Gary Wickham

Dignity is crucial to the proper operation of rights. If rights are to do what they are meant to do, they need to be deeply embedded in a country’s society and culture. It’s not enough just to have rights sitting on the books. The overwhelming majority of people in the country need to respect them at a personal level. Without the dignity component, rights are hollow. The contrast between rights with dignity and rights without is increasingly apparent with regard to two groups of Australians who are much in the news lately. These are those who have retired from the full-time workforce and those who are in the last stage of their lives – whether in their own homes or in some form of assisted-living accommodation.

Most experts agree Australia’s health financing system needs a reboot to reduce the distortions and inefficiencies created by the overlapping coverage between Medicare and private health insurance. Any new such financing system would need to carefully balance competition and choice, with affordability of coverage and equal access to quality care. It also needs the flexibility to respond to changing health-care needs. One solution is to allow individuals to opt out of Medicare and require them to buy private health insurance. This voluntary opt-out model, with risk-based government subsidies, would make private cover fully substitutable for Medicare.

The Australian Football League’s (AFL) fan base keeps growing and growing, whether measured by total attendances, total TV audiences, or the billions of dollars the league is able to command for its “product”. So what is it the barrackers are getting that keeps them coming back? You only have to be at a game for a few minutes, or observe the way dedicated fans watch on TV or mobile phones or listen on radio, to see that footy adds a lot of passion to a lot of lives. That’s important, but it’s not all that footy serves up. It also promotes a bizarre type of optimism that serves society well, the type of “keep going no matter what the odds” mentality that Australia has relied upon in the darkest times of its short history, especially the two world wars and the great depression. By this mentality, gathering glory is not the be all and end all of a life well lived – that’s sometimes frowned upon. What’s much more important is the stoic willingness to stare down hard times by shovelling gravel (usually only metaphorically) in the hope of building something better, even if the “better” turns out to be more shovelling alongside other like-minded people.

It’s both heartening and perplexing to read in the press about the ALP’s increasing determination, in the wake of the NSW election result, to make clear to voters that Labor is not allied to the Greens. It’s heartening because it has become obvious since its 2010-13 “fling” with the Greens that the electorate will punish any failure by Labor to mark its independence. More than that, it’s heartening because a political party that isn’t sure what it stands for isn’t really a party. It’s perplexing, on the other hand, because there seems to be considerable uncertainty within the party about where to look to find an independent progressive direction that can win elections. Has the current generation of Labor thinkers forgotten the names Bob Hawke and Paul Keating? Surely not. These two leaders knew what to do with all three letters in “ALP”: a strong and confident Australia, a strong and confident workforce, and a strong and confident party. This was and remains widely attractive. They strove for a strong and progressive Australian society, one that treated workers and employers as equally important. They convinced a majority of Australians that progress towards a stronger, fairer society would necessarily include a stronger, fairer economy – even if it entailed privatisation of some industries and assets. For them, a strong Australia was to be fully engaged in the world.

Ongoing reflections on the fall of the Rudd/Gillard Labor governments continue to feature suggestions about the impact of policy shifts to the Left, especially under Gillard (possibly influenced by her dalliance with the Greens). These suggestions mirror those made about the fate of the Whitlam and Howard governments. The increasingly shambolic Leftist reform agenda of the Whitlam years was seen to be too much for the electorate, while the fate of the Howard government was seemingly sealed by shifting too far to the Right in its approach to industrial relations. This is an intriguing theme, which, as the Whitlam and Howard parallels attest, continues to be raised whenever governments are thrown out rather than nudged out. But discussion rarely approaches the matter from the other direction: what is actually involved in sticking close to the political centre?

At the heart of growing concern about performance enhancing drugs in Australian sport is the very basic matter of sport as an even contest. As Roy and H.G. used to put it, no one is particularly interested in an exhibition of a man kicking a dog. Sport is the pursuit (and the industry) it’s become because those who play it and those who watch it desire, and now expect, a close contest between relatively equally matched teams or individuals. While some fans might wish to have their team win every game by a street, this outcome would be a turn-off for other fans, broadcasters, sponsors, administrators, and many others. The same is obviously true for a mismatch in boxing or tennis. So, the idea that some teams or individuals are using drugs in a bid to defeat not just their opponents but the contest itself needs to be confronted. Punishments need to be meted out. But are we overreacting? Before I go further, let me stress that I’m dealing here only with the use of drugs in sport deemed by officials to be performance enhancing to the point of creating an unfair advantage. My comments do not apply to any drug use that is illegal under Australian law (federal or state), which is a matter for the police and the courts (and for commentators qualified in that area).

The recently released fifth report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stresses the connection between climate change and severe weather events around the world, including devastating bushfires in places such as Australia. But what does this actually mean for governments? In the first decade of the 21st century many governments around the world unofficially competed with one another to show how serious they were about dealing with the threat of climate change. Perhaps the pithiest entry in this competition was this newsworthy slogan offered in 2007 by the soon-to-be Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd.

The inventive English journalist Dave Hill (who is as comfortable writing about politics and culture as he is about sport) published a book, Out of His Skin, in 1989 dealing with - among other things - the culture of English soccer. A highlight of this book for me is Hill’s description of how the former manager of English soccer clubs Arsenal and Watford, Bertie Mee, set out to prepare his players in the 1960s and 1970s. Thinking it vital to teach them “a rigorous outlook … towards all aspects of their lives”, Mee insisted on training them: in everything from which knife to pick up first in expensive restaurants to how to contend with the carnal temptations of trips overseas. A glance at the more recent, often outrageous (and outrageously funny) book by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, Soccernomics, will show you that Mee’s determination to help players as people, not just as performers, is still not as widespread as it should be. The authors’ concerns are made plain in the book’s subtitle: “Why England Lose”.

One of the more bizarre hobbies of Australian cricket fans is to taunt and berate the English cricket team for the number of South African-born players in its ranks. This has been standard fare in most Ashes contests for many years now, even when they are played in England. The next Ashes series, now just one sleep away, is likely to be no different. This year, though, those keen on this hobby may need to engage in more mental gymnastics than they are used to. This is because Australia has - until recently - been coached by South African-born Mickey Arthur. Its federal parliament has also recently rushed through legislative changes to our citizenship rules, allowing the talented leg-spinner Fawad Ahmed to play Tests for Australia despite having come here relatively recently as a refugee.

The modern Western university has five major historical trajectories, four of which were dominant for more than 400 years. But the fifth, while spanning no more than 50 years, has been a crucial driver of an important historical and social change, especially in Australia. The longest of the trajectories dates from the 11th century and was initially concerned with educating personnel for the Roman Catholic Church. It received a boost from the Christianising of Aristotle undertaken by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century: the main message of which was the need to strive for perfection in the image of a perfect God. Not much of the perfect God component survives in today’s universities. But in the form of perfect reason, given to it by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, it survives in a big way. The second trajectory is almost as old. It is more practical than it is intellectual, involving the education of children of those with landed wealth. In the 18th and 19th century it expanded to include the education of the children of those with moneyed wealth, something which made it suitable for the United States.