Letters to the Editor

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Our God-Given Rights 

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SIR: Peter Barclay (November 2011) highlights accurately the attacks on individual freedom by the Left which are well under way throughout all Western democracies. These attacks under the guise of “equality in everything” and “capitalism is bad”, if allowed to continue, will finally bring to heel all free people.

Christianity, which is the basis of our laws in particular, is a target for the elitist Left. It knows that to control the masses, Christianity needs to be relegated to the dustbin. Witness attacks in the USA by left-wing activists with support from left-wing media on Christianity in that country. For example, on the Golf Channel the reference to God in the pledge of allegiance was deliberately removed. American society was founded on the principle that the people have inalienable rights bestowed upon them by God. It is this tenet which is under attack.

Leftists know they have to remove God from the equation in order to finally control the individual for the greater “good” of the collective. I say to all free people, whether you believe in God or not, it is imperative to fight the notion that men are responsible for defining what is a human right. As soon as we let the individual human rights which God gave us be replaced with rights which men give us then we have lost our battle to remain free.

Greg Buchanan, Niagara Park, NSW. 

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Not Nice, Just Tired 

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SIR: Regarding “Nice People and the Servile State” (by Greg Melleuish, November 2011): Is it a question of Nice? I suspect it may be more a tendency to surrender to the endless stream of invective and crippling legislation produced by the new hordes at every level of government and quasi-government. As C.S. Lewis put it in the essay “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”: 

the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.  

I have surrendered, not because I am Nice, but because I am Tired and Debilitated from the endless struggle for justice and liberty against the new petty know-it-alls who have no vision except for their blinkers and an innate desire for ultimate control. It’s over.

Geoff Holt, Mittagong, NSW. 

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The Ad Fontes Principle 

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SIR: Bernard d’Abrera (Letters, November 2011) wriggled out of his incorrect description of Servetus as Calvin’s disciple with a casuistical agility which it is tempting to describe as jesuitical.

Pace d’Abrera, conservative Protestants are actually very grateful to the Western and Eastern churches for what they believe to be their providentially directed formulation of Christological and Trinitarian doctrine during the period of the first ecumenical councils, and are happy to recite the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds (filioque issues notwithstanding) which emerged from those early centuries.

Protestants, however, are also committed to the great Renaissance and Reformation principle (pioneered by Catholics such as Erasmus) of ad fontes—back to the sources—and therefore judge the often grotesque accretions which the Roman church has acquired over the centuries in the light of that same Bible which the Roman church claims to revere as the Christian faith’s authoritative foundation document.

One example of Roman adaptation is the unscriptural Constantinian concept of the union of church and state (which unfortunately some Reformers, such as Calvin, took over unreformed from Rome) which d’Abrera uses to justify the Roman church’s long, shameful and canonically unjustifiable record of sanctified violence, such as the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

In the Malone edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, there is a footnote describing a Roman priest who asked an English Protestant, “Where was your religion to be found before Luther?”, to be informed, “My religion was to be found then, where yours is not to be found now, in the written word of God.”

Bill James, Bayswater, Vic. 

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The Roman Church 

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SIR: The defence of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre by Bernard d’Abrera may be difficult to believe in the twenty-first century, but it does show admirable faith, internal consistency and reliance on no less than papal authority: omnes leges, omniaque iura, vim vi repellere cunctisque sese defensare permittunt (Innocent IV at the Lyon Council in 1245). The problem is that the Paris Huguenots used the Gospel while their “Christian” executioners used swords, axes and the (admittedly biblical) technique of defenestration. Paris may have been, as Henri de Navarre put it, worth a Mass, but surely not, in God’s eye, the crimes that followed it.

I do not think many Eastern (Orthodox) Christians—and certainly no Serbs—would relish being brought back “into unity with Rome by dint of their continued and unbroken use of the (sacramentally valid) Old Slavonic Liturgy”. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs shared the fate of the Huguenots between 1941 and 1945, while Bishop Strossmayer would have been turning in his grave. It is not the dogma and the ritual that perpetuate the 1054 Schism—these remain strikingly similar—it is the worldly activities of the Roman church which make it less than acceptable by the Protestants and the Orthodox alike. I cannot imagine a meaningful dialogue with d’Abrera. Neither could Christ, silent before the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov.

George Nikolić, Hughes, ACT. 

