What People Don’t Understand about the Rich.

People, particularly socialists, don’t understand the Rich

They’re always complaining about how rich rich people are, and how they’re getting richer. They’re always making comparisons between the incomes of average families and the incomes of the rich and the super rich. It is often seen as morally offensive, if not a crime against humanity, that someone can hack away at a dull job five days a week and take home $700 after tax while a CEO basks in a three million dollar a year salary and media barons can have assets amounting to billions.

Well, I’ve got a flash for everyone. The wealth of these people is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a sign that we’re all doing well.  Of course I agree that it’s annoying. There’s no argument there. We all wish we had that kind of money. Many of us probably deserve to have money much more than these rich people - many of whom are greedy, dull and not even that intelligent - but to complain about the inequality of wealth in society in general is not only a waste of time but is a misunderstanding of what it actually means.

Many people see the disparity between incomes of normal people and the superrich as an indictment of western society. It isn’t. In fact, the wealth of the super-rich is an indication of the success of western society. The wealth of the billionaires is a by-product of the collective wealth of the society as a whole. In other words: the rich are only rich because we are.

Socialists have never grasped this. The basic tenet of Socialism has always been that the rich are rich because the rest of us are poor - the idea being that somehow it’s a zero-sum game - that there’s a finite pool of wealth and the rich have taken more than their share; that somehow it’s our money that they’re spending. This notion was developed by Marx who theorised that capitalists in the 19^th century got rich by stealing the wealth created by the workers. The problem is that Marx, although he wrote a book called Das Kapital, never really understood the basic principle of capital. He saw industrialists as a new version of the old European aristocracy and industrial workers as a new class of serfs condemned to labour for centuries to keep their capitalist masters wealthy.

Marx’s error was that he saw capitalism as a system where workers laboured in the mines and factories that were owned by an entrepreneur class, to produce goods and services which were then consumed by the middle class. Thus, the middle class would enjoy ever-improving standards of living while the workers continued to live in squalor. What Marx didn’t understand was that for capitalism to work, workers themselves had to become consumers of the goods they produced and, because capitalism constantly reduces the cost of goods, their standards of living would gradually rise. Marx’s prediction of the proletariat enduring a state of permanent servitude was disproved just by observing the living conditions of workers in the 1950s as compared with the  living conditions in the 1850s.

Unions will claim that the improvement in conditions is due to the efforts of the trade union movement, decades of  strikes, go-slows, rallies, lock-outs, picket lines and lobbying, however this is simply not true. Workers’ wages, compared to managers wages and upper management wages are no higher now that they ever were, in fact in some cases workers’ wages have fallen in comparison to executives.

So if workers aren’t really being paid any better. How come they’re better off? How can skilled and unskilled workers own cars and television sets and even pay off homes?

Okay, a lesson in basic economics.

Imagine a tailor in the days before industrialisation. The tailor makes shirts for a living. Hand cutting and stitching, he can make 5 shirts a week. Let’s also say he needs $100 a week to pay his rent, put food on the table, buy shoes for his children and buy cloth and cotton for the shirts. He really can’t afford to charge less than $20 a shirt and hope he sells all the shirts he makes.

Now comes an industrialist who calculates that by setting up a factory with sewing machines and power cutters he can produce 1000 shirts a week, using only 50 employees. To do this, the industrialist will have to persuade someone to put up many thousands of dollar to equip the factory. If he’s lucky he will find one very rich person willing to invest. Early in the industrial revolution, many of the financiers were aristocrats. Alternatively, the industrialist can sell shares in the company to a large number of people who have smaller though still substantial sums of money to invest. Whatever the ownership structure however, the important thing is that the investors get a return on their money. Unless they make a reasonable return, they might as well  leave the cash it in the bank and get interest. And given that there’s always a risk in such a venture - the shirts may not sell - the return will have to be sufficient to coax them take the risk.

Let’s say that our industrialist raises $100,000 in capital and sets up a factory with modern textile technology. He hires 50 people to operate the machines and they go into production. They produce 1000 shirts a week, meaning each employee is now producing four times the number of shirts that the tailor did working on his own. If the industrialist pays his workers the same wage as the tailor was seeking - $100 a week - the wages bill will be $5000 a week. If the factory sells the shirts at a wholesale price of $7 it will get a weekly income of $7,000, enough to cover the wages bill and the cost of materials, plus overheads, cost of repairs and pay the investors a 10% dividend ($10,000) at the end of the year. This dividend represents a profit to the investors of about 20 cents a shirt.

