Wars often produce pictures that become emblematic and etched in our minds long after hostilities have ceased.
While depictions of heroism and camaraderie are preferred because of the positive things they say about a people, ugly representations inform of our less salubrious qualities, regardless of whether we’re men, women, from the United States, the Middle East or wherever.
America probably hoped the destruction of the statue of Saddam Hussein would turn into the icon of the incursion into Iraq; however, the event is being challenged by photographs from the superpower’s stewardship of the Abu Ghraib jail, particularly those featuring Private Lynndie England, who’s seen in one staring detachedly at the naked and prone male prisoner she has on a leash.
England’s femaleness and apparent, or location specific, fondness for degrading and dominating captives has made her the focal point in a controversy fuelled by many such images. Of course, some Iraqis have apparently said they want to capture American female military personnel and use them as slaves, while the oppression of women native to that country shouldn’t be forgotten.
As for the accused prison guards, including English, they seemed to have believed they were making sadistic reality television or a pornographic magazine and not acting as humane agents of a force that sees itself as a liberator.
For The Sydney Morning Herald’s Catharine Lumby, the guards’ motives for documenting their behaviour was more prosaic than base, “the truly shocking thing”, she argues, “is that people took these photographs with the apparent intention of showing them around…. they are in some primal sense, a bizarre inversion of all those smiling partygoers and contented couples who populate billboards advertising the joys of having a camera in your mobile phone”.
Central to the horror for some has been the involvement of women in committing acts of aggression, which is less expected than their being victims of them. This focus bespeaks much about our understandings of gender and the position of women in the general community and the military, where they’re only around 15% of recruits in the United States.
Joanna Burke in The Australian sees England’s “prominent role” as “particularly interesting”, evidently due to the way it contests radical feminism’s belief in men’s natural proclivity towards sexual violence, and presumably women’s lack of this tendency.
Burke fails to acknowledge that the sort of thinking that believes some attributes are masculine and others feminine came into existence long before radical feminism arrived in the 1970s. It has been traditionally supported by institutions like the military in the interests of reinforcing the status quo and ensuring a supply of men willing to fight.
That some behaviours, unfortunately, can be exhibited by any human in certain circumstances, such as when a group has power over another and there’s little to moderate, guide or inform on how that should function. It’s unpalatable but Lumby has a point when she states that “we would do well to remember that (the photos) show ordinary people behaving under the extraordinary pressures of war. In this sense, these images implicate us all”.
The brutal actions of the guards and the decapitation of Nicholas Berg in supposed revenge for them may not be equal in their depravity (a presumption based on seeing only the photographs published in the newspaper), but in a sense they’re on the same continuum and teach us that the line between civilisation and barbarism is thinner than many of us would like to think.
Whatever your opinion of the war, a welcome rejoinder to all this inhumanity came from First Lieutenant David Sutton, who refused to keep the activities at Abu Ghraib secret, when he said, “it’s not rocket science. It’s basic how you treat human beings – you don’t do certain things to them”.

I am indebted to www.crikey.com.au for drawing attention to a speech in the NSW Parliament by the Labor MP for Bankstown, Tony Stewart.
While it is very much a tongue-in-cheek effort, Mr Stewart implored the NSW Liberal Party to “take its politics back to Mosman and Vaucluse, and keep them out of Bankstown……….Bankstown is an egalitarian community…..what happened on this night is not indicative of Bankstown.”
Mr Stewart was referring to a meeting of the Bankstown Young Liberals to which the police had to be called after a “disturbance” between rival factions.
The Member for Bankstown fingered the NSW Liberal MLC, David Clarke, as being at the centre of the trouble. That caused me to make some enquiries about Mr David Clarke.
If you are disillusioned with the Liberal Party, or politics generally, I would urge you not to look up the ABC’s Stephen Crittenden’s recent interview with Mr Clarke. It will turn you off politics, and especially party politics, forever.
Apparently Mr Clarke is the proud leader of the “religious and conservative” faction that is emerging as a key player in the NSW Liberal Party. His faction seems to be centred around the Opus Dei Movement in the Catholic Church and the NSW Young Liberals.
In Queensland we have ethnic branch stacking……in NSW we have religious, and ethnic, branch stacking. Is it any wonder that, organisationally, the Liberal Party has never been in a more parlous state than it is today?