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The Church and the Slave Trade 

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SIR: Michael Warby (Letters, November 2011) mentions the encyclical Sublimus Dei (Paul III, 1537) as “evidence” of (hypocritical) “enthusiastic Catholic participation in both the slave trade and slave owning”. This is his idea of a clever riposte to my earlier point (September 2011) about Elizabeth I being involved for profit in the slave trade with her Muslim partners.

Circa 1530, less than fifty years after the discovery of the New World and its inhabitants, all of Christendom (including burgeoning Protestantism, and Columbus’s bankers in Florence and Genoa), doubted that American Indians were human beings, with immortal souls, because they did not seem to be descended from any of Noah’s three sons. It took a Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Minaya, bearing letters from his superiors in Mexico, to convince the Roman establishment that such doubts were unfounded. Although Sublimus Dei (1537) then unequivocally includes the “Amer-Indians” as human beings, the encyclical still holds onto another medieval attitude of legitimately enslaving “Enemies of the Church”, who might today be considered prisoners of war. This practice was not confined to the medieval Christian world. Such names as Auschwitz, Colditz, Changi, Kwai, the Gulags, and in 2011, Guantanamo, come vividly to mind. In any penal system, anywhere, anyone sentenced to incarceration objectively becomes a slave of the state, simply because he or she is made to forfeit their free will. Part of Sublimus Dei included a clearly permitted capture and enslavement of Henry VIII for his murders of Thomas More and John Fisher. It also endorsed the enslavement of Muslims lawfully captured in warfare, with the hope of their conversion—a mercy not reciprocated even to this day.

The loudest voices against human trafficking came from Pius II (1458–64), Leo X (1513–21), Paul III (1534–39) and Urban VIII (1623–44). They were followed by several later popes, particularly Gregory XVI, a contemporary of Darwin. Lastly, Leo XIII (1878–1903) finally brought serfdom to an end in the Catholic world. This particular pope appointed Cardinal Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers, to preach a crusade against the abominable crime of trafficking in human beings. The address of that great bishop to the Anti-Slavery Society in England was so memorable that it inspired General Gordon in his attempts to abolish slavery in the Nile Basin.

As a Catholic historian, I am painfully aware of the utter peccability, venality and even bestiality of many of the incumbents of the Petrine Office, but I must emphasise that notwithstanding the false expectations of many, the papacy is not a sacrament for the conversion of the incumbent—it is solely an office for the preservation of the Deposit of Faith against heresy and schism. As regards corrupt popes, Dante puts many of them—and also Mohammed—in hell. There is a sweet Latin joke, which translated into English goes something like this:

Q. Who was Pope Innocent IV?
A. Why, he was the eldest son of Pope Guilty III!

Finally, Reg Naulty (Letters, November 2011) may reflect that when Mohammed entered his cave to receive instructions from an angel to destroy all other religions, especially Christianity, it was allegedly the same angel, Gabriel, who half a millennium earlier, had appeared to an initially reluctant Virgin Mary, telling her that because she was “Full of Grace”, she was to become the mother of The Word of God Himself. To which deity was Gabriel reporting—God or Allah?

Bernard d’Abrera, Mount Dandenong, Vic. 

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Some of the Best Women Historians 

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SIR: Reading Philippa Martyr’s appreciation (November 2011) of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s work (I did find her Nightingale a touch tedious; but I also regretted she did not live to finish her biography of Queen Victoria) put me in mind of other women historians, mainly non-academic, who also wrote exemplary prose.

In Australia, the tragic Margaret Loch Kiddle (1914–58) produced two outstanding histories, as well as books for children. Alison Patrick notes, in The Australian Dictionary of Biography, “Her publications included Caroline Chisholm (1950), three books for children—Moonbeam Stairs (1945), West of Sunset (1949) and The Candle (1950)—and her posthumous masterpiece, Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria 1834–1890 (1961), defiantly completed just before she died.” Melbourne University awards a prize named for her.

C.V. (Veronica) Wedgwood (1910–97) wrote extensively on English history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and her best work was probably her biography of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford. Following his condemnation by parliament Stafford was executed in 1641 on the warrant of his master, Charles I, who was soon to share his loyal servant’s fate. The Strafford book first appeared in 1935 and the later, much revised Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford, 1593–1641: A Re-Evaluation was an indication of the author’s scholarship and ability to adjust her views in the light of further evidence.