This venture has now created wealth. Firstly, of course, it has created wealth for the investors who are making more than if they just left their money in the bank. But it has also created wealth for the public. People are now able to buy a shirt for a retail price of $10 instead of $20. (The factory doesn’t sell direct like the tailor so there’s a mark-up in the store.) This means that when a customer buys a shirt, they have $10 more left over than they used to. This allows them to consider buying something else. Even though the investors are making a profit of 20 cents per shirt, the customer has actually made a bigger profit of $10 on each shirt.

The point is that the savings that result from using modern technology and production methods are shared between the investor and the customer and the customer gets the greater share.

But what of the poor tailor, you say? He’s been put out of a job. Yes, unless he is one of the 50 people working in the factory, he has,. Because of mechanisation the factory will never need as many textile workers as there were tailors, so even if all the people in the factory are ex-tailors, there will still be tailors left over. So what are they to do?

The answer lies in the fact that people now have $10 left over after buying a shirt. This means that they can buy other goods which perhaps they could not afford before. Suddenly there is a general demand for more goods and services and more factories and businesses spring up to serve that need. Our tailor may not get a job in a garment factory but he might end up making crockery or furniture or working in one of the new emporiums that sell all the new consumer items.

Working in a factory may seem repetitious and depersonalised but the tailor will soon realise there are benefits: his wage is regular and reliable and he doesn’t have to provide his own equipment or materials. He too notices too that when he buys shoes for his kids, the price has dropped considerably. He too can afford things than he once couldn’t.

What has happened right across the society is that millions of people are suddenly able to access goods and services that once they couldn’t. For example, prior to the industrial revolution in England, few working class people could afford china. Their cups, plates and mugs tended to be tinplate, enamel or even wood. By industrialising the production of china cups and saucers, Josiah Wedgewood enabled millions of Britons to drink out of porcelain cups and teapots for the first time - something which was also a health benefit as porcelain is impervious to bacteria.

Here it’s important to note that wealth doesn’t just mean cash in hand, or the value of material assets. Wealth also includes having better health, financial security, leisure time and access to recreational and cultural activities. Many of these things are also created through investment. Institutions such as schools, museums, galleries, parks, libraries and holiday resorts are in their own way also means of creating wealth through “mass production.” Schools, for example, can be seen as an efficient way of providing “mass” education to the children of families who could not afford a private tutor or governess.

The important thing to remember, however, is that the whole capitalist process doesn’t work unless the customers buy the goods on offer. The manufacturer has to either offer a products at a lower price, or a better product at the same price than their competitors.

And there will always be competitors. Our hypothetical shirt manufacturer won’t have the field to themselves. Soon other factories will set up offering either better shirts, or the same quality shirts at a cheaper price. Faster machines or more efficient work practices could drop the price of shirts to $9 or $8. The manufacturer has to continually improve their product and the efficiency of production to stay in business. This means that the customers are continually being offered better goods, and cheaper goods and every time the price of goods drops, the customers' wealth increases. Even if their pay packet remains relatively the same, the money in it becomes worth more and more over time. Hence a workers wage which once only put modest food on the table and the meanest of clothing today pays for food, power, phone, petrol, home insurance and entertainment.

 And therein lies the basic principal of wealth. Investors only make money if the customer does. The wealth which flows to the investor is a share of the wealth which flows to the customer.  If the customer’s wealth does not increase, the investor generally doesn’t make any money.  And the amount of money the investor or the manufacturer makes is a rough indicator of how much wealth they’ve created in the society.

Take Bill Gates for example. He’s worth, on the basis of his shares, many billions of dollars. In real terms, on a cash basis, he’s worth hundreds of millions. This is because he was instrumental in marketing a series of computer operating systems from MS-DOS working up to Windows 10 which enabled an entire generation to run personal computers. Bill’s wealth may seem excessive but if you look at it on a per-computer basis, the number of computers running Microsoft software in the world is around one billion. If Bill Gates were entitled to only one dollar for each of them he would have a billion in cash - more than any other billionaire actually has (since most of their wealth is calculated from the value of their assets.)  Compared to that one dollar which goes to Bill, how much wealth has the owner of the computer gained? The ability to access the Internet, send emails, write documents, play games, print photos, run businesses. schools, hospitals, airlines, newspapers and so on. When you consider the value of the software to the user and society in general, a dollar payment to Bill doesn’t seem that much. It’s just the huge size of the consumer base that makes him so wealthy.