In the interview, Mr Clarke says the Liberal Party is a conservative party, and the Young Liberals are “very conservative”. In the next breath he proclaims the Liberal Party to be a “broad church”!!
The Liberal Party Clarke wants to see won’t be a broad church at all. It will be an intolerant, homophobic, reactionary, extreme right-wing organization bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the party Robert Gordon Menzies founded 60 years ago.
The Clarke faction will no doubt align itself with the majority faction in Queensland dominated by Senator Santoro – though the Catholic connection might cause come discomfort given that the latter left the Catholic Church for the Uniting Church, and is now a regular attendee at the St Andrews Day Dinner!
But these factions have one thing in common – an intolerance of anyone who dares to proffer moderate political or social views.
When Sir Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party he quite deliberately chose the word “liberal” and not “conservative”. People like the Honourable David Clarke are utterly determined to trash the Menzies tradition forever and turn the Liberal Party into an intolerant, faction riven, extreme right wing organization.
If they believe extremism wins elections, they should have a talk to the ageing hangovers from the Socialist Left in the Victorian ALP. The extremist positions, and occasional stoushes, in the Victorian ALP when the Socialist Left was dominant helped keep Labor out of office in that state for the best part of three decades.
It would appear that the Clarke faction is stacking branches using recruits from Catholic university colleges – especially in the Young Liberals.
Ethnic branch stacking in any political party is dangerous and divisive. Religious branch stacking, and division along religious lines, creates bitterness that lasts for a generation………and is high risk politics to say the least.
It is one thing to encourage Christians to participate actively in the political process. It is quite something else to use a mainstream political party, one that was founded on the basis of tolerance and diversity, for the pursuit of extreme religious and political agendas.
An electorate already deeply suspicious of politicians, and political parties, generally won’t be impressed by a party, or a section of a party, that allows itself to be dominated by either ethnic or religious factions. But that is the reality in Queensland and New South Wales today.

One group that consistently shows up in our research as being deeply dissatisfied with both political parties is separated and divorced males paying child support. Initial reactions to the budget suggest that voters are attracted by it, according to Roy Morgan’s latest poll . This is probably an announcement response coupled with many people calculating that they will be either better off or no worse off. The real test will be in a couple of weeks as those who were given nothing start envying those who were. These men are likely to be at the forefront of complaint, and with good reason.
The groups who have most reason to envy the beneficiaries of this budget are those earning less than $52,000 p.a. who have no children – they miss out on the tax cuts and the family hand-outs. This envy is likely to be magnified for male non-custodial parents. Here is why.
In the first place these men pay a huge effective tax rate because of child support payments. Now I am not suggesting that they should not be paying child support, but the child support rate is calculated on gross income, not net income. A man with three children will pay 32% of his gross income to the residential parent, irrespective of his marginal rate of tax. Between $21,601 and $52,001 that means that the tax man and the mother of his children between them collect 62% of the income he earns, a significant amount, and one that it is very sensitive to changes in tax rates. They would gain more than most if the lower tax thresholds had been adjusted up, and therefore have more reason than most lower earners to resent missing out on tax cuts.
But there is a factor that amplifies that resentment, and that is the way that the Family Tax Benefit is paid. Irrespective of the fact that the Child Support Act is drafted on the assumption that each parent pays toward the care of the children in proportion to their means, the Family Tax Benefit paid to each is calculated on the amount of time that the children spend with each of them. What that means is that, even in a family where the parents are earning roughly the same and therefore contributing roughly equally, the non-custodial parent will only see a fraction of the Family Tax Benefit, representing a windfall to the custodial parent.
So, for our father of three, not only is he contributing half the cost of raising the children, but he has been missing out on most of the Family Tax Benefit. Now under this budget not only will he miss out on tax relief, but he will see his former wife pocket another $3,600 tax free in the next twelve months. When Latham is working out his promises later this year he might consider making a pitch for this voter by at least ensuring that the FTB is divided in proportion to financial contributions, not time spent with each parent.
Many of these men were in the group of former One Nation voters so crucial to John Howard’s success last election. Looking after them might have quite an effect on how that group votes this election. All of them will have family and friends who may also be influenced as well.

Einstein pictured the world with four dimensions – width, height, depth and time – producing the possibilities of going backward and forward in time, just as we go up and down in space. St Augustine reconciled freewill to predestination by envisaging a God who sat outside time and knew what we would do because from his perspective we had already done it at the same time as we had yet to do it. Now the Internet makes us, relatively speaking, all Gods. We may not be able to see into the future, but our past is our present which is both a virtue and its vice.
