I was walking through Collingwood and Clifton Hill yesterday (as I did not grow up or ever live around there, I am not too sure where one stops and the other starts) and paused to admire the Bendigo Hotel in Johnston Street.

This is quite a distinctive and ornate pub, on the outside at least. I have not been inside for quite a few years, and it has the annoying habit of not opening until 4pm.

I quite like interesting and old school type pubs, and I intend to post more on them in future.

Many years ago, I read a book about the final collapse of the Cain-Kirner government. It was a collection of essays. by then-prominent journalists and academics. Essentially it was a laudatory panegyric by committed Keynesians who saw nothing wrong in the many fiscal and governance failures by Cain-Kirner and their ministers.

Instead, they placed the blame squarely on Paul Keating, the evil economic rationalist who, as Federal Treasurer, refused to bail out Victoria, and who used his leverage to block the sale of the State Savings Bank of Victoria to the Commonwealth Bank until the Victorian Labor Left were willing to support the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank in exchange.

It was not a great time to live in Victoria, the period from late 1989 through to late 1992. There was a recession and a number of major financial failures, at least two of whom (the Tricontinental merchant bank and VEDC) were due to serious shortcomings in governance by the state government.

The sale of the State Bank (and subsequent disappearance of its brand, subsumed into the Commonwealth Bank) is something which many of us felt deeply. I still miss it.

The sudden announcement today by the technocratic Andrews government that they were abandoning the 2026 Commonwealth Games due to cost overruns is only the tip of an iceberg which is starting to collide with SS Victoria.

The Andrews government, in its commitment to Keynesian policies, has been spending extravagantly for many years on its major infrastructure projects, collectively referred to as The Big Build. Lots of roads, railways and tunnels are either under construction or proposed.

Until very recent months, the Victorian Public Service has been considerably expanded in size and cost, and converted into an apparatus of the Premier’s office.

Small amounts of cash have been splashed out in handouts to the public – such as the annual payment to people who go online and do a half hearted comparison of energy prices to supposedly save on their bills. And there was the subsidy to people who chose to eat out in the city after the plague was aver.

At the same time as all that, he has found the funds to act as the white knight to the Karens at Netball Australia, buying the right to host their grand final for the next few years for a few million dollars. Similarly, the 2026 Commonwealth Games has been touted as a way of increasing tourism to regional centres and provided improved sporting infrastructure.

All of these things cost a lot of money, and there has been no abatement in the spending until this year. The figure of $180 billion dollars (ie $30,000 for every man, woman and child in Victoria) has been raised as the current debt.

This debt requires considerable austerity – both more responsible spending and the sudden recent introduction of higher property taxes which unfairly target those people who choose to own modest investment properties.

The only thing that surprises me about the cancellation of the Commonwealth Games is that they decided to actually make this hard decision, rather than continue on the high spending pathway and make less visible cuts elsewhere.

The implications of the decision to cancel the Commonwealth Games go a lot further than the possibility of tens of millions of dollars in compensation to the Commonwealth Games Federation.

The first implication is that of sovereign risk. When a government decides not to honour its word, it goes much further than the persons or organisations who have struck an agreement with that government – it means that other possible investors and stakeholders will think twice about doing business with that government or indeed operating in that jurisdiction. Because the Andrews government will not honour its word, it can not be trusted, and Victoria will be considered as a far less safe place to do business in than it was before.

The second implication is in the reputational damage to Victoria (and indeed Australia) in relation to prestigious events. Aside from the cancelled Commonwealth Games, Melbourne hosts the Australian F1 Grand Prix, and the Australian Tennis Open. And Chairman Dan’s Labor stablemate in Queensland is going to host the 2032 Olympic Games. The organisers of those events would be getting nervous indeed as a result.

Melbourne does not have the spectacular sights that Sydney has. It relies on being an events city – of being the sporting capital of Australia (and possibly the world) and on hosting other major non-sporting events to attract tourism (eg our highly woke Comedy Festival and the International Film Festival). This reputation has now been seriously shaken by this decision, and could take considerable time to recover.

The final implication that comes to mind is that the Andrews government has promised a lot to regional centres with the circus which is the Commonwealth Games. Supposedly, this is all much needed sporting infrastructure and tourism support for regional areas. Obviously the decision has been made the this is not so important after all.

But all of this, when you think about it, is about the money and about irresponsible behaviour. Spending the state into deep debt, year after year, is going to have consequences, just as it did in the late 1980s. Those consequences are now starting to manifest themselves, in the form of higher taxes and reduced services.

