Matt Price helps writer sell books

Sing a song, act in a film or write a good book and all of a sudden you are imbued with a superior knowledge of Internatonal Affairs. You are quoted by the press and appear on television talk fests with interviewers hanging on every word you utter and your opinion becomes gospel. Doesn’t make sense to me but Matt Price in todays Australian quotes a writer who has been awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature as likening the Howard Government’s controversial reforms to human rights abuses under apartheid in his native South Africa. The writer, Jim Coetzee, has won two Booker prizes as well as the Nobel Prize. Clearly he is a wordsmith but has little knowledge of Australian police or legal system.

(Jim) Coetzee said the South African police “could do what they wanted because there was no real recourse against them because special provisions of the legislation indemnified them in advance”.

So? Interesting statement on South African laws as they applied at the time but they have no relevance in any debate about our proposed anti-terror laws. Still, Matt Price gets paid for the piece, Coetzee sells more books and some people will add the piece to their store of irrelevant information to be used to base their irrelevant opinions.