Andropov

IT'S A WELL KNOWN observation that organisations that prize loyalty over competence tend, in the end, to failure. History is full of examples of failed gerontocracies, and political systems that chose long-running death over renewal: poor old Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko, elderly placemen lacking imagination, all of them causes and symptoms of the USSR's degrading later-20thC crunch, bywords now for a squalid and ideologically hollow State that had lost all legitimacy with its people and any hope of moral let alone structural renewal. The British car industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Wests Tigers. The list goes on.

In the last weeks (and really since October 2023) the world has seen the formerly fearsome Islamic Republic of Iran, which once boasted of its place as the centre point of George W Bush's Axis of Evil, utterly shown up as a State without state capacity. It was adventurist in foreign policy through its nasty little proxies, but in the end that adventurism came to nothing as a deterrent against attack. Its ability to defend its own skies is nil. Its ability to provide the basics of a decent life for its citizens is even less. As an ally, it has been worse than no friend at all to the Palestinians. The course of the most recent war shows a profound failure of that regime in the basics of regime survival, and in the obvious sense, is what happens when you prize promoting regime-friends over the functions of being a State. By contrast in modern, liberal and democratic, Australia, we obviously pride ourselves on being freer, and having a more open political and economic system. Life is better. It's true! But it's not as though we are free either of the vice of old, tired societies: closed shops of loyalists and functionaries.

Antoinette Lattouf won her unfair dismissal case against the ABC. It showed the ABC up as an insular body, undiverse and staffed by people whose ideas were formed in another era, before the internet, both prickly-proud and incredibly sensitive to the obvious bullying of lobbyists. The ABC exists in a permanent state of presenting itself as an eternal self-image of Australia in the (let's be generous) 1980s, instead of acting as a broadcaster/media organisation, much less as an independent news agency. Its Board is as easily influenced as a teenager, its political journalists seem to pride themselves so much on being Insiders that the show of that name seems detachedly unaware of the bad taste of the joke, and the organisation's only real success in the last decade has been a children's show about cartoon dogs.

It's not the only Australian organisation in this situation. Our country's public sector is Kingsmillist to the core: since there are so few ways out, worthy placemen and placewomen simply rise, without having to adjust their ideas or practices of State function along the way. Organisations and firms run in this way are hardly likely to prove good institutions of the kind of diverse, dynamic society Australia seems to want to be; its employees are formed by cultures as much as they contribute to them. Ita Buttrose the former chair of the ABC is 83. Kim Williams the current chair is 73. As Chairs both were-are as old, or older, than any of Brezhnev, Chernenko, or Andropov, at any time when they were leaders of the USSR.