Not at our expense: Why should taxpayers have subsidised the Soccer World Cup in Brazil?

That a single cent of public money was spent on the Fifa World Cup is a disgrace.  The fact that the Brazilian government has contrived to spend between 15 and 20 billion US dollars on the recent jamboree of football is unfathomable.  Let's make one thing clear:  if sport has long been seen by many as a cash cow, the World Cup is a bovine money-printing machine of truly gargantuan proportions.  Between administrators, television stations, sponsors, sports apparel conglomerates, producers of food, soft drinks, not to mention beer and yes, even players, agents and coaches, there are a multitude of snouts in the trough.  And there's room for them all.

According to Forbes, Brazil 2014 is estimated to generate US$4 billion in revenue for Fifa.  It's not hard to see why.  About 3.2 billion people (46 per cent of the world's population) watched at least one minute of the last World Cup in South Africa in 2010.  In fact, an average of 188.4 million watched each match.  It's not that Fifa needs public money to hold the World Cup, it's just that the tournament would be a little bit more work and a little less profitable without it.  That is not the people of Brazil's problem.

That the World Cup is such a massively profitable, massively popular event is reason enough for it to be considered beyond the realms of public funding.  But the poverty endemic in Brazil is a further reason the World Cup should never have received so many tax dollars.  Eighteen per cent of Brazilians live in poverty.  Indeed, minutes from the Arena Corinthians in São Paulo — a stadium which cost US$450 million — thousands live in tents and under plastic tarps.  The stadium hosted just six World Cup games.  And the cost of the Mané Garrincha stadium in Brasilia blew out to US$900 million, triple the original cost estimate, as a result of fraud.  Outrage over the ties between politicians and contractors triggered protests last year.

The money spent by the government on the World Cup could be spent on education or health.  Or, even better, left in the hands of the Brazilian people so that entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes can create jobs and wealth in what is now a sluggish economy after almost a decade of strong growth.  But even if Brazil was the richest country in the world, there is a broader philosophical issue with governments funding elite sport.  Elite sport is a fine thing, but it's not a universally adored pastime.  Though on the surface they may appear to be few and far between, there are many Brazilians who don't care about football (one in four believe the World Cup will harm Brazil's image).  How is it fair that their income has been used, against their will, to finance a luxury they have no interest in?

Unfortunately, this is a situation that is unlikely to change soon.  Governments are lining up to host and fund the World Cup — including Australia.  The bidding process is notoriously corrupt with various Fifa officials removed over the years for accepting extravagant "gifts".

Some, including the government of Brazil, will argue that the economic benefits of the World Cup taking place outweigh the cost.  And it's true that the almost a million fans who partied their way across Brazil will have been a tremendous economic boom for some.  But the economic benefits of big events like the World Cup and the Olympics are generally exaggerated.  For example, Time estimates that Brazil will end up with only about US$500 million in tourist spending — a paltry sum compared to the outlay stated above.

The real reason why governments are willing to fork out such grotesque amounts of their people's hard-earned for a football tournament is that politicians have long since recognised the benefits of being associated with their nation's sporting heroes.  It is no coincidence that Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff chose to formally launch her re-election bid during the tournament.

All of this is not to say that the World Cup is a bad thing.  Far from it, the World Cup is a wonderful sporting event that captures the imagination of the entire globe.  But it is morally untenable that some of the poorest amongst us (or anyone for that matter) end up footing the bill against their will.

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Academics against The Don

Don Bradman was ''peculiar''.  That is the startling finding of a pair of Monash University academics.  Of course, anyone with even the vaguest knowledge of cricket already knew that to have a Test batting average of 99.94 was clearly ''peculiar''.  Yet our Don Bradman's prodigious feats with the bat are not the reason why Monash duo David Dunstan and Tom Heenan claim he was ''an extremely peculiar Australian'', but rather because they believe he was an ''acquisitive, ruthless, and self-interested loner''.

Writing in the New Daily, the academics make it clear their real motivation for demolishing the ''myth'' of Bradman is because they regard praise for Bradman as part of a shift which sees Australia's ''popular history now being built on nationalistic self-aggrandisement in war and sport''.

The fact that John Howard once praised Bradman as ''the greatest living Australian'' is apparently enough evidence of guilt by association for members of the intelligentsia to decide that besmirching Bradman's reputation is an important aspect of fighting the culture wars.  The fact that Bradman is admired by plenty on the Left, such as former Wran government minister Rodney Cavalier, who has written vigorously in defence of The Don, is no obstacle to those on an ideological mission.

Apparently, in academic land, it is ''peculiar'' that a boy from a humble background used some of the connections he got through cricket to secure good jobs and endorsements.  This seemingly rational response to the opportunities which were presented to him is described as ''intense acquisitiveness''.  Oddly, having criticised Bradman for being too commercial in the 1930s, Dunstan and Heenan then turn around and accuse him of not being commercial enough as an administrator in the 1970s.

The authors claim that his teammates' criticisms of Bradman's personality have been ''swept under the carpet''.  While it is true that some works have tended to eulogise Bradman, these have been counter-balanced by numerous books and articles detailing the gripes of the likes of Victor Richardson, Bill O'Reilly, Jack Fingleton and Keith Miller.  Of course, Bradman was not popular with all his teammates, for the same variety of reasons which mean that, even in the most successful sporting teams, not everyone is great mates.

Dunstan and Heenan seem to be firmly in the camp of the ocker Aussie bloke wanting to booze with his mates for hours after the game, rather than the more ''new age'' Bradman who preferred to head home.  As we saw with the post-game bust-up between Michael Clarke and Simon Katich in the recent past, the divide between the drinkers and those wanting to get away to do something else continues to have a contemporary resonance.  But it is surely stretching things to try to make the sides of that divide fit into the competing sides of the culture wars.

The academics suggest that ''in many respects Bradman was more a sportsman of our age than his'', citing the ruthless manner in which Clarke and his team dispatched England this summer as being in Bradman's style (though surely in their sledging the current team owe more to the 1970s Chappell legacy than the 1930s and 1940s Bradman one).

So determined are Dunstan and Heenan to demonstrate that there was ''not much about Bradman that was great, or deserving of the adulation heaped upon him'' that as well as attacking Bradman's alleged character flaws they are unable to resist the temptation to undermine his on-field performances.  They claim that, while Bradman was a ''ruthless destroyer of ordinary bowling'', he did not do so well ''when the going got tough'' and ''often got out''.  This is presumably a reference to the Bodyline series of 1932-33 when Bradman averaged a mere 56.57, something that could only be considered a failure compared to his own lofty standards, not compared to anyone else's.

Reading the article one almost gets the impression that Bradman was the sole opponent of bodyline in Australia and that he got it banned for his personal benefit.  It seems that the Australian cultural Left are now happy to place themselves in the camp of snobbish English captain Douglas Jardine, who considered Bradman ''scared of the quick stuff'', and against the Depression-era Australian hero Bradman.

It does not fit the authors' narrative, but it is worth remembering that Bradman was an innovative captain and remains the only leader to have inspired a comeback from 2-0 down to win a five-test series.  He did this in 1936-37, engineering a comeback on a sticky wicket in the Third Test at the MCG by an early declaration in the first innings and a rearrangement of the batting order in the second.  In the latter dig, Bradman himself made 270 while suffering from a severe bout of influenza.  The aggregate attendance of 350,534 at that Test remains a record, so maybe Bradman's contemporaries appreciated his batting more than his modern critics.

Although they lecture in Sports Studies, Dunstan and Heenan are also happy to engage in a spot of medical diagnosis.  They suggest that Bradman might have been on the autism spectrum, commenting that ''he certainly lacked empathy and had a near obsessional ability to concentrate intensely for long periods on repetitious tasks''.  Normally, it might be regarded as poor form to pick on someone because of a condition with which they were born, but obviously that does not apply if attacking an alleged conservative.

However, they do have a contemporary authority for their view.  In 1939 the NSW Cricket Association vice-president commented that Bradman lacked ''social charm'' and was ''intensely suspicious''.  The vice-president was one Bert Evatt, the very same Bert Evatt whose own ''charm'' helped split the Labor party in the mid-1950s;  and, as for ''suspicious'', Evatt was probably the most paranoid figure in Australian public life in the 20th century.  But because he was on the Left, Evatt was presumably ''normal'' whereas Bradman, a conservative, was obviously ''peculiar''.

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The missing milestone

Last October's bushfires meant that 2013 was not a good year for the Blue Mountains.  It should have been a year of celebration.  However, unless you paid very close attention, you probably missed the fact that last year marked the 200th anniversary of one of the most momentous events in Australian history — the crossing of the Blue Mountains by Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth.  For 1813 should surely rank with 1788, 1901 and 1915 as one of the big years of Australian history.  It was the year that opened up the interior of the continent to the development of key industries such as wool, wheat and mining.

Yet the only attempts to commemorate the crossing were almost all local and small scale.  The only even moderately high profile effort was News Limited cartoonist Warren Brown retracing the route, which generated some press coverage.  There were no new television programmes about it, although the National Film and Sound Archive did post an earlier documentary about the crossing on YouTube — it was made in 1965.  This does seem rather sparse acknowledgement of such a momentous anniversary.

In the quarter century from the start of the first British Settlement at Sydney Cove in January 1788 until 1813, the colony of New South Wales had only expanded to other coastal locations such as the Hunter and Hobart.  This was all about to change when on 11 May 1813 Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth set off from Blaxland's property, south of what is now St Mary's, to cross the Blue Mountains.  Following a previous failed attempt, Blaxland had developed a strategy to follow the ridges, rather than the valleys, and the felicitous choice of route is reflected in the fact that the Great Western Highway and main western railway still largely follow it.

