REFLECTIONS DURING A PANDEMIC

Catherine McGregor is a freelance writer and a graduate of the Royal Military College who served in the Australian Defence Force for more than three decades including three operational deployments overseas. A well known commentator on television and in the press, McGregor has spent the pandemic reflecting on what it has meant for our national and personal spirit. On 23 June 2020, Catherine McGregor record a “virtual” address for The Sydney Institute that was posted on Youtube. This was followed by a discussion with Gerard Henderson. The text of that address and discussion follows.

REFLECTIONS DURING A PANDEMIC

CATHERINE McGREGOR

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.” So wrote the Bard in Hamlet. After a long drought, bushfires and now a pandemic, that ancient wisdom says it better than most of the cute virtue-signalling and blame-shifting on Twitter. These are challenging times. Times that will reveal who we really are and what we truly believe. So far, the signs are neither inspiring nor encouraging. My sense is that we are reaping what we have sown since the end of the Cold War. Radical individualism whether in the form of laissez faire economics or racial and sexual identity politics have reconfigured what it means to be a citizen in a robust democracy. Neither the left nor the right are entirely free of blame. The great toilet paper riots of recent times were the apotheosis of two trends. First, if people are consumers constituting a market rather than a nation then hoarding and demand­ing immediate satisfaction are both rational and inevitable.

Likewise, if we are mere members of a tribe defined by our sexuality, our racial identity or our gender — merely one incorrect pronoun away from suicide — rather than citizens bound by an allegiance to our state and homeland, then why expect courage and self-abnegation in the face of peril. Victims run in the face of danger. Those who insist “words can kill” are unlikely to respond to calls for resilience in the face of peril.

So now darkness engulfs our land. Both nature and our national mood are in awkward, involuntary harmony. Winter looms. Days shorten, the dark lingers, giving way to pallid belated dawn light. Soon, no government decree or virtual ankle bracelet will be required to incarcerate us in our homes and isolate us physically from our fellow citizens, and obliterate the little platoons that provide the foundation of civil society.

Nature is taking its cadenced course. Autumnal shades are fading. The leaves take on a vivid hue merely to gently descend then decay. Those yellow woods that inspired Robert Frost’s beautiful reflection as to whether we actually choose our destiny or whether it chooses us are receding in the face of a sudden chill in the southeast.

Autumn seemed to come late to Canberra this year. It followed a long, hot, fiery summer with the city shrouded in smoke. Anzac morn was mild. Then we were abruptly catapulted into the depth of winter. Already alpine regions, ablaze what seems mere moments ago, are dusted with early snow. When beggars die no comets are seen. But when the foundations of societies quake, time itself seems to warp and the orderly seasons forsake their rhythm. Early June. Last Christmas seems an eternity ago. Life before lockdown seems as quaint as flared pants and the Little River Band. But if nature is sending humans a message, maybe it is more optimistic than that propagated by Extinction Rebellion. A large asteroid sped past not long ago. It missed us by 3.5 million miles.

I am chalking that one up as a win for humans after a dire run since November last year. Sure, in the context of the times it is the equivalent of beating the eighth-ranked team in my third-grade competition when they could assemble only six players. But as our indefatigably optimistic coach would have concluded, “Reckon we turned the corner with this one. Could just feel it, boys.”

Yet to every time under heaven there is a season. And now nature itself is imposing confinement and introspection. At least that it is how it has felt to me in the cold, gloomy Canberra bubble this week. Be assured, dear readers, there are plenty of quiet Australians in this affluent city. Not all are insulated against the metaphorical chill winds blowing through the economy, this writer included.

Certainly, many in lucrative public sector employment have been spared the ravages of what has been termed euphemistically economic “hibernation”. Bears hib­ernate in winter. Businesses die. Metaphorical bears depress markets. In the real world, people lose dignity, hope and meaning when their work is abruptly stripped from them. The line between literal and metaphorical death is narrowing as our nation seems to be suspended between natural seasons and its passage through this pandemic to some version of normality.