So we shouldn’t writhe with resentment when we see the very rich building their multi-million dollar homes and buying entre islands. They’re only rich because they’ve made us all richer.

But there’s another reason why we shouldn’t resent them. We need them.

As said earlier, the industrialist who has an idea how to produce something better and cheaper needs to find investors. The problem with investment is that it is always risky. It would be nice if an entrepreneur could raise all their finance from ordinary people - what are called “Mom and Pop” investors in the U.S.

But there’s a problem with “Mom and Pop” investors.

Mom and Pop can’t afford to lose their life savings. Every so often entrepreneurs do persuade thousands  of ordinary people to invest in their projects and fund managers invest their clients’ savings in their schemes that all too often end in tears. Many a family has been ruined by investing in a speculative investment scheme that was “guaranteed gilt-edge blue-chip.”  The fact is that many – perhaps most - business ventures fail. So what is needed for economic development is a pool of people who are so rich that they can afford to lose millions of dollars and not actually go broke.

Fortunately there are such people. And they are worth their weight in gold. Literally. If we didn’t have people who could take a loss of several million on an investment and still be able to go on investing, our society would come to a standstill.

Actually it’s amazing that rich people do risk their money in new ventures when they could just keep it in the bank. That’s what happens when a depression occurs. During a depression, the rich don’t lose their money, they just stop investing. The result is that they stay rich but everyone else gets poor. Getting out of a depression is basically about getting the rich to invest again. The only way of explaining why they do invest is just greed. So as Gordon Gekko said “Greed is good.”  If it weren’t for greed the rich would simply keep their money in the bank and spend it on luxuries.

So, even though the rich are greedy, and boring and not even that bright, we need the little darlings to help us get richer. Every time you feel resentment that you are poor but Warren Buffet is rich, look around your house and realise that everything you have, the phone, the carpet, the television, the computer, the fridge, the stove, even the coffee mug on the sink only exist because at some point, some rich person sank a couple of million dollars into factory or a telephone company and made them all possible. So let’s not begrudge them their huge but alienating houses, their expensive but ugly clothes and their vacuous relationships - they’ve earned them and we should let them enjoy them. It’s the least we can do.

Shorten is right to oppose this unnecessary and undemocratic plebiscite.

Lord knows, I am not a supporter of the Labour Party but Bill Shorten is right to oppose a plebiscite over same-sex marriage.

I mean let's be clear. This notion of holding a plebiscite on the question of  same-sex marriage was simply a trick. It was a delaying tactic, a stick thrown in front of same-sex marriage campaigners to trip them up and impede the progress towards removing one of the last remaining obstacles to equality for gay people.

And it was a very clever trick

A plebiscite has the appearance of dealing with a vexed issue in a democratic way even though we have been able to resolve these issues in the past without any resort to plebiscites. We didn’t need a plebiscite to abolish the death penalty in Australia, or to decriminalise homosexual acts. And, most significantly, we didn’t hold a plebiscite before adding the provision “marriage shall be between a man and a woman” a mere ten years ago.

But suddenly we need a plebiscite to remove it.

Now, thanks to this tactic, the argument has arisen that same-sex marriage entails such a huge change to Australia’s culture and society that everyone is entitled to vote on the issue. There are only two problems with this:

1.   It’s not a huge change. It’s a tiny technical change. 

2.   You’re not voting on anything. Unlike a referendum, a plebiscite is not binding. The answer you write on the paper does affect any legislation, except psychologically. A plebiscite is just a 160 million dollar opinion poll which politicians can then refer to as indicator of public opinion. And clearly the results can be used by both sides to justify their position.

To explain the first point above. Despite the issues that are raised by opponents of same-sex marriage, the question is not whether same-sex couples can live together and raise children and generally be regarded as normal families – they are already legally doing that.  Just like a different-sex couples who are living together, same-sex couples are regarded as living in a de facto marriage by the ATO, Centrelink, the Department of Social Services, the Family Court and just about every legal jurisdiction. They already have the same rights, privileges and obligations as different-sex couples. So that’s not the issue.

And it’s not about whether same-sex couples can get married in the sense of having a marriage ceremony. Same-sex couples can already find celebrants and even churches that will perform marriage ceremonies where they make the same vows, with all the same sincerity and solemnity as different-sex couples. The only difference is that, at the end of the wedding ceremony, the different-sex couples get to sign a Marriage Certificate and their marriage is recorded in the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths.

