Category: Australian Politics

The magic of monarchy

I guess Americans will never understand it but there is something very basic in the human psyche that responds to monarchy.  And Europe’s monarchies are some of the world’s most civilized and stable places.  Because of its still-close ties with Britain (over a million out of 20 million of Australia’s current population were born in Britain), Australia is a monarchy and I am myself a strong supporter of the monarchy.  A few years ago Australia had a constitutional referendum in which there was a strong case made for converting Australia to a republic but the Australian people gave that a decisive thumbs-down —two thirds voted to keep the Queen as our head of State.

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Posted by jonjayray on Monday, February 28, 2005 at 06:04 PM in Australian Politics
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White flight in Sydney!

I’ve just come across an extraordinary research paper. It examines, in a remarkably open and honest way, the reasons why some Sydneysiders are leaving the established western suburbs and moving to “master planned communities” on the urban fringe.

What it finds is that the residents of these new communities are fleeing precisely those suburbs in which there is both a large amount of public housing and a rapid influx of immigrants. The residents are trying to recreate a traditional Anglo-Australian community in which they feel their identity, values and way of life are secure for themselves and their children.

In other words, the paper takes an academic (and surprisingly unbiased) look at the process of white flight.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, February 28, 2005 at 06:15 AM in Australian Politics
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A giant wakes to shake the world

From Michael Duffy, a former Australian Leftist politician.  He may be a bit optimistic, I fear:

“We are in the middle of an amazing revival of confidence in Western values.  Wherever you look, leaders are saying things that were unfashionable, even inconceivable, for decades. They are doing things that show a renewed faith in our Western traditions. For decades many in the West have been running scared. Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Cardinal George Pell’s motto is: “Be Not Afraid”. He chose this not because he’s a wimp - he could have played Australian Rules for Richmond - but in recognition of the fact so many of us were so afraid for so long.

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Posted by jonjayray on Monday, January 3, 2005 at 06:25 PM in Australian Politics
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“The White Australia Policy”

Keith Windshuttle‘s new book “The White Australia Policy” is not going to make the big splash his work on the British colonisation of Tasmania has had. There Windschuttle more or less single handedly overturned the established wisdom on Tasmanian frontier history and rammed home his argument with repeated volleys of documentary evidence, something he shows time and time again his targets either don’t have or frankly distort. Windschuttle’s big splash is not going to be overturned by his critics. They were caught with their pants down. Their collective embarassment and outraged response probably has more to do with the full glare exposure of their professional laziness and competence than with their ideological blinkers.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, January 1, 2005 at 07:40 AM in Australian Politics
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Conflicted motherhood backlash

In a recent Melbourne Age newspaper column Joanna Murray-Smith questioned the feminist values she had been brought up with. She felt that feminist careerism hadn’t left her enough time to properly mother her children.

Predictably there was a backlash. There have been five newspaper columns in the Age attacking the single Joanna Murray-Smith column. On Friday alone, there were two such columns.

There was nothing terribly new in these opposing pieces. One of the Friday columns, by a single mother and full-time writer, Allison Croggon, was most interesting for the kind of liberal language it used.

According to Allison Croggon motherhood has been a lot more fun than she expected. However, she describes the “role” of being a mother, rather than the “tasks” (which she enjoys), as an “iron cage” from which women have to seek “freedom”.

Why attack the “role” of motherhood in this way? Because liberalism (on which feminism is based) insists that we choose our own roles. Traditional motherhood is not a role that women choose for themselves but is, according to liberal thought, a mere “biological destiny” from which women have to escape. That’s why Allison Croggon can simultaneously confess that she enjoys the actual work of motherhood, but still insist that women need to “escape” from the “iron cage” of the motherhood role.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Sunday, November 28, 2004 at 05:10 AM in Australian Politics
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Conflicted motherhood

Joanna Murray-Smith confesses

in a recent Age article,

“I am leading the life the feminists of the ‘70s dreamed of: successful professional and mother - but it’s no dream.”

Why not? Because of the mental anguish she feels at not having time to spend with her children. She asks,

“Where is the play time with our kids? Where are the long hours of unhurried togetherness?”

She admits that “I go to bed at night asking myself over and over again how much our working lives really benefit our children?” and that “increasingly I resent the dishonesty of pretending that our children are not guinea pigs in an experiment that is, in many ways, a failure.”

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, November 20, 2004 at 05:35 PM in Australian Politics
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