As with any death, the passing leaves broken hearts, shattered dreams and human potential extinguished before it achieved full bloom. Many, in isolation, will share Frost’s sense of autumnal grief as they reflect on paths not taken. Would a safer office job have preserved their marriage or avoided the foreclosure on their mortgage? Was their pursuit of their creative passion a folly that now condemns them to poverty in mid-life? Should they have settled for the secure job in a commonwealth department rather than taking a risk on autonomy in the private sector? Was escaping the toxic boss to start their own small business a quixotic blunder?

Enforced isolation and unemployment leave plenty of time to ponder these questions, and others as well. The big, important questions, as Inspector Morse told his offsider, Lewis, in that poignant scene in the final episode, titled The Remorseful Day, of the popular series. Life. Death. And regret. As the waning sun “ensanguines the sky”, far too many of us have more time than money. We have time for repentance at leisure rather than leisure itself. No holidays. No sport. No hope.

Frost expressed it best in writing that we “shall be telling this with a sigh, Somewhere, ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference”.

We chose a drastic response to the pandemic. But for every physical symptom avoided, a mental toll has been exacted. Unlike the billions in debt it defies rational or precise calculation, though Adam Creighton in The Australian has been rigorous in reminding us that in “flattening the curve” we flattened much of society as well. My own neighbourhood already reveals the scars. Pubs closed. Restaurants and cafes shuttered. With the elapse of each day the likelihood that they will reopen decreases.

One little business run by a beautiful family from Cambodia had already closed after sustaining severe hail damage in the violent storm in January. I had breakfast there every day that I was in Canberra for seven years and regarded them as extended family. I loved them. Watched their little kids grow up to take their place behind the counter. Helped the son with his school assignment, which comprised delivering a speech as prime minister. He passed — just. Yet I did not even know their last names. And I miss them and grieve for those simple pleasures I took for granted and that imbued routine daily life with ritualistic meaning.

They have disappeared along with the other patrons with whom I shared banter about cricket and politics on a daily basis. Little platoons on which larger communities are built. The real people who put the flesh on the bones of the metaphysical assertion that no human being is an island. Again, none of us even knew the last names or occupations of the others. All gone. Dispersed. Perhaps scurrying furtively to buy takeaway coffees through narrow slit windows from masked strangers. Or striding joylessly around the streets without a sideways glance to expand their respiratory capacity to enhance their chances on the ventilator.

I spent much of last year grappling with depression and contemplating self-extinction. Just think. I nearly missed all of this.

I posted a photo of me with Alan Jones and Peta Credlin on Facebook. As I have written once before, in my darkest hours Alan Jones was a stalwart and caring friend. I do not lightly say I owe my life to him and a god to whom I pray and whom I found at the bottom of an empty schooner glass about 30 years ago. Neither Jones nor God are fashionable friends on Twitter and Facebook.

Much of the abuse that accompanied my posting of that photograph told me all I needed to know about the era through which we are passing. Authenticity has been usurped by empty “likes” by ephemeral friends whom one has never met, yet who reserve the right to police one’s real friendships and political views. That lovely transsexual who talked about cricket cannot possibly believe in God and vote for the National Party. Surely not? Sorry. That is a yes and another yes. So, I finally walked away with a mixture of disgust and relief from both platforms. Yet I was grateful for the hundreds of virtual friends whose extravagant, scolding abuse told me who they really were and revealed that, like most ideologues, they prefer abstractions to people. They prefer hectoring into the ether to debate. And their decency is but a thin veneer. This, more than plague and pestilence, is the greatest threat to our survival as a decent democratic polity.

I have largely adhered to my abstinence from social media but dropped social distancing to confirm my biases when Peter Dutton was diagnosed with COVID-19. Thousands either expressed the hope that he would die, or approved of those who expressed that noble, conspicuously compassionate sentiment.

The torrent of abuse was sickening. The irony of gloating at a father of three being infected with a potentially fatal disease, while piously advising others to “care for each other more peeps”, was apparently lost upon many of them. But tribalism has replaced citizenship.