That’s all it comes down to. Signing a certificate. That’s what all the fuss is about.

So, why, given that same-sex couple are already have, for all intents and purposes, the same rights as different-sex couples in regard to tax, inheritances, home loans, superannuation , divorce settlements, child adoption and so on, are opponents of same-sex marriage determined to stop them from having their marriage officially recorded by the Registry Office? The answer can only be - sheer bloody-mindedness. It seems that opponents of same-sex marriage realise they can’t stop same-sex couples living together, raising children, even adopting children and claiming the title of parents but at least they can deny them this one last thing –having their relationship officially recorded in the BDM Registry. Which is really just petty.

And the notion that people have a “right” to vote on this issue is simply incorrect.

It is not a principle of democracy that one group of citizens, regardless of how large it is, can vote to suppress the rights of another group. The most important feature of a right, be it enshrined in a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, Statutes or Common Law is that it applies apply to everyone. This is the nature of Justice: that the rules apply equally to all. Hence, if one person has the right to marry the person of their choosing, then everyone has the right to marry the person of their choosing.

Oddly, I am quite sure that if you polled the opponents of same-sex marriage about arranged marriages – the situation that occurs in some countries where young women and men are simply told who they have to marry – they would repudiate it as barbaric – a violation of the right to choose your own spouse. And yet they take the position that, in Australia, a gay man can only get married to a woman and a gay woman can only marry a man. How is this not the same denial of choice?

The unfortunate situation we find ourselves in is that there are, in Australia, people who enjoy the right and the privilege of being able to marry the person of their choice but who wish to deny that right to others. That denial of what is surely one of the most basic rights, is not something that can be justified by a plebiscite. Even if 90% of the Australian population voted against same-sex marriage it would still be a violation of human rights and thus an invalid vote, just as if a majority of people voted to deny Aboriginal people the right to go to school, or the right of women to be airline pilots. Such votes do occur from time to time in the world but they do not constitute democracy.

Islam is not the real source of the problem.

If we forget about Islam for a minute and actually start profiling the people who commit terrorist acts we find quite a few similarities. The first is that none of them are high or even medium achievers. They were generally poor performers at school, work in low paid jobs and have few if any career prospects. They either have no relationships with women or their relationships are compromised by infidelity, exploitation, bullying or outright violence. Many are hyper-masculinised, engaging in body building and steroid use and, like our own Ivan Milat, they are fond of taking selfies holding weapons.

These young men are found in all societies and they have always been an important resource for political extremists. In the 1920s the Nazi party in Germany recruited young violent thugs, put them in uniforms and called them the SA. They were supposed to “protect” Nazi rallies from disruption but their real job was to beat up political opponents and Jews. The  Communist Party had its own paramilitary force to match them. In Northern Ireland, violent young men were enlisted by both the IRA and the Loyalist defence groups and sent out to kill each other and a lot of innocent civilians.

The practice of recruiting not-too-bright, low-status, angry young men to commit violent acts has been around for hundreds of years: the only thing that has changed is the method of recruitment.

The Nazis had to personally approach young men who came to their meetings and ask them if they wanted to join. Osama Bin Laden was radicalised by a teacher at his high school. Prayer groups, sporting groups and other social gatherings have served as forums where potential converts are identified and approached. However, the advent of the Internet has brought with it the possibility of  recruitment over distances of thousands of kilometres. Far more effective than pamphlets, and much easier to hide, websites can deliver text, propaganda videos and on-line contact with others already in the organisation.

The Internet also enables remote activation. The genius of ISIS (if we can use that word) has been to see that you don’t need to call your recruits to a meeting, give them uniforms or weapons or even plans. No need to synchronise watches: you simply instruct them to kill non-Muslims by whatever means you have: kitchen knives, axes, a truck and so on, at  any time that you can.

It is important to remember however, that though many of the murders and massacres we have witnessed have been instigated by ISIS, these angry young men are likely to take up arms for a range of causes. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, shot 77 young Nords because he was opposed to Muslims. Gavin Long, the Baton Rouge police killer, was acting out of hatred for white people as was Micah Johnson the Dallas shooter.

So what kinds of people are likely to commit terrorist acts?

