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Description
A conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling "Stop!"
--William F. Buckley Jr, 1955
THANKS FOR YOUR warm welcome. And thank you Frank Devine for your wonderful introduction. Frank, like so many people in this room tonight, plays an important role in my story of the cultural sea change in Australia during the past decade. As a former editor and as a long-time columnist for the Australian, Frank has fought the good fights and helped dramatically improve the public culture in this country. More power to you, Frank.
It's great to be here in front of so many conservatives. Some might think it quite a contrast to my day job. To be a conservative in the journalism profession is a bit like how US presidential candidate Mitt Romney describes what it's like to be a Republican in the liberal state of Massachusetts: you're a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention. At least until recent times (say, the last five or so years), you were isolated in the newsroom; you were condemned for not conforming to the smelly orthodoxies of political correctness; and your political insights were treated not as a contentious contribution to the editorial conference, but as a flat earther's fit of extremist nonsense. There wasn't their opinion and your opinion; there was their opinion ... and you're insane!
I'll never forget my first week of work in Australian journalism nearly a decade ago. I started work at the Australian Financial Review at the height of the waterfront dispute in March-April 1998. My editor called me into his office on the morning that Chris Corrigan and Patrick Stevedores sacked the Maritime Union workers, and instructed me what our editorial line would be, which was along the following lines: "This is a great day for Australian capitalism; at long last, Australia is reaching a big bang end-game in its decades-long quest to remove the shame on its waterfront."
After writing my first draft of the next day's editorial for the editor, I then walked around the floor to meet my new colleagues. They were clearly concerned about the docks dispute unfolding outside our Darling Park office windows. One disturbed journalist asked me: "Comrade, how do you think we are going in the war out there on the waterfront?"
Now, the "comrade" talk naturally astonished me; I had, after all, just returned from Washington, where I had spent three years working at the American Enterprise Institute, and I could never imagine calling my colleagues John Bolton or Jeane Kirkpatrick "comrade", lest they confuse me with some Sandinista! Leaving that aside, I still assumed that my new work friends meant we in the sense that we were on message with the company line. So keen to assimilate into my new workplace, I thus plagiarised the editor's refrain: "This is a great day for Australian capitalism!"
My colleagues were bemused. "What on earth do you mean, comrade?" came the reply.
"You know, isn't it wonderful," I said, "that the government and Patrick are staring down the last gasp of old-style union militancy?"
Imagine my surprise when one senior journalist called me aside and warned me that airing such provocative opinions around the office could amount to a workplace dispute--even though I was merely parroting the paper's editorial line! My colleagues, you see, belonged to the journalists' union and so had pledged solidarity with the battling wharfies. Never mind that these battling wharfies had held the country to ransom for decades. Never mind all the notorious unreliability, high cost and long loading delays on our container wharves that made us an international exporting laughing stock. I stood out like a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention.
The episode, though, made me think: if the sober and august journalists at the nation's leading financial daily had such views about the modern workplace, I wondered how much more entrenched the same attitudes might be among the journalists at the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, as well as at the public broadcaster. Former veteran BBC staffer Robin Aitken once lamented he could not raise a cricket team of conservatives among staff at the British public broadcaster. I sometimes doubt if an indoor cricket team could be raised at the other Aunty as well as at many newspapers in Australia.
But in any event, I thought I could make some comments tonight on how opinions and the public culture have developed and changed over the years since my first day in Australian journalism.
WHEN WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR revived American conservatism by founding National Review in 1955, he said the magazine's job was to stand "athwart history, yelling stop". At that time, conservatism was regarded in polite society as a mental affliction and history did seem to be moving in the wrong direction if you were a conservative intellectual. Later, during the Reagan era and in the 1990s when Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress, American conservatives enjoyed thinking that history was on their side. As Time magazine's Michael Kinsley has recently put it: "They saw themselves as riding it like a Bronco, yelling not stop, but faster! faster!"
National Review's birth coincided with the arrival of an important milestone here in Australia. In a cultural landscape that the twenty-six-year-old Owen Harries thought was as flat and unvaried as the proverbial Australian sheep station, Quadrant magazine was created to defend cultural freedom. Fifty years ago it planted its banner at what Lionel Trilling called the bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet, and there it remains. Back in those days, Australia's cultural community was very small and isolated, and there was much less diversity and pluralism than in North America or Western Europe. This was the environment into which Quadrant was born.
Its first issue was published as Soviet tanks were crushing the 1956... |
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