Australia

Monday

Alex Massie

517/1

The first thing to be said of a test in which a side batting third can score 517/1 is that the wicket was not fit for test match cricket. The second is that, for once, this did not matter. Hilarity trumped common sense. None of us, not being present for the Melbourne test in 1912, can recall the 323 run stand shared by Jack Hobbs and Wilfred Rhodes but, somewhat sadly, that’s now been wiped from the record books by Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott. Actually, the wicket was worse than even 517/1 suggests. The teams combined for a score of 624/2 in the second innings. That’s a Sri Lankan

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Ashes! The Ashes!

Four years later than should have been the case, Andrew Strauss will skipper England in Australia. English cricket has righted itself since the Flintoff and Pietersen debacles. For a spell one sensed that marketing considerations were influencing cricketing decisions. The great strength of the present Strauss-Flower regime is that it is, in the end, almost dull. No drama, no fuss and precious little intrigue either. Australia, by contrast, are in some mild kind of flux. Where England picked their team before leaving home, Australia have been scrabbling to find players with sufficient form and fitness to justify inclusion. Xavier Doherty’s inclusion seems sensible but is based more on hope and

Friday

Alex Massie

Australian Cricket Sells Its Soul

Hard though it may be to imagine, it is entirely possible that Cricket Australia (as they style themselves these days) are even more cloth-headed and reprehensible than their counterparts at the ECB. At the very least they give a more than passable impression of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. If press accounts are reliable indicators, Cricket Australia is a shameless organisation. If they weren’t such a collection of Ocker Moneygrubbers they might not have arranged the recent meaningless, pointless, set of one day matches against Sri Lanka that have hampered their players’ preparations for the Ashes. Nor, had they a clue, would they have insisted

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Ashes: Post-War XIs

Ahead of the Times revealing its post-war XIs, Norm has made his own selection. As you’d expect, they’re pretty strong teams. It’s a little depressing to realise that selecting a Greatest Post-1945 Australian side is much, much more difficult than doing the same for England. In fact I don’t think I can disagree with any part of Norm’s England XI: 1. Len Hutton, 2. Geoffrey Boycott, 3. Ken Barrington, 4. Denis Compton, 5. Peter May, 6. Ian Botham, 7. Alan Knott, 8. Jim Laker, 9. Fred Trueman, 10. Derek Underwood, 11. Brian Statham. You could, mind you, make a case for Frank Tyson. Alec Bedser is also unfortunate to miss-out.

Thursday

Matthew Elliott

Lessons from the midterms for the AV referendum

Amid all the excitement of the US midterms, a small, local ballot took place which has important lessons for the UK’s referendum on the Alternative Vote – due to take place six months on Friday. Like us, America uses the straightforward first-past-the-post voting system for its thousands of elected offices – from local school boards and sheriffs to races for governors’ mansions and the White House itself. Their well-established primary system also gives voters a direct say in who the candidates should be – taking power away from the parties and making politicians more responsive to the demands of their local electorate. Because US politics is dominated by two parties,

Monday

Alex Massie

Annals of Leadership: Welsh Division

David Lloyd George is, I think, the only Welshman to have become Prime Minister but he was born in Manchester. Does this mean that Julie Gillard is the first Welsh-born person to become Prime Minister (or its equivalent) anywhere on earth? Surely Wales must have spawned someone who has been in charge of somewhere before now. But if so, who? (Entries are restricted to modern politics: in other words you can’t have Henry VII.) (Tom Switzer’s dyspeptic piece on Gillard’s kinda-victory is worth your while.)

Tom Switzer

Gillard’s fractious premiership

‘The definition of an Independent Member of Parliament, viz., one that could not be depended upon.’ – Former British prime minister, the Earl of Derby to Queen Victoria. In the August 21 federal election down under, the Labor government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard copped a stunning rebuke from the Australian people. Consider this: Tony Abbott’s centre-right Liberal-National Coalition won nearly half a million more votes than the Australian Labor Party. It secured more seats than the ALP (73 to 72 in the 150-seat House of Representatives). And the Labor administration became the first first-term government since 1931 to lose a parliamentary majority. So how does Labor claim a mandate

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Keats of Cricket

1st May 1930: Australian opening batsmen Bill Woodfull (1897 – 1965, left) and Archie Jackson (1909 – 1933) going out to bat against Worcester at Worcester. Photo: E. F. Corcoran/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images. The other day Patrick Kidd wrote a nice post on cricket and the outbreak of the Second World War, but, speaking of cricketing heartbreak, Saturday was the 100th anniversary of Archie Jackson’s birth. Poor Jackson. We’ll never know what might have been and, of course, it’s that sense of if that lends his story its power. It’s not quite right to say that Jackson’s premature death was a tragedy since the rules of tragedy demand that the

Saturday

David Blackburn

Too close to call Down Under

Australia has spoken, but it will take some time to determine what they’ve said. ABC is reporting that Australia is headed for its first hung parliament since 1940. Exit polls suggested that Julia Gillard’s Labor party would win the most seats; but it now looks as if Tony Abbott’s Coalition has obtained 73 seats, one more than Labor; there are also 4 independents and 1 Green MP to throw into the mix. Conservative Home is following the election in detail. Weak and indecisive government may follow, but the Coalition has the political momentum. 6 months ago Kevin Rudd was, in racing parlance, a dead-cert for re-election. Mounting enmity and severe

Saturday

Geoffrey Blainey

Identity politics

In the past half century, much ingenuity and humdrum effort has gone into redefining Australia as a nation. Politicians, intellectuals and advertisers have joined in the game of searching or ‘yearning for an identity’. The phrase ‘national identity’, now a bit boring, arrived only in the 1950s. In their thoughtful book, James Curran and Stuart Ward argue that this game was inspired by the global decline of Britain, the withdrawing of British forces from Asia, the coupling of Westminster with the European Union and the feeling that Australians were becoming ‘abandoned Britons’. It should be added that Australia was also abandoning Britain. The dramatic swing in Australian trade from Britain

