Where would the world be without ABC Radio National.... most recently the broadcast (on Ockham's Razor with Robyn Williams) by former Liberal Senator Chris Puplick, broadcast Sunday 24 August 2003.
Puplick, also past president of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board looked at the role of the court jester in 13th century Europe and examined the governments of today. He asked whether the present day advisors were giving frank and fearless advice to our political leaders or whether the truly independent sources of advice and expertise have been eliminated.
Some time back around the start of the 13th century, there emerged in the courts of Western Europe a peculiar political institution, the court jester.
He, always a he, appears in many guises. He was descended from the Romanic comic actors, the histriones, although his equivalents may be found in the you characters of Chi' and Chin dynasties of China. However, wherever found and whomever attendant upon, the role of the court jester is one and the same, and it is clear. Their job was to give what used to be called 'frank and fearless' advice to the monarch. They were the reality check to the absolute rulers of their day. They were the utter reverse of today's spin doctors. They told the governors what the people needed them to hear, they took the views of the masses to the masters rather than being employed to tell the masses the lies the rulers think they ought to be fed. Like the Roman histriones and the masked actors of Aristophanes' classical comedies, they looked the mightiest in the eye and told them the truths, often the uncomfortable truths which they did not wish to hear. They got away with it because those rulers, despots and absolutists as they may be, knew the value of someone telling them what they needed to hear, rather than what they only wanted to hear. It used to be thought that the days of absolutist government were long gone, and that modern Western governments are now held in check by some variety of countervailing and balancing courses such as Energetic parliamentary Oppositions, Independent and courageous judges, A vigilant and sceptical press, Articulate and respected human rights and non-government organisations, Questioning and thoughtful universities, Perhaps it is time we rethought that proposition and asked ourselves just how protected we really are from the ravages of absolutist and overpowering government, albeit that they are partly of our own making. A look around Australia and the rest of the democratic world, would certainly call into question our smug self-confidence that governments are somehow held in check and that the decisions made by our rulers are based upon the best frank and fearless advice available to them. Puplick then outlines the effect of September 11, 2001 on US democracy; then observes "a politically corrupted and compliant judiciary whose role in subverting the democratic choice of the American people in the 2000 Presidential election has already entered the halls of infamy among stolen elections." Next it's the turn of the Press : The American press, with few notable examples such as The New Yorker, until the lies about weapons of mass destruction became too much even for them, have aided and abetted in the increase of government power and been uncritical of the excesses of either the Congress or the Department of Homeland Security. Individual reporters who dared to question the President (I have in mind the treatment recently meted out to the doyenne of the White House press corps, Helen Thomas) have been cut out of the loop. Critical authors such as Susan Sontag have been all but banned from the airwaves. All the President's, and Secretary Rumsfeld's spin doctors went to work and out of the fog of so-called intelligence, emerged such events as the Niger uranium sales documents to take their place with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Zimmerman telegram as precursors of war and devastation. What we are now learning about so much of this process is that at various levels of the Washington bureaucracy, evidence was either corrupted or withheld largely because of a belief that the powers above simply did not want to hear it, or because those below were too fearful to tell truths which they knew, or suspected, contradicted what their masters already had in mind. One sees much the same happening in the United Kingdom, where the teflon appears to be peeling from the Barbadian tan of Prime Minister Tony Blair. However, it took the tragic suicide of a respected government advisor, Dr David Kelly, to start the process whereby the truth may be forced into the light of day. Interestingly, the week after it editorialised over the abuse of science in relation to Dr Kelly, The New Scientist ran an article about a recent British government report on GM foods which it characterised as being 'more about spinning a line than uncovering the truth'. In Australia we are by no means inoculated against the same contagions. The elimination of unwelcome sources of independent advice has been a feature of our system for some 30 years or so. Say what you like about the Menzies government and its era, but no historian will deny that Menzies kept about him people who would give him honest advice based on their best independent judgements. Their political background or colour did not matter much, one only has to look at the career of 'Nugget' Coombes to see that, and indeed Menzies valued honest advice greatly and let his senior public servants know that. He did not always act on their advice, but he never sought to be told only what he wanted to hear. That tradition ended with the election of the Whitlam Labor government and reached its apogee with Keating's dictum that he had the Reserve Bank 'in his pocket'. It was at this time that the practice of new governments replacing as many Departmental Heads as they could, purging the retainers of the ancient regime commenced. When the Howard government was elected, something like six such heads fell in one foul swoop. More recent events in Canberra have been equally chilling. Marion Wilkinson and David Marr in their book 'Dark Victory' recount numerous instances where senior public servants, knowing the truth, either concealed it or else presented it in a form which was less than utterly honest and certainly far from frank. This is just the start... there's the fully monty atRAPID RESPONSE EMAIL: What do you think?
Tuesday, September 2, 2003