Just the Facts, Ma'am - 22 September 2000

"Everything you never knew about Australia" could well have been the title of a front page piece one day this week in the Wall Street Journal.

Before I tell you about the wholly unexpected, and to some listeners wholly appalling, subject of this piece I ought to mention to people unfamiliar with this famous paper some things the Wall Street Journal is and what it is not.

First, its appearance, which has not changed in the 60-odd years I've been seeing it.

Surely the most demure front page in newspaper history - ah, except possibly the Kansas City Star, which in over 100 years boasted, no not "boasted" - wrong word, you don't boast about your modesty - let us say the Kansas City Star was famous for never carrying a headline wider than the regular single column.

Outbreak of a world war, the assassination of kings and presidents, D-Day - all reported in the regular type, one column width, no special typeface, no capital letters larger than usual, no expressions of surprise, shock, sentiment.

In short words, possibly not to be understood today, a great reporting paper. "Just the facts, ma'am," as the first television private eye used to say.

Well I don't know if the front page of the Wall Street Journal has ever had a story that demanded a double column spread. If there was one - the 1929 crash, death of Roosevelt - it didn't get it.

Every day, forever, six columns, a small headline barely two inches wide, a sub-heading in smaller type and then the text, on and on and jumping to an inner page and running, usually, to say 1500 possibly 2000 words.

You'll gather from this that there surely is not a more sober, a less lurid newspaper on earth than the Wall Street Journal, which - I should throw in for the uninitiated - is, like London's Economist, misleadingly named.

Maybe about a quarter is about finance and economics, mostly news of every sort - books, theatre, television - very strong on political reporting and international affairs. The only thing that is barely if ever touched is sport.

So since this week every other paper in the country and I'm sure in yours was being drenched by the Olympics, what sort of story could the Wall Street Journal carry from Sydney? I'll tell you.

Tuesday's paper - ah, here it is - a small italicised headline to show it's not a story of great seriousness. The headline reads: "In Sydney the games are hot - oh there's also those Olympics".

The small type sub-heading says quite coolly: "Australian host city revels in vice, brothels with themes and no agony over ecstasy."

This piece, I say at once, is not an investigative piece, not in the least prurient, nothing remotely like what the tabloids would make of it by way of manufactured indignation, mock moralising, luscious and lubricious details all shockingly revealed.

The piece is written as informatively, as soberly, as uninvolved as a piece which comes later on the alarming decline in the stock value of a famous chain of retail clothing stores.

The lead sentence tells, in a nutshell - as all lead sentences should - what the whole story is about.

This is it: "Athletes spring across a television screen in the dimly-lit parlour of Tokyo House, an Asian themed brothel, as Ms Raj-Dei, the madam, explains the prices and the menu for her two Olympic special evenings.

"She says she has doubled her staff and advertised in the Sydney newspapers so she can compete in Olympic special offerings with the city's 40 other brothels."

When I got so far I wondered at the absolutely neutral, unemotional tone of this, as also at the details of the menu, shall we say, of an Olympic evening special.

But once you read of the Lord Mayor of Sydney commenting on these very same attractions: "This will confirm Sydney as the international party capital" then the reason for this offhanded sobriety became very clear.

Prostitution is legal everywhere and regulated by the government which requires every woman so employed to pay 10% tax on her earnings but entitles her, through its labour laws, to workmen's compensation.

Gambling too is legal. The distribution of clean needles for drug addicts is funded by the state. The tolerance for technically illegal drugs - cocaine, ecstasy - is admittedly widespread.

I never knew all this nor, I'm sure, do most Americans except now the people who read the Wall Street Journal.

All this apparently carries the approval of the bulk of popular opinion. The Journal notes that sometimes clergymen and others express disapproval of Sydney's wanton ways but are generally dismissed as killjoys.

There's no evidence of a massive protest movement, a crusade against drugs, prostitution and so on as there certainly would be here.