The potential terrorist is typically a young male who has little prospect of significant achievement in mainstream society. He is likely to have learning difficulties and low academic achievement. He is unlikely to have mature or equitable relationships women and may express conflict over sexual matters where adolescent attitudes to sex are mixed with deep misogyny. He is likely to feel isolated or discriminated against because of his ethnicity or religion and is likely to react with exaggerated chauvinism in relation to his own cultural heritage and bigotry in relation to others. 

Other predictive traits include aggression, narcissism, intolerance of others’ views, an explosive temper and involvement in petty crime. Most significantly, he will be a young man with a poorly developed sense of self who is looking for, or has found, a male role model on whom to base his own identity. That  male role model may be a teacher, a religious leader, a para-military leader or just a more experienced and charismatic member of a political or terrorist organisation. What he sees in that role model is the person he want to be: a man who is strong, confident, respected, part of a supportive band of brothers.

If society does not offer these poorly-formed, resentful, young men opportunities to achieve a sense of value, ISIS, neo-Nazi groups, motorcycle gangs, drug syndicates and other anti-social organisations will.

Muhammad Ali and the glorification of violence.

I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised that so many people turned out to deliver eulogies on Muhammad Ali. Actors, celebrities, even President Obama, turned up to honour the great man’s achievements. I was not surprised that people should honour Ali for his ebullient personality, courage, devotion to charity and work inspiring marginalised people. I am just a bit surprised that none of these celebrities even mentioned that the way Ali achieved greatness was by punching people until they were unconscious.

After all, that was his job. Punching people.

I know they call it “boxing” but it’s really just “punching.” That’s all boxers do. They stand in a ring and punch each until one of them can’t punch any more. In the Olympics, running is called “running”, hurdling is called “hurdling” and swimming is called “swimming” so why is punching called “boxing”?  The answer is that calling it “boxing” seems to be an attempt to disguise the activity from what it really is which is just fist fighting. Which is, oddly, the very same thing we’re currently trying to eradicate from our streets and homes

After all, it is a little surprising that, at a time when we are running campaigns to stop street violence and teach people that Once Punch Can Kill and eliminate violence in the home, that people should be waxing lyrical about man whose entire career was based on punching people till they fell down or were so injured that the referee would have to stop the fight. At a time when schools are running anti-bullying programs and trying to prevent violence in the playground, it is more than a little disturbing to read biographical articles in which the writers seem to revel in the details of Ali's victories – bloodied faces, opponents sprawling on the canvas. Why are they not troubled that an African-American should find fame by inflicting brain damage on other African-Americans for the entertainment of cheering crowds of morons?

Yes, I know that some people will say boxing is an ‘art.’ But... no. Embroidery is an art. Etching, sculpture, wood carving, poetry and song-writing are arts. Boxing - that is: punching - is a skill just as butchering a carcass or gutting a fish is a skill. It takes practice but its primary purpose is still to inflict damage on a body.  What is possibly most remarkable is that, in other sports, punching someone will get a player sidelined, sin-binned, suspended, fined or even banned from the game. So how is it we tolerate a game where the entire aim is to punch your opponent?

The sickening answer to the contradiction is that there are still people out, mainly men (let’s face it) who think that boxing, punching, fighting, martial arts – whatever you want to call it – is  “manly”; that fighting is some sort of sign of masculinity - even a requirement of masculinity. This, of course, is the underlying cause of street attacks, bar fights, road rage and, ultimately, domestic violence.

So again why,  given the current efforts to remove violence from society and knowing that it causes brain damage, is boxing still legal? And how do we now have an even more violent incarnation of street fighting called "UFC" where combatants kick, gouge, knee and batter each other in a cage?

And most perplexing, what kind of arsehole pays to go and watch this? Over to you world.

  

Reflections of Bob Ellis and the Labor Party.

Night Thoughts on Jerusalem.

Reflections on Bob Ellis's Goodbye Jerusalem. (1997)

I wasn’t going to buy it. I knew it would infuriate me. But then I found myself with a couple of hours to kill one winter evening in South Yarra, and there it was in the bookshop. Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Jerusalem. It had just been re-released after some legal entanglement. "Typical!" I thought and bought it.

I had first learnt of Bob Ellis in the late Seventies. I knew him, by name only, as the author of the play The Legend of King O’Malley and was surprised when a friend assured me that he was regarded as a genius amongst Sydney's political/intellectual push. "Women want to have his children." she said.