And civility, according to one academic, merely reinforces privilege. Thanks for that cerebral insight, comrade. So, calling singer Sam Smith “him” is no longer a hate crime? If words kill, whom do they kill? Only the queer? Will civility be restored during the post-revolutionary phase, comrade? May we again treat others as human beings with civility after privilege is abolished and we all spend our time and universal socially provided income at festivals of dangerous ideas and writers festivals?

The poor are made of sterner stuff and are underrepresented on Twitter. And to the frustration of the left, especially in the academy, they have displayed a dispiriting lack of revolutionary zeal. Their false consciousness is manifest in multiple ways. They still believe in the nation rather than the United Nations. Some stubbornly cling to a belief in religion. And in numbers that continue to confound Labor and the Greens, they have returned centre-right Coalition governments for most of the period since World War II.

The humiliation of the political class in May 2019 makes me wary of rushing to judgment. Predictions are fraught with risk. Who saw this virus coming? But a few trends have reached an apotheosis and I warily offer some thoughts on where we may be heading. As the redoubtable Churchill said in his nation’s darkest hour, “I have myself, full confidence, that if all do their duty and nothing is neglected, and the best arrangements are made — as they are being made — we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our island home.” We will come through this. But what sort of nation will it be at that time, when it arrives?

Those words resonate today, spoken as they were by a man who had fought in wars and been under fire and survived. Both he and much of the generation to whom he spoke had already endured the Great War, the Great Depression and were awaiting the bombing of their cities. No doubt they could have used a good belly laugh from one of the ABC’s stable of rib-tickling and profane comedians.

But they had to be content with Churchill and their naive belief in their nation and their social fabric sustained by faith in their nation, faith in God and the knowledge that they had been repelling invaders since 1066. Churchill also observed, “when great forces are on the move in the world, we learn that we are spirits not animals”. Now is such a time.

When, recently, Scott Morrison spoke with authenticity about the perils that lie ahead, he did not rise to the heights of Churchill. That is perfectly fine and understandable. We do not face the existential threat that Britain faced in 1940. But he spoke from his heart and it showed. The Prime Minister declared hoarding and selfishness un-Australian. I wish I could share his certainty about that. People get the government they deserve, so the saying goes. Now that cliche has been inverted. The government deserves better from our people. I saw less spirit than animal herd behaviour.

When victimhood is valourised and every individual indulgence is clothed in the language of inalienable rights, then we have moved a long way from the foundations of this nation and those of broader Western civilisation. The riots over toilet paper were revelatory. We may look back on them with a mixture of mirth and embarrassment in several months.

But I fear they revealed our underlying fragility and the narcissism of an age where the transcendental and the communal are ridiculed and reviled. The persecution of Israel Folau was an ominous portent of how far this nation had strayed from its founding creed. A man was socially ostracised for quoting from the very book used to administer oaths in our courts and legislatures. Why not ban the book if it so causes offence? Yet Folau was erased by the same people who proclaim, “we will not be erased”, as if an imminent genocide awaited them in this, one of the safest nations on Earth.

There is little explicit recognition of faith or religion in our Constitution because it was a given. Simply assumed and pervasive in their moral terrain. Those who believed that death was not the end of our story knew fear, famine, pestilence and war better than we do. But they prevailed in war and Depression. Chalk up wins for the West over secular totalitarianism. The current terror is symptomatic of a people to whom any inconvenience — much less suffering — is an anathema because it is meaningless. Again, Shakespeare said it best: “Cowards die many times before their deaths.”

My faith tells me that in the spiritual economy nothing is wasted. There are seasons in our life. A time to reap and a time to sow. A time to live and a time to die. The ancients understood this even before the time of Christ. As Aeschylus wrote: “He who learns must suffer. Suffer unto truth. But then ripeness comes as well. And even in our sleep, pain which knows no forgetting falls drop by drop upon our heart. Until — in our despair, against our will — comes wisdom to us through the awful Grace of God.” The panic of the past few weeks reveals a society in which God is dead. But the corollary of that hollow progressive victory is pervasive communal terror of death and a loss of stoicism in the face of death or mild deprivation.

