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The case for a statue of Dictator Dan

Victoria’s 48th Premier, Dan Andrews, is about to be immortalised by a bronze statue that will stand at 1 Treasury Place in the Melbourne CBD alongside four other former state leaders. Mr Andrews, who infamously plunged Melbourne into the longest Covid lockdown on Planet Earth — a record 262 days — abruptly quit politics with little explanation in late 2023 after 3,219 days in the job. Before you sneer at the plan to immortalise Mr Andrews, there may be a rational explanation for this absurd move. Premier Jeff Kennett, a polar opposite to Andrews, decreed that premiers who served more than 3,000 days deserved a bronze statue. So far there are four: Sir Albert Dunstan (1935 to 1945, Sir Henry Bolte (1955 to 1972), (Rupert Hamer (1972 to 1981, and John Cain Jr (1982 to 1990). Poor old Jeff missed out. But Daniel Andrews? The guy with jug ears and a North Face jacket? That Dan? Public backlash to the planned sculpture, which comes with an estimated price tag of A$100,000, has been swift and vehement. However, in my view, much of the criticism is short-sighted. As we consider the various arguments raised against casting Mr Andrews in enduring effigy, I think you’ll agree the proposed statue will prove a fitting emblem of his legacy. “The project has been given the green light by the Labor-run state government despite Victoria facing a crippling budget crunch amid a ballooning debt crisis,” the Daily Maileditorialised this week. That may be so. But what better reminder could there be of a leader who increased Victoria’s public sector payroll by 70 percent, forfeited the state’s coveted AAA credit rating, and quadrupled Victoria’s gross debt than a memorial Victorians can’t afford? Meanwhile, senior opposition spokesperson Brad Rowswell has complained that Labor plans to “push on with an obelisk to their former dear leader” despite the cost of living for Victorians being “through the roof”. “How out of touch can this mob be?” Mr Rowswell scoffed this week.

Kurt Mahlburg

February 13, 2025

Over-ruled and over-burdened: a SCOTUS justice makes the case for less law

Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze | Harper Collins | 2024, 304 pages One of the first cases I worked on as a trainee solicitor involved preparing a brief for a judicial review of proposed new rules regulating the fishing quotas for herring. Long hours poring over reams of UK legislation, EU legislation, fisheries management policies, treaties between Ireland and the UK and minutes of parliamentary committees left me wondering how the fishing of such a delightful fish could require a seemingly endless number of laws and rules. In 2009, in a speech at the Lord Mayor of London’s dinner for the judiciary, the then Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, aptly named Lord Igor Judge, memorably said: “My request is one which has been frequently addressed, but so far without success. Can we possibly have less legislation, particularly in the field of criminal justice…. My Lord Mayor, in a rough and ready calculation, it seems to me that if every line of recent criminal justice legislation had been guaranteed by a payment to the Bank of England of £10,000 a line, the credit crisis would have been funded.” Halsbury’s Statutes is the nearest thing that the UK has to a statute book. At the beginning of the late Queen Elizabeth II’s reign in 1952, Halsbury’s Statutes ran to 26 volumes. This was the result of 740 years of legislating, stretching back to her predecessor King John and the Magna Carta. In the seventy years that she was on the throne, the number of statute volumes increased from 26 to 80. It is not just the number of Acts that has sharply increased but also the number of pages. In 1950, the average number of pages for a government Act was 16. In 2009, the average number of pages for an Act was 122. The unrelenting rise in the volume of legislation was pointed out in a brief laid before the House of Lords in 2013. Reading the appendix at the back, one gets a momentary frisson of Thatcherite zeal when one comes to 1986-87 and sees that the tide of legislation momentarily abates, before resuming its upward course. However, a recourse to the footnotes shows that it was in that year that the Queen’s printer moved from using the A5 page size to A4.