As a native of Melbourne, what I found hard to believe was that Sydney had a political/intellectual push. In the Seventies, Melbourne, with its Pram Factory, David Williamson and Tim Burstall; where Jim Cairns had burnt call-up papers before the massive Vietnam moratorium crowd, with its Flying Trapeze and Last Laugh comedy venues, was where it was at. Adelaide came a close second with its Arts Festival and hot-panted Premier. Even Tasmania had credibility as the bushwalking, folk-singing, eco-narcissist State. Sydney was regarded as the Australian version of Mayor Daley’s Chicago.

Further inquiries revealed that not only did Sydney have an active, volatile and incestuous Push but the Push-In-Question was possessed of the extraordinary conceit that it was the principal if not the only literary and political in-crowd in Australia. Indeed, the more one probed into the psychology of Sydney dwellers, the more it appeared that they collectively thought Sydney was Australia.

Over the next few years, a succession of books, exposes, inquiries and ABC reports revealed to the rest of Australia the morass that was and had always been Sydney politics. A strong Irish/Labor Party connection emerged. As a Victorian, I found this baffling. Hadn’t all the Catholics defected to the DLP in the Fifties? Did they later all migrate back to the Labor Party? The Sydney Labor party seemed to have retained its original working class links while Victorian branch had firmly repositioned itself as a party for the aspiring middle class - Barry Jones, Dr Moss Cass, Dr Jim Cairns. There also persisted, in Sydney, strong vertical integration between local, State and Federal politics while in Victoria and the rest of the country, there was strict class division on such matters. You would never have heard a Victorian Chief Justice inquiring about his "little mate" – a suburban solicitor with scruffy gangland clientele.

Sydney politics seemed very rough compared to the stately Victorian scene: branch stacking, punch-ups at meetings, corruption, the thuggery of Premier Askin - a Gordian knot of police, political, criminal and legal interests. Sydney, in the swinging international agnostic liberated Seventies, seemed manacled to its convict past.

The divergence of views between Sydney dwelling and non-Sydney dwelling Australians has always been dramatic.

To New South Welsh eyes, Keating’s usurpation of Hawke was the rightful accession of the long-serving party faithful over the politically suspect show-pony. To Victorians and others, it was Sydney power brokers calling in a debt. The NSW Right had reluctantly backed Hawke in '83 and now they felt they were owed a Prime Minister.

As this tale of two cities or, more accurately, two Australias – Sydney and the rest of the country – unfolded, we also learned more of Ellis, who began to range beyond his Sydney territory. Soon, the chances of meeting Ellis were not confined to the Port Jackson area. Ellis was to become a permanent fixture at the National Screenwriters Conference, the Screen Producers Conference and almost every other conference where he could be seen either slumped in a corner scribbling like Gibbon or saggily lurching after women.

His regular column in "Encore" magazine has become compulsory yet infuriating reading for the film industry. Compulsory for its promise of gossip, infuriating for its contradictions. Though himself one of the best screen writers in Australia Ellis continually defends, if not champions, appalling Australian films. He is clearly intelligent and yet staunchly defended, even eulogised, Keating during his reign. He is a mature man with a historical overview and, yet, nurtures an undergraduate loathing for conservatives.

And so... I opened the pages of "Goodbye Jerusalem" with some hope that this anthemic work might hold some clue into the occult workings of the Sydney left-wing literary mind. It might even hold a clue to the foremost political question of the age which is "Why would anyone support the Labor party in the Nineties?" I was not disappointed. Ellis’s memoir reveals much of the psychology of the left-wing intellectual: you might even say it leads us into the very heart of Labor sentimentality.

First of all the book is predominantly about names - the legal tender of Sydney society. ("It was a great do. X was there with Y and then Z walked in. Do you know Q? Fabulous person! Did you know that Q and W used to be an item? That was before he met M of course. It was when they were both working for R and he was on with J..." ad nauseam) The names in Jerusalem drop like steady rain that has set in for the day. Everybody knows, went to school with, taught, has got drunk or has slept with everyone else and Ellis has done it all with everyone. Ellis affects to behold all these connections and coincidences with profound wonder, "six degrees of separation!", as if they were in some way accidental, extraordinary, serendipitous, violations of the laws of probability - rather than the totally predictable and thoroughly intended outcomes of networking behaviours within that subculture.