Another clever feature of their journey was to treat every stage as a two-day process.  On the first day, the bulk of the party would set off, leaving horses and supplies behind and then, having navigated their way through the bush for a few miles, the advance party would turn back and cut a wider path for the horses to follow the next day.  After three weeks of this repeated process, they had covered about 50 miles and had succeeded in reaching the top of the Divide.  From the top of what became known as Mount Blaxland, the explorers could see what looked like potentially prosperous country stretching away to the west.

By the end of 1813 the colony's Surveyor-General George Evans, under instructions from Governor Lachlan Macquarie, had followed their route and surveyed some of the plain to the west.  Within two years, Macquarie himself had travelled across the mountains and founded the town of Bathurst.

This flurry of postcrossing activity tends to undermine the argument of emeritus Sydney University history professor Richard Waterhouse that the explorers' contemporaries did not share the modern view of the importance of crossing the mountains.  Waterhouse was quoted as saying that ''the report of the successful Blaxland crossing in the Sydney Gazette in 1813 amounted to one paragraph — a similar size to an article on a cockfight''. No doubt many 1813 Sydneysiders, just like their 2013 successors, wanted to read about sport rather than hard news, but Macquarie clearly understood the significance of the discovery.

Waterhouse is far from alone among modern historians in downplaying the importance of Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth.  Indeed, in recent decades, it has become something of a fashion to sneer at what one writer has referred to as ''the most hackneyed event in Australian history''.  One line of attack has been to question whether Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth were actually the first settlers to cross the mountains.  From the early days of Sydney town, escaped convicts and other adventurers had sought ways to scale them, most being turned back when the valleys they followed ended in sheer rock faces.  Some have argued that one John Wilson crossed in 1798, but the evidence is not convincing.  Certainly, in 1802, the Frenchman Francis Louis Barrallier got within a day's walk of the top of the Great Divide, before a lack of provisions forced him and his party to turn back.  There was also the botanist George Caley who regularly visited the mountains to collect specimens, but there is no evidence that he got much beyond the eastern foothills.

There are other reasons why the journey of Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth has come to be seen as more problematic by recent generations.  For decades, people have been deserting Australia's interior and resettling on the coastal fringe which has reduced our collective empathy with, and understanding of, the importance of what goes on beyond the Divide.

Further, where once opening up the interior was seen as unarguably good and progressive, in recent times this has been balanced against the negative impact that this had on the indigenous occupants of those grasslands.  Yet the fact that crossing the Divide magnified several times over the impact of British settlement on Aboriginal Australians only adds to the significance of what Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth achieved.  From 1813 onwards, the whole Australian continent, not just the coastal fringe, became available for settlement.  This completely changed the economic development of Australia and fundamentally altered the lives of many generations of settler and indigenous Australians.

Geoffrey Blainey pointed out in The Tyranny of Distance that, in earlier years, colonists had no great practical incentive to explore the interior, which he argued was more significant than the mountains' impenetrability in delaying a crossing.  However, with the coastal plain becoming more crowded, that was changing in the 1810s.  If Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth had not crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813, some other explorers would have done so in the ensuing years.  Whoever did it, and whenever it occurred, it was always going to be a landmark event.

Perhaps when John Dunmore Lang argued in the 1850s that ''the passes of the Blue Mountains are like the Straits of Thermopylae and could be defended by a mere handful of Australian Greeks against the whole power of Persia'', he was guilty of overstating their impenetrability and significance.  In 2013, we did the opposite.

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Notes from abroad

When someone ten years your junior asks you to drop your pants you know it's going to be an interesting evening.  Saturday started normally.  My partner and I were hosted by good friends, Adrian and Pat, at the final day of the Melbourne Cup Carnival.  Down a few dollars I left the track for the public transport trip to Tel Aviv.  Presumably the Qatari passport stamp sent me to be privately screened at Bangkok airport.  My satchel was taken away for an ''X-ray'' before being handed back 40 minutes later with its contents missing.  I was then taken to a private room and asked, ''Are you wearing underwear?''  Mum would've been proud they were clean as I stood for ten minutes as Israeli security inspected every part of my jeans before I reclaimed my dignity and boarded.

In Tel Aviv I met up with my media colleagues participating in the Rambam Israel Fellowship programme organised by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.  The comprehensive introduction to Israel included a tour of the old city of Jerusalem and the ancient fortress of Masada, and meetings with politicians, academics and journalists.  Our Palestinian guide took us to the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem for an uneventful, educational experience about how the locals live.  The local Palestinian kids decided to perform and threw rocks at the nearby Israeli soldiers.  The soldiers also performed by firing two tear gas canisters in the sky, before one landed five metres away, bounced and laid to rest at my feet.  Sadly I couldn't find a T-shirt that said ''I was tear gassed by the IDF and all I got was this T-shirt, stinging eyes and a decongested nasal passage.''

Tear gas is nothing compared to the experience of the small township of Sderot.  If Sderot residents hear the words ''red colour'' in Hebrew, they have 15 seconds until it rains Qassam rockets sent from the Gaza strip only a kilometre away.  That isn't very long, especially as it took five for our bus to stop and open its door.  I counted.  Fortunately Hamas weren't in the performing mood the day we visited.  I only have one bit of advice if you are considering travelling to Israel:  go!

For my sins, I observe international climate talkfests annually.  This year 8,000 environmental activists, rent-seeking businesses, media and negotiators attended.  Based on the current negotiating timeline a new global carbon cutting treaty is supposed to be concluded in Paris in 2015.  I'll have to make sure I am extra sinful that year.  I wasn't expecting to be greeted by a ''Green Warrior of Norway'' handing me a condom at the Polish National Stadium.  On the prophylactic's packaging were quotes about the evils of overpopulation and overconsumption.  Thankfully even far-left green activists recognised recycling's limits by warning that the product was for ''one usage only''.

A rare joy of attending these summits is spending time with like-minded, long-suffering free marketeers from across the globe, all three of them.  A fellow lonely sole at these events is Ron Bailey from the US-based libertarian Reason Foundation.  A disappointment of my travels is that they overlapped with the C.D. Kemp lecture.  This year's lecture was delivered by the best-selling author Matt Ridley.  He quoted Bailey for his erudite definition of the precautionary principle:  ''Never do anything for the first time''.  Bailey is a good dinner companion on cold Warsaw nights, but we have very different tastes in wine.

Climate talks are rarely eventful.  Negotiations are behind closed doors.  Journalists sit in the press centre typing copy.  The real colour and light is offered by activists.  They've mastered the art of providing snappy quotes and visual stunts for a gullible and bored media.  As climate change has dropped in public importance so have activist numbers.  The usual stunts are gone.  They symbolically walked out of the conference in anger at the progress of talks while chanting ''we shall overcome''.  After spending minutes in Warsaw's November climate they walked back inside to enjoy the warmth provided by the nearby coal-fired power station.

Each year a key negotiating theme develops.  This year developing countries wanted a ''loss and damages'' fund to help them finance the costs from major climatic events.  They used the Philippine typhoon as justification.  On the third last day the UN Secretariat installed donation boxes at 5pm so attendees could individually help Filipino victims.  By 7.15pm there was a solitary donation, and I am pretty sure it was put there to prime the pump.  Australia wasn't very popular at the conference.  Disconnected-from-reality activists and bureaucrats weren't impressed we elected an Abbott government that thinks carbon taxes are for repealing, not increasing.

I went through London to get home.  Aussie expat Jason Groves and his British civil partner and celebrated classical pianist Charles Owen organised a dinner in a rather swank Belgravia restaurant with fellow expat Gordon Adams and long-time friend and former Kiwi Shane Frith.  The quote of the night came from Charles who said, ''Not many British classical musicians regularly read The Spectator.  But the truth is, as soon as it arrives, I almost wet my pants with excitement.''  Over dinner I broke the cardinal ''one Martini is all right, two is too many, three is never enough'' rule.  Packing my bags to fly home the next morning was a challenge.

James Paterson's Diary

The best thing about appearing on Q&A is not hanging out with Tony Jones backstage, or even appearing before 700,000 viewers on ABC1.  It's logging on to Twitter afterwards and reading hundreds of abusive tweets from enraged lefties so that you know you've done your job.

This time was no exception.  In fact, I even managed to clock up dozens of tweets before the show went to air.  Many are not printable in an august publication like The Spectator Australia.  When the official Q&A Twitter account announced on Monday morning that due to an illness I would be replacing Australian Catholic University Vice-Chancellor Greg Craven, the howls of protest began.  One tweeter even announced he'd be boycotting the show because someone from the Institute of Public Affairs was appearing.  I'm sure the ABC was devastated by the advertising revenue they lost as a result.

After the show I log in to check if I met my KPIs.  Marieke Hardy is a writer whose work has been featured extensively on the ABC.  She's most famous for writing on ABC's The Drum website that she would like to see Liberal frontbencher Christopher Pyne ''attacked by a large and libidinous dog''.  So I must admit to being quite chuffed that she took to Twitter to label me a ''douchecanoe'', whatever that is.  Craig Reucassel, another recipient of taxpayer largesse via the ABC as a member of the Chaser team, is equally unimpressed.  He skilfully manages to fit an attack on me and my boss into just 140 characters, writing ''Sure James Paterson's #qanda appearance isn't great unless you remember John Roskam's appearance''.  Ouch!  Funnily enough his colleague Julian Morrow was much more complimentary in the green room after the show.

