Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.”
– Emmet Fox
Life always offers you a second chance. It is called tomorrow
— Dylan Thomas
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."
(Letter 16, 1657)”
― The Provincial Letters
“It's a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.”
―
Nightrider: "I am the Nightrider. I'm a fuel injected suicide machine. I am the rocker, I am the roller, I am the out-of-controller!"
~ Mad Max (Dir. George Miller of camp cove watsons bay fame, 1979)
Cricket Australia chairman David Peever resigns in wake of Longstaff Review
'Absolutely massive': China's secret detention camps seen from space
ABC NEWS
Imagery captured over a remote and highly volatile region of western China reveals a growing network… More
If humility is so important, why are leaders so arrogant?
"Lots of executives think they cannot be humble and ambitious at the same time." (Harvard Business Review)
Almanac: Doris Lessing on the nature of wisdom
Obeids' barrister reprimanded for unsatisfactory professional conduct
What was Murdoch’s involvement in the putsch that toppled Turnbull? Andrew Probyn, writing on the ABC’s news website, outlines and quotes from conversations Malcolm Turnbull had with Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Stokes and others in the days leading up to the coup. David Crowe, writing in Fairfax media, covers the same conversations, putting them in a wider context, and pointing to other forces tearing the Liberal Party. apart.
Almost crowded out by the political din of last week, there have been some insightful contributions to public ideas. In his article “Build-to-rent: a potential solution to Australia’s housing problem” Peter Mares stresses the need for more affordable housing for people with low incomes – a need related to but separate from the need to provide “social housing”. The supply of rental housing should not be a by-product of individual investors’ speculation. Rather, there is a need for long-term investors, with an interest in building quality rental housing and forming relationships with long-term tenants, to invest in housing.
Housing was one of the concerns of Hugh Stretton, whose ideas helped transform government policies for Australian cities. On the ABC’s Late Night Live Phillip Adams interviews urban historian Graeme Davison on Stretton’s legacy. Davison is editor of the book Hugh Stretton: Selected Writings. He describes Stretton as a public intellectual – “a person pf the non-Marxist left’. Stretton’s scholarship was not only about urban matters: rather he was deeply interested in the social sciences, and was critical of the notion that economic and social policy could be considered as separate domains. He was also a champion of mid-sized cities.
Laura Tingle’s Quarterly Essay “Follow the Leader” came out this week. She has given several interviews introducing her work, including this short interview on ABC’s RN Breakfast. Although the title suggests a traditional “leader-follower” model, her work is about leadership: she avoids the common fallacy of assuming that where there are people designated “leaders” there is also leadership. In fact, she warns about the danger of the rise of the strongman “leader”. She draws on the work of Ron Heifetz of Harvard’s Kennedy School on whose work recent contributors to Pearls and Irritations have also drawn in the context of the Morrison takeover – “A new ‘leader’ but no sight of leadership”.
Also in the realm of political ideas is a half-hour segment “Restoring ethics and faith in politics” on the ABC’s Religion and Ethics Report. It’s a three-way discussion between presenter Andrew West, political philosopher Adrian Past of the University of Kent (UK), and Damien Freeman of the Australian Catholic University. Padst has been studying the traditions of Labor and similar parties of the “left” and Freeman is author of Abbott’s Right: The Conservative Tradition from Menzies to Abbott. Those hoping to hear a heated argument “left”/”right” argument will be disappointed: rather it’s a thoughtful and insightful exposition of the values and ideas that have shaped our political parties, and the ways in which they have drifted from those values and ideas. The tensions manifest today are vastly different from the traditional presentation of a “left”/”right” conflict between collectivism and individualism.
And there is still plenty of commentary on the Global Financial Crisis. Last Sunday’s ABC Round table ran a program “What are the risks to the Australian economy” asking a cast of experts (John Hewson, Nicki Huntley, Stephen Halmarik, Christopher Joyce) about lessons from the GFC in relation to future risks in the Australian and global economy. There was general agreement that there is a worldwide problem of accumulating debt (corporate, government and household) and that financial markets tend to be faster to react to real or perceived crises than the real economy (but they have effects on the real economy).
