Why conservatives lose the culture wars JAMES ALLAN THE AUSTRALIAN OCTOBER 03, 2014 I ARRIVED here in Australia not quite 10 years ago to work in one of Australia’s longstanding universities. John Howard was prime minister. Almost as soon as I got here I remember bringing various university meetings to a breathless halt when I said how much I liked Howard. After a while I went out of my way to say it. Let me put it this way. The upper echelons of Australian university administration are not natural Coalition homelands. These people overwhelmingly vote left of centre. All sorts of studies have shown this in the US. It is at least as bad here in Australia. It affects all sorts of things, from what wins big social science grants (hint, it’s not projects in favour of strong border security or vigorous anti-terrorism laws or traditional views of marriage or scrapping carbon taxes or, well, you get the idea) to how universities are run internally. Your taxes pay for that monochrome outlook. I start with that reminiscence and those comments not because it gets a bit nauseating to hear plenty of people who were viscerally against Howard back then point to him today as some more reasonable option than Tony Abbott. Listen, on just about every count going Howard ran a more right-of-centre government than Abbott is running so far. And were Howard back in office the usual suspects would dislike him as much now as they did then. Still, I start the way I did simply as a lead-in to this general point. Conservative governments do a lousy job of putting people with their views into jobs that affect the general cultural outlook. Put bluntly, they lose the culture wars because they don’t bother to fight them, not really. So British Prime Minister David Cameron appoints more Labour-leaning people than Tories to quangos and various top administration jobs. And Canada’s Stephen Harper has yet to appoint a single person to Canada’s Supreme Court who could not have been appointed quite easily by the left-of-centre opposition party, the judicial activist cheerleaders. Well, OK, Harper did appoint one, but the Supreme Court itself ruled that appointment unconstitutional. And I’m not making that up. Here in Australia we have a national broadcasting company that sucks up more than $1 billion of your taxes every year. So you can say that $500 million of that comes from voters who prefer the Coalition. Yet not a single big-ticket current affairs show is hosted or produced by someone with a right-of-centre pedigree. The appearance of bias is blatant. It shows up there; it shows up when Q&A runs a program on terrorism with four blatantly anti-government people, plus Tony Jones, on one side, with a government minister on the other; it shows up when the ABC contracts for a documentary on Paul Keating hosted by Kerry O’Brien but turns down one on Howard hosted by Janet Albrechtsen. (The latter got picked up by Channel 7. Guess which had the higher ratings?) Yet ABC managing director Mark Scott can see nothing wrong with any of this. No appearance of bias, not a hint, can he see. I feel as if the man lives on a different planet from the one I inhabit. Yet here’s my main point. Scott was appointed by the Howard government. Labor would rarely, if ever, make that sort of error. But can we imagine Malcolm Turnbull appointing someone just as blind to the leftward bias of the ABC as Scott’s replacement? Well, to ask is to know the answer. Again, it was the Howard government in its final years that appointed a High Court justice who signed on to both of the recent majority judgments that struck down two different Howard government pieces of legislation on the basis of some mystical implied voting right type thingy. It appointed someone who is more activist than at least one later Gillard and Rudd appointee. As I said, I really liked Howard. But he can hardly be said to have taken on the ABC. Or the universities. Or to have ended the way everyone’s taxes are used to fund an overwhelmingly one-sided, left view of the world. The same seems to be true thus far of Abbott’s government. Who thinks I’m being unfair if I were to characterise the ABC’s general default attitude to the Australian military as being highly suspicious and prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone casting aspersions on it? Or, to contrast it with Scott’s take on the ABC, we are all supposed to give the ABC every benefit of every doubt in answering the bias question, but then the ABC will have none of that when it comes to its coverage of the Australian Defence Force, or strong border protection laws, or anti-terrorism laws. Because, really, who would think otherwise in the circles in which your average ABC heavyweight travels? None of this would be at all problematic if those who wanted to see, and hear, and read such views were paying with their own money. Same goes with funding massive Australian Research Council grants for projects that would make the preponderance of Australians guffaw, or choke with laughter (or rage). But in fact it’s all taxpayers’ money that funds these and plenty else besides. If we can’t have two hosts per big-ticket show, one from each side of politics, then it’s time to make the ABC take advertising, which will push it towards the centre of the political spectrum as it has in Canada. Yet if Howard never did that, what hope is there that an Abbott government will? We’ll be lucky if it appoints someone even marginally more open to the issue of bias than Scott. James Allan is Garrick professor of law, University of Queensland.
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 16:50:24 +0000
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