Tonight's panel consists of myself, shadow Attorney-General George Brandis, Chris Evans, the ALP's recently-retired Senate leader, comedian Corrine Grant and Rachel Botsman, whose biography describes her as a ''social innovator'' and ''global thought leader''.  I still have no idea what that means.

I'm very glad one of the topics we discuss is freedom of speech and the way the Gillard government's draft Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill threatens it.  The IPA through our Legal Rights Project has been the leading voice against the Bill.  It's great to see George Brandis use the opportunity to deliver a strong defence of free speech and make it clear the Liberal party will oppose the Bill outright.  One of the aspects of the Bill that has not received sufficient coverage is how it reverses the onus of proof and thereby undermines the presumption of innocence.  As I point out, if I'm offended that Tony Jones doesn't give me sufficient air time, under the new anti-discrimination laws I can sue the ABC, and they have to prove themselves innocent!

We move on to the mining tax, and a self-described lifetime Labor voter complains to Chris Evans that the Gillard government hasn't hit the mining industry hard enough, to the delight of the studio audience.  In his answer, Evans suggests that the applause is a good indication of changing community sentiment and perhaps the government should look at reforming the tax to collect more revenue.  I can't resist the opportunity, and point out that if the ALP really thinks a Q&A audience is a representative sample of the Australian community, no wonder they are in such bad shape.  It wins me no friends in the audience, who loudly groan.  But at least Sinclair Davidson at the excellent blog Catallaxy Files appreciates it — he writes that it was my best comment all night, and Andrew Bolt agrees on his blog.

The audience seems determined to prove my point.  At the end of the show, when Tony Jones announces next week's line up, they again audibly groan when he says one guest will be from the Centre for Public Christianity.  It's as if having a Christian on the ABC is something to be outraged about.

A perennial frustration for Q&A watchers is the amount of time dedicated to the ins and outs of politics instead of policy issues.  Corrine Grant is particularly vocal early in the episode about how Australia doesn't have enough big policy debates.  To be fair, this is a pretty policy-dense one.  But the final question of the night, in the form of a video, concerns why Tony Abbott will no longer be appearing every Friday on the Today show.  I can't think of a less important topic to discuss than the Opposition Leader's media appearance schedule and the panellists' theories of what sort of media management tactics his team are running, so I say so.  Of course, Corrine Grant believes this is a deadly serious matter of national concern.  And nobody mentions the failure of every Gillard government minister bar Anthony Albanese to appear on The Bolt Report on Ten.  Tony Jones doesn't seem to appreciate my criticism of Q&A for spending time on trivial topics like this and announces in response that they will be pioneering a new format with detailed questions to ministers and shadow ministers in the lead-up to the election.

A sympathetic tweeter asks me why me and my colleagues bother turning up to events behind enemy lines.  The obvious answer is that it is a great platform to advocate for freedom.  But it's also true that sending the Left into fits of rage is actually pretty fun.  And I think we provide a useful community service.  There's even an online petition with 2,000 signatures calling for the IPA to be banned from the ABC.  Without us, what would these people do with their lives?''

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An Australian bloodbath

It's an intricate two-step, but one false move now spells death.  As Kevin Rudd surprises everyone, including his own supporters, with his adroit middle-of-the-night resignation in Washington DC, seeking the ideal strategic moment to knife his nemesis, the Prime Minister ducks and weaves hoping she won't shoot herself in the foot (again).

''The simple truth is that I cannot continue to serve as Foreign Minister if I do not have the Prime Minister's support,'' said Mr Rudd, hilariously eschewing a ''stealth attack on a sitting Prime Minister'' and twisting events to appear decisive and ''honest'' while fraudulently painting himself as the aggrieved and innocent party (''the Australian people want an end to this soap opera'').  Jumping before he was pushed, he has cannily thrown the spotlight onto Julia Gillard's presumed inability to beat Tony Abbott at the next election.

When a political party tears itself apart in such spectacular fashion, there is often a key policy issue at stake;  Abbott vs Malcolm Turnbull over climate change being an obvious example.  Not this time.  As with his original ''faceless men'' dethroning, Mr Rudd's latest move comes with no philosophical baggage.  It's simply a question of perceived popularity, mind games and who is the wiliest fighter.

In the absence of any clashes of conviction, Mr Rudd had to find another angle of attack.  This was eagerly provided by the Press Gallery over the past few weeks, keen to notch up a hit after being wrong-footed by political events more than once in recent years.

A strong, confident leader would have been impervious to the hysterical but essentially empty provocations of various media outlets.  Ms Gillard wasn't.  Above all, it is Mr Abbott's success in fatally weakening the Prime Minister that is at the heart of her current predicament.  Constantly carping on about his ''negativity'' and the ''No-alition'' has proven to be Ms Gillard's biggest mistake.  At every turn, and on every policy issue, she has empowered the opposition leader in the eyes of the electorate (and, possibly, wavering members of Caucus), while feeding the impression that she doesn't know how to defeat him.  Much like the picadors who soften up the animal for the kill, Mr Abbott has relentlessly driven his spear into the spine of Ms Gillard, making it that much more tempting for Rudd the matador to convince himself (and his supporters) that he can finish her off.

Bleeding, clearly rattled, and unable to shake off the ''untrustworthy'' tag, it is immaterial whether Ms Gillard survives.  Her confidence and authority are shattered, and her Prime Ministership is doomed.  And yet Mr Rudd himself is deeply unpopular within Caucus, as this week's bloodletting from colleagues Wayne Swan and Tony Burke made clear.  Meanwhile, there is always the possibility of a third contender popping up, eventually.  Whoever is left standing, the Labor party has been battered to within an inch of its life.  Still, for pure entertainment value, not much can compete with the bloodsport of Labor politics.

The closing of the Australian mind

It has long been the lament of academics that their self-evidently brilliant ideas and advice are seldom heeded in the ''real'' world.  Nowhere is this disappointment more evident than in the field of social sciences, particularly political science and public policy.

One recent illustration of academics' frustration with their failure to influence public policy was the launch of The Conversation, a website which describes itself as ''an independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the university and research sector''.  Headed by former Age editor Andrew Jaspan, the website is primarily resourced by the Group of Eight elite Australian universities.

Evidently, it is well-funded.  Besides Australia's major universities, it also enjoys support from corporate partners, the CSIRO, the Federal Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, and the Victorian Department of Business and Innovation.  This support appears to allow it to employ dozens of staff, including editors — and in some cases, deputy editors — for each of the website's ''sections'' (''Science + Technology'', ''Politics + Society'', ''Environment + Energy'' and so on).

The Conversation was launched explicitly to address the ''problem'', as described by University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis, that universities are not successful at communicating their messages to the public;  as if the reason academics are unable to influence public debate is because they lack a highbrow version of News Limited's opinion website, The Punch.

As the site's charter admits, it hopes to ''give experts a greater voice in shaping scientific, cultural and intellectual agendas'', and aims to work for the advancement of the ''public good''.  It also promises to be ''editorially independent'', provide ''diverse'' content and be ''free of commercial or political bias''.  Whether it achieves this is open to question.

Professor Judith Sloan, one academic who can boast a tangible impact on policy and public debate, is unconvinced:  ''This site strikes me as emblematic of all that is wrong with Australian universities.  Crammed with puerile, naïve, left-wing tosh, the contributing academics really have no idea when it comes to serious public policy contributions.''

Indeed, if you believe that diversity should extend to the ideological realm, The Conversation is hardly fulfilling its charter.  Take a recent sampling from its ''Environment + Energy'' section:  one article labels the governments' carbon tax as ''profoundly inadequate'' because it doesn't go far enough, another argues that the climate debate focuses far too much on ''the risks to Australia's economic prosperity'', and a piece cheerily points out that businesses could become more ''efficient'' thanks to the carbon tax.  Others suggest that ''one small thing you can do for the environment'' is to ''be inspired'', and yet another argues that scientists have a duty to speak out against policies such as the Victorian government's decision to allow grazing in Alpine national parks.

On a brighter note, one article suggested that Christopher Monckton should not be prevented from speaking at a university, but not before comparing climate sceptics to ''Holocaust deniers, supporters of paedophilia, critics of vaccination [and] advocates of racial inequality''.  The website also proudly featured ''Monckton watch'' on its homepage, a section dedicated to criticising the British climate sceptic during his visit to Australia.

Every article that appears on the website is accompanied by a disclosure statement that lists any possible conflicts of interest the academic author may have.  Obviously, this is part of The Conversation's efforts to elevate itself above commercial media and demonstrate the rigorousness of its content.

But many of these articles, supposedly ''curated'' by The Conversation's team of professional journalists, are littered with political talking points like ''clean energy future'', a phrase that features in headlines and introductory paragraphs of numerous articles on the website, and — coincidentally, of course — in the Gillard government's publicly-funded advertising campaign in support of its carbon tax package.  This represents either willful participation in the government's propaganda campaign or, more charitably, sloppy editing standards, because neutral language would be both more accurate and more illuminating.

Moreover, one way that academic writing distinguishes itself from opinion journalism is that it is referenced and peer-reviewed.  Yet the articles that appear on The Conversation are rarely footnoted and only occasionally contain links to other articles which back up their claims.  Neither are articles on The Conversation peer-reviewed, which is ironic considering many articles published on the website assail climate sceptics for not submitting their work to this process.

Conservative or even vaguely centre-right voices appear extremely rarely on the site.  To be fair, that is not totally the fault of the editors:  the reality is that academia is substantially dominated by the Left, and paeans to renewable energy are probably easier to source than robust critiques of big government.  But herein lies the problem.  One of the reasons academic ideas are not taken seriously in the political world is the perception that they come solely from one end of the ideological spectrum.