Two things prompted these musings. According to Asians in Media “A programme complaints report published this week by the BBC shows that in October last year it broadcast an old episode of Only Fools and Horses which used the term ‘Paki’.” They quoted the BBC Programme Complaints Unit as saying “…research shows that [the] perceived offensiveness [of the term ‘Paki’] has increased significantly over the intervening years, and, in the absence of a particular contextual justification, its use in programmes is no longer acceptable.”
In future the BBC “would try and make sure those words are edited out so they don’t cause offence to our audiences”.
So, a programme which was suitable for broadcast 40 years ago is not suitable for broadcast now because if it were produced today it would be deemed offensive. What would that policy mean if it was transferred to books in a Library? According to the BBC, should we be monitoring and winnowing catalogues to ensure that no-one reads offensive material? Or should we do what the Victorians did to Shakespeare (and what the Beeb is doing to Only Fools and Horses) and bowdlerize offending texts? Or is this only a consideration for the broadcast media?
My other prompt occurred in that area where text, images and broadcast converge – the Internet. I have just seen the video of the alleged beheading of American Nick Berg by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It is horrendous, particularly the final moment where the severed head is held up, in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of Cellini’s Perseus with his trophy of Medusa.
Just watching the video I felt a little like a medieval who had taken his wife and family and some lunch for the outing to see a public hanging; or who had to walk into town under the eyes of the heads of malefactors arranged around the gate on pikes. This is a truly barbaric and archaic piece of web video, and not the BBC, nor anyone, could do anything to stop me seeing it. It is the ultimate snuff movie, and I can only justify watching it to myself on the grounds that it is part of the historical record of our times that I am trying to understand.
I imagine likewise that somewhere there is a site where I can also download old episodes of Only Fools and Horses. There are certainly sites where I can download just about anything and I would think that in another century a fair proportion of that material will still be available online, even Berg’s beheading, although sensibilities will have most likely changed again.
There has always been a tension between the possible and the polite. We all self censor, depending on the context we are in. The Internet hands the battle to the possible because it ultimately lacks any context. If it can be uploaded onto a website someone will do it, and it is virtually impossible to stop others seeing it. In this world we live in we are going to have to get better at understanding and dealing with the past and the present, which may mean being more tolerant of our own past selves, as well as others. It will mean a world that is less congenial to some, but more honest. It is not an option to censor, or bowdlerize.

Last federal election was all about those Australians who had started voting One Nation in the 1998 election. It appears this federal election is all about voters who live in Western Sydney, or at least that is my tentative conclusion from last night’s budget.
There is a predictable rhythm to national economic management. The first budget in a government’s term takes the hard decisions and sets the course. This is adjusted in the second budget, and all being well, the government reaps the benefits in its third budget and spends some of the fiscal capital that it has built up hoping to turn it into political capital.
This budget appears to have been put together by Treasury in conjunction with the pollsters and demographers as the government strategically spends its capital to court a demographic that appears to me to be at their highest concentration in Western Sydney. That is: families with children where the major breadwinner earns $52,000 plus per year and the minor breadwinner is working part-time. These voters get not only a tax cut, but more childcare and out-of-school-hours care places, and a massively enhanced family tax benefit. They must be the ones that Tom Burton in the SMH calculates will receive an additional $117 per week.
In that sense this is a defensive budget, because it is targeting the very same demographic that Mark Latham has identified as being the ones that he wants to appeal to. Latham even gave them a name – “Aspirational Voters”.
Is this a wise decision for the government, or are they just following fashion?
Last election Howard built an electoral coalition around the middle to upper demographics to which he bolted on most of those who had been voting One Nation. These latter voters tend to be older and less-well educated than most; in small business, blue-collar or small cropping employment; and often earning less than they could on welfare. They are patriotic and xenophobic; are more likely to hunt or fish than the average; and are more likely than most of us to be military (particular Vietnam War) veterans, or divorced or separated fathers. The logic appeared to be that the first group is Liberal Party home territory and could be more or less taken for granted, while immigration and terror issues could be used to gain the loyalty of the second group.
