aboriginal community: “I could not identify anything which told me Morgan was an Aboriginal person except the part about our common Aboriginal study grant.” Morgan’s claim, “we had an Aboriginal consciousness now”—made when, aged thirty, she and her mother discovered they were descended from Aborigines of Western Australia’s north-west—was dismissed by Huggins. Genetic inheritance alone did not make someone an Aborigine. “Solely swallowing the genetic cocktail mixture,” Huggins wrote, “does not constitute ‘being’ an Aboriginal as so many Johnny-come-latelies would have whites believe.”

These comments were made not in some nondescript publication but in an academic journal—peer-reviewed no less—Australian Historical Studies, April 1993 edition. If you find this argument so disappointing, instead of reproaching Quadrant for reproducing it, you might have sent a letter to the editors of the journal who published the original, Professors Stuart Macintyre and Marian Aveling, plus a copy to Huggins herself at the University of Queensland where she is adjunct professor in the School of Social Work.

I accept your assurance that your institution followed all proper procedures when it appointed the three Milroy sisters to academic positions in Aboriginal affairs. My article never made any suggestion to the contrary. Still, I was surprised when Sally Morgan was made Professor and Director of your university’s Centre for Indigenous History and the Arts, since her only formal academic qualification is a BA pass degree with a major in psychology. Even though her book My Place seems to me more a family memoir than a work of academic history, it must have been the major reason she won the position, since she had published little other historical research when she gained her appointment.

If her book was that important, there is an issue I would like to take up with you. As you may be aware, My Place has been subject to serious criticism, which Sally has so far failed to answer. In an interview on the Nine Network in 2004, Judith Drake-Brockman described the book as “absolute fabricated tripe” that made her “disgusted and sick”. She called it “a fiction of our relationship and a caricature of history”.

Judith is a member of one of the two families at the centre of the book. Sally claims her half-caste grandmother Daisy Corunna was the illegitimate daughter of Howden Drake-Brockman, the white pastoralist who ran Corunna Downs, near Marble Bar. Judith, one of Howden’s legitimate children, denies this, and much else besides, in her own family memoir Wongi Wongi, published in 2001 by Hesperian Press.

Judith provides considerable evidence, including family photographs, to disprove Sally’s claim that Daisy was one of the “stolen generations”. Rather than being stolen, Daisy was employed as the Drake-Brockman children’s nanny, and she spent her teenage years in this position—the summer months in Perth and the rest of each year on Corunna Downs, where Daisy’s own mother still lived. Moreover, Judith argues Daisy’s father was not Howden but Maltese Sam, the station cook, originally from the Torres Strait islands. Indeed, Judith challenges Sally’s entire characterisation of Daisy. In real life, Daisy did not speak the way Sally records in My Place, and never had the “poor fella black” attitudes the book gives her. Judith also dismisses My Place’s account of the childhood of Sally’s mother Gladys, whom she knew from birth. In her 2004 interview with journalist Helen Dalley, Judith called upon Sally and Gladys to take DNA tests to establish whether they really were descended from Howden. They declined to co-operate. “We respect the right of others to hold different views to ourselves,” Sally said, “but my family does not wish to participate in the program.”

In my own book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations (2009), I discuss all these issues at length and argue Sally’s response is unsatisfactory. Her book on the two families’ relationship has given her an influential position in a public institution. State education authorities around Australia require thousands of students to read My Place every year—the book has sold more than 600,000 copies, mainly to school students. Hence the issue is far more than a private dispute between families.

If Sally took a DNA test and published the results she would immediately resolve one of the most contentious issues, whether she and her two sisters really are the great granddaughters of Howden Drake-Brockman—not to mention her book’s insinuation that Howden might also have been the father of their mother Gladys, and thus their grandfather too.

In the interests of transparency of scholarship, Sally should also place the original tape recordings of her interviews with Daisy and other family members in a public library or archive where other researchers can double-check the accuracy of her transcripts. As I’m sure you are aware, it is normal practice across a range of academic disciplines to make source data available in such a way to other scholars.

I urge you to ask Sally to take both courses of action. Her academic position and the influence of her book on school children throughout Australia give her a public responsibility to defend her work. I hope you will agree that a response in these terms would meet the academic and scholarly standards your university was founded to uphold.

Yours sincerely, Keith Windschuttle, Editor 

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A Catholic Bias? 