In this light it hardly seems surprising that academics fail to make their mark on public policy debates.  The dominance of the Left on campus may be gratifying for those who hope to change society by influencing the young, but it actually contributes to their exclusion from the public policy process.  And in order to actually influence public debate, you need ideas that are relevant, achievable and have some semblance of community support.  Australian academics are not just one flashy website away from reshaping the nation according to their vision.  To achieve that, they require nothing less than a fundamental cultural revolution.  Until then, others will hold sway.  Judging by their contributions to date, that might not be a bad thing.

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One savings account we don't need

How could a Liberal support a sovereign wealth fund?

A number of Liberal MPs have recently been publicly floating the idea of a sovereign wealth fund for Australia.  They've been joined in their calls by the Greens (always a good barometer of bad policy) and some economists.  The idea is relatively straightforward:  the Federal government should take advantage of our unprecedented high terms of trade, driven by the mining boom, to save and invest capital for Australia's future.  A number of countries, most notably Norway and the oil-rich Gulf states, already have such systems in place.

The precise reasons for the establishment of a fund, however, are hard to pin down.  Advocates are typically vague about what specific purpose the fund would serve, beyond ''saving for the future''.  One argument is that thanks to our rapidly aging population we will need savings to fund the expensive retirements of a dauntingly large generation of baby-boomers.

This amounts to a recognition that while our current generous healthcare and pension schemes are fiscally unsustainable, instead of reforming them we should simply squeeze the current generation of taxpayers more to fund them.

Of course, Australians already have enforced saving for the cost of retirement, via compulsory superannuation.  Do we really need another layer of government-directed investment?

We're also told that a sovereign wealth fund will allow us to finance ''investment in the future''.  Whatever that means, it is logically flawed.  For starters, this is akin to poorer countries giving aid to richer ones, because every generation to come will be vastly wealthier than those before it if current growth trends continue.  The only reason to doubt this is if you believe that technological development and human innovation will cease in the future.

Nevertheless, the best way to ensure successive generations are as wealthy as possible is to keep government as small as possible and to tax the productive parts of the economy as little as possible.  If our economic future is uncertain, the best approach is to keep the economy strong, not to squirrel away productive resources in a misguided attempt to make government more able to face these challenges.  Levying higher taxes to fund government-directed investments will only depress economic growth.

The third argument for a wealth fund is that it would allow us to finance Keynesian government spending.  Supporters argue that if the economy took a turn for the worse, the government would have a large pool of assets that it could quickly liquidate to resuscitate the economy.  Clearly some politicians haven't noticed how Keynesian ''stimulus'' spending spectacularly failed to lift the US out of the economic mire.

While the Future Fund, established by then-Treasurer Peter Costello in the final years of the Howard government, is in some ways akin to a sovereign wealth fund, at least it had a very specific purpose:  to meet the unfunded liabilities of commonwealth superannuation schemes.  It was never designed to be a honeypot that governments could dip in to whenever they felt the need.  But there is always the risk that the temptation will grow too great -- and recent media reports have suggested the Gillard government will be raiding the jar in its next budget.

There is no evidence to suggest that government managers are better placed to determine the best investments for a nations' future.  In fact, there's ample evidence for the opposite.  After all, government decisions are inevitably influenced by political factors that have little to do with sensible, long-term investment.

But what is truly bizarre is the number of Liberal MPs who have been prominent among the sovereign wealth fund boosters.  Because there can be no doubt that a sovereign wealth fund is utterly incompatible with any reading of liberal philosophy.

At its core, the idea of a sovereign wealth fund comes from the government-knows-best school of politics.  It presumes that bureaucrats know better how to spend a nation's resources than do individuals and companies.  There is only one word to describe a sovereign wealth fund:  statist.

How else to describe a belief that, even after government has paid for all its current (extensive) spending commitments, it should continue to tax individuals so that it has a large enough surplus to lock away in government-managed investment funds?  After all, the capital to invest in a fund has to come from somewhere, and in this case, it comes from taxpayers.

Wouldn't that surplus government revenue be best returned to taxpayers via lower marginal tax rates?  The answer for Liberals should be clear.  Liberals believe that individuals know better than government how to spend their own money.  They trust them to make decisions in their own interests without ''guidance'' from the state.  They believe a small government best preserves individual freedom.  And they think that the free market and private enterprise are the best tools for generating wealth and prosperity.

A sovereign wealth fund violates all of those principles.

It's also peculiar that Liberals -- who fought so hard for decades to privatise government-owned businesses -- would advocate what amounts to the stealthy renationalisation of the private sector through massive government purchase of private assets.

So what accounts for the recent explosion of support in Liberal circles for a fundamentally illiberal policy?

On a superficial level it is easy to understand what attracts some Liberals to this idea.  First, it gives the Opposition something ''positive'' to talk about, and helps combat the Labor party line that the Opposition is purely negative and has no agenda of its own.  Second, it dovetails nicely with the Liberal party's criticism of the Rudd-Gillard governments' profligacy and the record debt they have accrued in office.  Finally, it allows individual MPs to brand themselves as ''thinkers'' who are future-focused and willing to explore innovative policy solutions to complex governance problems.

The embrace of the idea of a sovereign wealth fund by many in Australia's party of free enterprise and individual liberty is deeply concerning.  It suggests a wider disconnect with the values and philosophies that are supposed to underpin the Liberal party.  It is doubly unsettling when considered alongside other departures from liberal philosophy in the name of political expediency, most notably the Opposition's growing flirtation with outright protectionism and its stubborn fealty to an absurdly generous, government-funded, paid parental scheme.  It's time that Liberals who truly support the free market stood up to slay these illiberal policy ideas.

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What matters more: stability or Question Time?

The little we see of parliament isn't the true measure of our political culture.

Nobody who has ever sat through a full session of Federal Parliament's Question Time would argue that it is an edifying spectacle.  But the introspective angst that followed Australian journalists' first exposure to the UK parliamentary Question Time was completely over the top.

Australian Twitter feeds usually scroll slowly in the early hours of the morning, as few updates are sent while most Aussie tweeters sleep.  Not so on one night in late July.  Twitter was alive with activity, as Australians sat up and watched an engrossing special session of British Question Time amid the News of the World hacking scandal.

Superlatives flew as Australian tweeters, many among them Canberra Press Gallery journalists, marvelled at Prime Minister David Cameron's performance.  He was, in the words of many, ''serious'', ''mature'', ''intelligent'' and ''sophisticated''.  His answers were to the point and did not avoid the question.

The questions themselves were hard-hitting and relevant, and there was little sign of the ''Dorothy Dixers'' to which we are all too accustomed in Australia.

Indeed, it didn't take long for unfavourable comparisons to be drawn with Australia's own Question Time.

The Age's national affairs correspondent, Katherine Murphy, quickly distilled the Press Gallery's collective view.  In an opinion piece a week later, Murphy obviously made full use of her thesaurus, describing Australian Question Time as ''pathetic'', ''rubbish'', ''banal'', ''pointless'', ''timewasting'', ''confected'', ''aggressive'', ''spiteful'', ''gladiatorial'', ''soporific'', ''bitchy'' and ''a joke''.

Murphy was joined by a chorus of her colleagues -- many of whom approvingly shared her article on Twitter -- in bemoaning what has become of our Question Time.

Canberra Times editor-at-large Jack Waterford remarked that watching PMQs that week was ''an occasion for genuine colonial cringe'' because ''politicians [asked] actual questions and politicians actually [answered] them''.

ABC Radio Brisbane presenter Christopher Welsh said watching Australian parliamentary proceedings made him want to ''stick skewers in [his] eyeballs'' and that he was ''enthralled'' by the UK parliament's Question Time, because it is ''so much better than ours''.

Of course, there was nothing new about last month's PMQs.  It has long been fast-paced, free-flowing and entertaining.  But it seemed that the Australian parliamentary Press Gallery had discovered it for the first time.  Only a cynic would suggest that this had something to do with the subject at hand.

Maybe they are right.  Perhaps our Question Time really is the worst in the world.  But who cares?

Appearing on Mornings with Jon Faine on ABC Melbourne's 774, former Monthly editor Sally Warhaft was aghast to hear me say that I thought the operation of Question Time had no bearing on how the country is governed.

Katherine Murphy argued in her piece that Question Time ''symbolises everything that's wrong with political discussion in Australia''.  Really?

After all, Question Time only showcases a tiny slice of our politicians' activity, and an unrepresentative one at that.  Just because it dominates media coverage doesn't mean it's accurate.

Question Time receives disproportionate attention because it is much more entertaining than the minutiae of policy development.  Headline-grabbing clashes, witticisms (of highly variable quality) and the theatre of political combat make for much better footage and copy.

Try enlivening an earnest exchange between an academic witness and a genuinely inquisitive senator at a committee hearing, or a dedicated local MP's five-minute oration about a great charity in their electorate, and you'll see why Question Time is a tastier proposition for a journalist.

Recent events highlight the absurdity of holding up parliamentary behaviour during Question Time as any way representative of the quality of a nation's governance.  Britain's politicians may use well-rounded vowels and speak in crisp sentences, but British streets have also been ablaze with thousands of rioters and looters.

While the Left and the Right disagree about the cause of the riots -- some say it's inequality, others lax policing -- it's clear that poor government policy played a role.  Nor is it Britain's only problem.  The country is mired in record debt, unemployment is nearly nine per cent and, according to some studies, social mobility has rarely been worse.

The US, too, has always had a much more serene and cerebral parliamentary culture.  There is no Question Time at all, members are highly deferential to each other on the floor, and speeches, while partisan, are most often respectful.  The most controversial recent departure, when a Republican Congressman yelled ''you lie'' during President Obama's State of the Union address, was remarkable because it was almost unheard-of in US Congressional history.