Latham appears to have made the judgement that he can’t get the One Nation voters, but he can eat into Howard’s middle class support via the “Aspirationals”. Howard and Costello appear to agree with him because there is absolutely nothing in this budget for the typical ex-One Nation voter.
Not only haven’t they received a tax cut, but their “sandwich and milkshake” tax cut of last budget has been taken away from them by inflation and used to bribe other demographics. On my calculations, someone without children and earning up to $50,980 p.a. is anywhere up to $229 per year worse off in real terms.
There was some non-monetary, subliminal recognition of these voters early in the Treasurer’s speech when he said:

“Over the last eight years so many countries — countries much bigger than us — have gone into recession. We have been challenged by financial collapse in our region, by plagues like SARS, by terrorism and war, by an aching drought that still lingers. We have had many difficult challenges and we have come through.”

So many of the themes are there that these voters react to. We are a small vulnerable country. There are threats (even including SARS for Gods sake, when was that a problem in Australia!?) which might get us. We’re parked at the wrong end of Asia. The bush (where so many of them live) is in trouble. But none of the sort of recognition that proves a treasurer really cares for you – cash. These people are expected to stay in the fold because of psychology.
They are not the only group to be ignored. Younger voters have been too. The government seems to be gambling here on the propensity of the young to be optimistic. This morning on ABC radio Costello essentially said that these voters would be looking forward to the time when they would have families and would be earning $50,000 plus per year incomes and wouldn’t worry about being neglected now. He may well be right. Some of them will also be beneficiaries of the government’s decision to increase the threshold when HECS repayments start.
This is a good budget if you are the member for Paramatta, or Lindsay or Macarthur, and it is western Sydney seats like these that the government must feel are most vulnerable. They are not the only marginal seats for the government. I am not so sure how the budget will be read in less affluent parts of the country. Take Longman held by the Defence Minister, Mal Brough. At a state level this seat is solidly Labor and the Liberals depend heavily for their federal majority on One Nation type voters. Presumably the assumption is that enough of these voters are “breeders” that they will be too busy spending the $600 they will receive per child this year and then again next to be jealous of tax breaks for stock brokers. Longman has a young demographic, so this may well be the case.
Will this hold true in another urban marginal like Townsville? I am not so sure. The demographic there is older. What about Wide Bay or Hinkler, both sugar seats? Again the demographic is older. The sugar package may hold them in, or it might be that they will be attracted to the additional spending on infrastructure, such as the $3.1B Auslink promise (some of this was obviously targeted at Richmond, a rural northern NSW marginal where some of it will straighten the rail line).
There has been debate recently about whether taxpayers want tax cuts or better services. The Treasurer’s speech suggests that one government is theme is that we can have both. This is undoubtedly one of the biggest spending budgets in Australia’s history at $200 Billion. It is difficult to work out how big from the budget papers because while they track budget expenditure as a percentage of GDP, they ignore the GST receipts, making comparisons with years before 2000 difficult. Where this money is going can be partially gauged from the Treasurer’s boast that health spending has doubled from $17 billion to $35 billion since 1996.
What will Latham’s response be? One possible line of attack would be to point out the most favoured demographic and assert that we have a Prime Minister who runs the country from Sydney who now seems to think that he should run the country for Sydney, and play on the lack of tax cuts for lower income earners. There are plenty of votes in regionalism in Australia.
Another is to suggest that what the Prime Minister gives with one hand he will just as promptly take with the other once an election is out of the way, look at the “milk and sandwich” tax cuts, eaten and drunk by inflation.
Latham could also point out that the failure to raise the tax-free threshold means that the poverty trap has been exacerbated (again by inflation) for those trying to get off welfare.
Latham will be constrained to some extent because the government has spent the surplus and he cannot reallocate spending priorities without taking some of the promised benefits away. This isn’t necessarily a problem. Latham doesn’t need to make specific counter promises at this stage. His strong suit is that people are unhappy with the level of social services, particularly health and education. While the government may have upped spending in these areas, that doesn’t mean that voters perceive a benefit. Latham doesn’t have to get into the details, he can merely ask the questions. “This government says it has doubled health expenditure in the last 8 years, but can anyone tell me where they can see the benefits? Why is it that hospital queues are longer than ever?” etc.
Despite the large headline figures the budget is really just business as usual for the government. Another possible line of attack therefore is to paint it as the final gasp of a party that has run out of ideas for the future, delivered by Peter Costello, a man who is more interested in getting into the Lodge than delivering budgets.
