Cheers all round for Andrew Bolt who extracted an apology, however grudging, from the ABC for broadcasting false and defamatory slurs on him! One for the books!

For a hundred years the mainland states have laughed at the Tasmanian Hare-Clark quota-preferential system of voting. With its ‘droop quotas’, its ‘Robson rotations’, its ban on how-to-vote cards, its multi-member electorates and elimination of gerrymanders, it is, the critics say, incomprehensible and makes decisive results almost impossible. It is in short the creation of mad intellectuals — unlike those practical clever dicks on the mainland who gave us single-member, gerrymandered electorates with first-past-the-post winners as modified by preferential votes. This favours, we are told, decisive results, even healthy landslides. Yet last weekend it was Tasmania which produced the landslide and South Australia which looks like resulting in another hung parliament. Whatever the critics say, Tasmanians are unlikely to give up their peculiar ways.

In a trenchant address to the National Press Club, Michael Fullilove of the Lowy Institute dismissed the familiar Australian boast that we punch above our weight in world affairs. The phrase is, he said, ‘demeaning’ and ‘debilitating’. It is also wrong. In fact we punch below our weight whenever we can get away with it. He ended his speech in a fine flourish with a quotation from Bismarck: the world’s leaders must listen for the rustle of God’s mantle in history and try to catch His hem for a few steps. The trouble is that the world’s power has been moving away from our ‘great and powerful’ western friends and moving eastwards towards us. But we haven’t been listening for God’s mantle. Our defence spending is under 2 per cent of GDP — ‘a level not seen since before the second world war.’ We have fewer diplomatic posts than Belgium. (‘Madness.’) None of our commercial television networks has a full-time correspondent in Beijing. So we have a choice: ‘Do we want to be a little nation with a cramped vision of our future? Or do we want to move up in weight? I hope we decide to think big.’ The tone is set at the top.

The new Australian prison film Healing revived some sore memories from a former life — from my spell as minister for prisons (or ‘corrective services’) in New South Wales back in the 1970s. The film (starring Hugo Weaving and Don Hany and directed by Craig Monahan) is about attempts to rehabilitate prisoners in a low-security ‘facility’ by engaging them in the healing of wounded birds of prey. The ending is not quite a happy one but it is the next best thing — the recognition that we all, humans or raptors, are wounded in our cages and need a healing sanctuary. Set in a Victorian prison camp, it is one of the few films to try to do justice to ‘corrective services’.

It inevitably reminded me of the fate of the royal commission into prisons which it was my job, under Premier Eric Willis, to set up 1976. It was a turbulent period. Prisons were rarely out of the news. There were riots, rallies, action groups, plays and television debates. Actresses thought it chic to marry prisoners. Leftists regarded all inmates as political prisoners. (On one of my visits to Parramatta Gaol, Jim McNeil, an inmate who wrote a popular play The Chocolate Frog, gave me a copy of the prisoners’ magazine Contact which ran a debased Nietzschean line: the criminal life of danger is superior to the suburban life of security.)

The royal commission we set up had three respected commissioners and an acclaimed consultant, Sir Leon Radzinowicz of Cambridge. It had the full backing of the prisons commissioner Walter McGeechan, a reformer in the spirit of the film Healing. We wanted it to be the most thorough investigation of prison systems in the world. But everything went wrong. Premier Willis called an election and lost. The new government sacked almost everybody I had persuaded to serve. It set up a new royal commission as a means of discrediting the former government. It destroyed the career of Walter McGeechan. In his book Walking on Water: A Life in the Law, Chester Porter QC summed up: ‘An opportunity was missed that will probably never come again in my lifetime.’ To rub salt into the wound the new government appointed as minister for prisons a man who was himself sent to prison for taking bribes to release prisoners. It is all blood under the bridge now. But the mistreatment of McGeechan still sticks in my craw. Even after all these years, there are some who want the government to establish an annual Walter McGeechan memorial lecture on prison reform. That won’t happen. But at least the film Healing does something to keep his spirit alive.

Paul Howes of the AWU stirred the trade union possum when he called recently for a ‘grand compact’ between unions, business and government. Billy Shorten of course said Howes was talking through his hat. But Howes pushed on. The other day he carried his message to the free enterprise think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies. We should, he said, depoliticise industrial relations. We should follow Germany where the big trade unions get Angela Merkel along as keynote speaker.

This is obviously a Good Idea. But Howes could set an example. Why does he not have Tony Abbott or Eric Abetz as keynote speakers at his next AWU conference?