Images of deserted landmark streets in Sydney or Melbourne have drifted across our screens, at times accompanied by the haunting instrumental strains of Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence. Aptly, that melody is planted in my brain as the anthem of a youth receding into the mists of crowded memory. It was taken from their album Wednesday Morning, 3AM. That is the time when uninvited spectral visitors disturb our sleep. I don’t know about you, but I never awake at 3am to plan my next holiday or to conjure with memories of a sunset ensanguining the sky, into the West away.

No, 3am is the hour of reckoning with regrets for the past, and for jousting with anxiety about the future. Regrets about that road not taken in that yellowed wood. And, right now, many, many Australians are besieged by such unbidden anxieties. All our material progress swept aside by an invisible disease.

Depression is the term being applied to our likely economic trajectory. I am not an economist; I am a writer. So, each evening, like Simon & Garfunkel, I turn my collar to the cold and damp and wander around the empty streets. It is eerie and depressing. The grainy black-and-white images of the Depression era actually convey more action and congestion than our socially isolated hibernation of 2020.

Hence, I derive almost childish pleasure from the odd balcony light display. It seems an almost grand gesture of defiance of the pervasive sombre gloom. Gallant railing against the dying of the light.

If I did not face jail for causing temporary overcrowding and infringing social-distancing restrictions I would love to knock on the owners’ doors, embrace them and thank them profusely for lighting up the funereal darkness; for affirming vibrant life and offering a beacon of hope to passing strangers.

Again, Frost was no stranger to the darkness and loneliness of city life. He wrestled nocturnal demons and they inspired some of his most beautiful work. Thank goodness he did not deal with his sense of isolation by deciding to learn Spanish online or train for a virtual triathlon in his lounge room. As he wrote:

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Anzac commemorations this year were cancelled. That is sad. But maybe we are now a nation so lacking in courage that it may be an honest admission of our unworthiness to celebrate the Anzac legacy. For my part I joined some of the gunners from the gun line on that brutal afternoon at Long Tan in August 1966 at a small town in Victoria. Shaking hands, hugging fellows, along with reading prayers are revolutionary acts in these arid times. To paraphrase Shakespeare: “For he that outlives this day shall be my brother. Be he ne’er so vile this day shall gentle his condition. And those abed (in social isolation) shall feel themselves accursed they were not here …” One of my mates summed it up less eloquently yet more succinctly than any of the social media poseurs: “I worked out why everyone is hoarding bog rolls. Because every time someone sneezes the rest of us shit ourselves.” Maybe we have lost more than the Holden in this season.

Like it or not we are all becoming too well acquainted with Frost’s night. When will some semblance of normality return? I know among most of my mates the lustre of home-based work has rapidly worn off. Among many of my peers the reality and the grief has finally settled on them. And most of them at least have some form of income and an assured place to sleep.

The full economic impact has not yet been felt. Those most vulnerable to the virus can be classified with some precision. Those who succumb to despair may pass invisibly from our midst. And not even their loved ones can gather to bid them farewell.

REFLECTIONS DURING A PANDEMIC – DISCUSSION – CATHERINE McGREGOR & GERARD HENDERSON

Gerard Henderson: Catherine, thanks for a stimulating talk. You mentioned civilisation in crisis. Now, you and I have similar backgrounds. Our parents voted for the Democratic Labor Party and I’m ten years older than you are. And we’ve had similar views over the years but we have disagreed. Neither of us have had statues erected for us so no one can pull them down.

Catherine McGregor: Yet.

Gerard Henderson: But these days what you’ve said at The Sydney Institute you wouldn’t be able to say at pretty well any university in Australia.