Running through this Who’s Who and Who’s Been Up Whom of the Left is Ellis’s acute, sometimes agonising, uncertainty of his own place within the subculture. The book is described, with some irony, and perhaps genuine regret, Memoirs of a Labor Outsider a subscript which is hard to take seriously given that the entire work is a chronicle of his encounters with heavyweights. And yet here lies a clue to the central dilemma of the acolyte. No matter how deeply the groupie penetrates the in-crowd, there always seems to be a more private circle to which they are denied access. Power elites, like onions, seem to peel down infinitely, always revealing yet another inner sanctum just beyond the reach of the aspirant. The result is that the acolyte experiences simultaneously a gratifying sense of belonging and a disappointing sense of rejection.

Ellis notes (and possibly identifies with) other excluded Labor party figures: Calwell sitting alone with his conscience in the church; Daly sent to Coventry for defying Evatt. Ostracism and betrayal are recurrent themes in this book which presents itself, overall, as a tragedy, It is never made clear, however, exactly whose tragedy it is, Ellis's or the Labor Party's.

In a way, it purports to be the tragedy of Men, particularly Great Men.

Like most left-wingers, Ellis disdains the "Great Man" theory of history and yet Jerusalem consists mainly of homage to a series of Great Men he has known, or wishes he had known: men whom he lauds with deep affection if not outright hero worship. This is mythmaking on a grand scale. Ellis is engaged in the construction of a pantheon which will show all these men (including, I assume, himself by association) as great and significant people. Chifley, Whitlam and Hepworth are dealt with in the fondest possible terms; doted upon as if they were fathers or grandfathers, indeed the entire book is a epic of, not so much brotherly, as filial love; a love for venerable, decent, brilliant, loving, outrageous men - almost a hymn to Men in general but in particular to father figures, the bigger and more cuddly the better. (Ellis consistently belittles short men, as if smallness of stature had been medically proven to be a symptom of meanness in spirit and mind.)

Indeed, Ellis seems to see the history of the class struggle as a battle between male individuals. He regales us not only with great men but brave men, working men, loyal men, brilliant men, sad men, dead men, insane men and especially drinking men. Anecdote after anecdote begins "And so we were in the pub when K walked in and said…." and after a while you begin to wonder. "Don’t these men have wives? Families? Do they ever see their children? Do they ever stay home and just watch television?"

Women, by contrast, are starkly absent, appearing only as adversaries of mythic proportions - Bronwyn Bishop the Valkyrie, Pauline Hanson the Harpy - or as carnal diversions: the shared girlfriends, the groupies, the toys. There is of course, Mrs Ellis, Anne Brooksbank, always in the background; loved and revered, supporting, strengthening, guiding. But how do we reconcile Ellis’s admiration of and dependence on his wife with continual references to his attempts to grope and seduce other women, references made with astonishing candour, as if the stumbling failure of the attempts somehow excused them?

Larded over this adulation of Men and scant regard for women, is an adulation of Irishness; a quality which Ellis seems to regard as a genetic quality. At one point Ellis makes the comment, somewhat ruefully, that while the Irish settled Australia, the Scots conquered it. Of course, as a Melbourne-bred descendant of Scottish immigrants, I would, be inclined to agree with that. While the Irish are famed for drinking, singing, fighting, writing, nostalgia, blowing people up and sorrow, the Scots are famous for drinking, singing, fighting, engineering, medicine, physics, banking and dying on the battlefield. Both countries suffered crushing poverty under the domination of England but, while the Irish starved and drank and sang, the Scots, cannily built great technical universities, invented electronics and television and donated to the imperial armies of England whole brigades of ferocious soldiers who terrified the living crap out of the Zulus and Pathans who stared wide-eyed through the morning mists to see advancing lines of tall, red haired men wearing skirts and puffing on what appeared to be flutes inserted into the rectums of yowling tartan tomcats.

Thus the Scots, while appearing, oddly, to be willing to die for their English oppressors, ended up, like Figaro, making their masters dependent on them - for Scottish education, Scottish acumen and Scottish toughness ("Whatever it takes"). Little wonder that these tough, pragmatic, sometimes Calvinistic wowsers rose to positions of political and financial power in Australia. Ellis however, sees the ascendancy of Scots in Australia as cause for regret and we wonder why. Is Ellis is anti-pragmatic? Or is he just pro-nostalgic. For, unlike the Irish, the Scots are notably unsentimental about their country of origin. As my eighty year old Scottish neighbour used to say. "Scotland is the best country in the world to starve in."

