A Union Leader in the Afrika Korps

Sir: Following the publication by Quadrant of my book Australia’s Secret War: How Unionists Sabotaged our Troops in World War II, a history of wartime strikes, go-slows and sabotage in Australian strategic industries, Mr Sam Harrison has brought to my attention a passage in the unit history Let Enemies Beware: Caveat Hostes: The History of the 2/15 Battalion 1940–45 by Ron Austin, published in 1995. The relevant passage is as follows:

An interesting anecdote relating to wartime security was related by Bandmaster Norman Henstridge. Whilst at the POW Cage at Benghazi, Norm was approached by an Afrika Korps officer who said, “Good day, Norm. How are you going?” A startled Norm replied, “Who the bloody hell are you?” The officer replied, “Don’t you remember drinking with me at the Don Hotel in Darwin? Do you remember the wharfies’ strike when you blokes unloaded the coal boat? Well, I was the bloke who organised the strike!”

My book details the fact that such a strike did take place in 1940 and service units were forced to unload coal for Darwin’s power station (pages 78–80). The fact that a man who became an officer in Germany’s Afrika Korps was one of their union leaders casts an additional light on the behaviour of our watersiders.

Hal G.P. Colebatch
Nedlands, WA

The Stacked Deck of the Referendum Debate

SIR: Frank Salter (March 2014) is correct to point out that the Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous People was stacked to bring about the “right” outcome.

Sadly, this is not the only part of the debate which will be slanted heavily in favour of those who wish to see divisive language inserted into our Constitution. Expect to see numerous local government bodies reaching straight into ratepayers’ pockets to help fund the “Yes” campaign.

Despite all of this, with a concerted campaign, such a referendum can be defeated.

Jerome Appleby
Plympton Park, SA

Physicalism and Materialism

Sir: Professor Andrew Irvine asserts (March 2014) that David Armstrong’s articulation of “physicalism” is persuasive and has been enormously influential. I deny that it is persuasive and question whether it has been quite so influential.

Just as Irvine could not, within the confines of a short appraisal of Armstrong’s career, thoroughly explain why he thinks physicalism is true, so I cannot, within the confines of a letter, give all the reasons why I think it is false. This argument must be carried on elsewhere—in the technical philosophical literature. But the claim that the undeniable success of physical science means “the debate is now virtually closed” cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged.

This kind of declaration is commonly heard from materialists (which is what physicalists really are, of course) and has been since the eighteenth century. Its effect, intended or unintended, is to hitch the ancient and hoary theory of metaphysical materialism, with all its difficulties, to the shining reality of modern science, with its achievements and prestige, and in doing so to end discussion. But recognising the power of modern science (a product of the human mind, after all) to predict and manipulate the motions of matter need not entail accepting the view that matter is all there is.

On the question of influence, Irvine claims that while “it may be that the proximate cause of people now believing minds are physical comes from the success of various brain scans and other medical technology … the distal cause comes from the influence of philosophers and scientists working in the 1950s and 1960s,” including Armstrong. This surely gives far too much credit to the power of academics outside the academy (alas, since I’m an academic myself!) and to reason itself in shaping popular thinking. It may be that one of the proximate causes of the current prevalence of materialism was the work of Armstrong and co., but the distal causes are probably of a different kind and go back much further.

Again, materialism is not some hot young thing; it’s a very old thing that’s married up. There were materialists in ancient Greece and India, in the Middle Ages, and in every era since, and the reasons for believing or disbelieving in materialism are much as they always were. If the doctrine has become, not for the first time in history, dominant within our so-called educated classes, this is, I would theorise, because there is a connection, stronger than the one often drawn between materialism and modern science, between materialism and much of modern politics and culture (the philosophical premise of modern liberalism, for instance, is materialism); and because it suits our educated classes, who hate and fear religion and will believe in anything as long as it appears to refute religion, to believe in materialism, just as it suits them to believe in a range of other questionable doctrines. As for the suggestion that the “success” of brain scans (success at what? creating multi-coloured images of what we have mostly long known is going on in the brain?) is compelling evidence in favour of materialism, I urge readers with an interest in the subject to investigate further; this is just not true.

John Sexton
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois, USA

McCarthy and the Venona Project

Sir: I read the article by Neil McDonald, “Trial by Television: The Downfall of Joseph McCarthy” (March 2014), a number of times to find any reference to the Venona Project, which when declassified in 1995 during the Clinton administration, proved beyond any doubt that there were at least 200 Soviet agents working in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.

