I first came across Neville Wran back in January 1946. Just out of school but not yet enrolled in Sydney University, I stumbled on a student advertisement inviting everyone to a rehearsal by the Sydney University Dramatic Society (SUDS) of an anti-Nazi play (No More Peace) by the German expressionist/communist poet Ernst Toller, with lyrics by W.H. Auden. The theatre was an old upstairs saloon of a sleazy city pub. I had barely stuck my head in the door when the desperate director, Kurt Kaiser (aka John Kay), drafted me into the role of Nazi doctor ready to pass every man jack, however unfit, as fit for military service. Neville Wran, student activist and newspaper columnist, was cast as a burlesque Hitler. The critics panned my performance as lacking conviction. They thought Wran’s Hitler needed more work. I never trod the boards again, but Wran strode onwards to greater things on other stages, forensic and parliamentary. There is a moral in this cameo somewhere but I am not sure what it is.

Journalists are usually the last people you would ask to give a public talk on journalism. It would be bit like asking lawyers to speak publicly and frankly about the legal profession. It’s not going to happen. But last week four leading journalists had a go on the more limited subject of public broadcasting. It was a CIS forum on ‘What’s the Point of the ABC?’ The journalists were: Nick Cater, Andrew West, Paul Kelly and Brendan O’Neill. West made a robust case for the ABC. No newspaper or broadcaster, he said, comes close to the ABC’s Radio National for ‘discussion and discovery’. He cited his own programme, the Religion and Ethics Report. Where else, he asked, would you find serious discussion of the role of religion in the recent Indian elections; or the threat to Christians around the world; or how the Grand Mufti of Egypt could decide the life or death of 529 Egyptian protesters? He referred warmly to ‘giants’ of commercial radio like Alan Jones, John Laws and Neil Mitchell, but insisted that commercial radio ‘cannot do what we do’. I know what he means. I have occasionally been invited on to such programmes as The Philosopher’s Zone (to talk about Michael Oakeshott) or Counterpoint (about Jim McAuley); there is not the slightest possibility of any commercial radio station being interested in such obscure figures. So, declared West: ‘Here I stand, possibly alone in this forum in my defence of the national broadcaster.’

He was not quite alone. The other three agreed that we need a public broadcaster, just as we need a public library or public gallery. But they all thought the ABC has failed in its mission. It has ‘lost its way,’ said Cater. It is suffering from ‘a profound identity crisis’ and spends too much of its annual $1 billion on stuff barely worth watching. O’Neill agreed: ‘It has lost its way,’ he said, and become ‘shoddy’. Kelly thought the problem was that it had never been clear about what its way is or should be. What is to be done? Cater called for a new Dix Report on the ABC, and O’Neill for ‘a massive rethink’. Kelly wanted the ABC to acknowledge it has a problem. Everyone agrees that, in Cater’s words, ‘we need a robust, constructive, national debate’ — everyone, that is, except the ABC. The forum was a good start, but only a start. No one mentioned the Chris Kenny case. There was barely a passing reference to leftist biases in the ABC.

I had never been to a formal lunch to celebrate the Queen’s birthday. But I could not resist an invitation from Australians for Constitutional Monarchy and the Australia-Britain Society to celebrate it last week in the distinguished company of the Governor of New South Wales, Professor Marie Bashir, in the Strangers’ Dining Room of Parliament House, Sydney. The Usher of the Black Rod met Her Excellency as she arrived at 12.05pm in the Parliament courtyard and escorted her to the Strangers’ Lounge where some 165 of us were waiting. She was on a tight schedule. She had to leave at 1.45pm to greet the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince George as they arrived at the Opera House — ‘our future Queen and two future Kings’, as one enthusiast put it. At 12.25pm we were ‘encouraged’ into the Strangers’ Dining Room, followed by the Governor at 12.30pm. We began by heartily singing ‘Advance Australia Fair’. Speeches followed including one by the captain of Riverside Girls High School (Lucy Burke). We lustily sang the royal anthem and joined in the loyal toast. The Governor addressed us for about 15 minutes — on the Queen’s ‘impeccable and inspirational leadership’, the grandeur of British traditions, ‘the innate nobility’ of the Aborigines and Australia’s future in Asia. ‘What a wonderful time it is to be alive!’ After the vote of thanks and presentation of a splendid bouquet, Her Excellency left for the Opera House, and the raffle was drawn — first prize a (donated) hamper of luxury British goods. What sticks in my memory of the occasion is the Governor’s speech and the passionate, defiant and good-humoured way in which everybody belted out ‘God Save Our Gracious Queen’.

Brendan O’Neill, the Irish libertarian noted above, has joined in the 18C debates in a striking tribute to Senator George Brandis as an Attorney-General inspired by Voltaire. He is, says O’Neill, ‘the most exotic, rarely sighted creature of the 21st century, a politician who believes in freedom of speech.’ Look it up. It’s in Spiked Online.