Maybe some of us have been wrong all along about the overall character of Australian society.

I think back to the abdication of King Edward VIII, which I covered minute by minute in London for the 10 days that shook the world.

When you see television features today about the abdication they usually wind up with the conclusion that it was caused by Mr Baldwin's and the Conservative cabinet's distaste for Mrs Simpson or the shockability of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

What, in fact, was fatal to the king's hopes of having Mrs Simpson as his queen was what Gladstone called "the non conformist conscience" which in one century created a liberal party, in the next a labour party and - this was the overlooked, crucial point - had been a most powerful force in settling and governing the dominions - Australia, Canada and New Zealand in particular.

When the British Labour Party leader, Mr Atlee, declared that the party would not think of having a king married to a twice-divorced woman, the king's cause faded.

What doomed him in the end, when the colonial secretary approached the dominions, was the adamant opposition on the same ground of Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

But it seems that Australia has changed and is well aware of what it's doing. The head of a government sex help project - which holds seminars, distributes free condoms and other preventive measures - says this policy has positively helped contain Sydney's Aids.

One official looking over the whole permissive scene puts it all down to "good old Aussie pragmatism", which is more than a passing thought and a challenge to other governments and other moralities.

Talking of protest movements, the assertion of public morality there was no more than a squeak of protest in Washington last Tuesday when the Senate passed a bill by a massive bi-partisan majority - 83 to 15 - which lifts all previous restrictions on trade with China and gives it permanent trading rights, for the first time since it became a Communist nation.

Thus, after the 50 years war which seemed to have climaxed in the Battle of Seattle - the war between idealism and reality - idealism lost.

If that sounds a little cryptic may I remind you of a fairly recent book I talked about, a book on American diplomacy by the former secretary of state to presidents Nixon and Ford, Dr Henry Kissinger.

The most enlightening thing in that book is his isolating the two main trends in American foreign policy in the 20th Century, what he roughly calls "reality and idealism."

One was President Teddy Roosevelt's ambition to found an American empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific Philippines. He called this "manifest destiny" and another Republican president called it "America's duty to protect our little brown brother."

But there eventually came a national backlash, a national distaste for empire. The whole cadre of marines popularised a song: "He may be a brother to big Bill Taft but he ain't no pal of mine."

If there was one man who personified the revolt against empire and Teddy Roosevelt's realism it was the president who conceived the League of Nations - President, sometimes called the Reverend, Woodrow Wilson - the idealist statesman to perfection.

At the 1919 peace treaty conference the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, said: "We thought we were to deal with a statesman, we found we had a bishop."

It was Wilson who put at the heart of the peace treaty the noble doctrine of self-determination - should not every nation have the right to govern itself instead of being the lackey of some imperial power? Quite right.

What, however, did not occur until years later was what was to happen to the various nations, the various minorities, inside these new nations - the 35% Germans, for instance, in the new state of Czechoslovakia?

Self-determination led in time to the creation of a dozen new nations, a dozen new armies, a dozen new tariff barriers. The French generalissimo of all the allied armies in the First World War, Marshall Foch, when he signed the Treaty of Versailles for France, he said: "This is not a peace treaty it is a 20-year armistice." Exactly. Right on.

The Americans then and ever since have found France a puzzle because the French did not, in the American view, take a moral attitude towards the countries it traded with.

Most countries don't. But there is this admirable trait, always alive in the body of American opinion and American policy: we're not going to trade with China, the Soviet Union, Chile or anybody else so long as they imprison dissenters, suppress free opinion, torture and enslave the people in the name of a people's republic.

When the Soviets collapsed the United States was the first to offer Russia loans and trade.

China has been, for several administrations including Clinton's, the main target of America's passion for other peoples' civil rights. But finally the argument for free trade over protection won.

It was a defeat for the liberals and the Seattle rebels and for the trade unions whose talk, however, about civil rights did not drown out their main complaint: those poor suffering Asians are going to take away our jobs.

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