Contrast this with the daily insults and even expletives hurled across the floor whenever the Australian Prime Minister rises to speak.

But like Britain, the US is neck-deep in debt, and more Americans than ever believe their country is heading in the wrong direction.  But hey, at least their parliamentary behaviour is classy.

The truth is that at this moment, Australia stands almost alone as the most trouble-free and best-governed country in the western hemisphere.  Our economy is strong, employment is at near record highs and even the Rudd and Gillard governments haven't been able to drag us down to European levels of national debt.  Thanks to a sensible bipartisan policy consensus in favour of free trade, open markets and (relatively) limited government, Australians have never enjoyed greater prosperity.

So tell me again why Question Time matters?

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Shouting the odds

There is nothing more irritating in a debate than when a particular point is constantly made on the basis that, to its users, it is so self-evident that no further discussion is required.

A current example is the issue of sports betting, where the perceived clincher in many letters and comments is a reference to children talking about odds.  As one worried writer to The Age concluded her letter, ''When ten-year-olds are talking about football games in terms of belting odds, the AFL should acknowledge that there is a deeper problem.''

And the problem is?

It does not appear that the ten-year-old in question is sneaking off to place an actual bet.  All the kid is doing is what anybody talking about which team will win a forthcoming game is doing, in the same way kids and adults alike have done since Tom Wills played in Yarra Park. ''Who do you think will win?''  ''I disagree.''  All the use of odds does is to quantify the probability, in a way not dissimilar to aggregating the predictions of newspaper tipsters.

Besides, I can top the concerned ten-year-old's parent, as I have a seven-year-old, who similarly discusses the odds.  She loves using the published odds as a guide as to which team is likely to win and even explains when she thinks the odds are wrong.  As yet, she does not associate it directly with ''putting money'' on it, but even when she does, I fail to see how this is some terrible modern evil.

I remember, when I was 10, I lost a fifty cent wager when Hawthorn lost to Richmond.  And fifty cents meant something in 1982!  In fact, all through my schooldays, kids bet on the outcome of football matches.  Being unsophisticated souls, most of this was done on a straight basis, which meant that those following weaker teams were being dudded by taking even money when they should have had odds against or ''goals in''.

I was introduced to the notion of ''goals in'' by my Year 8 teacher, who not only insisted that he and I have a bet on the outcome of the following weekend's game between our respective teams, but also demanded a couple of ''goals in'' to take account of the fact that his team was lower on the ladder.  I assume, in these less tolerant times, he would face serious disciplinary action for corrupting the students in his charge.

Certainly, today's teachers seem much more alert to the potential evils of gambling.  A teacher recently approached some friends of mine about a most concerning discovery she had made about their young son.  She had found a form-guide in his bag.  I gather she was even more shocked to discover that this activity actually had parental approval.

After all, discussing odds with your child seems a worthwhile learning activity.  Just as kids in the southern states of Australia have traditionally been particularly good at their six times table, now their numerical ability is being enhanced by constantly playing around with the numbers in the odds.  Kids who know how odds work must have a head start when mathematics classes turn to the topic of probability.  And odds demonstrate how maths has an important application to something that is interesting and fun.

Gambling's supposed effect on children has always featured heavily in all the rhetoric of Australia's highest-profile anti-gambling crusader, Senator Nick Xenophon.  Earlier this year, when opposing the idea of a casino's name appearing on an NRL team's guernsey, he claimed it ''normalises gambling behaviour for young kids''.

This may come as a shock to the Senator, but gambling is already normal.  Dozens of totalitarian regimes have tried to ban it, and dozens of democratic ones have imposed onerous regulation on it, but people like to gamble and to discuss the odds of whether one outcome, or another, will occur.  Personally, I'm more worried about footballers normalising tattoos;  but unlike Senator Xenophon, I don't want to ban everything in society which offends my sensibilities.

Given its very normality, children should be exposed to gambling as they are growing up.  In recent decades, parents have been bombarded with the notion from experts that the earlier children are given sex education, the better the world will be.  I am inclined to agree, but am thus somewhat bemused to find that many of the same people who want kids to know about sex at an early age object to them knowing about betting.

Sports betting may not always have been legal in Australia, but it has always been part of our culture.  Fifty years ago, the Sporting Globe published weekly odds on various aspects of football, and the earlier history of both football and cricket in Australia contains numerous examples of betting.  Coinciding with the legalisation of sports betting has been the huge decline in the presence of horse racing in the mainstream media, outside carnival time.  A generation ago, the majority of the sports report on the ABC TV news on a Saturday was replays of the closing stages of all races except those where ''vision has been withheld by the stewards'', complete with lots of talk of betting prices.  Perhaps the increased visibility of sports betting has helped fill the void created by the downgrading of the races and trots.  Whether Manikato was 6/4 or Collingwood is $2.50, the principle is the same.

And speaking of Collingwood, the recent transgressions of Collingwood players Heath Shaw and Nick Maxwell demonstrate that sporting authorities need to keep educating players on why participants cannot bet.  The fact that the players and their families were so blasè in their non-comprehension of this fact beggars belief.  Now, one can debate the specifics about whether the AFL handed out the appropriate penalties, but clearly it is an issue that all sporting bodies know they have to address.

There are clear problems if administrators fail to properly regulate gambling on their sport.  However, whether it is betting on cricket or the impact of drugs on the credibility of cycling, the sports themselves will be the big losers if the public feel that outcomes are being manipulated.  The fact that the AFL pursued such small losing bets shows that they are being vigilant.

Of course, there will always be problems and controversies in the future, but these hardly seem to outweigh the enormous interest and enjoyment that the application of odds to sport can provide.  I look forward to sharing that enjoyment with my daughter as she grows up and just hope Senator Xenophon, and others of his ilk, do not deny us that pleasure.

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Failure is an Orphan

In any endurance sport, punters are unlikely to put money on a prime minister who swans around the nation in the back of a limousine over an opposition leader who annually pedals his way from Melbourne to Sydney for charity.

But if you believe recent Canberra gossip, Julia Gillard is spruiking her ''long game'' strategy that will reconnect her electorally with the western suburbs of Sydney and the entirety of Queensland.

And what's the central thesis to Gillard's argument?  That public opinion concerning her carbon tax will turn once the tax is implemented and supported by generous taxpayer funded compensation.  Then, the heat will be turned back onto Abbott and any plans to roll back the tax.

But Labor has made a core strategic error if, as identified by the Australian's Dennis Shanahan, it is ''implement[ing] a political strategy to once and for all deal with climate change as an issue and implement a carbon price''.

Unlike Gillard, John Howard had a tax he was happy to sell.  It simplified fiscal arrangements, was truly revenue-neutral and didn't go up annually.

But introducing a carbon tax won't put the screaming baby safely to bed.  On 1 July 2012, Gillard's carbon tax will be born at a likely weight of $20 per tonne of emissions and will celebrate its first birthday a year later with a rate growth spurt expected to be around 4 per cent plus 2 per cent CPI, taking it to $21.2 per tonne.

And at each carbon tax baby's birthday the rate compounds, so by age two it has already grown to nearly a hefty $22.50 per tonne.

Consequently, in the weeks leading up to the likely August 2013 poll, Gillard will have the awkward task of explaining that her broken ''no carbon tax under a government I lead'' commitment won't be replicated when she argues ''carbon tax compensation will increase every year''.

It begs the question of how taxpayers will vote after being fooled that Labor took the morning after pill once, let alone twice.

For the past few months Gillard and her climate change minister, Greg Combet, have quietly dropped revenue neutrality as part of their carbon tax narrative.  It's likely they have finally realised paying off nine out of ten households, trade-exposed industries and electricity generators won't fit neatly into the $11 billion they'll collect in the first year.

The window of public support has also snapped shut.  The latest Lowy poll into Australian foreign policy attitudes shows the public's support for cutting emissions has collapsed from 75 per cent in 2007 to a mere 46 per cent this year.

In part, the government is paying the price for Kevin Rudd's claim that the Howard government's failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol was the barrier to taking action on climate change.  Rudd's support for ratifying the failed treaty was symbolism over substance, and left the Australian public unprepared for the true cost of emissions reduction.

Similarly unrealised hysterical ''scientific'' claims about climate change's impact and misleadingly rosy rhetoric about the outcome of the Copenhagen climate conference have further eroded public trust.  The lack of international political and economic will to cut emissions can only continue to harm the Gillard government's claims.

The recent Productivity Commission report concluded that Australia is carrying high carbon costs, and would have to remove existing climate change programs while introducing a carbon tax if it didn't want to steal Europe's self-flagellation carbon whip.

The Australian's Greg Sheridan sourced from Senior House Republican Jim Sensenbrenner that he thinks Australia's carbon tax is ''unilateral economic disarmament'' and the US won't be following suit.

At least there is an off-chance the Chinese might one day introduce an emissions trading scheme if they can find a way to profit from it.  But without similar economy-wide schemes, Australia is left trying to design a carbon price software package without the Chinese Windows and US Apple operating systems having been designed yet.

The problem is exacerbated without an international treaty negotiated to succeed the expiring Kyoto Protocol at the end of 2012.

Since the 2007 Bali climate change summit, governments have squabbled over extending the protocol or creating a long-term non-binding emissions reduction cooperative agreement.

The subsequent Poznan, Copenhagen and Cancun summits all failed to resolve this deadlock, and the 2011 Durban summit is also likely to leave a carbon tax at risk of being born a bastard.

