The Inspector-General of Misconception

by Frank Moorhouse

  It would cause the languid Australian psyche to reconfront its civitas (to put it in simple words); it would be a Festival of Rationale (that is, the rationale for our public living arrangements).

  IN DEFENCE OF THE COMMITTEE

  The most disparaged part of democratic life, other than the long speech, is the committee.

  ‘We are overrun by them, like the Australians were by rabbits,’ said Winston Churchill during the Second World War. He spent much time trying to circumvent or abolish committees but they saved him from quite a few wilful disasters (the invasion of Portugal being one).

  Yet probably, hundreds of thousands of Australians serve on committees, panels, inquiries, councils, working parties, boards. We are hugely skilled at committee work and procedure.

  We applaud the work of Dr Judith Brett of La Trobe University, who in a remarkable essay, ‘Meetings, Parliament, and Civil Society’ has focused on the role of ‘meetings’ in our economic and social life.

  The author Frank Hardy used to tell a good committee story about the Meatworkers Union of Victoria.

  During the Second World War, the abattoir workers’ executive committee in Bendigo voted in favour of a second front being opened to take the pressure off the Soviet Union.

  They decided to send the resolution directly to Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill.

  When sending it off, the branch secretary added at the bottom: ‘Please note that this resolution has still to be ratified by the membership and should not be acted upon until then.’

  The committee system is really the unrecognised tier of government working alongside and within local, state and federal government.

  Much of the day-to-day life of the nation is run by committee, including much of commercial life.

  Arts patronage is run by committee.

  Nearly all of our organised recreation is run by committee. Most of our major judicial decisions are taken by juries, a committee.

  We have heard that even some families have ‘committees’.

  Nearly everyone tries to avoid serving on them (or at least ‘protests’ about having to serve).

  The most deadly ridicule of the committee comes from a near-forgotten, perniciously humorous book called Parkinson’s Law by C. Northcote Parkinson, which sets out to analyse the madnesses of bureaucracy and committee work (surely, the basis of the TV show, Yes, Minister).

  Parkinson thinks that an effective committee is made up of nine members.

  Policy is made by three who are talkative and able. Information is supplied to these three by two experts, and a financial warning is given by one other who sees his or her role in life to issue financial warnings.

  With a neutral chair, this accounts for seven of the committee members.

  Parkinson says that the other two are silent members. ‘We know little as yet about the function of the two silent members,’ he says.

  Committees are usually composed of experts, officials and laypeople.

  There is a tendency now for the laypeople on committees or in public to assume a ‘representative’ position which, it is implied, carries a new kind of expertise.

  So a gay person on the committee is expected to ‘speak for gays’, a Tasmanian to speak for all Tasmanians.

  Committees increasingly wish to include someone from the ‘arts’, or ‘a parent’ and these people are so selected and unofficially labelled to give the committee political credence.

  This blithely ignores the multiplicity of divisions and contradictions which exist, say, in ‘the gay community’ or among feminists or the arts or whatever.

  Or within any given individual, may we add.

  True, these people might have paid more attention to data from these areas. But maybe not.

  Alcoholics do not necessarily know much about the chemical, organic or psychological effects of alcohol. Or anything about alcohol.

  Poets do not necessarily have a clue about arts funding.

  Attributing or accepting representative status should be carefully considered.

  But why is committee work bemoaned?

  Firstly, with few exceptions, committees are characterised in political science terms as bodies which ‘lack original jurisdiction’.

  They are usually adjuncts of a larger body – the membership of the organisation, the corporation – and as such are places of delegated and limited power. Most committees can, if necessary, be overruled.

  Yet right down to the golf club management committee, committees do exercise power. They hire and fire. They spend money (very often public money). They implement plans and they build. They buy and sell property. They formulate policy. They admit and they expel.

  The characteristic which lowers the appeal of the committee is the anonymity of committee work.

  No glamour comes to the individual committee member.

  It has lead, quite correctly, to the notion that committee work is ‘thankless’.

  Committees are also time-consuming. That is, everyone on the committee can have a say, and usually does. The work does expand to fill the time available for it.

  This is not necessarily a bad thing.

  One of the most interesting arguments we have had about committee work was on the Press Council.

  One of the members, Edmund Rouse, a newspaper executive from Tasmania, had a game he played where he timed our decision-making. This, he argued, was good executive practice.

  He would proclaim it a ‘good day’ if we finished earlier than we had the previous month.

  Half-humorously, we argued that this was philosophically and technically an incorrect approach to the work of the Press Council.

  We said that we should pride ourselves on the length of our deliberations, on the time we put into the subtleties of a complaint rather than the rapidity of our decision.

  The pleasure of this argument for us was that it took nearly an hour and wrecked Edmund’s attempt to finish by 11 am.

  Finally, the irritation of committee work is inherent in the process of decision-making. The calibre of membership is often uneven which means that you have dumb and tiresome people on the committee.

