Forget about a double dissolution. Tony Abbott knows it would not only help Clive Palmer. It would help Billy Shorten too. It would be good for the Palmer United party because it would halve the quota needed to elect senators. It would help the Labor party in the light of the government’s low standing in the polls which are unlikely to change much in the near future. After a double dissolution the Coalition could end up being far worse off in the Senate and losing the House as well. So expect more Canberra shambles for the time being.

The received view is that the public will not pack the cinemas to see a documentary. I hope this is wrong in the case of Once My Mother, Sophia Turkiewicz’s deeply moving story of her mother Helen, who had, she believed, betrayed and abandoned her as a child in a Catholic orphanage in Adelaide. The were reconciled years later as the old woman was dying with dementia. But it is more than an emotion-charged autobiography, it also tells the epic but neglected story of those postwar Displaced Persons, 170,000 of whom settled in Australia after surviving years of deportation, horror and slave camps.

Aged 16, the orphaned Helen was one of up to two million Poles deported to Stalin’s Gulag in 1939 and forgotten by the world. But she was able to join the permitted exodus of Poles who volunteered for General Anders’s Polish army to fight Hitler. She trudged thousands of kilometres to link up with the British army in Persia while tens of thousands of her fellow travellers died on the way. When the war ended, she was dispatched to a Displaced Persons’ camp in Northern Rhodesia where Sophia was born. After six years in Africa, Helen with Sophia were shipped, penniless, from Mombasa to Fremantle. They were among the first of the DPs settled in Australia. When a desperate Helen placed or ‘dumped’ her seven-year-old daughter in the Adelaide orphanage, the heartbroken Sophia felt a wound from which it took a lifetime to recover. The film supplements Wanda Skowronska’s marvellous memoir of the DP experience To Bonegilla From Somewhere. It opens in cinemas on 24 July.

Where do you draw the line? Is there a line to be drawn? The recent defence by a District Court judge in NSW of incest between consenting adults will surely strengthen the hand of the ‘slippery slope’ lobby. That lobby has for generations opposed the liberalisation of laws governing sexual relations. It gradually accepted the decriminalisation of homosexuality (as the Thorpe affair attests) but continued to ask, what’s next? That turned out to be same-sex marriage — unexpectedly since early spokesmen for the homosexual cause had scorned marriage as bourgeois and oppressive. If we redefine marriage, the slippery slopers said, to include gay marriage, then what is the answer to Senator Cory Bernardi who told the Senate that ‘some creepy people’ would want to legalise bestiality or a love-based union between man and animal? Why not, he asked? But the suggestion so outraged reformers including many moderates that Bernardi was compelled to resign as parliamentary secretary to Tony Abbott who readily accepted the resignation. (‘Cory will have to do a fair bit of political penance, no doubt about that.’) Yet the Melbourne philosopher and bioethicist Peter Singer AC spoke up for love-based zoophilia. He seemed amused. ‘I thought the Liberal party stood for individual freedom,’ he said to the former Liberal Senator Helen Coonan on the ABC’s Q&A. The debate on marriage continues with the Bernardi-Singer issue still flickering in the background.

Now, by questioning the taboo on incest, Judge Garry Neilson has reopened a wider debate on sexual law and practice. Back in April, although only now reported, the judge had suggested that, just as homosexual sex is now widely accepted, so a jury today might find ‘nothing untoward’ in sibling incest in certain circumstances. Thereupon the Attorney-General Bradley Hazzard declared that incest is ‘completely reprehensible, unacceptable, disgusting and criminal’. He was reflecting public opinion — although not legal opinion where Commonwealth and State statutes are uncertain and untested. In any case the Attorney-General referred Judge Neilson to the Judicial Commission. One newspaper wanted him sacked immediately.

Whatever happens in this affair, the slippery slopers will see it as further evidence for their cause, while some reformers will see it as a debate we have to have. The slippery slopers will surely win the debate — in the short if not the long run. In either case it is desirable that the laws be clarified, whatever view one takes of the moral issues.

I have some slight standing in the wider debate since some 18 years ago I edited a book or symposium called Double Take: Six Incorrect Essays where I persuaded the late Christopher Pearson to write the brilliant chapter he called ‘The Ambiguous Business of Coming Out’. It was part memoir, part manifesto and part an intimation of his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. It is a pity that his voice is missing in current debates. But his chapter will figure prominently in a forthcoming collection of his essays and columns called A Better Class of Sunset. Nick Cater has edited it and Jack Snelling, Minister for Health in South Australia, has written an introduction. Connor Court is the publisher. Pearson’s friend Tony Abbott will launch it in September. It will be enlightening to hear what he has to say now about the issues raised by Senator Bernardi and Judge Neilson.