Catherine McGregor: That’s a pretty fair assessment, frankly. I’ve been in the university system so my critique is based on recent experience. I taught in a strategic studies department at the so-called University of Canberra where no one ever failed. I was censured for failing students who were illiterate in English. I and was told, “Look they’re good kids but they’re struggling. Let them through.” The degradation of standards can be traced back to the Dawkins reforms where Colleges of Advanced Education pretended to be universities. A diminution of standards has happened. More importantly, the scourge that is the conformity now taking place in the UK and US. People who pride themselves on being so radical and others who are what John Howard once dismissed the cultural dieticians of the era. Grotesque media pile ons for anyone who utters anything they disagree with. I disagree with Bettina Arndt on some things. I think she underestimates the gravity of domestic violence in some cases and can justifiably be seen to be a victim blamer on occasions. But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t got a right to speak at a university. And that’s happened. People who supported the No case in the same sex marriage debate were exposed to violence on campuses as recently as 2017. So, there’s a counter culture at work. We saw this in the Vietnam protest movement when the left were rampant on campuses. These were places where rallies and rolling discussions and teach-ins were the order of the day. Now they’re the stuff of trigger warnings about something that offends someone’s sensibility.

Gerard Henderson: It’s got worse, hasn’t it? Because, if we go back to in the early days of the Vietnam debate there were moratoriums where different views were heard. As the debate went on, more and more people got driven off campus. I remember in 1974, the number two figure in the South Vietnamese embassy in Australia was driven off the La Trobe campus. I helped to look after him when that happened, although I wasn’t involved in the invitation for him to speak there.  I recall, at Melbourne University, the Attorney-General Ivor Greenwood was driven off the campus and this happened in Sydney and other places. But it’s much worse now and it’s more all-embracing, isn’t it? With the Vietnam days, the issue was Vietnam but now the issue is what? Everything.

Catherine McGregor: It is. Use the wrong pronoun and you can be destroyed commercially over this increasingly bizarre range of pronouns that people can use. My firsthand experience was that there is little worthwhile discussion and I was enrolled in a Juris Doctor Degree at ANU as recently as six months ago.

That became prohibitively expensive and I’ve gone back to the old Dip Law run through the Law extension committee, Australia’s oldest law course. Frankly, the online learning environment there is better. There’s a current barrister teaching, he doesn’t mince his words and there are no trigger warnings and so on. It’s just a hardheaded, realistic course. But I found the university culture stultifying. And, frankly, because of the prohibitive fee structure and a business model built on foreign students, whether it was cultural reticence or language barriers, there were virtually no students speaking in class or tutorials. They were all on screens – the lecturer would speak and there was very little discourse. No stimulation, no worthwhile chats with peers. I found it a very, very strange environment compared to tutorials even 20 years ago.

Gerard Henderson: Going back to the pandemic and civilisation in crisis. To what extent has that been affected by the pandemic? If you look at the start of this year, where you started your talk, we had the bushfires, not the worst bushfires in Australian history but among the worst bushfires in Australian history. And we had a whole exchange on climate change. Not many other views were heard. Then we had the pandemic and now we’ve got that acceleration of the shutdown culture, the de-platforming culture. So, where’s the pandemic fit in all this? Has it made it better? Has it made it worse?

Catherine McGregor: I think it’s made it worse. Again, I’m not a qualified psychologist. I’m not a social psychologist of the type Bernard Salt is, or a demographer. With the wrongful killing of George Floyd, a lot of decent conservatives such as George Will, Mattis and others criticised the President for the way he alluded to using the military to get to St. John’s Church in Washington. Sensible people were trying to keep a nuance here. But the response globally, with such intensity and the barbarianism underlying it, is what staggered me. The wanton destruction of historical artefacts. As a trained historian it goes against the grain for a start. You kind of say, rationally, it didn’t come out of nowhere. There are some underlying fault lines especially on race, and especially in the US. But the fact that it burst into flames right across the Western world made me think that it has been intensified, perhaps, by the pandemic. Because of the sheer level of alarm, social scientists are reporting high levels of anxiety amongst people.

A lot of people for long periods of time were at home with their kids, schooling them at home, trying to manage work life pressures, not getting out as much. It strikes me that perhaps there was more fertile ground psychologically right across communities. There was a despair and an anxiety that might have led to an outburst of this kind of behaviour. But it caught me by surprise when it went into a second week and when it then migrated to Britain. And to see it happening here, on the scale that it was happening here, and with the accusations being made about substantial figures in Australian history, it struck me that we collectively lost our minds, frankly.