Island off the coast of Asia is the title of a book by former army officer and Professor of International Studies at UNSW, Clinton Fernandes. In an interview with Phillip Adams onLate Night Live Fernandes takes us through a geopolitical history of Australia’s relations with south and east Asia – a history reaching back to colonial times. Our dominant and enduring foreign policy has been to be “part of a bigger power”. (He also reminds us how businesspeople involved in the Caribbean slave trade established our sugar industry.)
In Britain Theresa May’s Brexit negotiations seem to be headed to a “no deal”, or at best a messy “Canada-style” arrangement with a hard Northern Ireland border and weak economic ties with the rest of Europe. Writing in the UK Spectator, James Forsythdescribes her as “horribly isolated: both in her own cabinet and in Europe she has few allies.” The best she can manage, for both the pro- and anti-Brexit factions, is to say “I tried”.
While the Tory Party is tearing itself apart, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has a renewed confidence to promote a social-democratic agenda. The BBC reports on his speech to the Labour Party Conference – a speech denouncing “the edifice of greed-is-good, deregulated financial capitalism”, and promising to bring back “fairness and humanity” into public services. At the same conference shadow chancellor John McDonnell set out plans for re-nationalising rail, water and energy utilities, and Labour has not ruled out another Brexit plebiscite.
Many contributors to Pearls and Irritationshave written on the ABC’s issues of political interference and governance. governance issues. They include Quentin Dempster, Anne Davies, Jocelyn Pixley, Peter Manning and Paul Collins. Writing in Fairfax media, Waleed Aly provides a wider context. He cites other cases involving the ABC and commercial media, and says “we’re in an age of increasingly aggressive, emboldened political interference in journalism”. Political interference in the ABC is “about a civic culture that is slowly falling apart: a political class with fewer civic boundaries, less concerned with the independence of institutions, and a muscular intolerance of dissent.”
Ross Gittins summarises the essence of government economic and financial management. The approach of Treasury and Finance is so “no brainer”. It is “Just Say No. Just tell every department to find savings, and cut their admin costs by yet another 2.5 per cent, then look the other way while they make short-term savings at the expense of our future.” It’s about a monomania with fiscal figures, rather than any serious concern about the nation’s economic structure.
Few people will disagree with Danielle Wood and Kate Griffiths of the Grattan Institute who point out that “Powerful groups have triumphed over the public interest in some recent debates, from pokies reform to pharmaceutical prices, to toll roads and superannuation governance.” Their report Who’s in the room? Access and influence in Australian politics is rich in data showing not only who has influence but also that by international measures of corruption Australia has been slipping in the last ten years, from a rank of 8 out of 15 “developed” countries to a rank of 13. Property developers and highly-regulated industries feature strongly in their findings. (Some specific findings are in separate posts on Pearls and Irritations.)
American Libraries – “For most readers and writers—and book lovers in general—thelibrary holds a special place of honor and respect. The New York Times asked 12 authors to describe their local public libraries or share a memory of a library from their past. Here is what Barbara Kingsolver, Curtis Sittenfeld, Neil Gaiman, Amy Tan, Kiese Laymon, Diana Abu-Jaber, Chris Bohjalian, Annie Proulx, Julia Alvarez,Ramona Ausubel, Charles Frazier, and Jerry Pinkney have to say about their libraries.”
“What interests me most are stories about survivors…people who escape with their lives from dangerous situations in the Icelandic wilderness. How do they cope? Why do some live while others don’t, though the circumstances are similar? Why do some get into trouble and others not? ….[And I wonder about] the people left behind, left to struggle with the questions raised by the events…those left behind to cope with the grief and loss.”—Erlendur, detective with the State Criminal Investigation Department, Iceland
If it sounds strange for the publisher to refer to this novel by Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason as the “sequel to the prequel,” that is because the novels in this series featuring Detective Erlendur have not been published in chronological order. The first novel to be published in English, Jar City(2000) was actually the third novel in the series, and eight more novels have been published since then. Several of these books refer to a traumatic event in Erlendur’s childhood involving him, his father, and his much-loved brother, and the author and publisher are now providing more background information about Erlendur’s early years to fill in and develop more about his youthful experiences in an effort to explain his current psychological makeup and his dark vision of the world.