Expect even higher taxes and more reduced services for the foreseeable future. And reduced investment and business activity in Victoria.

Let’s face it, there is no political philosophy more obsessed with money and its possession (or lack thereof) than Communism (and its slightly watered down version – Socialism). Karl Marx did invent the term ‘Capitalism’ to describe the existing socio-economic status quo, and he was always obsessed with money – because he had little of it. Thankfully his factory owning, fox hunting, chum Engels was around to perpetually sling him some cash in between his own efforts to exploit the proletariat.

My possession of busts of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao (not to mention Comrade Ho) is my own ironic statement on the place where Marxist philosophy really belongs – the trashcan of history. Plus I do appreciate the kitsch value of such effigies.

A friend of mine is decluttering and minimising her material possessions at the moment, so she gifted me her two Ikea Billy bookcases. These were needed because two of my own inferior flat pack bookcases from another furniture store have started to gradually come apart.

And so this week I spent a happy Tuesday rearranging my library, and using a hammer and some nails (not a common experience for me) to restabilise my old bookcases for further use.

One of the newly acquired Billy cases has been used, if you are that interested (and you are if you are still reading this) to hold my collection of books on Ancient History (and my textbooks from my ill fated four year long attempt to learn Latin as a middle aged adult).

The other is to rehouse my collection of books on Shakespeare and his plays (it would come as no surprise to you that I have, over forty years, received three separate hardback copies of the Collected Works of Shakespeare).

The provenance of my newly acquired bookcases is of some amusement to me. My friend used to work, when she was doing her university degree in Community Development (or Communism, as her father goaded her), in a second hand bookshop in Sunshine Plaza over a decade ago called ‘Plato Books’.

It was owned by Dr Andrew Theophanous, a former Labor MP who was very much in the socialist left of the ALP. His doctorate, after all, was in communism rather than medicine. [Dr T’s political career ended rather ignominiously, but I will not dwell on his misfortunes.]. His post political (and post parole) career included opening a few second hand bookshops.

Whilst his oft stated intention was to bring literature and high culture to the Hoi Polloi of Sunshine, flogging a range of second hand books (including some computer programming and share investment texts which were out of date well before 1980) was more about, you guessed it, trying to make money. In that, he had some historical success, as he had apparently founded Academic and General Books many years earlier and sold that business for a tidy profit.

When Plato Books did not work out (I assume he named it after the first major totalitarian thinker prior to Marx), he closed it down, and gave the book cases to my friend.

And there you have it. My book cases used to belong to a Communist. As they are quite large and yet to be completely filled, perhaps it would be good Feng Shui for me to place my busts of Stalin and Mao in them for the time being.

I am a proud member of Generation X, far more virtuous and responsible than the Baby Boomers, and far less self-entitled than the Millennials (ie Gen Y).

I would say that the main flaw with my Generation is that we have a bit of a problem understanding Irony.

I will give you two examples.

One is Alannis Morrisette’s 1996 hit ‘Ironic’, which I quite enjoyed almost 30 years ago. She gives us many examples of things which she considers ‘Ironic’, but which actually are not quite so.

The other is Winona Ryder’s character in the great archetypical Gen X 1994 rom-com ‘Reality Bites’ (who could fail to remember her classic pick up line “I’m a non-practising virgin”.). There is a scene where she is discussing Irony with Ethan Hawke and he gives a dictionary perfect definition of it in clarification.

So my Generation might have a problem with understanding what Irony means some of the time.

Thankfully Crown Casino, opened in the flower of our adulthood (the 1990s when we were mostly in our twenties), is there to help remind us of what Irony is really all about.

The news today advised us that Crown Casino is arguing financial problems in relation to the payment schedule for a $450 million agreed penalty with AUSTRAC for what has been described as ‘very egregious conduct’.

Much as I have no problem with people choosing to gamble, I am skeptical about when governments legalise gambling. It is never done to maximise individual liberty (something which I support), but solely as a means to ensure that government gets a cut of the house take (something I do not really like) in taxes.

Aside from its large bank of poker machines to lure in and beguile the less imaginative gambler, Crown has as many tables as any of the casinos in Vegas for the more sophisticated gambler.

And aside from the social harm caused by gambling, where many people beg, borrow and steal to feed their habits, after first exhausting their own resources and those of their families, the high volume of cash turning over in casinos does raise the spectre of money laundering by crime syndicates. It is this which Crown has failed to properly address.

Which leaves its legal representatives arguing today that there would be ‘very significant financial hardship’ to Crown if they were to be forced to cough up the $450 million settlement immediately.

Isn’t it Ironic, don’t you think?

