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July 15, 2003
Here in little old Adelaide we have just had a popular festival of ideas around the themes of hope and fear. The smorsgboard of ideas was herald as a homegrown success due to the attendances being around 30,000.
It was not a success for the Anglo-Australian Sydney conservatives though. They sneered. Sydney may be looking rather tired, dirty and tacky these days, but its conservatives can still shrug their weariness off, free themselves from their disgust and raise a bit of their big contempt for the people.
I have previously mentioned the scorn of Tim Blair, who called the festival of ideas a carnival of the left-wing rabble. Now Gerard Henderson has also got in the contempt act about the people at the carnivalof ideas.
Henderson tells us that Adelaide is the place which laps up strident anti-Americanism; it is the home of a luvvies' collective where everyone (or almost everyone) agrees with everyone else; and it is besotted with cosmopolitan ideas of the future prospect of a world parliament.
Why it was a only yesterday that Adelaide was being denounced as the home of protectionism, populist resentment, anti-development, a lack of get up and go and suburban stupor. And South Australia is being mocked as a 'not-in-my-backyard' state because it resists being a repository for low level nuclear waste.
Poor Adelaide. It can never win a trick. But at least its not provincal anymore. The suburban masses have stirred, and they embraced cosmopolitianism.
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