  The committee may take longer to see the point than you do. That is, the committee mirrors life.

  Committee work does not suit large egos, self-seekers, impatient zealots, and revolutionaries (characteristics which are to be found in most of us on some issue or another).

  May we quote, immodestly, the words of a character from a short story, ‘Milton rebutted – intellectual tricks and accusations’?

  The character says, ‘That one does not “like” committee meetings is what committee meetings are all about.

  Committees are supposed to be obstacles to our wilfulness and our rashness …

  Committee-goers are wilful.

  Committees are parental.’

  Despite our impatience, we do change the world, usually for the best – and we do it one committee meeting at a time.

  ON CULTURE

  OUTBREAK OF ANCIENT VIRUS

  The Office of the Inspector-General has been sent reeling with shock following recent reports of an intellectual virus hitherto thought to have been eradicated in all but the most remote parts of Australia.

  Although it was after midnight when the first report came in, we immediately assembled an emergency task force in the operations room.

  We used our PowerPoint program to good effect and could see that our officers were impressed by the composure and cogency of our presentation although were visibly shaken when we revealed the problem.

  We told our assembled officers that what we were witnessing was the reappearance of the dreaded Cultural Cringe, a virus thought to have been eradicated from the anatomy of the nation.

  But worse, gruesome mutations of the original virus were festering.

  The term is attributed to critic A.A. Phillips who said in 1950 that, ‘Above our writers – and other artists – looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon culture. Such a situation almos
t inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe.’

  The first consideration facing our Section for Loose Ends was whether cultural cringing was really a matter for Our Office, being officially concerned, as we are, only with cockeyed and odious notions in public discourse.

  For instance, could it be simply an act of desecration in the Cemetery of Dead Ideas?

  We ruled that it did concern us under the statute concerning Notions To Which There May Be No Happy Answer.

  Around this time, inquiries reached us from some writers of the younger generation living abroad asking whether the virus still existed and what should they do with their lives if they think they have it.

  That the calls came from some so young and full of promise and brilliance broke our heart.

  As they expressed it, there is still an uneasiness which lies within those Australians who have global aspirations.

  Our laboratory identified it as Virus Variant A: Agitated Expatriate.

  Or, This Little Piggy Went To Market.

  The symptoms are as follows: The person who is contemplating living and working overseas (especially in the arts) experiences an immobilising dizziness accompanied by the recurring incertitude, What-dreadful-things-will-happen-to-me-if-I-don’t come-back-to-Australia? Will my creative well dry up if I stay away? Or will it, conversely, dry up if I don’t stay away? Or will it be contaminated?

  This hangs over the Australian film directors, for example, who go to Hollywood.

  This is not the pure Cultural Cringe but a new variant of it.

  Phillips himself pronounced the term Cultural Cringe dead in 1983. ‘It is time,’ he said, ‘to accord the phrase decent burial before the smell of the corpse gets too high …’

  This new variant does not say we are not good enough. It says Australia may not be right for me (or not good enough for me) and if I say this, or even think it, I will be severely punished.

  Phillips should be alive today to smell the corpse now as we stand in the graveyard of ideas, in the light rain, while gumbooted cemetery workers dig in the clay to exhume the stinking, twitching body, prematurely buried, still alive and thumping in its coffin, fuelled by rancid nutrients of an unidentifiably foul kind.

  One young operative had to go off and be sick behind a squad car. Even old hands were seen to grow pale, trying to master their nausea by smoking cigars with a studied savoir-faire.

  We instructed all staff to wear rubber gloves and protective clothing while handling the case. We see on the noticeboard that some wag has suggested that given the sensitive nature of the matter and the egos involved, that we also wear ‘kid gloves’ (apologies, goats).

  Following our laboratory autopsy, we tender into evidence the first specimen.

  The specimen was from the Sydney Morning Herald where a columnist commented on the absence of David Malouf from a literary award presentation.

  She says, ‘… the author is currently sojourning at his Tuscan home’.

  The use of the words ‘currently’ and ‘sojourning’ are wink words used to suggest a leisurely occupation in foreign parts free of any considerations about what might be happening back here in Australia.

  The use of the words ‘Tuscan home’ also implicates David. The word ‘Tuscan’ is redolent with exotic superiority. And isn’t ‘Australia’ the only ‘home’ an Australian can have?

  The next specimen was from the Australian in a review of the book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories edited by C.K. Stead.

  One Pacific writer, Ihimaera, had evidently withdrawn from the book complaining about the integrity or whatever of the selection for the book.

  In turn, Stead, the editor of the book, in his introduction attacked Ihimaera for creating the ‘spectacle of … protecting Pacific values by fax from the south of France’.

  Elizabeth Webby, in reviewing this book, comments that the implication is that Ihimaera is ‘an expatriate enjoying the good life in France’.