A colleague decided not to attend my giant retirement celebration last Friday because he was licking his wounds after not getting tickets to one of the Taylor Swift concerts which were on sale last week.

Oh well, my bar bill was well into the four figures as it was.

Much as I enjoy listening to Taylor Swift, and can sort of see what is going on with why so many people go crazy about concert tickets for her performances, I fear that she has some deep issues.

Despite being extremely successful and good looking, her music suggests that she has some unresolved angst issues, as well as a lot of self pity and self loathing.

I was recently introduced to her song The Man, which is probably her proposal as a feminist anthem. I enjoyed it, but I see some inherent flaws in her logic. Take the chorus for instance:

Let’s look at the reality – she writes all sorts of angsty songs about men she breaks up with, but she can pick and choose who she is with, and probably is the one doing the dumping. She is probably the biggest recording artist (male or female) in the world today, and has set several chart topping records which are unlikely to be equalled.

There are obviously a lot of women in a worse situation in the world compared to men, in the western world as well as less wealthy and advanced places, but our Taylor is not one of them. Her current net worth, according to the Ecosia search I did this morning, is $740 million (US that is, not Australian), as compared to Leo Di Caprio ($300 million). Yet she has the chutzpah to sing:

And they toast to me, oh

Let the players play

I’d be just like Leo

In Saint-Tropez

For all her self loathing and self pity, Taylor Swift has done very well. And probably, singing like this makes her an Everywoman for teenage girls and gay men to adore and identify with. But the reality is that she is The Man. She has all the power and white privilege that middle America can offer, if you happen to subscribe to such superficial beliefs (I don’t), regardless of her sex.

But I will still hum her music, even if I find her somewhat whiny.

The men (and it would have almost invariably have been men) who undertook the Haj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, prior to the modern era, would have been both rich and brave.

Rich to be able to afford to leave their affairs and families unattended for the duration of the journey, and to pay for a journey, by caravan at least, and possibly, depending on the distance, sail as well. It would have been a journey that could have taken years.

Brave, because a caravan across the desert involved running the risk of bandits and inclement weather. There was every chance of dying along the way, or at the destination.

Today, in the age of the jet liner, it is affordable to everyone of that faith who can pay the cost of the return airfare, although there is a novel risk of being crushed in a crowd of hundreds of thousands, and the ancient danger from the stifling heat, even where there is air conditioning part of the way.

I read T.S. Eliot’s poem The Journey of the Magi this past week for the first time in several years, and it’s words do convey some of what such a caravan across the desert might have been like:

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Travel, particularly Exploration, has always been the preserve of the rich. Staying on the T.S. Eliot theme, I recall the end of Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful Of Dust (a title based on a quote from Eliot’s magnus opus, The Waste Land). The protagonist, landed gentleman Tony Last, copes with the loss of his heir and marriage by going exploring in the Amazon, to end up trapped and the prisoner of a hermit, who forces him to read Charles Dickens to him constantly – aptly symbolising the cultural decay both Eliot and Waugh felt best depicted the inter-war years.

Learning of the loss last month of tourist submarine Titan, it intrigued me that several of the paying passengers are mega rich dare devils, one being a prominent member of the Explorer’s Club. He holds several records for piloting high performance aircraft for long distances, and has been on other deep sea excursions, and into space on one of those commercial tourist space flights which the rich now indulge in. I am not sure whether he has been to the South Pole or climbed Everest, but I assume that he either has, or would have liked to eventually.

But even though rich he was, and brave for taking such risks (I look apprehensively at a roller coaster and get nervous getting on an airliner), he was no real pioneer. He might hold some contemporary flight records but he was no Charles Lindbergh or Walter Doolittle or Chuck Yeager or Yuri Gagarin, men who pioneered flight.

Which did give me great cause for reflection this past couple of weeks since the Titan was crushed, with its occupants dying mercifully instantly but needlessly.

All those modern ‘explorers’ are not pushing the limits` of human exploration or adding to the body of human knowledge. They are extreme tourists, thrill seekers who find the ordinary avenues of travel to be mundane, and who take their lives into their own hands because they are rich enough and brave enough – or fool hardy enough – to do so.

In an age where Big Game Hunting is no longer acceptable, paying $US 250,000 for a ticket to visit the wreck of the Titanic, or to join an expedition to the South Pole, or to get on a spaceship owned by Elon Musk or Sir Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos, or to get sherpas to more or less carry you to the summit of Everest is the new form of exploration for the mega rich.