Gerard Scullion

February 14, 2025

The Potomac mid-air collision: the role of ADS-B

That headline is supposed to make you wonder what ADS-B is, as I did the first time I read about it. The mid-air collision, of course, is the tragedy that happened last 29 January, when American Airlines flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas, was coming in for its final approach to runway 33 of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. About half a mile from the end of the runway, the plane collided with a Black Hawk helicopter. Both aircraft crashed into the Potomac, killing all 64 on board the airliner and the three crew members on the helicopter. It was the worst United States air disaster in terms of fatalities in over twenty years, and the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is continuing its investigation following a briefing held on 6 February for members of Congress. As reported in a piece from CNN, NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said at the briefing that it was not clear whether a system called ADS-B in the helicopter was working at the time of the crash. The critical nature of this question becomes clear when we realise that the height of the helicopter at the time of the crash is something that hasn't yet been explained. Deadly intersection Airliners coming in for a landing have to follow a definite glide path in order to reach the runway, and so there are strict restrictions on where other aircraft can go near airports as busy as the Reagan National. The Black Hawk helicopter was flying something called Route 4, and was practising what are called "government continuity operations". In other words, if the President and other key government figures have to get out of town in a hurry, they are going to travel by Black Hawk helicopter, and the people flying the helicopters have to keep in practice. Presumably, the routes flown by these helicopters are height-restricted, so planes approaching the airport will pass above the helicopters. Whether the Black Hawk involved in the mid-air collision was too high is a critical question, which is where ADS-B comes in. That acronym stands for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, and it is a souped-up version of the transponders that commercial aircraft have had for years which tells air-traffic controllers what height a plane is flying. And that system was a step up from the old follow-the-blips technology that traffic controllers had to use in the early days of radar-assisted air traffic. Knowing how high an aircraft is helps a controller decide whether two converging blips just mean a harmless intersection of two flight paths at different altitudes, a scary near-miss, or a disaster like the one that happened last month.

Karl D. Stephan

February 14, 2025

JD Vance, Pope Francis and immigration

On the day of his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order called “Protecting the American People against Invasion”. It was not language designed to ingratiate himself with the American people’s Catholic bishops. The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, described the executive order as “deeply troubling” and predicted that it “will have negative consequences, many of which will harm the most vulnerable among us”. To defend the new Administration’s initiative, Vice-President Vance, a Catholic convert, invoked his favourite theologian, the 5th century bishop and philosopher, St Augustine, whose opinion was that people who deserve our good will are ranked in a hierarchy. “Just google ‘ordo amoris’,” he tweeted in response to a critic. “Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?” Just google “ordo amoris.” Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone? https://t.co/otvv5g1wFN — JD Vance (@JDVance) January 30, 2025 By the way, in answer to Vance’s rhetorical question, yes, there really are people who think that their duties to children in Zambia are the same as duties to their children. The leading one is the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer along with his acolytes in the “effective altruism” movement. They are nuts. However, that’s not to say that Vance is correct. In the Vice-President’s hands, “ordo amoris” is Latin for MAGA. As his boss’s executive order put it: Enforcing our Nation’s immigration laws is critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States. The American people deserve a Federal Government that puts their interests first and a Government that understands its sacred obligation to prioritize the safety, security, and financial and economic well-being of Americans. And he has described immigrants in dehumanising ways which I am certain would have distressed St Augustine: “These aren’t people, these are animals”. Or “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” Or they’re “poisoning the blood of our nation”. He has justified his plans to deport 10 or 12 million illegal immigrants by describing them all as criminals. “When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag,”he said shortly after he was elected. So Vance is partly right and partly wrong. But the part that is right is trivial and the part that is wrong is a distortion of his Church’s teaching. Obviously, it’s right that he should feed his own kids before feeding kids in Zambia. But it’s wrong to sprinkle Latin tidbits over the executive order and to imply that it is applied Catholic social teaching. The English translation of “ordo amoris” is “charity begins at home”, not “mass deportations of animals masquerading as humans”. In any case, “ordo amoris” or ordered charity, is probably not the right frame for the knotty question of immigration, in the US or elsewhere. As Benedict XVI explained in Deus Caritas Est: “Love of neighbour, grounded in the love of God, is first and foremost a responsibility for each individual member of the faithful.” Charity towards our neighbour is by no means irrelevant to the plight of immigrants, legal and illegal. But the first way to determine what a government’s obligations are is through the lens of the virtue of justice. If obligations to migrants are regarded only as acts of charity, they may seem simply supererogatory (google it, to quote Mr Vance). In other words, nice idea but I’m having lunch.