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SIR: I write this after reading Bernard d’Abrera’s article “God versus Allah (Pt II)” (September 2011). Whilst some good points were raised I, as a Reformed (read “Calvinist”) Protestant, do have some issues.

There was the continual underlying motif that Roman Catholicism is the one true church and that Protestants are somehow merely pseudo-Christian sects. Whilst it was not explicitly stated, after reading the article it would not be an unreasonable deduction, for one who did not know better, to deduce that Protestants are somehow anti-Trinitarians.

The most egregious link in this regard was his reference to Michael Servetus, describing him as “Calvin’s disciple”. Even a Protestant tyro with the most rudimentary education in Protestant history knows that Calvin and Servetus were theological and ideological opponents, primarily due to Servetus’s anti-Trinitarian teachings. (Calvin was a firm Trinitarian, as even a cursory examination of his “Institutes of the Christian Religion” readily reveals. The doctrine of the Trinity was also firmly adhered to by all prominent Protestant teachers including Luther, Zwingli, Bucer, Knox and Cranmer.) Indeed, it was those teachings which earned Servetus a death sentence, executed at the behest of the city council in Calvin’s Geneva (and a heresy which made him a wanted man throughout Roman Catholic Europe).

The notion that “Calvin murdered Servetus” is a charge that is constantly cast in Calvin’s teeth but Calvin actively opposed the death of Servetus and, upon hearing that this was to be conducted at a fiery stake, sought a quicker, more merciful death. This was denied by the Genevan city council, proof, if ever it was needed, that Calvin was not the “Tyrant of Geneva” as he has continually been portrayed. Yes, Calvin did see Servetus’s death as the ridding of a pestilence, but only in relation to Servetus’s teaching. Calvin’s continual compassion for the man himself has been well documented.

As for Mr d’Abrera’s off-hand remarks regarding the “real presence” in the Eucharist, his reliance on apostolic succession and other arguments used by Roman Catholics in an effort to prove their notion that Roman Catholicism is the true church, these have long been effectively dealt with by Protestant authors. Ironically, one of the most effective speeches against some of these very points was by one of Mr d’Abrera’s own, Bishop Joseph Strossmayer, at the first Vatican council in 1870. I would suggest anyone interested go to www.trinityfoundation.org and look it up.

As for the notion that the Huguenots would agree to be “of one faith with the Turks”, such is little more than Catholic propaganda. The Huguenots were dedicatedly “Calvinistic” in their teaching and it seems highly unlikely that they would have compromised in this matter. Indeed, it was this lack of compromise that resulted in tens of thousands of them being slaughtered by Roman Catholic forces in the infamous St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, a fact that Mr d’Abrera conveniently ignores. It is therefore disingenuous of him to take the moral high ground via the teachings of certain popes on slavery when one considers how much blood the Catholic Church has on its hands. Yes, it is an unfortunate fact that there is also blood on some Protestants’ hands but this is a mere drop in the ocean in comparison.

It is a pity that an otherwise informative article was undermined somewhat by a “history” that amounted to little more than Roman Catholic propaganda.

Mick Koster (via e-mail). 

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The West and Its Foes 

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SIR: September’s Quadrant was a challenging read, which led to a difficult decision: which contributor had made the most noteworthy contribution. Messrs Minogue, Bendle, Connor and Kates really zeroed in on the poor quality of academic thinking and its conformity against Western democratic values and support for values absolutely hostile to us, as well as media bias. Messrs Arndt, Luck and Klaus zeroed in on the poor quality and bias in understanding energy and potential alternatives.

Whilst the Cold War is behind us it is perverse, as David Horowitz noted in his book The Unholy Alliance, how irrespective of the viewpoint of the foes of Western society, the Left intelligentsia find more in common with them than with the society which gives them freedom and tenure be it in universities or with public broadcasters. Horowitz, Hitchens and Orwell have all hit upon this dismal fact. 

M. Gordon,  Flynn, ACT.  

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No Quidding 

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SIR: I was pleased that Quadrant published a chapter from my new novel in the July-August issue. The Quidding Pirates was the novel’s original title. However, the publisher, Acashic, has changed the title to Counterstrike. The book is available under that title from the Acashic website.

Hal Colebatch, Nedlands, WA. 

(Editor’s note: In the September edition, an article by Hal Colebatch quoted a line from a John Masefield poem, using the term “quiddling pirates”. This was an error. It should have been “quidding pirates”.)