The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen commented cynically a century or so ago about ‘conspicuous consumption’. There is little more conspicuous than the sort of thrill seeking that mega rich dare devils are consuming today when they spend money which would take most of us several decades to save on a potentially one way ticket to the stars or the depths.

Are they bored with their lives? What would the philosopher Nietzsche think of extreme risk takers who do not need to take such risks, but do so recklessly for mere thrills, unlike the hapless tightrope walker at the opening of his work Thus Spake Zarathustra?

Thrill seeking is one thing, but it is another to disturb the peace of the dead. The Titanic is a mass grave for some 1500 people who met a horrible and untimely death. There is nothing romantic about that, nor about risking one’s life to go visiting such a dangerous and solemn place. To be honest, I feel that it is ghoulish. This is nothing like making a pilgrimage to Paris Cemetery to pay your respects to Jim Morrison or Oscar Wilde or the many other worthy souls buried there. It is more like the rubber necking motorist who cannot tear their eyes away from a car crash they happen to pass by.

I’m not really retired yet, but I have 12 and a half months of extended leave to get used to the idea, and I am not going back to work.

I started my leave at lunchtime yesterday, marked with a very large farewell drinks at my Club with about a hundred colleagues and friends. The bar bill was sufficiently big that I will not be heading off on any holiday before my upcoming trip to Italy mid September. But hey, you only retire once, and I think Aristotle wrote something in the Nicomachean Ethics about Magnificence (or Munificence – they are much the same thing) being a virtue.

So what do I do now?

As the t-shirt says: I do what I want, when I want, where I want.

For today, that involved a nice long afternoon nap on the couch, followed by reading a few chapters of the latest Lindsey Davis murder mystery. Afternoon naps are going to be a large part of my lifestyle going forward.

I have a lot of binge watching in front of me. Now that Warrior Nun has been renewed for a third season, I feel justified in investing the time to watch season 2, and I need to make the time to finish watching revenge drama The Glory.

My lawn does need a lot of attention, and I think I will need to mow it sometime this week. Plus prune the fruit trees.

Already, several well worn business shirts have gone into a charity collection bag, and my white t-shirts for work days are going to be converted into cleaning rags. I also am going to get rid of most of my ties – not that I have worn them very much in recent years.

Life is good when you can retire at an age where you are still young enough to enjoy it. Right now, I count myself very lucky.

www.joe.ie/movies-tv/netflix-warrior-nun-uncancelled-776838

I am delighted that Warrior Nun has been uncancelled and I look forward to bingeing season 3 on Netflix!!!!

There is a very memorable passage in AB Facey’s beloved memoir A Fortunate Life where an unnamed senior British officer visits the front line at Gallipoli. When he suggests a highly risky and pointless action and is told that they do not want to lose more men needlessly, his callous reply is: “What is a few men?”.

In 1989, the Australian band Hunters and Collectors named their album “What’s a few men?” in tribute to this mention. I immediately got the reference.

Facey went on to comment that he and his comrades then would refer to that visiting officer as Lord Kitchener, probably with the awareness that the Field Marshall would have been equally as callous as (if not even more than) his fellow officer.

Kitchener, who made his name as the anti-hero of the Boer War, before becoming the poster boy of the British Army in the First World War, would have at least have been extremely callous, if not indifferent, to the lives of friend and foe alike. It was, after all, in the Boer War where the concentration camp was invented, as a way of controlling the enemy civilian population.

With the lens of 120 years perspective, it is difficult not to see the civilian deaths from disease in those camps as a crime against humanity, or that Kitchener, if he were alive today, would not be facing prosecution under the Rome Statute.

Whether Kitchener himself was guilty of ordering war crimes, such as those which Breaker Morant then committed, and for which Morant was rightly punished, is debatable.

This has come to the fore again this week, where people in Adelaide are petitioning for the inclusion of Breaker Morant’s name on a Boer War Memorial, just shows how little we have learned.

Let us get this straight: Breaker Morant was a murderer and a war criminal. He killed several unarmed people, including civilians. It is possible that he was following unofficial orders from the British command structure, but this would not exonerate him of his actions.

In recent years, various elderly Germans who, as teenagers, served in some minor capacity in concentration camps, have faced justice for their complicity in crimes against humanity. Why is it that those people are facing justice, whilst on the other side of the world we are still considering Morant as a hero and a martyr?

Following immoral orders does not exonerate the guilty of their crimes.

Which segues into the other current matter. The Australian Federal Police have had to abandon their initial war crimes investigation into Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC due to the possible inadmissibility of some of the evidence they have, whilst a senior barrister has raised the opinion that quite possibly, his infamy means that Roberts-Smith cannot be fairly prosecuted.

