LETTERS.

ROBERT MANNE AND QUADRANT

SIR: Robert Manne has been rewriting history again, this time accusing Quadrant and like-minded people of running a sinister campaign against the "Bringing Them Home" report. This is actually a case of role reversal, since it was Manne and Raimond Gaita who began the campaigning after the report's release. It is now agreed on all sides that the report was exaggerated and sloppy in many aspects. But instead of reining in these exaggerations, Manne and Gaita added further exaggerations by their ludicrous claim of genocide. Ron Brunton, the Quadrant group and others then performed the necessary task of reducing the report back to reality, by showing that, while there was inhumane treatment, the real numbers were much less than one-in-three, not all were stolen, it wasn't a whole generation, and so on. Now Manne, reluctantly forced to semi-admit these corrections, anomalously directs his animus at those who got it right. Ideologues never acknowledge they are wrong, and must always have the last word.

There is a distinct pattern in Manne's outbursts over a decade on three issues: free trade, Demidenko's novel and the "stolen generations" issue. In all cases he entered the debate very late in the day on matters about which he had no previous knowledge, made an initial intemperate claim, and then started to do post hoc facto "research" to try to justify his position as instant expert. The common thread is that Manne's target is always the right. This is strange coming from one who edited and promoted the collection The New Conservatism in Australia, in the introduction to which he wrote: "I must admit to having no competence in economics whatsoever". Manne specialises in interrogating the alleged inconsistencies of others, but never explains his own. It is good to see that Quadrant, under its present editorship, is back on track after the aberration of the Manne years, carrying on the role for which it was founded, which was not to be duchessed by the left, but to expose and oppose the intellectual fads of the moment.

Patrick Morgan, Boolarra, Vic.

THE MULTIVERSE HUNCH

SIR: Paul Davies was asked by Phillip Adams in their television conversations why, if life evolved on earth once, this did not constitute evidence that it is very, very common in the universe. Davies answered that, since life is a virtual miracle statistically, there is no reason at all to think it could occur twice, and so we are almost certainly unique.

David Armstrong, agreeing with Martin Rees in the review of his book Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe (April 2001), sees the real problem as explaining the origin of our universe, taking biological evolution as proven. I disagree. Something that is statistically virtually impossible (life) cannot become "likely" merely by existing, since there is no "fundamental law" yet discovered that leads to life on earth, even if laws can predict all the pre-conditions for it. The emergence of life and mind remains a separate problem from the emergence of a life-possible universe, even though Davies himself concedes the biological evolution issue.