Both parties, and Crikey, losing their way

Alan Baird writes: Re. “Believing the unbelievable” (yesterday). Les Heimann is SO-O-O on the money! And Crikey isn’t. Bernard Keane is thoroughly right-wing and follows the usual growth fetish and trickle-down-eternal-expansion rubbish Tony Rudd (or is it Kevin Blair?) followed, five millimetres to the Left of the Tories. By the way, it’s great to see that Alan Jones, after spending hours reading Crikey, has dimly discerned that using the term “Tory” is  possibly an indicator that Crikey isn’t espousing conservative-reactionary “Liberal” party thoughts. But don’t be reassured! Quite a lot of Crikey opinion isn’t too far away, philosophically speaking. The trouble is, the so-called “Left” of the Labor Party no longer is. When you’ve got the late lamented Julia coming out with a knee-jerk response on Julian Assange as “guilty” without even considering what was published, you know There Is No Alternative. Labor/Liberal, Right or Right. If both major parties set out for Brisbane from Sydney, they’d end up in Hawaii.

Keane’s outdated moral compass

John Richardson writes: Re. “Ten things we’ve learnt about the surveillance state” (yesterday). The real problem for Bernard Keane is that Smiley is dead and the world that he, Assange, Snowden, Chomsky and a few other old-fashioned romantics, like Keane and me, has forever changed for the worse.

I knew we were in trouble when a former colleague told me how he had counselled his eight-year-old son about stealing, having caught him taking money from his mother’s purse. He was deadly serious in advising his son that “the most important thing about stealing is not to get caught”.

So having a moral compass is no longer considered important; even for clergy. Possessing the cunning to avoid detection, talk your way out of being prosecuted or, best of all, having the chutzpah to blame someone else is all that counts these days. Best get with the program.

Doughnuts for the arts

Melissa Madsen writes: Re. “The naked truth far less s-xy than media furore at Flinders” (yesterday). The most surprising thing about this article is that a staff room in a non-sandstone public university like Flinders has doughnuts!  In my particular wing of this venerable institution, we feel blessed to have hot water and working plumbing, never mind doughnuts.

Mark Latham should channel Sir Keith Joseph explaining policy in the UK “We pump money out of a hole in the North Sea and pour it down a hole called British Leyland”.