Australian
conservatives are mostly stupid and the federal government is just plain dumb,
writes Smage columnist Gerard Henderson.

Well, not quite,
but that’s the gist of his bemusing spray this morning on how the latest ABC
board appointment might well be an own goal in John Howard’s culture war
against the nest of communists and deviants.

“The fact is that
there are few articulate conservatives in Australia and certainly fewer, per capita, than in
the United
States
or Britain,” writes Gerard. By implication then, the vast
majority of Australian conservatives are inarticulate and, in an age when the
ability to communicate is a prime talent, they could therefore appear to be
simply stupid.

If you accept
Henderson’s belief that there’s only a handful of Australian conservatives who
can string a couple of thoughts together, you’ll buy his central thesis that
the Howard Government is particularly stupid for putting so many of its scarce
cultural warriors on the ABC board, as it takes them out of the game. Henderson:

When one-time ABC critic Ron
Brunton was appointed to the ABC board in 2003, he ceased writing his regular
column and effectively dropped out of the public debate. When former ABC critic Janet
Albrechtsen was appointed to the ABC board in 2005, she ceased criticising the
public broadcaster in her weekly column.

It is unlikely, now that he is an
ABC board member, that Windschuttle will repeat the strong criticisms he made
of the ABC in his 2005 Earle Page memorial oration.

In other words, three of the few
articulate political conservatives in Australia have withdrawn from the front-line of the
so-called culture wars, at least to the extent that they were engaged in
public conflict with the ABC. It’s going to be quieter on the ABC front, for a
while at least.

And for what? The ABC board is
only important every five years or so when it appoints, or reappoints, the
public broadcaster’s managing director. I can’t help
suspecting Gerard is right. The worry, though, for anyone not committed to old
lefty ideas, is the suggestion that
Brunton, Albrechtsen and Windschuttle are among the best of Australia’s very few articulate conservatives. If they’re the
best…