We will be doing some focus groups next week to see how the parties have fared. By then we will know what Latham will say, so it will be over to the voters to make their own judgements, and our’s to report them.

Last night I decided to watch the Treasurer’s budget speech, rather than go to the Treasury website and download the documents I was interested in.
After a 30 minute rushed speech by Peter Costello, I was not much the wiser. Instead of being the “Report to the Nation on the Government’s Stewardship of the Economy” that it used to be, the budget speech read more like the Opposition Leader’s reply!
There were so many “give aways”, and no mention of any increases in any taxes and charges, that at one stage I thought the election had been called yesterday afternoon, and the Opposition Leader was outlining the raft of promises all oppositions make.
When Paul Keating decided to tailor his budget speech for television, he did a disservice to democracy. Peter Costello has maintained that disservice.
Had Les Bury or Frank Crean been delivering the budget speech last night, they would have struggled to get beyond the introduction before time was up.
I hold the old fashioned view that the budget speech should be much more than about the handouts. It should detail the economic and fiscal performance of the nation and the government – and the outlook for the year ahead.
It should also treat the people with a measure of intelligence and tell them how the surplus was arrived at, and how the record spending in the year ahead will be funded. One needs to plough through the Treasury website, or the budget documents, to find these details.
It might be argued that citizens watching the speech were only interested in what was in it for them. I doubt it. I am sure the majority of families that will benefit were watching “The Block”, or “Hot Auctions, or even repeats of “Everybody Loves Raymond”.
The young singles, who missed out completely were probably listening to 4MMM, and remain none the wiser that they are no better off.
Having said that, one needs to ask just how much of a difference to the political “climate” the budget will make?
Time will tell, but I would not bet on the budget giving the government the sustainable “lift” in the polls they expect (and needs). And I am a betting man!
The reason why is quite simple. The electorate remains as volatile as ever, and as suspicious of governments, and oppositions (in other words, politicians) as ever.
It is especially suspicious of pre-election tax cuts…………….and today’s politicians have Malcolm Fraser’s infamous “fist full of dollars” and Paul Keating’s no less infamous “l.a.w. tax cuts” for that.
With interest rates low, inflation low, unemployment low, and the economy growing strongly, the government should have a clear, if not unassailable, lead in the polls. The fact that, on the basis of all published polls, it continues to trail Labor only confirms just how close the coming election will be……..and how hard it will be for the government to win a fourth term.
The worry I have about the budget, and about the opposition’s likely alternative, is that Australia is slipping more and more into the “handout mentality” era. Instead of asking, “What’s in it for the country?” we ask “What’s in it for me?”
I can recall when the press gallery was really only interested in how much smokes, beer and petrol were going up in the budget, or whether pensioners were getting a $1 or $2 increase…………….and that one reliable leak was a triumph for the journalist who got it.
How times have changed. The Treasurer could have tabled a bunch of recent clippings from the daily press, moved that they be printed, and the budget would just about have been delivered.
Call me cynical if you like – but that’s exactly what the electorate is likely to be today, and after Mark Latham replies tomorrow.

THE Australian electorate has a well deserved, and practised, reputation for dealing swiftly with governments, politicians and political parties who treat it with arrogance and contempt.
Judging by the comments over the weekend from Senators Brandis and Mason, among others, there remain some politicians who have yet to get the electorate’s message.
The presumption contained in their comments about a transition in the Liberal leadership, and the Prime Ministership, after the elections is that the result of those elections is a forgone conclusion, so much so that the taxpayers might wish to save themselves the bother of going to the polls (not to mention the cost).
Nothing could be further from the truth, and I don’t need opinion polls to tell me that.
Federal elections in Australia are generally close, with 1996 being an obvious exception.
When one looks on a seat-by-seat basis at the forthcoming poll, it is possible to see how Labor could win with a marginal nationwide swing because of “local factors” – especially in regional Australia.
It is equally possible to see how Labor could lose ground, notwithstanding the apparent improvement in its base vote under Mark Latham.
Even in 1972, with the Liberals led by the hapless (and electorally hopeless) Billy McMahon, the election of the Whitlam Government was somewhat diminished by losses by Labor in Western Australia.
Since then, the Australian electorate has become even more volatile, and certainly less trusting of politicians, and governments.
But back to the weekend comments. The one question that needs to be asked is this – why?