The roots of Ellis’s love of Irishness appears to lie in a respect for things humble and honest, a respect for men who work by hard physical labour. But how do we reconcile this sentiment with the admiration of power that elsewhere infuses the writing? Whence the name-dropping? Such confusions riddle the work. Ellis supports tariffs, yet despises the (Scottish) politicians - McEwan and Menzies - who created them. He affects affection for the uneducated, and yet his satiric writings snobbishly lampoon John Hewson for having gained his PhD from Saskatoon. Ellis is simultaneously scared by Keating and at the same time admiring of him, like a new boy in awe of the Head Prefect.

Of course the confusion is not Ellis’s alone. The schizoid nature of the Labor mentality is captured brilliantly in Gerry Connolly’s impersonation of Keating: "You establishment… scum" (Only a Labor Prime Minister could regard himself as a not being part of the Establishment.)

In the end, Ellis seems to love the Labor Party for its people, not its policies. As with Keating himself, Ellis’s commitment to the Labor cause seems to arise not so much from empathy with the underdog as a white-hot hatred of pedigreed dogs. Ellis's loathing of John Howard goes beyond all reason, seeking to portray him at best as an Australian Rick Moranis ("Honey I Shrunk the Deficit") and at worst as an arch fiend. At the same time he reveres the consummately aloof patrician leader, Whitlam.

But, putting Ellis’s confused and bathetic sentiments aside, Goodbye Jerusalem is also a revelation of the mentality of the Labor party machine. In particular it is an insight into that machine’s astounding failure to understand Australian attitudes at any given time over the last fifty years, illuminating starkly the gulf between the views of the True Believers and ordinary Australians.

To begin with, the Party always seems to have been fighting the last war. We see Chifley, after World War II, campaigning on a "never again" platform (referring to the Great Depression) just when the country is about to embark on a period of unprecedented prosperity. How did it take the Labor Party 30 years after WWII to grasp that there wasn’t going to be another Depression and refocus their policies accordingly, by which time the prosperity was, ironically, starting to wane? The result was Whitlam shovelling cash into education, the arts, and "quality of life" programs, just as the good times were coming to an end.

How could Keating’s minders have NOT anticipated that the rapid succession of reforms under his Prime Ministership - anti-discrimination, anti-vilification, unfair-dismissal and pro-Asianisation - would start to make the public jittery and that the High Court Mabo decision – which seemed to imply that the aboriginal people still legally owned a lot of Australia and white Australians might have to give it back - would create widespread insecurity. How could they not see that focussing on aborigines as a downtrodden class, at a time when the recession was creating a new class of downtrodden whites, would make Pauline Hanson's preposterous proposition - that aboriginals were better off than poor whites - somehow credible. Timing. Timing.

How could Keating’s minders have not seen that he was pushing the Republic barrow so fast that the wheels were bound to come off. Hawke would have presented the Republic issue as a matter for all Australians and made them feel that they had chosen it. Keating basically said, "It’s coming folks, so you better get used to it."

Though he purports to be an outsider, Ellis analyses these towering failures of common sense and sensitivity like an insider, attributing the electoral backlash against Keating to the foibles of electioneering; to television debates in which he suggests ludicrously that the studio lighting favoured Howard; to a forged letter scandal which no one even remembers; finally to the sour-grapes suggestion that Keating wasn’t really trying anyway. All excuses to avoid the overwhelming reality that the public hated Labor’s policies.

What is most striking in this portrayal of Labor thinking is what is NOT mentioned. Reading this book, no one would imagine that we were in the Age of Communications. There is not the slightest mention of the impact on society of computers, cable and satellite TV, global news organisations, the Internet, street kids, heroin, the loss of the entire TFC industry to Asia, immigration, the mushrooming litigation/public inquiry/prosecution industry, the gigantic gamble of sharemarket-based superannuation or the aging of the Australian population.

Rather, what is revealed is a world of intellectuals and politicians still clinging to age-old divisions, grudges, memories and a Fenian resentment of the wrongs suffered by long-dead fathers. Goodbye Jerusalem is indeed a wake indeed but not for any vision of the future. It is wake for the past: a lament for the Hibernian Dreamtime written by a writer who is in love with the idea of writers in love - not with women but with other men; a writer who is pining for his own Lake Isle of Innisfree and a Celtic twilight where life is poetry, drink and free love or, at the very least, a time when men could go down the pub and get away from their wives.

 Ian McFadyen 1997