Is it Cricket?

The Australian Government’s 2020 summit for a privileged few is increasingly an object for contempt (listening for even a short time to talk-back radio makes that clear). It will, ere long, be seen for what it is. It provides a means by which the federal government can ram home decisions which are contrary to the personal and private interests of Australian citizens. Clearly the exercise represents a trivialization of the concept of idea. Just as socialists everywhere have trivialized the concept and rights of the person the Prime Minister, Mr. Kevin Rudd (aka St. Kevin07) will in due course begin a process to curtail the rights and opportunities of citizens.

The concept of childhood has, on the face of it, received a crushing blow just his last week (one can only hope that the financial aspects of total control of children from birth will stymie the system long enough for more mature reflection on childhood. Taxation will surely prove one such matter within a matter of weeks. Foreign policy has already been made trivial when not merely supercilious.

The policies toward Iraq and Afghanistan are hopelessly contradictory: one can justify engagement in both situations or none, but not one or the other. Mr. Rudd says that one must have an ‘exit strategy’ before any such military engagement. So what is it in the case of Afghanistan? What do Mr. Rudd and his colleagues hope for Iraq (presumably a market for wheat but nothing more)?

The Prime Minister has mentioned climate change as one topic: how many sceptics of anthropogeneric global warming are among the delegates? Nor any-one holding a brief for free trade, I suspect. And so it goes. The point being that only persons working within a small range of ‘ideas’ will prove acceptable. Nothing new in that, Australian media, and especially that owned by government have denied the presence of ideas and concepts of existence that do not fit with their own regulatory and contemptuous concept of the person. Their starting point, we will find, is as so often it has been, the Grand Inquisitor. It was that way last year with the remarkably crude when not simply sarcastic response of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference to the previous government’s intervention in remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

It is the reality that for Australian intellectuals and their governments contempt for the ordinary person is a primary reality, that the individual must be subject to regulation in all aspects of life. This is merely a matter here of description not hyperbole. Day by day one experiences the essential contempt of government and its friends for ordinary people. The 2020 summit is intended to deepen, and will doubtless prove successful in intensifying, that structure of contempt. Human liberty has little if any place in this summit just as regulatory government labors to stamp out such vestiges of liberty as have survived to this point.

C. Paul Barreira, 20 April 2008