I suspect the answer lies in the pomposity of the Senators concerned, and their remoteness (like that of most of their Senate colleagues) from the electorate. It may also lie in their impatience for promotion and recognition.
If the Coalition allows itself to go into an election campaign debating “when” not “if” Peter Costello will replace John Howard as prime Minister, then it will be courting the kind of electoral retribution inflicted on Leaders such as Nicholas Frank Hugo Greiner, Wayne Keith Goss and Jeffrey Gibb Kennett.
I well recall being in Sydney in the final days of the 1991 NSW State Election, a poll in which the Greiner Government was widely presumed to be heading for a landslide re-election victory. Having read the Sydney papers on a daily basis in the run up to the election, I had my doubts.
The daily media was giving Greiner a tough run for moving into the VIP suite at the Regent Hotel during the campaign, and for restricting public appearances, and press scrutiny, during it.
I tried the “taxi driver test” and my doubts were quickly confirmed. I recall word for word what one cabbie told me “Greiner has done a good job but the c… is too far up himself”.
The result changed the course of NSW politics – Greiner lost most of the seats he had won in the 1988 landslide, paving the way for his inglorious exit a year or so later.
The two Queensland Liberal Senators, and their merry little band of followers, should take note. The electorate is not impressed by politicians who take it for granted; and politicians musing about a change in the Prime Ministership next year (even before a general election is held) are surely taking it for granted in spades!
Senators Brandis and Mason have put the Liberal leadership and “transition” on the public agenda on the eve of the last Budget before the election. Their sense of timing could hardly have been worse.

Sunday’s recent reports into age-related infertility have got me convinced my thirty-something-year-old eggs aren’t fit to make a rubbery omelette, let alone a little me.
While I could admit some guilt for allowing myself to rundown rather than reproduce, I prefer, like the ABC’s Virginia Haussegger, to blame mums, the feminist variety this time, because aren’t they responsible for everything from bad cooking to sons who use hair-care products?
Apparently, Haussegger was indoctrinated by the anti-baby “mantra preached by feminists in the 1970s”, which must have been selectively intoned since I don’t remember hearing it, although I might’ve been sick the day it was taught in Mothercraft.
Despite the fact that criticising feminists can give a girl’s writing career a boost, I suspect their supposed influence during the years of Alvin Purple and The Paul Hogan Show isn’t the major explanation for women’s procrastination when it comes to procreating.
It does seem some women think, as Helen Dalley suggests, that “I can probably sneak in another five to eight years…and then I better start having babies”.
The concept of extended youth is endlessly promoted today via cosmetic companies, plastic surgery, diets and fitness videos released by tight-faced celebrities. If a shot of Botox can smooth out pesky lines, why shouldn’t we believe fertility problems are also easily remedied?
Anyway, the extended adolescence of everybody, especially me, means we’re probably not going to admit there’s grey on top or things inside nearing their use-by-date.
That “certain narcissism in our culture” author Sophie Cunningham “think(s) children can…snap people out of…” is also encouraged by pop psychology and confessional literature and television. While this focus on the self suits me, feminism is about women as a group, so I’m not sure why it should be held accountable for the “Me” generation and structures and ideas that capitalism and patriarchy own.
When Haussegger asks, “how is feminism helping to sort through the enormous load of expectation it has created for women to succeed beyond being “just mothers”, I wonder whether she can imagine what it’s like when nobody expects anything more of you than motherhood.
Since women have worked hard to stake their claim as whole human beings with many needs and interests, a more appropriate question is, “when are men going to challenge the status quo and help create a society where the home and the labour market are friendly to the family and every member in it, including them?”
An important rejoinder to Haussegger came last year when Zelda Grimshaw reminded us that, “the world (our feminist mothers) envisioned for us saw parenting shared between the sexes, and supported, financially and socially, by the community. They imagined a world that would allow us to fulfil our need to nurture without foregoing our creative and intellectual lives”.
Well said, but I’m off to pick up a few tips from Janet Albrechtsen on how to remodel myself as the pin-up of conservative, middle-aged men and thus give my career the kick along it needs.
Hate student politics, then read this.

Graham you argue cleverly but I wonder if not overly so.