Gerard Henderson: So, the fact many people in the nations we understand best, say the OECD nations, were physically constrained, when people got out, there was pent up frustration to an extent. So, there’s that attitude. But you’re also talking about this other attitude of stress. If you go back 100 years, it strikes me, as a historian looking back, there was a different attitude to death.

Catherine McGregor: Resilience.

Gerard Henderson: We lost 50,000 dead in a population of 5 million at the time of the Spanish flu a century ago. That would be 75,000 dead in today’s figures. Instead, we have just over 100 dead today. The question is about our attitude to death. I guess that those living 100 years ago had a different attitude to death because it was more common. These days it’s not so common.

Catherine McGregor: Yes.

Gerard Henderson: So, are other factors building in that weren’t around previously?

Catherine McGregor: That does connect to something. A century ago, coming out of that great war, there was a high incidence of infant mortality. You may have had a sibling who didn’t survive birth or died very young. These were the people who went away to Gallipoli in the first AIF or were on the Western Front. I look at the High Court bench, those justices who made some pretty tough decisions during the Great War. I think nearly every one of the justices, bar Isaac Isaacs, lost a son in the war.

Two things. There was more widespread religious adherence. So, people accepted death as a fact of life. This narcissistic cult of the individual, which now is really on steroids, about individual empowerment and the absolute triumph of, let’s call it narcissism. It’s about the sensual. It’s about the ephemeral. It’s about the transient. Whereas religion is about eternal things, whether you believe it or not. At least it claims that suffering is not meaningless and that life, however nasty, brutal and short, may have an innate meaning and there may be eternity. That’s a big belief I’m not uncomfortable proclaiming.

Writing for The Australian, I decided in the current zeitgeist I was going to say it because I’m sick of apologising for it or hiding it. I wrote that I’m firmly a believer. I’ve written it more than once, in fact. That arouses the shackles from many in traditional faith who say my whole life’s an insult to God. I’ll live with God’s judgment on that and leave the rest to God. But I do believe. And I do think that if you have that prism, and it’s a shrinking prism in our society, it affects your attitude to eternal things, morbidity, mortality, adversity. This is where I do think we’ve lost resilience as a society. Not solely because of religion.

I still see our soldiers and operations a lot. We’re still breeding tough enough people and running a training system that still does that. But if you go back 100 years, people didn’t think they were here to live forever. No one had that factored in. There’s almost an assumption societally now that something has gone wrong if you die or if you suffer adversity.

Gerard Henderson: On a news bulletin recently, it was reported that a 95-year old person had died in a nursing home. And you think, that’s on the main news? Any other time, however tragic, such a death would not make the news. So, what you’re saying is that if you believe in an afterlife, you’re less stressed about this life?

Catherine McGregor: Well, that’s the comfort I draw. I’ve been at the brink a couple of times of ending my life, certainly with the gender dysphoria when I was still struggling with trying to not act upon it. I came very close to the edge. And more than once since. I found out, incidentally, at one point that I’d been wrongly medicated, they’d given me the wrong hormonal dose altogether. There was a physical reason I was in the depths of the depression. But I have clung, ever since I stopped drinking, to a belief in a deity. And I went back to the Catholic Church. Indeed, I was a daily communicant in the Catholic Church before transition.

Unlike a lot in the queer community, I don’t expect the Catholic Church to turn its teachings inside out to accommodate me. I’m at odds with them. I accept the encyclical says male and female he made them. Therefore, I go elsewhere to find my solace. But I don’t expect to cancel their teachings. Having a view that life is not futile, having a belief in a God, a benevolent God, has sustained me through some dark times. I pray daily and I don’t say that to be a pharisee, I just say that incidentally, that shows where the cancel culture got to. I referred to someone as a Pharisee online and was told I was an anti-Semite. I mean that and I say that with a straight face; an academic said it was anti-Semitic to say that. I’ve not openly espoused a lot of my beliefs, but I do draw great comfort from the fact that I believe in a God. I believe in God. I’m a Christian. I believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God, and I broadly believe he suffered, died, buried and rose. That’s what I draw comfort from.

Gerard Henderson: You’re a resurrection kind of person?

