Pearls and Irritations

Recent P&I contributors have drawn out sharply the consequences of American influence in Australia.

Many of these influences have been beneficial, of course. The importation of American exploitation of internal combustion engines and the long-distance transmission of electricity, while not costless, has had many advantages.

As for what roughly might be called the “cultural”, Australia would be notably poorer without the thrills of motion pictures like Double Indemnity, The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance and The Apartment, and the refinement of the literary works of Emily Dickinson, Flannery O’Connor, Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Portis; there may be others.

The obvious trick is to step between cultural cringe and the demotic cultural strut of, say, the late Sir Les Patterson or frenzied Australian commentators at the Olympic Games.

As America pumps out so much, Austral cringing can become second nature, or even first nature. The consequences are infantile imitation at the expense of resident imagination, a befooling neglect of other parts of the world like our massive neighbour Indonesia and a diversion into the likely calamitous, and certainly impoverishing, AUKUS dead-end. As if to exemplify all this, on 26 August, ABC presenter Patricia Karvelas delivered a long note for the ABC website raving about how Australians would vote, if they could, in the Harris-Trump presidential election. So infantilism hits a cringing rock bottom.

Before the Americans of course, it was Britain who, to put it at its most benign, dispossessed the locals who had been here for 50,000 years or so, not long after modern personages began to trickle out of Africa in search of “fresh woods and pastures new” long before the poet Milton scribbled this oft-misquoted quip.

The strength of British influence remains strong. The symbols are pervasive. Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and so on. How many King and Queen streets can the country sustain? Too many seems barely enough. The British imported cringe into Australia and insisted upon it.

So Australia is a constitutional monarchy with good old King Charles at its apex. Crouching below him is a structure of parliamentary democracy owing a lot, although not all, to the arrangements that have applied in the United Kingdom for a good while. Australia is said to adhere to “Westminster principles”.

A monarchical government is, of course, first order cringe but notwithstanding that, the system, with its local adaptations, doesn’t lose a lot in comparison with other governments. Nevertheless, it is unwise to use the UK Government as it now works (or doesn’t) as a benchmark for Australia.

In an article in The New York Review of Books (15 August), British journalist and historian, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, dishes up a savage assessment of the present condition of the government at Westminster.

Wheatcroft gets stuck into the UK electoral system, non-compulsory voting based on single member electorates with a first past the post deal in which the winner takes all. He notes that since the election of Tony Blair in 1997, the “British electorate discovered… the art of tactical voting which is one way the Westminster system can be outwitted…”. He points out that on one occasion the Liberal Democrats were able to increase the number of their MPs from 20 to 46 with a smaller proportion of the popular vote. In the last election, Labour got 63% of the seats with 34% of the vote, while in 2019 it got 40% of the seats with 33% of the vote. Meanwhile, in 2024, the Reform UK party of the odious Nigel Farage, got 1% of the seats with 14% of the vote – stiff cheese, Nige.

Nevertheless, if a democratic system is supposed to provide a more or less equal opportunity for citizens to have their problems taken to Parliament by their representatives for attention, the British electoral system fails to do so.

The “Westminster principles” also permit the appointment of persons who have not been elected as ministers, by plonking cronies into the House of Lords where the standards of accountability are loose to say the least.

But after the last election, the salt was rubbed into this democratic affront when Sir Keir Starmer ushered in to the Lords and made Minister for Skills, Jacqui Smith, one of whose claims for fame is her rorting of parliamentary expenses including, as Wheatcroft points out, seeking and obtaining payment for “the cost of pornographic films her husband had been watching”. Starmer, though, is only following precedent as his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, made former prime minister David Cameron a life peer and foreign minister, presumably though Cameron must take most of the blame for the disastrous Brexit referendum. And so it is that notwithstanding Westminster principles, gratuitous reward is permitted to displace accountability.

As “squalid” as these things are, Wheatcroft says, “they are dwarfed by worse outrages” – that the decisions to invade Iraq and leave the European Union “were both based on lies”. He points out that while the Joint Committee on Intelligence told Blair that evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction was “sporadic and patchy” and “limited”, Blair told anyone who would listen that it was “extensive, detailed and authoritative.” When he left Downing Street, JP Morgan Chase paid Blair a million dollars a year as a part-time adviser, a heavy balm for any regrets he’s unlikely to have had over his untruthfulness.

Then, in the shadow of the Johnson and Truss prime ministerships and after 14 years of Tory rule, Wheatcroft points out that UK “real GDP has grown by 11.5%, compared to an average of 18.5% for G-7 countries, and real earnings less than a third of the G-7. National debt is the highest it’s been since 1961, taxes are higher than they’ve been since 1945 and wages and productivity are stagnating”.

As there is no generally accepted statement of “Westminster principles”, the best thing to go on is the way the Westminster Government in the UK is now. For as much as Australia can be grateful for its governmental inheritance from Britain, it’s hard to see that it is worthy of imitation or emulation.

Australia should advance its forms of government and public administration on its own terms and their specific merits, without cringing before airy notions of “Westminster principles”, the recent workings of which have been unattractive. Australia needs an Australian system of government in which a stern question can be asked about the wisdom of having a foreign monarch as its head. Until it can do so more robustly, it will remain susceptible to the worst of American influence and blind to its best.

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