But despite the shaky foundations of Gillard's tax, its introduction will foster rent-seekers to defend it.  A risk for Abbott is that the Press Gallery becomes bedazzled by industrial support for a legislated carbon tax when they argue business certainty will be undermined through its removal.

The problem is that the companies doing so are likely to be AGL, General Electric, Better Place and Pacific Hydro, all of whom have significant business interests in turning non-viable assets into profits if the government punishes their competitors through a carbon tax.

It's the reason these companies, with a smattering of others, recently released an open letter ''strongly support[ing] the introduction of a well-designed carbon price to support the transition to a low-carbon economy''.

Attacking Abbott's carbon tax rollback will actually play into his hands.  After all, doing so will keep the issue alive throughout 2012-13 as other government policies are debated.  Meanwhile, Abbott will seek to argue with the same legitimacy that every weather event is connected to climate change, and that any cost-of-living price rises will be the carbon tax's fault.

By that time, love for the carbon tax baby will have gone cold.  The public will more than likely want to see it put to bed.

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Tony Abbott? What did he ever do?

It's now approximately 18 months since Tony Abbott's election as Liberal leader, and the federal parliamentary Press Gallery is still grappling with the idea of Abbott as a successful Opposition Leader. 

Try as they might, they can't account for his remarkable performance in the role thus far.

The hostile reception that Abbott's Budget reply received in many sections of the media is a case in point.  Journalists lined up to ridicule Abbott's speech as a ''policy-free zone'' that failed the test of an alternative prime minister.  They noted, derisively, that he only announced one new policy idea -- to tackle business red tape -- and didn't attempt to list the coalition's alternative budget savings.

The ABC's Barrie Cassidy was among the fiercest critics.  Surveying the performance of opposition leaders past and present, the one-time Labor staffer classified Abbott as a member of the ''long list of low achievers'' based on his response to Wayne Swan's fourth budget.  Cassidy castigated Abbott's response as ''populist, contradictory, rhetorical and shallow'' and singled out his defence of middle-class welfare for special attention, describing its use as a tool for ''vote-buying'' that deserved to be cut.

In one sense, Cassidy is right.  Australia's family payments system is overly generous and has been used masterfully in the past for political reasons.  This, along with Abbott's continued embrace of his Rolls-Royce paid parental leave scheme -- which would necessitate an increase in company tax -- continues to give many small-government Liberals major heartburn.

But middle-class welfare is criticised in economic circles mostly because of its inefficiency and the absurdity of taxing income earners only to hand much of it back to them -- after some bureaucratic churn -- in the form of family benefits.  And the government's budget made no attempt to tackle this.  If the government was committed to reforming Australia's tax and transfer system, it would have coupled benefit reductions with tax cuts.  Instead, in its quest for more revenue, it only did the former.

In this light, and especially considering the government's upcoming carbon tax, it was hardly surprising that Abbott went for a populist attack.

And why bother laying out detailed policy proposals at least two years out from an election?  Previous opposition leaders have hardly been rewarded for doing so.  Brendan Nelson copped it from all sides for his five cents-a-litre petrol tax cut, and Malcolm Turnbull's plan to increase cigarette taxes only earned him internal party criticism.

Instead, Abbott sensibly used his 30-minute, uninterrupted, nationally televised address to empathise with Australians who feel like they are doing it tough financially.  It was classic Abbott -- well scripted, confidently delivered, laced with humour and audacious claims to Labor's fracturing working-class base.  But virtually no commentator could appreciate Abbott's performance for its political smarts.

Some may still be ruing their failure to anticipate Abbott's rise.

Take Peter Hartcher, the Sydney Morning Herald's political editor.  After Abbott's election as leader, Hartcher derided him as the ''least electable'' of all possible leadership contenders.  Last week, marvelling at the political depths being plumbed by the Gillard government, Hartcher gave Abbott little credit.  Instead, we are told, the government's problems stem from one man:  not Abbott, but media mogul Rupert Murdoch.  According to Hartcher, the Murdoch tabloids have ''declared jihad'' on the government, and Gillard and her ministers are terrified of them.

This is an all-too familiar tune.  Other Fairfax scribes like the Financial Review's Laura Tingle have banged this drum before.

Tingle has written that the Gillard government had a tough time with the media because the Murdoch-owned News Limited papers were disappointed with the election result.

Likewise, Crikey's Bernard Keane -- who predicted that an Abbott leadership would reduce the Liberal party to a  ''reactionary rump'' -- said one of the government's biggest problems was the ''sheer partisanship'' of News Limited papers.

This criticism completely overlooks and disregards Abbott's central role in causing Julia Gillard's political headaches, and is part of a long line of efforts by some members of the Press Gallery to diminish his achievements.

The Age's Michelle Grattan, who wrote in late 2009 that the Liberal party's decision to oppose the emissions trading scheme was ''ill-judged', argued last weekend that Abbott had been ''dealt a favourable hand'' by coming into the Liberal leadership as ''Rudd was weakening'.

Huh?  When Tony Abbott was elected Liberal leader in December 2009, commentators such as Grattan predicted Armageddon for the coalition.  Voters' satisfaction with Kevin Rudd's leadership was then measured at 58 per cent, compared with 32 per cent who were dissatisfied -- numbers Julia Gillard can only dream of.  It was only later, in April 2010 when Rudd abandoned the ETS, that voters began to desert him.  And though few in the Press Gallery are keen to give Abbott his due, it was his ferocious campaigning against the policy that forced the ALP's hand.  Far from being lucky to be elected Liberal leader, Abbott made his own luck.

Not done disparaging Abbott's success as leader as at least partly due to fortune, Grattan then went on to suggest that electing Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader today would help the coalition to ''pick up some Labor voters''.  As it happens, we have a great natural experiment to test whether Grattan is right:  Turnbull's disastrous period as Liberal leader.  Recall that the coalition's primary vote fell as low as 34 per cent and its two party preferred to just 41 per cent.  Against this, we have not only Abbott's long string of polling successes -- putting the Liberal party ahead of Labor in two-party preferred terms time and time again -- but also last year's election result, where Abbott generated a swing to the coalition and delivered it more seats than Labor.

Grattan isn't the only journalist to have mused about the prospects of leadership change for the Liberals at the peak of their political performance.  Laurie Oakes, long serving doyen of the Press Gallery by acclamation -- who predicted Abbott as leader would be ''electoral poison'' -- kicked off speculation earlier this year with a column before parliament resumed in February.

In the Daily Telegraph, Oakes erected a false hurdle for the Liberal leader.  ''Abbott's colleagues will be watching the first Newspoll of the year with interest,'' he intoned, ominously, and backed it up with a quote from an anonymous Liberal MP who said questions ''would be asked'' if the Coalition was not leading the ALP in the first poll of the year.  Obviously, that poll and all subsequent polls have been strong, and no moves to replace Abbott have arisen.

If there was any remaining doubt about Abbott's political strategy, it should have been erased by a series of devastating poll results this week.  In short succession, Galaxy, Nielsen and Newspoll delivered more and more bad news about the Budget and for the government.  In the ultimate justification of Abbott's approach, Labor and Gillard now languish on record low two-party preferred, primary and personal approval measures.

It's almost as if these journalists, having being shown up by Abbott's rise and success as Liberal leader, can't bear to give him his credit for his performance so far.

Australian politics is not rocket science.  Voters expect their governments to be stable and predictable.  That's why Julia Gillard's public assassination of Kevin Rudd as prime minister shocked many voters.  Australians don't like increasing taxes, nor do they reward politicians who break heartfelt promises.  That's one reason the proposed carbon tax is wreaking such havoc on Labor's primary vote.  Another reason is that many voters are unconvinced that Australia donning a hairshirt will do much to combat the threat of global warming.  And most Australians expect the government to demonstrate it is in complete control of its immigration system.  Small wonder that the continued people-smuggling crisis is also weighing down Gillard and her team.

If one can grasp these simple truths, it shouldn't be hard to account for Abbott's success.  And perhaps that's just the problem.  Journalists, particularly those who reside in the nation's capital and who socialise only with the like-minded, don't always grasp these facts.  That may explain why they cheered on ''climate action'' in the face of growing public disquiet, and why many sneer at measures that seek to control our borders.  And maybe that's why the explanation for Tony Abbott's success as Liberal leader continues to elude them.

An illiberal cause

The O'Farrell government should repeal Labor's undemocratic campaign finance laws.

Among the final and most cynical acts of the Labor government of NSW was a bill to rig the campaign finance system in its favour.

In November last year, with the help of the Greens on the Legislative Council, NSW Labor passed sweeping reforms which restricted electoral donations and spending, as well as campaigning by independent political and community organisations.

Reforms included spending caps for political parties in each seat and caps on donations by individuals and companies.  The legislation also limited statewide spending by third parties, including unions.  While union affiliation fees to the Labor party remained, the ALP assured us none would be spent on campaign activities, just ''party administration''.  Any shortfall in party funding was to be made up with massively increased public subsidies.

Inexplicably, particular industries were singled out for bans, including tobacco, alcohol and gaming.  This is in addition to bans on property developers.  The list appears to have been drawn up to target businesses the Greens hate the most, so no one should be surprised if logging companies, miners and anyone selling fatty fast foods are added to the list in the future.  You never know, even companies that do business with Israel could be added next!  Obviously, wholesome industries like the renewable energy sector remain free to donate, though given their profitability is almost entirely reliant on favourable government regulation and subsidies, it's nothing short of hypocrisy they were left out.