Thursday

Alex Massie

Great Political Feuds: Hawke vs Keating

As Danny Finkelstein tweets, never mind Blair vs Brown vs Mandelson, the feud between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating is just as entertaining. The latest outbreak of fighting has been caused by a new biography of Hawke, written by his wife. Keating does not approve of its depiction of their time in government. As this letter to Hawke demonstrates: Dear Bob, It was with much disappointment that I opened The Weekend Australian to find on page three the headline “Hawke’s take on ditherer Keating and lying Richo” and to read at the first line that either you or Blanche had described me as “an ailing vacillator”. As you know, I

Wednesday

David Martin-Jones

Old South Wales socialism made Gillard who she is

Australia’s 27th prime minister is not only the first female holder of the office, but also only the second foreign-born PM. Like the first, Billy Hughes, she is Welsh. Ironically, Wales has now produced twice as many prime ministers of Australia as it has of the UK, of which it remains a constituent part. However, Julia Gillard makes little of her heritage. ‘I always knew, growing up,’ she said, ‘that we had chosen this place [Adelaide] because it offered us opportunities beyond those our homeland could have delivered. My parents could muse on what life might have held for them in Wales. Frankly, I cannot. Australia is and always has

Thursday

Alex Massie

Growing up on Struggle-Street

Tom Switzer knows much more about Australian politics than I ever will, so I commend his post on Kevin Rudd’s downfall to you. (For an alternative take see John McTernan here.) What I would say, mind you, is that it’s a bad idea for a Prime Minister to abandon his signature issue simply because the going gets a little bit tough. That’s what Rudd did on climate change legislation* however and, frankly, even from a distance of many thousands of miles, one can see why his stock would struggle to recover from that debacle. Anyway, let’s talk about journalism and political terminology. Reading the accounts of Australia’s latest political shenanigans

Tom Switzer

Fallen idol

‘A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren’t still there, he’s no longer a political leader.’ Perhaps nothing better describes the extraordinary downfall of Kevin Rudd than American presidential adviser Bernard Baruch’s remarks in 1932. Extraordinary, because for three years from 2006 to late 2009, Australia’s prime minister was in the political stratosphere. And yet, today, Rudd was knifed in the most ruthless, swift and effective fashion. And the hit men? Factional warlords of the Australian union movement. The Opposition leader Tony Abbott reflected the views of many Australians when he told Parliament today: ‘A

Thursday

Alex Massie

Mods & Trads: Australian Edition

An interesting piece from the BBC’s Nick Bryant, arguing that Australian conservatives have concluded that Cameron failed to win an overall majority because he was insufficiently clear – that is, right-wing. The Liberal leader Tony Abbott appears determined not to make the same mistake [sic*] and is modifying, that is to say abandoning, some of his predecessors modernising touches as Australia prepares for its election next year. If Abbott wins – though at present the polls suggest the electorate doesn’t like Abbott’s Liberals or Prime Minister Rudd’s Labour party and would, in a burst of Aussie Cleggmania hand the Greens 16% of the vote – then we can expect the

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Who’s Afraid of a Hung Parliament?

So it seems you have to vote Conservative to accept the party’s invitation to join the government of Great Britain? Who knew? Tory warnings of the dire consequences of a hung parliament are understandable but, I suspect, unfortunate. There is little evidence that the electorate believes that a hung parliament will be a disaster, far less than they can be cajoled into thinking that they’re letting Britain down if they don’t vote Conservative. And that, my friends, is the underlying message sent by the Tories’ blitz against a hung parliament. A hung election might not be ideal but it might also be a fitting end to this exhausted, depressing parliament.

Sunday

Daniel Korski

A welcome return of defence diplomacy

Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox has given an interview to the Sunday Express, where he talks about overcoming a sense of “colonial guilt” bestowed by revisionist historians and the need for a new government to forge defence links with commonwealth nations, such as Australia and New Zealand, but he also cited India and Saudi Arabia. They have a “strong appetite” for closer defence links with the UK, he argues.   Looking at variable defence relationships with countries like India, and non-NATO partners like Australia makes good sense. Nicolas Sarkozy has done the same – and even invited Indian troops to march down the Champs-Élysées last year on Bastille Day. A

Sunday

Mark Bathgate

Bring on the serious economic debate

Why does Britain fall for financial spin so often? The question goes well beyond the great confidence trick of Gordon Brown’s ten years in the Treasury. I’m just back from three weeks in Australia. What’s always struck me in the years I’ve gone there is how different the newspapers/news shows/political debates are. They are well informed about macro-economics, and there is much less of the spin/personality culture of the mainstream media in the UK. Canada is exactly the same. Last week, the Canadian budget was published – a very clear and credible path to getting budget back to balance within three years. One of their officials explained to me that

Saturday

Patrick Carnegy

A dream made concrete

You are celebrated as the architect of one of the most famous buildings in the world, now in your late eighties and living quietly in your home outside Copenhagen. One day a beautiful blonde German girl knocks on your door. She is clutching a folder of her photographs of the extraordinary structure on the other side of the world which, following a dispute in 1965 with a new Australian Government, you have never seen completed. For her, that architectural work was love at first sight. For you, her images are a love letter that confirms the enduring greatness of your conception. It is happiness on both sides, and its fruit

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Headline of the Day | 14 October 2009

Courtesy of the Australian AP: PM eats biscuit, Twitters about it Good to know that Kevin Rudd enjoyed his visit to a bakery in South Australia. [Hat-tip: Toby Harnden, via Twitter. Obviously. My Twitter feed is here.]