At around 3pm today the nation will collectively exhale as the independents, after 17 days, announce who will make up our minority government.
In the meantime, there’s always The Australian…
Yesterday our national broadsheet ran a front-page op-ed piece under the headline ‘On all counts, Coalition deserves independents’ by conservative Kenneth Wiltshire suggesting the independents should follow the advice of British statesman, author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher Edmund Burke and do what their voters wanted them to do. That is, install Tony Abbott:
When the member exercised his conscience, the wishes of a politician’s electorate was key.
Speaking of the constituents Burke said: “Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interests to his own.”
On this basis it is clear that our three independents would support the Coalition to form government in today’s Australia.
One Crikey reader, who wished to be called ‘Prof Anon’ was compelled to write in to us:
I have never seen an academic quote someone and then ignore the fact that the next sentence starts with ‘but’ and that the remainder of the piece quoted goes on to explain why the statement before the ‘but’ is wrong. However, this is exactly what happens here. Burke’s very next sentence reads:
“But his unbiassed [sic] opinion, his mature judgment [sic], his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living.”
This is no small matter. Burke’s speech is famous for arguing AGAINST the idea that the MP should express the wishes and interests of his citizens — a view being put by his then opponent. He argued forcefully that an MP should exercise his judgement as a member of the nation’s parliament.
Oddly enough, The Australian locked off comments on the piece.
We’ll end with this wisdom of Prof Anon:
The approach the independents are taking are in line with Burke’s view. Wiltshire is arguing the case for his opponent yet claiming Burke. As is so often the case, the great conservatives of the past would not recognise those who claim the conservative mantle in the present.
Roll on 3pm…
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Hit the website at around 3pm this afternoon for Crikey’s full coverage on the call that everyone’s been waiting for: who will form government?
Prof Anon was not the only Crikey reader to be scornful of the UQ Prof. (My own thoughts as a graduate from UQ was, the term “Professor” no longer means much.) News Ltd may have cut off the Comments prematurely but at least they printed this letter today: (relevant extract only):
Letter to Editor (print, 7 September, 2010)
James Jupp, Hughes, ACT.
Kenneth Wiltshire is well qualified to comment on politics, but he has misread the widely quoted speech of Edmund Burke to the electors of Bristol in 1774. The key phrase was this: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
That kind of distortion is now so routine in the Australian that I routinely ignore it.
One might just correct such as distortion as incompetence in a first year essay, but for an academic to so distort another’s position is simply intellectual dishonesty.
The wonder is that any academic would think that they could get away with it and that the Australian’s editor would allow them to do so. That passage from Burke is so routinely quoted, particularly by conservatives, that it would be surprising if a large part of the Australian’s AB readership wouldn’t have picked up the error.
An academic’s intellectual dishonesty on one issue reflects on their intellectual honesty and competence in everything else they say and write.
Prof Anon is quite right. Our MPs are supposed to be representatives, not delegates. We elect them because we trust them to go to Canberra, listen to all the arguments and all the evidence that is not available to us, and then make a decision. We can then pass judgement on them at the next election depending on how their decisions turn out. The problem with the party system as it has evolved is that MPs are indeed now delegates – of their party – and are not required to exercise their discretion in Parliament at all.
To see 3 MPs weighing up the arguments, negotiating with the players, and then making a decision is so refreshing. It should happen more often!
There is an analogy with the role of the jury in the legal system. It only works if the jury is cut off from influence by other parties who have not sat through the whole trial and heard all the evidence. Otherwise they will be subject to prejudice (= literally making a judgement before knowing the evidence). Juries cannot be delegates, and neither should MPs.
Yes well said Prof Anon. I posted a comment on the Australian’s website, to which they said they would get back to me if they accepted it. 24 hours later, no response, no comments. Why was I foolish enough to think they would let Prof Wiltshire be called on that dreadful piece of verballing of the conservatives’ champion?