John Howard tells the story about a public meeting organised by the Women’s Electoral Lobby back in 1974 when he was first a candidate for Bennelong. He was asked his view on abortion. He gave, he said, a ‘rather conservative response’. It caused ‘an audible intake of breath’ from the audience. But he won points for candour. ‘On sensitive social issues it is always desirable to be direct and clear.’ It was a common experience. Something similar happened to me a little later. I too faced a WEL meeting where one member asked whether I agreed that a pregnant woman must have exclusive ‘control’ over her body. I took the usual view that, since someone else’s life is involved, I could not agree — unless the woman’s life or mental health is at risk. This view was grudgingly accepted as arguable even if wrong. But that was then.

In the following years opinions hardened until President Clinton found a formula on which a ceasefire could be based: abortion should be ‘safe, legal and rare’. Now even Tony Abbott in Clinton mode insists he has no plans to alter current permissive abortion laws. Into this moral armistice Senator Cory Bernardi has stepped with his new book The Conservative Revolution. He has broken the ceasefire and called for a new debate. Abortion, he declares, is submission to ‘the creeping culture of death’. You have to admire his sang-froid as he responds to tight-lipped inquisitors. But is his language ‘direct and clear’ on such a ‘sensitive’ issue or simply provocative and counter-productive? I will have more to say about The Conservative Revolution next week.

Tony Abbott is determined to mount and win a referendum to incorporate a recognition of the Aborigines as the first Australians in the federal Constitution. He included his plan in his lively (‘Have a go!’) New Year message and he is going about it sensibly with wide public consultation (‘conversation’). Many Liberal voters will back him out of loyalty. But others will remain cautious. It would, they believe, reintroduce a divisive racist theme into the Constitution and do nothing to solve indigenous problems. The New South Wales Constitution gave Aborigines the vote in 1866, 100 years before the Commonwealth moved on the matter. But it made little difference. Public opinion has long supported Aborigines but looks to them to take the necessary initiatives, not to lawyers. This is the obstacle the Prime Minister will have to overcome. It will be no push-over.

The SBS TV series on ASIO, its failures, successes and follies will no doubt dig up plenty of material. But it is unlikely to explore the allegation raised more than once by Paul Monk, formerly of the Defence Intelligence Organisation, that the KGB had moles inside ASIO. Monk asks why details of Soviet ‘penetration’ of governments in many countries (as documented by the Soviet defector Vasili Mitrokhin in 1992) have been made public — with the extraordinary exception of Australia. Here Mitrokhin’s revelations have been hushed up. Monk believes that Soviet moles were active in ASIO between 1952 and 1985, including one who became head of security vetting. No one in a position to deny or refute his claims — or his competence to make them — has done so. It is a suitable theme for a television documentary. But do not expect any hint of it in the current SBS series.

Here is an idea for a film. In 1996/7 the director Bruce Beresford was researching his Paradise Road about how Australian, British and Dutch nurses coped with their horrific experiences as POWs in Japanese prison camps during the second world war. In one Indonesian prison they maintained morale by creating a voice orchestra, a choir without songs. (The Japanese guards banned singing songs.) But Beresford stumbled across unpublicised details about what happened when the war ended. Indonesian nationalists ablaze with hatred of the Dutch seized the opportunity to murder as many Dutch nurses as they could. The nurses’ only hope was to be shipped to Australia as quickly as possible. But Australian unions refused to give them any priority because union policy was that the Dutch women were disgusting colonialists and the Indonesian nationalists fearless freedom fighters. ‘The fact they were attacking unarmed women who had suffered years in prison camps did not appear to be a matter of concern.’ In a bizarre turn of events the principal defenders of the Dutch nurses turned out to be their Japanese prison guards. Beresford was reminded of these events by reading in Hal Colebatch’s Australia’s Secret War how unionists sabotaged our troops during the war. When I told Colebatch about Beresford’s research, he was amazed. He had not heard about it. ‘It would make a film in itself,’ he added. As it happened, Beresford intended to work some of these postwar details into his film. But he gave up as it is a separate story.

Paradise Road is a wonderful film. I enjoy it as much for its big theme as for some of its details. I liked, for example, the use of the splendid old Marrickville Town Hall (built in the 1870s) as Raffles Hotel in Singapore, or the building of a Japanese prison camp on the outskirts of the Port Douglas tourist resort in Queensland. It is also a pleasure to see Cate Blanchett in one of her first important roles before she became world famous. But it would still be good to see a realistic picture of the postwar transition in Indonesia.