Will its allies around the world ever recover that confidence in the United States, which they lost with President Obama’s bungling of the Syrian crisis? Probably they will — given America’s strength and resilience. But a knell has been sounded, especially for those smaller powers, like Australia, which depend on the US. We have been warned.

I came across a pamphlet during the week that alerted us all to the secret truth that Tony Abbott is not only a liar and misogynist but he only pretends to be a Catholic. The truth, it said, is that he is an old-fashioned freemason whose ambition is to destroy the Catholic Church! The evidence for this illumination is his compromises on abortion. Other illuminati, far more numerous, continue to denounce him as a Catholic fanatic. R.J. Stove of Melbourne has a theory about them: adopting the style of the great English journalist William Cobbett, he refers to the role of THE THING in Australian life — the well established ‘Whig-pagan-cultural Marxist alliance’ for whom Abbott will always be the ‘mad monk’. Why does it not occur to his critics that Abbott is neither fake nor fanatic but simply a centrist conservative?

One of the great sponsors of free trips to China by MPs and journalists has been the hi-tech giant Huawei, near Hong Kong. It claims to be independent, a great free-enterprise success story and ‘outside the system’ in China. It has been lobbying the Australian government for a piece of the action in the NBN. But the Labor government turned it down on national security grounds. (‘Absurd!’ cried Alexander Downer. ‘Clumsy and unprofessional!’ declared Andrew Robb.) The company hopes the Coalition government will reconsider the matter. But speaking to the Sydney Institute about his book Party Time: Who Runs China and How, the journalist and old China hand Rowan Callick warned Parliamentary travellers that nothing is ‘outside the system’ in China. The Communist party is all-pervasive. It can silence any significant opinion in any organisation. It may not always exercise this power but it has it. ‘Buried inside the somewhat opaque company structure [of Huawei] is a Communist party committee which, while not steering day-to-day business, has a veto power over strategic decisions.’

Callick — formerly with the Australian Financial Review and now with the Australian — has a journalist’s eye for the ‘fascinating detail’ which sometimes illuminates daily life. For example, he reports his conversation with a smart, ambitious Chinese woman in her thirties who told him that her heroine when young had been Jane Eyre. (‘I read and reread the novel.’) She wanted to be independent and not rely on her parents’ money. (‘I wish my daughter would read Jane Eyre,’ said Callick.) Today she finds the compulsory Communist party meetings ‘passionless and predictable.’ But when she agreed to let Callick interview her, she chose a coffee shop where they could not be overheard… Callick also describes the current usage of the Chinese equivalent of the communist ‘comrade’ in English. In China it is tongzhi. The term has now been adopted by Chinese gays and lesbians. When used by po-faced old cadres it prompts ill-concealed mirth. The Chinese, Callick says, are ‘highly individualistic and resilient.’ They rejoice in their glorious economic success. But they too hear the sound of distant thunder.

Clive James has always been a fine television performer and a witty interviewee, but what a splendid interview he did with the ABC’s Kerry O’Brien the other day. Perhaps his fatal ilnesses added depth to his wit. He ranged over many themes — women, friendship, Dante, poetry, evil, Australia… I was particularly moved by what he had to say about his poem ‘Son of a Soldier’. James has told the story more than once but never in as heartrending a way. He wrote it in his mid-fifties after visiting his father’s grave in Hong Kong. His father had been due to arrive home in Sydney after years as a Japanese prisoner-of-war. A telegram arrived instead. His plane had crashed. His father was dead.

James, who was six at the time, was ‘scarred and injured’. He learnt that ‘nothing is nailed down’, that creation is not on your side. The incident taught him cold detachment. His father was never there to tell him to ‘find someone, love her and not be stupid.’ But at the graveside almost fifty years later the floodgates opened and he wept ‘authentically’. He added with a glint in his eye that at the back of his mind he knew this graveside moment was good material for a poem. ‘Never trust a writer. They dramatise themselves.’ But that added touch was surely a literary conceit. You trust him on the big story. Top television.

It was more a one-man show than a literary talk at Waverley Library when Richard Glover — columnist and broadcaster — dramatically presented George Clooney’s Haircut and Other Cries for Help, his latest miscellany of scenes from suburban life. He also told, with gusto, the sad-comic story of his family. Glover’s mother was one of those Australians of English descent who, distressed about her down-market ancestors, invented a posh family tree. It is a far more common folk practice than we allow for. Glover calls it the Magwitch Syndrome. She also told Glover that he is Australia’s first artificially inseminated child. None of this is in George Clooney’s Haircut but when I asked him, Glover agreed he will make a book of it some time soon. The packed house applauded.