As a result of the reforms, NSW is left with a hideously complex set of regulations which are a compliance nightmare and substantially tilt the playing field in favour of parties of the Left.  For example, the $1 million cap on political spending by third parties theoretically allowed each of NSW's 22 unions to spend a total of $22 million campaigning for the ALP, while at the same time reducing the amount the NSW Liberal party could spend on its own candidates.

Campaign finance reform is currently a fashionable political cause in Australia.  Academics, broadsheet newspapers and many politicians advocate drastic changes to the way our election campaigns are financed.  It's puzzling that numerous Liberal MPs are among these advocates, given the tendency of these reforms to disadvantage the Liberal party and the philosophically illiberal nature of the extensive regulation that accompanies them.

Among their number has been NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell, who is a longstanding supporter of campaign finance reform and has publicly advocated outright bans on donations from companies and unions.

While it is clear former Premier Kristina Keneally and the Greens delivered a bastardised version of O'Farrell's plans, it remains true that the political climate was made favourable towards radical reform in part because of urgings by Liberals.  This bitter experience should serve as a warning for other Liberals about the perils of supporting campaign finance regulation.

Many Liberal MPs, understandably, do not enjoy raising money.  Some genuinely think reform would make our political system healthier.  Others hope it will curtail the outsized influence unions have on the political process.

This is fundamentally misguided.  For a start, unions derive only some of their influence from their financial might.  At least as much, if not more, comes from their historical and cultural links to the ALP, their positions of power on its executive and their control over preselection.  Removing union donations will not end union influence.

It might, however, reduce business influence in politics.  Many companies buy a seat at the table of both major political parties through their donations.  It doesn't guarantee them a favourable decision, but it does help them to be heard.  Ending donations from both businesses and unions could end one source of often sensible influence on political parties in the name of economic reform.

But this is just one of the reasons Liberal support for campaign finance regulation is misguided.  Another is its utter incompatibility with liberal philosophy.  For example, with what do reformers propose to fill the gaps left by reduced private fundraising?  Your taxes, of course.  Aside from the fact that there is a long list of better ways to spend this money -- returning it to taxpayers through tax cuts being just one -- political parties should realise that increased public funding is a double-edged sword, at best.

Political parties already test the patience and goodwill of voters at election time by clogging their letterboxes with campaign literature and bombarding them with television and radio advertisements.  Imagine how tolerant voters would be if they knew they were paying for almost all of it.

And if political parties rely on a substantial proportion -- perhaps even a majority -- of their funding coming from the public purse, they will struggle to resist calls for greater government interference in the running of their internal party operations.  Don't be surprised when activists start calling for affirmative action in Liberal preselections, or secret-ballot elections conducted by the AEC for internal ALP elections.  If political parties are funded like public service departments, they can expect to be treated like them.

The US's experience of campaign finance reform demonstrates the most fundamental reason why Australian policymakers should reject the regulatory approach:  it doesn't work.  Attempts to restrict donations from companies and to place strict limits on the donations of individuals have dismally failed.

Today in the US, instead of companies donating to candidates, all their top executives do.  Unions and companies also donate to, or even set up, special advocacy organisations which can receive almost limitless donations which are then used for political campaigns.

Attempts to restrict their activity have meant they've simply changed the style and language of their commercials.  For example, instead of advocating a vote in favour of or against a sitting congressman, these lobby groups will run ''issue advocacy'' campaigns that highlight all the tax increases the congressman voted for or funding for education they voted against.

What all attempts to regulate campaign finance, both here and overseas, appear to overlook is that individuals, companies and unions will always seek to influence a government that intervenes in society and the economy.

While governments hand out subsidies and regulate industries to the benefit of some and the cost of others, people will always seek to influence them for their own benefit.  For many companies, favourable government decisions are the difference between profit and loss.  Securing government contracts, favourable regulation and financial assistance is as important in some industries as a good marketing or efficient HR.

Regulating the ways in which individuals and others can donate to parties will not make donations go away.  If reformers really want money out of politics, their best course of action would be to pursue a smaller government that treads more lightly regarding society and the economy.  Big government will always attract influence-peddlers.

Campaign finance regulation hurts the Liberal party, is inconsistent with liberal philosophy and does not even achieve its goals.  Sadly, the early indications from the new NSW government is that it favours an even more regulatory approach, by banning all party donations from third party groups such as unions.  They would be better advised to opt for a neutral donations system with minimal regulation.

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Unmaking history

March may seem a little early to give an award for 2011's silliest contribution to public debate in Australia, but surely, Monash University academic Tony Taylor has the prize securely in his keeping.

Associate professor of education Taylor recently commented on the historical significance of the English Civil War or, to be more accurate, commented on its lack of significance.  According to Taylor, it was ''arguably just a series of confused and confusing localised squabbles that may have a special significance for UK history, but not for anybody else (unless they like dressing up in period costume)''.

What turns Taylor's views from amusing wackiness to something of serious concern is the fact that over the past four years he has been a key player in the development of the three drafts of the new national history curriculum.  Under both the Howard and Rudd/Gillard governments, he has been happily beavering away on deciding what our children should be learning in school, as well as developing national professional standards for the teaching and learning of history.

Anyone with the slightest knowledge of world history would realise that far from being ''localised squabbles'', the Civil War produced a seismic shift in thinking on how the state should, or even could, operate.  Until the 1640s, it was surely inconceivable that parliament could revolt against the monarchy, that a monarch could be tried and executed and a republic would be declared in its place.  The impact on Britain and Ireland of Cromwell's Commonwealth, the subsequent Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, was clearly enormous.

However, these events also had a profound influence on Europe and North America in the following century.  At the time the English were chopping off the head of their king, the alternative model on the Continent was absolute monarchy, which came to be personified by Louis XIV of France.  Without the alternative thrown up in England, absolute monarchy might have had even greater resilience.

Indeed, if we indulge in a little counterfactual history, it is hard to imagine any of the French or Scottish Enlightenments, the American War of Independence or the French Revolution taking place without the explosion radical ideas unleashed by the English Civil War.  These ideas led to the development of the founding principles of liberal democracy, the political system which has spread throughout much of the modern world.

Further, without the political ferment in 17th century England, it is extremely unlikely that the Industrial Revolution would have taken off in the manner it did, so the Civil War can lay claim to be an important contributor to the modern world's dominant economic system, market capitalism, as well as its political system.  Yet, here in Australia, a person as influential as Taylor does not rate any of this, believing interest in it is confined to eccentrics wanting to dress up.

His curriculum work done, Taylor was off to enjoy the benefits of an Australian Research Council grant to ''conduct a comparative analysis of the political contexts for the development of history national curricula in Australia and Russia'' when he was rudely interrupted.  I'm not sure how this would be treated in Putin's Russia, but a bit of lively criticism of the proposed curriculum by shadow education minister Chris Pyne was enough to give Taylor a ''museli-choking'' moment at his breakfast table.  In response, he fired off a piece to Crikey defending his pride and joy.

He was particularly concerned by Pyne's claim that Christianity was a bit underdone in the national curriculum.  Au contraire, Taylor said:  Christianity is covered in Year 8 under ''the spread of Christianity'', medieval Europe under the Crusades (not so good, that bit), the medieval dominance of the Catholic church and the Spanish conquest of the Americas (another not-so-good bit).

Just to be clear here, the bits in brackets were also Taylor's words, effectively undermining his own case by admitting that Christianity only cracks a mention in its ''not-so good'' moments.  It is a bit hard to fathom how anyone could draft a curriculum so openly hostile to the West's dominant religion and expect to escape uncriticised.

So, there are some things that are not there because they are trivial (e.g. the English Civil War);  and some things that, despite critics' claims to the contrary, are there, although they are generally bad (e.g. Christianity).  Then, there is a third category, which is perhaps the oddest of all Taylor's defences.  These are the things that are not explicitly there, but are there implicitly.  Hence, of Magna Carta, Taylor says, ''not that it's explicitly mentioned but, as a teacher, you'd be daft not to spend some time on Runnymede''.  But, if we can trust the teachers to teach the right things, it only raises the question as to why we are having a national curriculum in the first place.  And this is, indeed, a very good question.

The genesis of the history curriculum goes back to the History Summit of 2006.  As with a number of other policy areas, the Howard government, perceiving a problem in the states with the poor quality of history teaching, tried to impose a centralised solution.  The futility of this approach was highlighted by the fact that even while the Coalition remained in power they did not manage to get an outcome they liked.  Worse, it apparently did not occur to them that, if you create a centralised power, your political and ideological opponents might use it in ways which create an even worse situation than the one you were trying to rectify.

The realisation that the education system was not providing the opportunity to understand our cultural heritage was one reason why the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program was created, which undertook the analysis of the national curriculum as one of its first projects.  All the feedback the program has received is that young people crave to learn about what is important in the past.  No wonder they feel they are missing out, if those deciding what they should learn can display as great a degree of historical ignorance as Taylor.

However, perhaps in one way at least, we should be grateful to Taylor.  With his impetuous response to Pyne, he made it clear just how fundamentally flawed the national curriculum is.

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Adapt to survive

The Labor party once made great fun of John Howard's distinction between core and non-core promises.  Julia Gillard has now added to that taxonomy:  a promise so intolerably core it has to be explicitly denied during an election campaign.

It's damned hard to reconcile August 2010's ''There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead'' with February 2011's ''The two-stage plan for a carbon price mechanism will start with a fixed price period for three to five years''.

Labor's goal during the 2010 campaign was to get over the line and govern another term.  Just like any political party.  But where Labor broke new ground was by being happy to say anything or promote any idea to get there, no matter how divorced from its own philosophy or the wishes of its supporters.

Disavowing a carbon tax is what US political consultants told Gillard to do.  So that's what Gillard did, no matter what she or her party thought.