There is a forest out there in the world of Sydney broadcasting but you seem determined to see only individual trees and even worse, parts of trees. What the Jones, Laws & Howard affair all points to is the dire state of public discourse in Australia. There is no way of proving that what Laws said about Jones and Howard is true. But I tell you straight Graham, I would like to have the same chance of winning the lotto this weekend as of it being true, very true. Moreover I have more than a sneaking position that you would not say no to the same chance.
When I listen to Jones pour out his right wing rants, I realise how far we have moved to the Right in Australia. That is so far that someone like Robert Manne is regarded as a leftist. I would laugh but I am too busy weeping.
As for the good Professor Flint should he resign? Well I personally hope that like the Pope he hangs on and on and on. The survival of the pope is wonderfully damaging to the Catholic Church. Three cheers for that say I!
Similarly Flint’s refusal to fall on his sword is doing incredible damage to an institution (the ABA), and a Party (Liberals) and a Prime Minister (Howard), all of which for Australia’s sake should be swept off the public stage.

Maybe I am reading this incorrectly, but I sensed relief in the media when it was determined that the bombs that exploded in Athens were from locals, not Al Qaeda, as though this should somehow matter.
The other night Phillip Adams had three experts on Late Night Live who argued that Al Qaeda didn’t really exist as an organization, but more as a form of inspiration. I like to think of it as being a bit like Olympic sport. With 9/11 Bin Laden broke the four-minute mile of terrorism. If you are in the terrorism business these days, it is not good enough to bomb a police station, you have to do much more. The World Trade Center had a population about the size of Warwick, so to beat that you have to take out a whole town, or an electricity grid, or something on that scale, and sooner or later, someone will.
At the same time as Bin Laden has provided new quantitative benchmarks he has also established new qualitative ones. During the last couple of centuries it has become common to think of war as being something which generally occurs between state actors, and for national purposes. This is contrary to most of the history of war. Throughout history war has been a way of appropriating what belonged to someone else and legitimizing your subsequent ownership of it. Most governments up until the present century started off as little more than kleptocracies, and many conquests were begun by sub-state actors, such as for example Ghenghis Khan, (some of whom eventually became almost supra-state actors).
How was it that Alexander the Great, for example, conquered and then held such large swathes of country with such a relatively small army? Easy, the peasantry and the town-dwellers were resigned to being ruled by the people who lived in the fortresses and they didn’t really care who they were as long as they didn’t charge too much for the “protection” they provided and left them alone to graft a living.
As a result war was effectively commerce by other means with many soldiers in standing armies being essentially mercenaries who did it for plunder and booty and the chance of ransoming someone rich. Keith Suter in his latest article in On Line Opinion argues that war seldom works for the aggressor, but Keith is talking about Twentieth Century Wars where the conquest is of technologically advanced societies in an era of increasingly sophisticated ideas about human rights. Taken over the sweep of history, Keith’s argument is wrong, as the colonial empires of the Europeans from Greece to the late Nineteenth Century demonstrate.
These types of wars meant that it was not uncommon for sub-national groups to be at war with each other. The Viking occupation of Northern and Eastern England is a good instance of this (not dissimilar in many ways to our own colonization of Australia).
Bin Laden’s actions have returned the concept of war to the sub-national level. As it has become unthinkable that any advanced Western Country could fight a war with any other, because the costs so far outweigh the benefits (Keith is right on this point), in a sense war in these countries has only become possible at a sub-national level. Ironically the complexity of modern society and technology makes this easier than it has been for some centuries. In this sort of war everyone becomes potentially a front-line troop.
Which is why it is very important that our Olympic Team goes to Athens. Just as the terms and reasons for prosecuting war have changed with the Al Qaeda innovations, so have the weapons. The American occupation of Iraq, and the ongoing fighting in Afghanistan, shows just how difficult it is to use arms and armies to quell these sub-national forces, even ones that are conventionally armed.
Despite the exaggerated claims for military intelligence and military might, we will never be able to pre-empt or foresee all acts of terrorism. However, we may forestall them by showing that we are not afraid and that we believe that they will in due course prove to be ineffective. This needs to be demonstrated in the most obvious way. We frequently refer to our sportspeople in martial terms, and see them carrying the banner for our country in a way which in previous years we would have been accorded our armed forces. This year, in a very real sense, the image is the reality. This Olympics we have the opportunity to make sporting achievement speak national values. Sport and politics do mix, they always have, but now there is an urgent need to demonstrate just how effectively one can speak for the other. This year sport is war by other means.