CHARLES WOOLEY
After the election campaign, Chinese President Xi Jinping doesn’t look so bad
Iwrite laid up in plaster with a broken ankle and an uncharacteristic degree of ill-humour, which anyone who has suffered this condition would understand.
It may be the painkillers, but I have changed my mind about the Chinese regime. From my hospital bed I watched as Xi Jinping assumed the mantle of emperor for life and thought the Chinese president appears such a nice avuncular man. In the Confucian tradition, Mr Xi looks wise, thoughtful and serene and his personal motives appear nothing less than the welfare and improvement of his people. Oh, and of course world domination.
Like so many Western liberals, I disapproved of the lack of free speech, the absence of habeas corpus (an arrested person can simply vanish), the lack of separation of powers (the Communist Government is also the police and the judge and jury) and, of course, most of all I worried about the absence of free elections and the contest of ideas.
But since the gaming lobby so easily bought the one-seat majority in our own tiny little South Pacific parliament, it is too obvious just how distorted and venal democracy can become. A cashed-up fatuous pitch about “loving your local pub” was suddenly more important than all the obvious urgencies of health, education and housing.
Clearly, I have been a naive advocate of representative democracy and will no longer be preaching to our Chinese friends. The perversion of our democracy by self-seeking political donations has never been so obvious. Even a narrow majority, fairly won, might have allowed Premier Will Hodgman to use this victory to improve the lives of all Tasmanians. But this one-seat majority, so questionably won, will haunt the second Hodgman Government for its electoral life. Whatever good the Government might attempt to achieve in this second term will be compromised by its manner of winning it.
I like Will Hodgman. He is a decent man (no, that’s not just the opiates speaking), and it would be a shame for all of us if the stain of corporate venality forever tarnishes our faith. Democracy can only work when people believe in it. So there is one redeeming positive thing the Hodgman Government could do next. Before we are allowed to know, some time in 2019, just how much money the gambling lobby contributed towards this narrow Liberal victory, the Parliament should legislate comprehensive changes to the electoral funding laws. It should ensure our democracy and government is never for sale to the highest bidder. But I won’t be holding my breath.
The death of Stephen Hawking this week put all other Earthly matters into some perspective. Hawking was generally regarded as “the greatest scientific mind of the second half of the 20th century” (before him there was Einstein). Hawking was a genius cosmologist trapped in a twisted body by a cruel form of motor neuron disease. He was confined to a wheelchair and only able to speak through a computer. He was said to never complain, his motto being: “While there is life there is hope.” I’m not sure why, but that simple optimism actually sounds more convincing when heard in the flat monotone of computer-generated speech.
Hawking went out last week with one last big bang. He had believed for some time our cosmos is merely one of many coexisting universes, sharing time and space but no awareness of one another. As if life isn’t already complicated enough!
Dramatically, Hawking has left behind the mathematics necessary to create a space probe able to discover the “multiverse”, as he called it. While most of us have trouble handling just one tiny corner of this infinite universe, it seems the world’s cosmologists are beside themselves about the chance to open yet another can of worms. Either they’re a weird mob or they are all on painkillers.
In life, Stephen Hawking was as unstoppable as the big bang theory, which he explained to us in 1988 in his
A Brief History of Time. I grasped only a little of it back then, but of course he did have an IQ of 160 and mine was somewhat less.
He wrote dozens of books, hundreds of research papers, won as many awards, held the highest academic offices and still had time to make a television series.
Busy as he was, despite his constrained physical state, Hawking also contrived to have an affair. In 1995, he left his wife of 30 years to marry his nurse. Given Stephen Hawking’s circumstances, this surprising imperative was perhaps best explained by his most famous quote: “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us very special.”