Catherine McGregor: I am.

Gerard Henderson: There are not many resurrection people around in the Christian churches these days.

Catherine McGregor: Well, apparently, there are Anglican bishops. I might be defaming the current Archbishop of Canterbury but certainly one of his predecessors, wasn’t entirely convinced you had to believe. The whole claim of Christianity falls apart at the seams if that isn’t accepted. There’s one thing that is an ascertainable, verifiable historical fact – whether you accept the resurrection or not, the cluster of people who claim to have met Jesus after his resurrection all went to their own martyrdom, refusing to renounce that view. That’s potent evidence even to the most hedonistic in the 21st century.

Gerard Henderson: In Australian society, multicultural Australian society, in the area of religion you’re talking about, if you’re talking about traditional Anglo Celtic Australians, there’s very little belief. But if you go to those who have come from Asia, or the Middle East, or Africa, even some from Eastern Europe, there’s quite a degree of belief. Some is Muslim belief, some of its Christian, traditional, some of it is Christian Orthodox, some of it is Buddhist, Hindu and whatever. We now have believers divided from non.

Catherine McGregor: Absolutely.

Gerard Henderson: A division between the immigrants from outside of Anglo Celtic nations and those of us of Anglo Celtic background. Is this going to have an impact?

Catherine McGregor: Well it already has I think Gerard if you look back. It’s interesting that some of the Labor reformists like Chris Bowen and Tony Burke are in electorates with were very high No votes in the same sex marriage plebiscite. Some of those safe Labor seats are also very multicultural seats. Labor had complacently thought it had a lock on the multicultural vote. But when a question of faith and belief and sexuality and gender came up, a lot of those communities didn’t make a large noise about it, but very silently went and cast their ballots for conservative candidates and they voted no in the plebiscite overwhelmingly.

Bowen’s constituency was something like a 79 per cent no vote if I’m not wrong. Likewise, through that area where GetUp! did Peter Dutton and George Christensen and others favours by campaigning against them. There’s a relatively strong corridor of church attendance through key parts of south east Queensland, including my old hometown, Toowoomba. So, there is a fault line around that.

I might just add I had a very dispiriting experience with Cricket Australia over this, where I walked out of the Human Rights Commission consultation process on trans inclusion in sport and also out of the Cricket Australia consultation process. I defined myself as not needing to be treated as a woman. I played in women’s cricket for a while, at the invitation of Greg Chappell and Pat Howard. They wanted to see how I went. I didn’t reflect deeply on it at the time. No objections were raised. But launching a policy with fanfare the way they did with the AHRC and so on, I recused myself from it and publicly denounced it, over which some have accused me of being a hypocrite. But I think my position was consistent all along. I always sought the permission of the coaches and the players I would play with. And I made this point to Cricket Australia.

They were saying this is a game for everyone. But does that include Muslim families in western Sydney, Pakistani diaspora communities, Indian diaspora communities, many of whom are observant in their faith traditions? In grade female cricket, you can encounter players 14, 16, 17. You’re opening the door. And this was the draft policy. They ultimately did impose some medical test. But I was criticised for wanting to keep the process medically and was challenged by a queer activist. I said, you’re actually saying that it is totally self-definition. A person doesn’t even require a female driver’s licence to play female cricket. Let me know how that goes in western Sydney amongst observant Muslim mothers when they realise their teenage daughters are playing cricket with someone who is, for all intents and purposes, anatomically male and not even attempting to conform to social transition. Anyway, they didn’t implement the most extreme version of it. But the fact that it was even discussed, I walked out on it after that.

Gerard Henderson: It seems to be those who are making the most noise at the moment are those who on social media, in the social sphere, are those who are less concerned about the afterlife. I’ve got a question here about where Australia will be in an economic and social sense after the pandemic. The question here is, after the end of COVID-19 will Australians emerge more conscious of the local strength and economic potential of this nation and less dependent on what is called by our questioner “global consumerism”? Do you think we’re actually going to be more Australia focused, or do you think we’re going to miss what we’re currently missing, in terms of travel and contacts?