Michael Cook

February 14, 2025

Sterilisation and surgical mutilation of children ‘paused’ by Qld govt

The questionable practice of subjecting minors to puberty-blocking drugs is usually met with government indifference and little attention in the local media. However, Queensland Health’s recently-announced restriction on this treatment for all new child and adolescent patients has clearly provoked the Albanese Labor government’s health minister Mark Butler into action. On January 31 he announced a review into gender therapies, to be conducted by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), with an interim report to be delivered in mid-2026. This is seen by many to be a stalling tactic to avert the action initiated by Queensland’s recently-elected Liberal National Party government. Predictably, the Australian Human Rights Commission and media outlets such as Crikey.com have protested about so-called right-wing “ideology” preventing “trans and gender-diverse” children from accessing this controversial form of medical treatment; but Queensland Premier David Crisafulli and his government must stand firm for the sake of thousands of innocent children. Note that in Queensland 600 current “gender” patients will nonetheless continue to receive treatment with puberty-blockers or hormonal drugs. Up-to-date statistics are uncertain, but the numbers undergoing gender treatment each year have been increasing in all states. In Queensland, the number of patients soared from 190 in 2017 to 922 in 2022. In Victoria, it increased from 472 in 2019 to 1,290 in 2023, with a lengthy waiting list. It is believed that social media, classroom indoctrination and the entertainment industry — not to mention the ill-considered “advice” of sections of the healthcare industry — are responsible for this surge. In Victoria, health professionals and others are threatened by legal penalties from seeking to dissuade children and others from this irreversible course (see below). The only recognised guidelines for gender-reassignment practices in Australia are the model developed by Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) and a similar framework promoted by NSW Health. Both were recently described by Sydney journalist Bernard Lane, as “nothing less than the blueprint for gender-affirming medicine in Australia”, created by its very practitioners. Paradoxically, Mr Butler’s intervention, belated as it is, confirms the inadequacy of the RCH and similar guidelines. Children and adolescents presenting with gender dysphoria are often also suffering from other psychological problems. These include depression (74.6 percent) and other conditions such as suicidal thoughts and autism (Australian Trans Pathways Studies in Youth, 2020). Why normal standards of care, relying on evidence-based research, have been ignored in these cases is explained by Australian psychiatrist Dr Andrew Amos in a revealing study published last year in Australasian Psychiatry. He explains that the principle of the gender-affirming model of care is that “all health clinicians have an ethical responsibility not to question or evaluate patient reported gender identity, even when that identity is unstable, changes rapidly, and is co-morbid with severe mental illness”. Dr Amos points out that these practitioners “assume access to gender-affirming interventions is a human right that should be available to anyone competent to request them”. That is, they reject the need for any systematic evaluation of whether these treatments have benefited patients. Despite a torrent of information from overseas warning of the dangers of this treatment, and the new restrictions on its use for minors in Finland, Sweden, the UK and some US states such as Florida, Australian governments have persisted with transgender “treatments” of children. At no point have they ever felt obliged to produce evidence to justify their practices which lead to the irreversible sterilisation of children too young to make a mature decision about many other facets of their lives. So-called healthcare professionals have driven a wedge between family members, and bullied parents into withdrawing their objections to their children being subjected to transgender treatment. In Victoria, parents, doctors, teachers and counsellors face heavy penalties if they offer advice, or even prayer, contrary to transgender ideology, as stipulated by the counselling censorship provisions of the state’s draconian Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act 2021. We have seen in the UK the 2019 scandal surrounding the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). In April 2024 came the bombshell report by Dr Hilary Cass, OBE, commissioned by NHS England, on gender identity services for children and young people. In addition, Scandinavian and US reviews have found the evidence favouring hormonal treatment of gender-distressed minors to be very weak and uncertain. In reality, gender-affirmation or sex-reassignment is impossible, owing to unalterable chromosomes. Moreover, surgical reconstructions are only cosmetic. Long-term studies overseas do not record positive outcomes, especially for those who later regret an irreversible choice made when they were children. Australian governments and even courts have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the weight of evidence from overseas pleading caution. This is how an Australian Family Court judge resolved the case of parents disputing the administering of testosterone to their 16-years-old trans-identifying daughter. He ruled last November that, in the absence of evidence-based guidance, it is “common sense” to accept the “best available guidance” and a “consensus favouring gender medicine”. This judge used masculine pronouns throughout when referring to the daughter and rejected the relevance of “potential later interventions” when endorsing testosterone treatment.

