Australia Diary

The Australian Jews strike me as a robust and confident community. This is surely because they have nothing to fear from their fellow Aussies, who are on the same page. Australians don’t have Britain’s thousand-year history of — how to put it — profound cultural ambivalence towards the Jews. Australia also still has a strong sense of itself as a nation (although this is now under assault, as in Britain, from the intelligentsia). Self-confident nations tend not to turn upon their Jews. Britain’s national identity is unravelling; one symptom is the current net emigration of indigenous Brits. The Australian Jewish audiences I speak to, many of them Holocaust survivors or their children, are aghast to hear about both the virulence of British anti-Israel bigotry and the way in which the establishment is sucking up to Islamic extremists — or as our government tells us to call them, ‘anti-Islamic’ extremists. I warn them, however, to treat me with circumspection since I am known to be an extremist Zionist insane warmongering Islamophobe. They cheer.

It is very odd to hear people in Australia still talking about Tony Blair with admiration. Wasn’t it a treat to hear him at the Iraq inquiry, they say; isn’t he just so wonderfully articulate, what a shame he isn’t still Britain’s prime minister. I tell them that in Britain people think Blair should be prosecuted for war crimes and that the Iraq inquiry is widely viewed as a hanging tribunal for a mendacious and illegal war. They are baffled. When I tell them that it was public feeling against the Iraq war and his support for Israel that drove Blair from office early, they are open-mouthed.

I am reminded that when I last spoke in Australia a few years ago, I shocked one Blair admirer when I observed that the former PM’s support for the Iraq war was actually out of character as the one good thing he did in a governmental record of general nihilistic radicalism. The name of the individual whom I thus so cruelly disabused was Tony Abbott.

In Perth, I observe the enormous amount of new building that is going on. The city is booming from the exploitation of Western Australia’s vast natural mineral resources. Ah, I think, so this must be where all those British emigrés are fetching up. I am conscious of an unfamiliar sensation. It is called being in a place that has a purpose and a future.

I am mesmerised by Tony Abbott. A conservative politician who actually articulates conservative values! A political leader who actually leads! Such a phenomenon is unknown in Britain, where David Cameron’s Conservatives believe they have to go with the left-wing flow. And of all issues, Abbott actually won his party leadership through scorning man-made global warming theory for the scam that it is. This is surely as if Galileo had been elected to the Papacy. Abbott thus took on and bested not only Prime Minister Rudd but his own Liberal party colleagues who had supported Rudd’s ruinous environmental policies. And wonder of wonders, such realism is winning votes; people queue up to say to me: ‘At last, a politician who tells it as it is.’ As a result, Abbott is snapping at Rudd’s heels. A politician who is not afraid to tell unfashionable truths to ideological power; a conservative who is fighting on the right side of the culture wars. Can I bottle him and take him home with me?

I arrive in Sydney to 40-degree heat and humidity to match. People talk about the weather almost as obsessively as they do in Britain. I admire the city’s exquisite waterfront, and note how much of Sydney’s recreational life is conducted on or around water. This surely contributes to the pervasive sense — despite the city’s troubling slum areas — of general well-being and high quality of life. Kind friends take me out for a spin round the harbour in their boat. The rain teems down and we put up umbrellas in the open stern, but despite the tropical deluge the views are still magnificent.

When the weather improves, I do the glorious walk from my hotel on Bondi Beach along the cliffs. I do no more than paddle in the ocean because I fear that I may be eaten by a shark. Brits like me probably think that Australian beaches are regularly scenes of carnage straight out of Jaws just as Aussies believe that England is still ruled by chinless wonders in ermine. To my joy, I discover a wonderful sea-water pool carved out of the rocks on Bronte Beach, provided for no charge by the munificent Waverley council. I bet such a pool wouldn’t be free in Britain. But then there aren’t so many sharks in Britain. Only in politics and the media.

I am bemused to read that the populist demagogue and reputed über-xenophobe Pauline Hanson intends to come to live in Britain. Talk about frying pans and fires! Doesn’t she realise that she’s coming to a multicultural paradise where we are fortunate to enjoy the benefits of a burgeoning parallel informal jurisdiction of Sharia law, where the burqa is more visible than the Beefeaters, and where our wise government employs Islamic radicals to advise it on countering Islamic radicalism? On the other hand, perhaps she does. The truly racist British National Party, which is making opportunistic hay with the mainstream parties’ refusal to address legitimate concerns about mass immigration and Islamisation, may be looking for a leader who doesn’t look like a thug. Just when so many Brits are going the other way, too. Australia gets Ben Elton, we get Pauline Hanson. Says it all, really.