Of course, the Prime Minister's reversal of what seemed a pretty explicit promise not to price carbon says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of that policy.  But it says a heap about her approach to politics.  She's very, er, political.

Careful policymaking would be a distraction from the important business of political manoeuvring.

The Greens might bear this in mind as they negotiate with Gillard and her ministers.  Any deal is one grumpy focus group or James Carville phone call away from being discarded.

Nevertheless, if all the government's legislative cards fall in place, after July 2012 Australia will have a price on carbon.  That's almost exactly when poor old Brendan Nelson suggested the Coalition under his leadership would implement one.

Nelson's policy had an important condition:  international action on climate change.  It was a more innocent, optimistic time.  Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull also spent 2008 and 2009 rabbiting on about Copenhagen and international agreements.

Yet in 2011 the closest Gillard comes to mentioning the molasses-like movement to international agreement is a vague ''the global economy is shifting''.  Just vaguely shifting, in general.

This modified rhetoric places the government's climate policy at one remove from its purpose:  to combat global climate change.

For this government, a carbon price is no longer about stopping, reducing or slowing global warming -- a task which would require concerted, co-ordinated global action.  Now it's just the season's most fashionable economic reform.

Gillard has implicitly admitted the chances of international agreement on emissions action in the foreseeable future are near zero.  The chances that the unco-ordinated and compromised carbon initiatives now being introduced in some countries will have a significant impact on the global climate are even lower.

Don't underestimate the magnitude of a transition to carbon-free energy production.  Or the economic and social change that transition would cause.

The Australian government's carbon price will start small.  But if it is to make any dent in our carbon emissions it will have to be steadily raised, year after year.

Even during the ''fixed-price'' period which Julia Gillard announced would precede the full emissions trading scheme, the carbon tax will still increase ''annually at a pre-determined rate''.

Any government facing complaints about the cost of living -- justified or unjustified -- will find that very challenging.

A Galaxy poll commissioned last week showed that 66 per cent of Australians were unsure about the relationship between human-induced carbon emissions and global warming.  This figure has remained steady for at least 12 months.

Combine this finding with survey data revealing that even people who fully accept the dangers of anthropogenic climate change are unwilling to pay the extra money a modest carbon price would demand, and you have quite a political pickle.

Gillard may initially win some political points for a courageous and aggressive stand on climate action.  But those points will disappear when higher energy bills are mailed out.  Especially since the Prime Minister has effectively taken personal, political responsibility for everybody's electricity costs.

Hers is a pickle shared by every government which wants to act on climate.

The situation is even more serious in the developing world.  Energy poverty is a serious development problem.  Traditional home methods of producing energy (burning wood, agricultural residue and animal dung) are a major health hazard for the world's poor.  Economic growth is held back by unreliable or inaccessible electricity.

So no responsible developing world government would penalise large-scale energy production significantly enough to have an impact on the global climate.

The only policy position sensitive to these political realities is a focus on adaptation.  Adapting to climate change -- whether natural or anthropogenic -- is the only approach which accommodates questions of political economy.

Sure, it's easy to imagine an ideal world where a mechanism can be developed which prices the externalities of pollution efficiently, consistently and effectively -- where the best legislators can team up with the best scientists and the best economists to write the best laws which take into account the best research, unimpeded by politics and democracy and the mendacities of self-interest.

But that's not our world.

If you fully accept the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's dire scenarios, there's still reason for optimism.  The economist Indur Goklany, poring over the UK's Stern Review, found that human and environmental wellbeing in the foreseeable future will be, on balance, higher in a ''richest-but-warmest'' scenario.  His argument should carry weight:  Goklany has been a long-time delegate to the IPCC.  He argues that tackling the consequences of climate change is far more efficient than trying to prevent it.

That is, a rich world is better able to cope with the adverse effects of any climate change than a poor one.  When it comes to climate change, it is far more efficient, and far more practical, to treat the symptoms.

And it's the only approach which takes into account the raw, unforgiving logic of political action.

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The ''Three Cheers'' used to come from the Left

Last August, Kevin Rudd called for an end to hostilities in the History Wars.  Yet, as with many other Rudd proclamations, this one is unlikely to come to anything.  Already in 2010 we have seen Keith Windschuttle and Robert Manne resume their longstanding battle over the ''Stolen Generations'', and the government's own history curriculum has been assessed by many through the History Wars prism, despite Julia Gillard's assertion that its interpretations were neither ''Black Armband'' nor ''White Blindfold''.

So, if the History Wars are to continue, it seems opportune to highlight one often overlooked fact.  While in recent decades the Left have clung to a ''Black Armband'' interpretation of Australian history, until the 1960s, most of them supported what is normally called the ''Three Cheers'' (or to use Gillard's term ''White Blindfold'') view.

The terms ''Black Armband'' and ''Three Cheers'' to describe those who see mainly negatives, or mainly positives, in the nation's past, were coined by the perennially adroit wordsmith Geoffrey Blainey.  In his seminal 1993 Latham Lecture, Blainey explained how ''to some extent'' his generation had been brought up on a ''Three Cheers'' view, which maintained that ''nearly everything that came after [the convict era] was believed to be pretty good''.  He acknowledged that this position may have been ''too favourable, too self-congratulatory'', but he argued that the swing to the opposite ''Black Armband'' extreme had resulted in a take on the nation's history that was ''even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced''.

When Blainey was young, ''the Left wing and the Right wing were alike in their congratulations, though they rarely congratulated the same events''.  However, while in the ''school lessons or papers or radio'' that Blainey absorbed in his youth, the Left and Right may have been equally represented, there is no doubt that the Left had the numbers when it came to writing the more intellectual versions of Australian history, or teaching it in the universities.

Writing in the Introduction to Australian Civilization in 1962, The Spectator Australia's own Peter Coleman described ''the standard radical-Leftist interpretation of Australian history which is given in nearly all the textbooks''.  Coleman cited works by V.G. Childe, H.V. Evatt and Brian Fitzpatrick, and even the Cambridge History of the British Empire.  This standard Left position tried to cement ''the unfolding of Social Progress and the increasing initiative of the working class'' as the overriding themes of Australian history.

However, according to Coleman, some relief was at hand.  A postwar Counter-Revolution was underway.  It was led by a historian who ''by his questioning of orthodox assumptions ... did more than anyone else to release historians from the prison of the radical interpretation and to begin the systematic study of the neglected themes in our history, especially of religion''.  The historian in question was Manning Clark.

Clark was still seen as the leader of the new more pessimistic history when, in 1977, Michael Roe dubbed the standard Leftist optimistic brand as a ''Whig interpretation of Australian history''.  Identifying many of the same characteristics as Coleman had in traditional Left-leaning historians, Roe ran through some of the elements which made Australian history a ''success story'' for them.

He highlighted the fact that ''Australians had outpaced Britons in gaining many of the radical boons defined most emphatically by the Chartists''.  Other aspects of the nation's past which appealed to this school of historians included the Eureka Stockade and the spread of pastoralism.  Most of all, ''the burgeoning of the Labor parties, roughly 1890-1914, ... appears as crucial -- capping the best of what had gone before, and determining much of the future''.

Roe also pointed out that ''Australian Whiggery has had a strong Marxist tincture'', evidenced by historians such as Fitzpatrick, Russel Ward and R.A. Gollan, all of whom ''were confident that Australia was peculiarly the product and property of the working man''.  This was a working man who read the Bulletin, loved the poems of Henry Lawson, idealised mateship, voted Labor and to whom no policy mattered more than White Australia.

Historian John Thompson has identified what has happened to this version of history in more recent decades.

The radical national or Old Left tradition of Australian history has long since fallen from favour.  Indeed, its conspicuous masculinist values and its perceived limitations, evasions or omissions concerning subjects such as race and cultural diversity have been powerfully challenged and progressively revised from the time of the first assault in the late 1960s to the present.

One of the first steps towards the exit door for the ''Three Cheers'' Old Left school came in 1968 when New Left historian Humphrey McQueen launched an attack on Ward and his most famous work, The Australian Legend.  In a 1979 study of Australian historiography, Rob Pascoe draws attention to the fact that many of McQueen's criticisms of the Old Left were similar to those made by Coleman in 1962.

Of course, Coleman and McQueen had very different versions of history with which they wanted to replace the Old Left model, but the fact that the dominant paradigm both were challenging belonged to the Left has been largely forgotten in many of today's simplistic debates.

Interestingly, one of Ward's main arguments, in his response to McQueen's critique, was that the latter was not following the normal forms of historical disagreement, and he hoped that ''some sense of group solidarity with one's fellow historians should help us disagree without rancour and to debate without sneering''.  Ward, and anyone else who challenged the New Left view once it became dominant, was to be sadly disappointed.  The New Left were always willing to fight their battles aggressively.

The replacement of the Old Left historical paradigm by that of the New Left meant that, whereas ordinary Australians were in the past idealised by their historians, they were now regarded with growing suspicion.  Instead of Australians being praised for their belief in democracy, progress and material prosperity, such concepts became problematic;  a view that only became more entrenched among intellectuals when Australians used their democratic rights to protect their material prosperity by voting Liberal in December 1975.  Within a couple of decades, the unthinkable had happened:  concepts such as mateship were being used more by John Howard than by the Left.

There is no doubt that Coleman's 1962 analysis was correct:  the Old Left historians did have a skewed vision of Australia's past.  One should not lament their demise.  However, it is vital to remember them and to understand that, prior to what are now called the History Wars between Left and Right, the battle between the ''Three Cheers'' and ''Black Armband'' views of Australian history was a civil war within the Left.

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