Barbara Tuchman (1912–89) wrote gripping, clear dramatic history minus footnotes, and dull scholars accused her of being a novelist. Obviously they were unaware of Simon Leys/Pierre Ryckmans’s wonderful quip about historians being novelists of the past and novelists being the historians of the present. Her Guns of August—or August 1914, depending on which side of the Atlantic you bought your copy—has to its first chapter, in my view, one of the best introductory paragraphs written by an historian.

Students and others who would like to develop their writing style, something greatly helped by imitation of the best, would obtain that as a bonus for their reading these wonderful historians.

Gregory Haines, Croydon, NSW. 

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Paying for Schools 

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SIR: Despite the scare campaigns being run by Kevin Donnelly (November 2011) and other Liberal supporters, private schools have nothing to fear from the Review of Funding for Schooling.

The SES model is absurd because it pays schools on the basis of the wealth of the other people who live in the street where their students come from. It is so bad for low-fee private schools that 60 per cent of Catholic schools are not funded under it, but under the Hawke-Keating Labor government’s Education Resources Index. This is the so-called “over-funding”.

The Average Government School Recurrent Costs formula includes the cost of base funding that any school must have, which it is inefficient to duplicate by having two schools in the same locality when one will do, and the extra costs of students with special needs (such as ESL, disability, low family income) whether or not they actually attend the school being funded.

The whole system is also politically damaging because it leaves the federal government open to the propaganda attack that it provides more support to private schools than to public schools.

The key task of the Gonski review is to establish the funding level necessary to provide each student with a first-class education. Once that amount is established, a new, rational system with federal–state cost sharing for all schools will be devised that does not require top-up funding.

The obvious problems with the Allen Consulting Group approach to school funding are those that Dr Donnelly does not mention: that it does not even get around to producing a figure for its proposed resourcing standard in its 112-page report and that the methodology it proposes for someone else to do the job is not based on an explicit staffing formula for schools. It is likely that the review will recommend the Victorian Labor government’s government school funding model for all schools, though the amounts need to be substantially higher.

As explained in my submissions to the Gonski review, the marginal recurrent cost per mainstream student of a properly staffed, high-quality education system is $6,993 for Years 3 to 6 and $8,320 for all other levels. That would provide staffing ratios of 18:1 and 15:1 respectively, sufficient to reduce both primary and secondary teaching loads and maintain small classes. This is in addition to a base amount of around $1,000,000 per secondary school (eight teachers plus other costs) and around $250,000 per primary school (two teachers plus other costs).

The greatest danger is that the Greens and the Coalition may try to stop the new policy getting through the Senate. The government can stare them down by saying to the Greens, “Do you really want to stop our public schools getting an extra $10 billion?” and saying to the Coalition, “Do you really want to stop our private schools getting an extra $5 billion?”

Given that I was campaigning for state aid to private schools when Dr Donnelly was still a leftie at La Trobe University, I think my confidence in the current Labor government is well placed.

Chris Curtis, Hurstbridge, Vic. 

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Truth Despite the Media 

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SIR: I laughed when I watched the ABC’s Leigh Sales interviewing Alan Jones on the 7.30 program. She asked him if his approach to the climate change issue was “fair and balanced”. What a joke! The taxpayer-funded ABC has campaigned against climate change sceptics ever since this issue has been around. If it wasn’t for Alan Jones and a few others like him there would be no media coverage of the sceptics’ point of view at all.

In recent times however the sceptics’ arguments have gained a massive amount of ground despite the efforts of almost all mainstream media, massive amounts of government-funded propaganda and lobbying from an enormous “green” industry greedy for government handouts.

The reason for the newfound success of the sceptical position is quite simple: it’s based on empirical evidence and truth, rather than fictitious computer models and the beliefs of the new green religion. What started as a few lonely voices in the science community who dared to say “the emperor has no clothes” has now become a great groundswell of public opinion. Australians can look out the window and see the rain, feel the cold winters and notice that we are not yet drowning from rising sea levels. The truth will prevail in the end.

Tony Hassall, Ballandean, Qld. 

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In the Interest of (Political) Justice 

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SIR: Professor Allan’s critical article on the judicial activism of the High Court (October 2011) in its application and interpretation of the Australian Constitution, whilst warning of the excesses of such self-assumed licence, seems to generally condemn all measure of expansive judicial reasoning. At least it makes no case for any approach to judicial interpretation other than that of the “black letter” lawyer.