John Morrissey

February 11, 2025

The Panama Canal: an artery for global trade

In his inaugural address, Donald Trump declared that one of his administration’s priorities would be to regain control of the Panama Canal. This claim reopens a century-old debate over who built it, who lost it, and who truly owns this 80-kilometer engineering marvel that stitches together the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. With over 140 maritime routes, 1,700 ports, and 160 countries linked through it, the Canal is a key artery of global trade. I visited the Canal a few years ago, and, beyond its logistical genius, what struck me the most was its turbulent history. French vision, American execution, Caribbean workers In 1869, fresh off his success with the Suez Canal, French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps set his sights on Central America. He was determined to carve a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, which was then part of Colombia. This would be one of the 19th century’s most ambitious infrastructure projects. A report in The Economist from 1879 called it “a bolder enterprise even than the Suez Canal,” predicting the logistical, technical, and health nightmares ahead. As if they had a crystal ball, the project collapsed just a decade later, sunk by financial ruin, yellow fever, and an engineering failure. Lesseps’s Panama Canal Company would be bankrupt by 1888. Yet where the French had failed, the United States saw an opportunity. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine—a US foreign policy that justified American influence in Latin America while keeping the continent off-limits to European colonial ambitions—Washington backed Panama’s independence from Colombia in 1903. It then secured the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty granting it full control over the Canal’s construction and operation. Nearly 40,000 workers from the Caribbean—mostly from Barbados—were recruited to build the Canal. And in August 1914, just as World War I erupted, the Panama Canal opened, redrawing the map of global trade. Without the Canal, global shipping routes would be significantly different. Before 1914, ships traveling the east and west coasts of the American Continent faced a long and dangerous journey. The Canal slashed fuel consumption, cut transit times, and made global trade more efficient than ever. Today, a San-Francisco–New-York voyage has five possible routes by sea. The fastest? Through the Panama Canal—10 days, 23 hours. The next-best option? A 27-day detour around the Strait of Magellan. The canal moves the world… but at what cost? For much of the 20th century, the Panama Canal was a geopolitical chess piece. The Canal Zone was US territory and a flashpoint for anticolonial sentiment in Central America. By the 1960s and ’70s, Panamanian resentment escalated, culminating in the 1964 Flag Riots. Clashes between Panamanians and US forces resulted in multiple casualties. In 1977, the Torrijos-Carter Treaties established a phased transition plan that transferred control of the Canal to Panama by 1999, marking a major shift in US-Panama relations. Trump has called this handover “foolish,” blaming President Jimmy Carter for giving away a trade goldmine. At the time, the decision was intended to reduce anti-American sentiment in Latin America. Today, the Panama Canal is a vital economic force. Managed by a private entity, it generates roughly 4% of Panama’s GDP, through the tolls paid by vessels using the Canal. About 5% of global trade flows through it annually, and the US is its biggest user—around 40% of US container traffic passes through each year. Meanwhile, China is catching up fast. From October 2023 to September 2024, China accounted for 21.4% of the cargo volume transiting the Canal—making it the second largest user after the United States. Beijing has also been investing in Panamanian ports, raising concerns over who has more influence. And the stakes are rising… Water shortages in Lake Gatun (one of the lakes that feed the Canal) restrict ship crossings and raise questions about the Canal’s long-term viability, as does the fact that the century-old locks are not big enough to accommodate today’s largest container ships. All the while, Nicaragua is reviving dreams of an alternative Canal, backed by Chinese investors.

Daphne Posadas

February 10, 2025

Is the UK’s ‘respect for international law’ an excuse for an unaccountable legal dictatorship at home?

