There is a new battleground between left and right liberals, namely, happiness. Their debate about what makes us happy reveals a great deal about the mindset of both the left and the right, so it’s well worth looking at.

I will take as a representative of the left, the Australian “think-tanker” Clive Hamilton, and on the right, another think-tanker, the Swede Johan Norberg.

The left: Clive Hamilton

Last year, Clive Hamilton published a discussion paper called “The Disappointment of Liberalism”. He began this paper by noting that liberalism had succeeded in its basic aim.

What is the basic aim of liberalism? Let me put it this way, as simply as I can.

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Sweden is a land of high taxes. One consequence of this is that some skilled immigrants, understandably, find it a less attractive option for settlement than elsewhere.

So a government business agency has called for skilled immigrants to pay a lower tax rate than native born Swedes.

Kai Hammerich, of the Invest in Sweden Agency, wants to lure more workers from China and India to work in the IT and medical fields (despite considerable unemployment amongst university graduates in Sweden).

His suggestion has met with a warm response from skilled immigrants. This is how “Andrew” from Singapore sees it,

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Kathe Boehringer, the Head of the Law Department at Macquarie University, has written a spirited defence of her colleague, Professor Andrew Fraser.

Here is part of what she has penned:

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This is how my 13 year old daughter, who attends a private school in the south of England, is taught to comprehend the workings of Western business among the nice folk of sub-Saharan Africa.  It is a cartoon which liberal educationalists and text book authors Rosemarie Gallagher and Richard Parrish consider relevant to Key Stage Three Geography.  They put it in a text book with the catchy title “geog3” which they have co-written.

I am aware, of course, that there is much worse going on in other subject areas.  I am not holding up this petty product of modern leftism, which I’ve been examining this evening at my daughter’s request, as an especially egregious example of the propagandist’s art.  It is, I fear all too average.

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Simon Weisenthal has passed away in his sleep at home in Vienna.  He was 96.  Today’s obit pages will lead with his passing.  Everybody will have something important to say about justice and guilt and those damned Nazis.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, leads the pack.  He is quoted in the Telegraph saying, “I think he’ll be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust.  When the Holocaust ended in 1945 and the whole world went home to forget, he alone remained behind to remember. He did not forget. He became the permanent representative of the victims, determined to bring the perpetrators of the history’s greatest crime to justice.”

Weisenthal himself said, “When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it.

Speaking purely for myself, I want people to know that there is a certain inflation in what we “know”, hammered into public consciousness - and conscience - by the incessant repetition of statements such as Hier’s.

History’s greatest crime?  Debatable.

Malcolm Fraser is a former prime minister of Australia. He is a member of the “conservative” Liberal Party, but likes to declare himself at every turn to be a very compassionate progressive liberal.

One of his legacies is the handing over of Rhodesia to the political rule of Robert Mugabe. His biographer Philip Ayres wrote in 1987 that “The centrality of Fraser’s part in the processes leading to Zimbabwe’s independence is indisputable. All of the major African figures involved affirm it.”

Ayres also quotes Mugabe himself as saying, “I got enchanted by him (Fraser), we became friends ... he’s really motivated by a liberal philosophy.”

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An update on events from this part of the world.

First, the New Zealand election result. The best party on offer was New Zealand First, which wants dramatically reduced immigration. The party received the third highest vote and won seven seats, but its leader lost his seat. The two main parties still dominate the vote, but both rely on the support of smaller parties to form office.

Second, there’s bad news on the Drew Fraser front. Deakin University has pulled his article from its law journal because of legal advice that it would contravene anti-discrimination laws. So even an academic, peer reviewed article is not allowed to be published because of such laws. Goodbye free speech.

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Malegapuru Makgoba is the vice-chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.

He wrote a newspaper column earlier this year which strongly criticised white South African men. He accused them of being racists who could not adapt to a society “making every effort ... to transform itself into a just, equitable and non-racial society”. He wrote of them as “spoilers” who did not appreciate the new Constitution “which respects human dignity, diversity and non-sexism.”

So far the average Western leftist reading this will be cheering on Mr Makgoba. But they might like to read a little further. The kind of non-racist, diverse society Vice-Chancellor Makgoba wants white men to embrace is a purely black African one.

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