  However, Elizabeth goes on to ‘excuse’ Ihimaera from this charge with the defence that he is, in fact, in Menton, France, as the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow living, that is, holed up in a little piece of New Zealand in France, so to speak.

  Another specimen from the Sun-Herald. ‘Artist Arthur Boyd [now deceased] says while he may spend much of his time overseas, there should be no doubting where his heart lies. The Australian of the Year defended (sic) his long stays in Britain … “I do live here, I just like to go away from time to time,” he said.’

  The headline of the piece says, ‘Boyd’s art is in the right place.’

  This and the Ihimaera and Malouf specimens were identified by our laboratory as Virus Variant B: The Unhappy Ones Who Are Stuck Here.

  Or This Little Piggy Stayed Home.

  The symptoms of this virus are as follows. The sufferer experiences a profound sense of unease on reading about expatriate fellow nationals – are they having a better life? Are they meeting famous and wonderful people who will advance their career and enrich their life while I am back here working away by the light of a candle in a pokey room in Grub Street?

  Further, the sufferer is then gripped by an uncontrollable rage that the absent fellow national, by living in a desirable foreign environment, is committing a cultural treason; the expatriate has escaped from the limitations of Australian life; that the fellow national, that is, is not back here putting up with the hell of it all on the frontier; is not helping to build the culture.

  The next specimen is an advertisement for Australia Council funding which specified that the recipient ‘must spend most of their time in Australia’.

  This is Virus Variant C: You Will Remain Seated; Do Not Attempt To Leave.

  The sufferer experiences these symptoms: The dread that one by one anyone who is any good is leaving the country and that those who are left will be seen as second rate, poor cousins in the cultural world. In their head the sufferers hear someone saying, Will-the-last-to-leave-please-turn-off-the-lights.

  In the Australia Council and other arts funding bodies, this quickly becomes a craving for the power to stop anyone leaving. ‘If we have our way, no one will get out.’

  These variants of the virus have created an atmosphere where those Australians who have chosen to live abroad and make their careers there are, upon returning to Australia on a visit, made to swear loyalty oaths before they are received, applauded or rewarded.

  The most famous loyalty oath now was written by the late Peter Allen who, every time he visited, had to stand up in public and sing, ‘But no matter how far or how wide I roam, I still call Australia home.’

  Expatriates such as Clive James and Robert Hughes who can’t sing, are made to say, ‘Australia has changed so much since the fifties – it is not the same place which I fled back then. Circus Oz is fantastic and the restaurants are really world class.’

  Findings

  As with the parent virus, all the mutations are spawned by the simple fact of being born in Australia, a country which, on the maps, is Down Under.

  In the cases of Boyd, Ihimaera and Malouf: In this we see, obliquely, some faint hope of a cure.

  More often these days, in interviews and at dinner parties, our operatives report that people remark that ideally they would like to be able to say, ‘I share my time between my apartment in Paris and a humpy in the Flinders Ranges.’

  That seems increasingly to be an acceptable sort of thing to say. Hence, Boyd and his wife, in the article quoted above, were described as dividing their time ‘between Suffolk and Bundanon, their south coast property’.

  Warning: It is still not acceptable to say that as soon as I can arrange it I am getting the hell out of here for good.

  Uncharacteristically for Our Office, we have ruled that the whole matter of the problem of this National Wound Which Will Not Heal is too tricky to adjudicate.

  In the absence of a clear adjudication, we can only issue a public warning as follows. While the parent virus may not be
endemic, an assortment of strains are (many more than identified in this report!), and that even being frequently conscious of the existence of these matters is a type of infection.

  The aim may be to turn the wound to a thing of beauty.

  But for as long as it is asked, it remains a serious question.

  We can only advise that as a general rule, all those in the arts practise Unsafe Art until further notice.

  To expatriates we advise, in the words of that famous expatriate, James Joyce – that they be ‘cunning exiles’. You may conceivably produce a Ulysses.

  And remember that all successful expatriates are, in the end, possessively reclaimed by their mother country.

  CULTURE WARS

  We once had a large wall chart in the ‘War Room’ of our writing office on which we identified the various power groups in the literary arts.

  It was very much the old Left/Right analysis. Nonsocialist/democratic-socialist/communist/Trotskyist/anarchist.

  The Inspector-General’s Office has the chart now.

  Who fights for control of the literary arts in contemporary Australia?

  The literary culture is a network of decision-making processes which can be seen as cultural ganglia or switch points.

  The first ganglia of the literary process is the power to identify, to publicly encourage, and so authorise new talent.

  It is the power to control the gateways to book publication.

  The power groups now include the admission committees to tertiary writing courses and the committees which decide new writer grants.

  It includes the control of writers’ centres and festivals which can in turn decide who appears on panels at writers’ festivals and other events.

  It includes the editorship of the ‘official’ little magazines; that is those funded by the state or by universities – Meanjin, Southerly, Overland, Westerly, and so on – which have as their mission the introduction of new talent to the readership.