I did notice in the article a sneering reference to Ann Coulter. I would just like to suggest to any person that is interested in the truth about McCarthy to read Treason by Ann Coulter (2003).

Bruce D. Scott
San Remo, NSW

Lifting the Bureaucratic Curse

SIR: James Hoggett (March 2014) refers to the plaint in the Tao Te Ching about taboos. It is of interest that a couple of centuries later in the Western Han Dynasty the ratio of bureaucrats to people was about one to 9000. This situation deteriorated over the millennia to a ratio of 1:67 in modern China!

As a child I often heard the dictum, “The devil finds evil for idle hands to do”. When I grew up I realised that it was actually directed at parliamentarians and bureaucrats. So what is to be done? I make the following suggestions.

It would be futile flailing around trying to repeal individual laws and regulations, and none of us would live long enough to see success. So let’s staunch the flow by chopping off the idle hands. This could be done by doing a head count of bureaucrats at all three levels of government including quangos (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations). Then derive the ratio of bureaucrats to population. Serving members of the armed forces and police forces would be excluded from this count. We now reduce the number of bureaucrats by two thirds and derive a new ratio with a view to incorporating this in an amendment to the Constitution in a referendum. Thus the bureaucracy could only increase with an increase in population.

The beauty of this is that there would an immediate cessation to the flow of red, green and brown tape. The bureaucracy would lack the numbers to police the nonsensical stuff and the rest of us could just ignore it.

If we got rid of the federal Education Department, who have nary a school, there would be a release of about 10,000 bodies, with obvious innovative skills, to fill productive jobs. Academics in our universities would have more time for teaching and less time-wasting and unnecessary form-filling.

If we got rid of the federal Health Department the states could run their hospitals without the bureaucratic overhead of the Health Regions.

The quangos should be totally eradicated. They seem to start life as a ministerial thought bubble, and then develop a life of their own like a noxious weed. This should be easy, as having been included in the original calculation, their proportion becomes available to other appreciative entities.

Such a limit would prevent a government from trying to lower the unemployment numbers by loading thousands of bodies onto the public payroll.

With the success of such a constitutional amendment there would no doubt be an all-in brawl between the three levels of government over the allocation of bodies permitted. In the meantime the rest of us could enjoy the change that is as good as a holiday.

One can only dream!

P. Amos
Seaford, Vic

The Quest to Steal Marriage

Sir: In the final comment of David Palmer’s letter (March 2014) he asserts, as many before him, that a referendum rather than a parliamentary vote would bring about the situation where “the arguments in favour of marriage between a man and woman might at last be given a hearing in public discourse, rather than just the shallow and trivial nonsense dished up constantly in the media in favour of same-sex marriage”.

He also makes reference to the excellent articles by Geoffrey Luck and John de Meyrick (December 2013) collectively titled “The Inherent Irrationality of Gay Marriage of Laws”—two essential reads for anyone genuinely interested in the subject.

I would first note the second paragraph of Geoffrey Luck’s piece where he points out that “Immediately the Federal Parliament amended 100 different laws in 2008 to remove discrimination against same-sex de facto couples, the gay Australian Coalition for Equality demanded the removal of what it termed ‘discrimination in marriage’.”

For me, however the most important sentence in his entire article is where he says, “Legal recognition and acceptance of homosexuality by society was never enough; stealing the right of marriage has long been the objective.” It is this word “stealing”, to describe the agenda of the gay and lesbian rights movement in relation to marriage, that nails this proposition.

In common and in company with the likes of the Green movement’s real agendas, proponents of “gay marriage”, have skilfully employed an extremely perceptive strategy built around a simple truth; namely the laziness and ignorance of a large cross-section if not the majority of our society, when it comes to their own research and scrutiny of political, economic and social issues (among others).

This presents fertile ground for simplistic, feel-good notions to take root with the concentrated application of the most basic fertilisation, in a very clever campaign supported by a politically correct (and themselves often lazy) media. This powerful combination of “love” and “equality” skilfully applied to underpin their proposition, is virtually irresistible to those who are lazy and all too ready to be identified, and to some extent personally defined, by their association with what they have determined to be a popular and, they can even claim, a righteous cause.

“Changing the Marriage Act” which is what this is really all about, has nothing whatsoever to do with “equality” or for that matter “love” (notwithstanding that most people would claim their construct of “love” to be a key reason behind their decision to be married). When it is all boiled down it is simply an attempt to “steal marriage”.

Alan Howard
Bendigo, Vic