More from Poor Peter’s Almanac: Kevin Rudd is disliked by all who know him but is popular on television. Tony Abbott is liked by all who meet him but is wooden on camera or platform. So Rudd has a short-term advantage in campaigning. But I expect Abbott to win the election. If he wins narrowly his enemies in Parliament will not be opposite but behind him. Contingency plans are already being prepared. A grim prospect. The best result would be an Abbott landslide. Unlikely.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus made it clear in his talk to the Sydney Institute last week that he has not scrapped the government’s anti-discrimination bill which proposed to make it unlawful to offend someone at work over his political opinions. All he has done, he said, is refer it back to his department for refinement. So if the Rudd government hangs on, stand by for new attacks on freedom of speech.

But Dreyfus was in fine fettle when he turned his guns on the Coalition. One minute he was congratulating it for its bipartisan support of the Labor government in the case before the International Court of Justice against Japanese so-called ‘scientific whaling’. Next minute he was denouncing these same exemplars of good sense for their climate change ‘denialism’. They are not just mistaken, they are ‘inane’, ‘absurd’, ‘dishonest’, ‘destructive’, ‘farcical’, ‘hollow’, ‘deceitful’, ‘ineffective’, ‘obfuscatory’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘distorted’. He even called up the Victorian bushfires of 2011 and the Queensland floods of 2013 as evidence of global warming (ignoring all the dreadful bushfires, floods and cyclones, not to mention killer heatwaves, recorded over the past 200 years). He called for an open ‘contest of ideas’, but what chance of that is there when in the same breath he dismissed the eminent sceptical scientists and their supporters as members of the Flat Earth Society?

Small wonder that university students have a limited understanding of a free society when so often the university staff sets an authoritarian and intolerant standard. Earlier this year staff at Melbourne University objected to a student society’s political banner which criticised people-smugglers. They reported the students to university security officers who ordered them to take the banner off-campus! Last week Griffith University staff complained about the proposed visit by the Aboriginal MP Bess Price whose opinions they considered ‘incorrect’. A university official then withdrew her invitation. At least in
this case the Vice-Chancellor apologised to Bess Price for the staff’s bigotry.

Good news that Queensland has rejected the proposed Gonski make-over of the state’s schools. (Minister for education John-Paul Langbroek said he could see ‘no point’ in meeting his federal counterpart, Billy Shorten, again.) The Victorian Premier Napthine has been equally outspoken. (He does not want ‘bureaucrats in Canberra dictating the day-to-day running of Victoria’s schools’.) Premier Barnett in West Australia long ago took the lead in rejecting ‘Gonski centralism’. No chance now of all the states ‘signing up’ before the deadline.

Sydney critics were unanimous: Angels in America is one of the great theatrical experiences of the age. It is everything from ‘wonderful’ and ‘unforgettable’ to ‘magical’ and ‘unmissable’. So I went along to see. I found it a trashy and vulgar show with cardboard characters and flat dialogue. Subtitled ‘a gay fantasia’ and set in the 1980s, it is only partly redeemed by its moving, naturalistic scenes of the misery of homosexuals afraid to ‘come out’ and of others horribly dying from AIDS. But three hours and ten minutes of it! And that was only the first half. I was also turned off by the obnoxious politics of the author Tony Kushner. In his comic book, all conservatives are evil. Anti-communism is the great curse of the age, typified by sleazy Roy Cohn, whose boast is that he helped send Ethel Rosenberg, Stalin’s spy, to the electric chair. The play is well acted and directed. Did I allow its politics to blind me to its subtleties? Would the panel discussion, I wondered, be helpful? Panellist Dennis Altman likened the play to Desperate Housewives, director Eamon Flack considered it too long, and Rabbi Lawrence offered some reflections (he called them ‘Talmudic’) on love. The audience applauded enthusiastically. But I ‘went out by the same door as in I went’.

When I was a boy at primary school a cheerful old clergyman came to our school once a week to tell us Bible stories. They were irresistible: Moses in the bull-rushes, Daniel in the lions’ den, David and Goliath. He did not give much ‘religious instruction’ but he did soften us up, as it were, for the Christian message. The same may be said of the TV mini-series The Bible now being screened around Australia after extraordinarily popular runs in America and Britain. The secular critics remain unconvinced. They note stilted acting, a heavy-handed script (‘You always were a fighter, Moses,’ says Pharaoh), and many deviations from the Bible story. Christian critics are more permissive. The CEO of Bible Society Australia said: ‘My prayer is that the eyes and ears of Aussies will be overwhelmed by the living word of God.’ There is no doubt that an audio-visual presentation is no substitute for a meditative, imaginative reading of the Bible. But it may in some cases be a first step. Almost 50 years ago a New York critic said of John Huston’s film The Bible: ‘This will set back the cause of Christianity by 2,000 years.’ You can’t say that of this new The Bible. I will keep watching it. It takes me back to my school days and that kindly clergyman.