Catherine McGregor: If I had to make a guess Gerard, and it is a guess, I think there’s a sort of Westphalian emergence here. Whatever you make of Trump, I don’t think you’re engaging in Trump derangement syndrome to say his slogan is America First. He’s something of an isolationist. He’s wary of foreign entanglements. Russia has become increasingly assertive and nationalistic. China is on the move. You’re going to see great power rivalry and alliance systems much more. The Davos gang are going to be the losers out of this. You’re going to see even fairly liberal Liberals saying we need more supply chain security. Jim Molan is not a classic neoliberal, nor Andrew Hastie, but they’re very much saying we need to be mindful about stockpiling vital supplies such as fuel. They would be to the left of Paul Keating on the economy coming out of this, I suspect, for national security reasons rather than economic arguments.

Adam Creighton in The Australian has been superb in his coverage of this. The one thing that I’m worried about societally, and I say this as a conservative, is for the great ballast of the Menzies tradition. Scott Morrison refers to the quiet Australians and Menzies called them the forgotten people. Will we come out of this with a frugal employed middle class who are capable of saving, putting something aside, owning homes, going to work, and taking a punt on a small business? Or are tradies, people on the land, and so on, going to be the casualties both of the drought and the pandemic thus far.

I had this discussion with Paul Kelly and Chris Mitchell, a couple of years ago. I’m really concerned that the problem with importing too much Trump into the centre right tradition is that we risk extinguishment of that great underlying middle class that are noisy about politics. What does the future of centre right politics look like if you don’t have those people Menzies talked about?

There’s a tendency on the left, among creatives and others, to sneer at those who engage in the trades and run small entrepreneurial operations. There’s been a view that they’re Philistines and they’re not arty enough and so on. But there’s a great balance upon which our middle class rests and, by extension, the centre ground that has supported the centre right tradition and because of compulsory voting, have essentially seen, as you know, Labor governments in Australia. This is why, despite all the cultural noise and the proliferation of people on the Insiders couch and Twitter, Australians misbehave routinely and elect LNP governments.

Gerard Henderson: Yes. If people followed what the ABC said we would have had green left governments for decades. Finally, you’ve been close to both the major parties. As you pointed out, you’ve also fallen out with both the major parties. But how do you see the leadership of Scott Morrison, Josh Frydenberg, Mathias Cormann as against the leadership of Anthony Albanese and his key figures? Do you think it’s too early to make that judgment?

Catherine McGregor: It probably is. In terms the talent pool, when I look across the Coalition bench Mathias Cormann is underrated. Christian Porter is a very substantial individual, a bright fellow and very hard working leader of the government in the House. Frydenberg, again, is a talent. I think the PM has been underrated. The holiday during the bushfires was a very bad failure of judgement but he’s put that behind him. Let’s see what happens in Eden-Monaro. It would be extraordinary for the government to win a seat at a by-election. That’s a peculiarly difficult turf for him given the that bushfires impacted there and he did have a very prickly reception, as you recall, at Cobargo and a couple of places when he visited. The local mayor McBain is a popular Labor candidate and one of those local kind of real candidates rather than a Party apparatchik. She’ll win as a local hero candidate if she does. It would be extremely damaging to Albanese to drop that seat. So let’s see how that goes.

Everyone’s saying a plague on both houses over branch stacking in Victoria and so on. But the fact is, if you look at Scott Morrison’s government, there are fewer professional apparatchiks than there are in the key positions in the Labor ranks. Morrison may be penalised when the teat dries up, which it’s going to. Some people are going to be in real social distress. It could be a very tough time to be an incumbent at the next poll. But, on talent, if you’re looking along the two frontbenches, who would I prefer to trust with reining in an enormous amount of debt and maintaining some kind of sense of liberty and traditional values? I’d go with the Morrison government.

Gerard Henderson: So we’ve ended up where we started, which is a good place to end up. In a sense, the impact of the pandemic you think will still be with us at the next election in around two years time. That’s an astute observation. Many thanks for giving that and all your other observations today.

Catherine McGregor: An absolute pleasure to join you, Gerard. Wonderful to see Anne again as well.