I do hope that these issues are resolved, and that due process of the law can be followed properly, either to exonerate Roberts-Smith, or to convict him.

In the case of Roberts-Smith, unlike those of Morant, there are no suspected orders from the command structure to commit war crimes. These are the product of a toxic warrior culture, of which Roberts-Smith was a progenitor rather than a product. The command failures which led to this culture flourishing do not exonerate the officers involved from failure as leaders, but they do not make them complicit in war crimes, the way that Kitchener may well have been.

Whilst we await the prosecution of one suspected war criminal, we should not be celebrating a convicted war criminal as a hero. Nor should the carefully curated display devoted to Ben Robert-Smith’s military career continue to be on show at the Australian War Memorial.

We need to remove any lingering doubt about what we as a nation expect from our soldiers. There is no glory, nor heroism, in war crimes.

American historian SLA Marshall is best known for his study Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command.

In this book, he asserted that, in most US Army units in the Second World War, only one in five men actually fired their weapons. In elite units, the ratio was one in four.

Of those who did, he claimed that many were traumatised by the experience, such is the psychological reluctance to take human life, even in situations like war, where it is considered acceptable by most people, rather than murder.

Many of the non-traumatised shooters were, according to Marshall, suffering from psychopathic disorders.

This does go some way to explaining why the Waffen SS were so effective at fighting, even when greatly outnumbered. The reluctance to kill was probably missing in most of the members of that force.

[NB – the data behind Marshall’s study has been discredited, but academics have found that the underlying premise holds regardless.]

The recent civil court findings against Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC in his defamation case have me thinking about Marshall and his findings. The court found, on the balance of probabilities, that he is guilty of war crimes and murder on the battlefield, particularly the execution of unarmed prisoners – and of compelling other soldiers to participate in such killings.

The findings were so significant that whilst the court did not find that there was sufficient evidence of other matters (such as domestic violence), there was no defamation of his character in those unproven allegations, because of the severity of the proven accusations.

This matter is not over. A civil court finds on balance of probabilities. No criminal charges have been laid, and if criminal charges are laid, the standard of proof is higher – beyond reasonable doubt.

When considering the human taboo against taking life, it does worry me about what sort of people we are lionising for their heroics. Killing in war is a necessary evil, but it is not something which is glorious or something to celebrate. It is no coincidence that our greatest war heroes are Simpson the stretcher bearer and Weary Dunlop, the army doctor – men who saved lives rather than took them. They are the ones to whom we have erected statues, and rightly so.

The finding of the civil court is extremely serious. The most high profile and feted war hero from Australia’s recent and fruitless involvement in Afghanistan has been found not to be a war hero, but to be a war criminal. This was not surprising – the Brereton Report was released in November 2020 and indicated that war crimes had been committed and covered up by 25 members of the ADF.

At the time of that report, I wrote in this blog about the ‘ghost’ of Breaker Morant. For too long we have considered Breaker Morant a martyr and a scapegoat, rather than what he truly was – a war criminal who was rightly executed.

It is time that we exorcise the ghost of Breaker Morant.

Firstly, we need to make it clear that there is no place in the Australian Defence Forces for war crimes, and that there is no glory or profit or matyrdom to be gained from such conduct. This hang over from the case of Breaker Morant in the Boer War, that he was a martyr, needs to be finally dealt with – we need to accept the truth instead of mythologising such people.

Secondly, we do need to prosecute any of these alleged war criminals, including Corporal Roberts-Smith, with the full force of the law. Holding the Victoria Cross should not be seen as giving someone immunity from being held to account.

Thirdly, the Australian Army’s leadership needs to be held to account. It was commissioned officers who had the oversight of our forces in Afghanistan, who turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the conduct of those NCOs who committed such crimes. This failure of leadership has never adequately been addressed – many of the officers involved have progressed further up the chain of command, medals intact, and are now generals, their careers embellished rather than sullied by their command experience in such situations.

I would say that until this is resolved, the most senior positions in the ADF beyond Chief of Army (ie the sole four star position and various of the inter-service three star positions) should be held exclusively by senior RAAF and RAN figures.

Fourthly, there are many medals and citations still to revoke. This includes not just that held by Corporal Roberts-Smith, but those of those officers and current generals who failed as leaders.

This is what we need, as a civilised community and democracy where our defence forces are accountable to our elected leaders, both to maintain our security and our democracy through a professional and ethical defence force. It is also what both our allies need from us, and our potential enemies. How we treat our enemies is a mark not only of how we then should expect them to treat us, but how we should behave as a decent society, one which should be reluctant to resort to warfare.