Traditionally, it has been only criminals who broke the law. These days, the law instead all too often finds itself being broken in a far more complete manner by those who are supposed to be busy upholding it – namely, the lawyers. Particularly broken at present are the malfunctioning laws of the United Kingdom, their chief current wrecker being Lord Richard Hermer, the Attorney-General for the governing left-wing Labour Party. I wrote about this particular deluded individual here on Mercator last week, in relation to Hermer’s Panglossian fantasies about how, if Western nations like Britain and the US would only follow made-up international laws down to the very last letter over dangerous military-related issues of global geopolitics, then rogue opposing non-Western powers like Russia and China would inevitably pay our fine moral example some heed and follow suit themselves by ceasing to invade and threaten foreign lands like Ukraine and Taiwan in the future – a notion fit only to be described as being “unrealistic” at best, “insane” at worst. There is an equally malign consequence of Hermer’s utopian legal mindset I did not mention last time around, however, and that is the highly destructive impact of his ideas upon purely domestic UK laws, rather than upon the country’s legal dealings with other nations. If anything, the damage presently being done by this particular aspect of his thinking are even worse. Bordering on illegal An old colleague of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, with a corresponding background in international human rights law, Hermer is as left-wing as lawyers come, as shown by 2024 comments of his about the very idea of a political party pledging to “control our borders” being inherently “de-humanising” to those attempting to illegally cross them: rather awkward, given the political party for which he now works publicly pledged (albeit falsely, just like their Conservative predecessors repeatedly did) to protect the nation’s borders themselves at the last election. Lord Hermer’s opinions upon such subjects matter. As the government’s chief legal compliance officer, Hermer is responsible for assessing which particular policy proposals are likely to be deemed legal or illegal by courts, lending him de facto responsibility for deciding what can and cannot be done when running the country. Given his fanatical belief in ensuring the supremacy of international laws over boring and outdated old national domestic laws – or “seek[ing] to raise the standards for calibrating legality”, as he robotically puts it – this can make it difficult for ministers to actually act to deliver on their manifesto promises. Labour have just announced that their forthcoming Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill will be scrapping important prior legal provisions giving ministers the right to disregard interim injunctions from the wholly unelected European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg when deporting illegal immigrants, even those who perform trivial little acts like raping people, blowing them up, or stabbing their children to death. And why? Ask Lord Hermer. On January 30, the Attorney-General gave a speech to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), pledging attendees his solemn assurance that, despite the UK supposedly having left the EU, the supposedly “sovereign” country still intended to remain firmly entangled within the legalistic web of the Union’s parasitic judicial offshoots nonetheless: “And if I may, I’d like to be very clear. The new United Kingdom government will never withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights or refuse to comply with judgements of the Court or requests for interim measures given in respect of the United Kingdom.” We are told by Labour that their new Borders Bill will grant Britain full control of its external borders; and yet Lord Hermer’s PACE speech explicitly hands control over them towards Brussels and Strasbourg instead. As one unnamed government source asked UK broadsheet The Times: “Both of these announcements were made on the same day. How can they possibly be reconciled?” The answer is that they cannot: except by purest shysteristic casuistry. To the mere legal layman, Britain may appear to have ceded sovereignty of her borders to Europe and the ECHR, goes the misleading legal argument. But as she has done so voluntarily, this means that ultimately the nation doesin fact have control of such boundaries: the government controls its own decision to hand away its control to others. Some less legally-minded members of the UK government disagree. Last week, several Labour Party Ministers also spoke to The Times under condition of anonymity, claiming Hermer’s legalistic hold over his old pal Keir Starmer was so tight it amounted to a near-total “freeze on government”. Under previous Conservative-era administrations Attorney-Generals advised Ministers should go ahead trying to implement new policies unless there was a plausibleprospect of them being sunk by unaccountable foreign do-gooders in international courts. So sacred did Lord Hermer consider such holy bodies, though, he had altered official advice to mandate no such policies should proceed if there was even the tiniest, implausible chance of them being so thwarted, either. End result? Nothing meaningful whatsoever could ever get done in the country anymore. Nothing, that is, except for a few very curious exceptions – i.e., any measures that Lord Hermer himself happened to personally politically approve of.