This raises once more the perpetual discourse between the conservative and the liberal approaches to legal interpretation so eloquently canvassed in the many and various debates prompted in England by Lord Justice Devlin back in the 1980s. (The subject has been reviewed in depth by Chief Justice French in a paper, “Judicial Activism: The Boundaries of the Judicial Role”, at the LawAsia Conference in Vietnam in 2009 and also in his article, “Judicial Activists: Mythical Monsters”, (2008) 12 Southern Cross University Law Review 59–74. See also Dyson Heydon, “Judicial Activism and the Death of the Rule of Law”, Quadrant, January-February 2003.)

Lord Justice Devlin was not only an activist judge, he was also a very outspoken commentator on English law in its relevance to (then current) social and political issues. His view was that popular moral and social attitudes should be allowed to influence lawmaking in order to preserve the social and “moral fibre” of society. (He obviously did not trust the Parliament to be up to the task.)

As he declared in a lecture at the London School of Economics on June 25, 1975, when referring to the interpretation of statutes: 

The rule does not insist on a literal interpretation or require the construction of a statute without regard to its manifest purpose. There should be, as Lord Diplock has said, “a purposive approach to the Act as a whole, to ascertain the social ends it was intended to achieve and the practical means by which it was expected to achieve them”. 

But that then introduces the perplexing queries as to the “social ends” the legislation intends to achieve and how they are to be discerned. Are they to be judged as they were at the time of the legislation or with the later case arising? Also, in this process, does the legislation then mean something other than what it says, and if so how tenuously may that meaning be explored and applied; at what point does it become fanciful and legislative rather than interpretive, no matter how it may otherwise seem to be in the interests of justice, or even good sense?

This departure by the High Court from a strict literal approach in respect of the Australian Constitution is not so much a matter of “becoming a metaphorical ‘living tree’ or ‘living constitution’ whose meaning changes over time … as determined by, and only by, a majority of the High Court Justices at any point in time”, as Professor Allan contends. Rather is it a matter of which end of the judicial microscope is used through which a judge may scrutinise the Constitution in relation to particular cases. The Constitution never changes (except by referenda). Its interpretation in respect of particular cases may.

There is however, a role for judicial activism where it does not invite the personal and social opinion of the “closet politician”. For example, after television was introduced in 1956 the Australian government appropriately assumed its national control. There was nothing to suggest that the makers of the Constitution pre-1900, ever envisaged the coming of this service. In unquestioned terms, the High Court held that section 51 placitum (v) giving the federal Parliament, inter alia, the power to make laws relating to “telephonic services”, was good enough to cover television, even though those services are patently different concepts. (See per Barwick CJ, in Jones v Commonwealth [1965] HCA 6 at 4/5.)

There is to be noted, of course, the inherent difficulty of amending the Constitution by comparison with an ordinary act where an acceptable amendment can be readily made. This gives greater purpose and justification to the reasoning of the activist judge.

There is indeed no end to the debate. We are left to rely upon the good sense of judges to know where the line is drawn and not to cross it.

John de Meyrick, Sydney, NSW. 

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Twenty-One-Gun Salute 

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SIR: Anthony J.P. Robinson (Letters, November 2011) wrote, “Wouldn’t it be nice for our real head of state to get a twenty-one-gun salute somewhere for a change, instead of the nineteen-gun salute they get as a viceroy?”

Mr Robinson is mistaken. He has obviously confused the nineteen-gun salute to the Parliament, which follows the Governor-General’s speech from the throne after opening a new parliament, with the twenty-one-gun salute given to the Governor-General on leaving the Parliament after being sworn into office. The Governor-General is entitled to twenty-one guns, not nineteen.

David Smith, Mawson, ACT. 

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The Final Word—or Not 

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SIR: The trouble with asking rhetorical questions is that sometimes people are inclined to answer them. Unlike Anthony Robinson I did not think David Smith’s article on the Constitution warranted the term “rant”, so I’m definitely not in if he’s counting readers who are sick and tired of reading Smith’s work. On the contrary I’d be tempted to say Smith has provided the final word regarding who is the head of state.

I found David Smith to be fair-minded, reporting the good reception received by Dr Margaret Kelly’s paper; I’d even go so far as to say Smith was very gallant in ascribing her motivation for her provocative and dogmatic irrelevancy to a ploy to arouse interest.

I’m curious about the brief but vigorous period of questions and discussions that is said to follow every conference paper. Are we to believe that Ms Kelly was not challenged on the day regarding her dogmatic statement? Or is Ms Kelly’s capricious notion what keeps the Samuel Griffith Society going?

T. Varjavandi, Balgowlah Heights, NSW.