Horse 3382 - I Read Quadrant Magazine So You Don't Have To

This is Quadrant magazine.

The chances are that you probably have not heard of Quadrant magazine. As far as the Four G's of magazines go (Grin mags, Grot mags, Grunt mags, Grumble mags), Quadrant is a Grumble mag which styles itself as having a bias "towards cultural freedom, anti-totalitarianism, and classical liberalism". In reality though the magazine under the editorship of Keith Windschuttle, actively pursued an editorial bias of colonial imperialism which often flirted with white supremacy, advocated for the power of the state to enforce same, and took the editorial stance that anything which didn't conform to Keith's increasingly narrow view of the world was simply never published. If the magazine's own tagline of its bias was supposed to be a mission statement, then I can only assume that as time went on that it became more like a Newspeak metaphor, where two plus two equalled five.

I used to read Quadrant sufficiently enough that I saw its internal shift from what was late 90s neoliberalism to something which was more at home in "Bulldog" magazine of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Bulldog was the magazine of what was the British National Front; which one can only assume was started in the wake of the demise of the British Union of Fascists. Quadrant magazine was never as blatant or open as Bulldog but under Windschuttle's editorship, it certainly pointed the pulse as if it wanted the ship to steer in that direction. So toxic had Quadrant become, that even I couldn't bring myself to be bothered to read it anymore. The question of why I of all people would be reading Quadrant in the first, can be easily answered that if you consider that The Australian is the doyenne of News Corp and Rupert's little princess, then Quadrant was the intellectual darling of the right that The Australian looked up to.  

So when I found out that Windschuttle stood down as editor and Rebecca Weisser replaced him, I was interested to see if the magazine had shifted in tone. It had not all that much. This latest edition though, is a rollicking ran through The Australian's reject list of contributors. The July-August 2024 edition of Quadrant, is the literary equivalent of Red Bull's Flugtag but instead of there being water below, it is just a concrete runway. 

Tony Abbott's piece tries to make the case that there is too much American Liberalism in Australian courts. It manages to be an amazing piece that actually makes no reference to any court case; even though there should have been an open goal with Giggle v Tickle before the courts when this went to publication. The piece is peppered with short, sharp, scattergun, sentences; which are very much of the kind that you will find in Abbott's book "Battlelines", which was a more coherent read than whatever this is supposed to be. I suppose that if you are putting a book out for publication, that the process of having an editor would tend to force someone to think and rethink about what they have written. Tony's piece is borderline unreadable.

But wait, for the low low price of $15 (which to be fair is actually pretty good value for longform journalism (?)) you get the words of TWO ex-Prime Ministers for the price of one. John Howard has written a very very longwinded and deliberate piece which, on the face of it appears to be making the general case that anthropomorphic climate change either isn't real and/or that there is nothing that we can do about it, and then pivots to a kind of puff-piece for nuclear energy. 

It was Howard's Government which put the kibosh on nuclear energy generation in Australia and while this might be a case of an opinion changing due to someone having better information, this is not even hiding in plain sight that this piece has a very narrow target audience; specifically of a group of 227 souls whose workplace is a house, in a hill, with a flag on top, and a roundabout going around. This is the hymn sheet from which Blue Ties are expected to sing from. 

As for the rest of what is in here: we have Gerard Henderson writing an apology piece for George Pell, Tim Blair actively demonstrating that the right is unfunny and why people like him deserve to be made fun of by "leftist" comedians, the latest hit piece in the more than sixty-part installment on Bruce Pascoe, yet another piece denying that racism exists, while another 

In short, Rebecca Weisser's replacement of Keith Windschuttle looks as if you had taken a nap in August 2004, or August 1954, and woken up, and nothing had changed at all. It looks as though Quadrant is still the same Grumble mag that it always was but someone has just changed the lightbulb.

I hate Quadrant magazine. 

No really. 

My late mother quite wisely said that you shouldn't hate something unless you want it dead. Quite frankly if Quadrant magazine died, then not many would mourn its passing and maybe even some iota of public discourse would improve slightly.

Having said that, Quadrant magazine is a textbook case of one thing and one thing only fitting into an exact hole in the market. There is no competitor because the market would never absorb it; which is hilariously ironic given that classical liberalism (which Quadrant pretends to promote) likes the idea of the competition of ideas in the marketplace.

How does this small thing fit into its perfectly sized niche? Well, if there are 50 newsagencies the country who sell 20 magazines per issue, which over two months is not that hard to do, then that is a circulation of 1000 copies at a time. 1000 copies at $15 is $15,000. $15,000 on a bi-monthly basis is six times per year, which is $90,000 per year. Now obviously I have no idea of exactly how many copies are sold per month but as I am just chucking rocks into a pond here, that's good enough.

Quadrant magazine is a tidy little earner for exactly one person full-time, is probably bankrolled by some right-wing benefactor, and likely pays its contributors in nothing more than artisanal garlic bread and pot pourri. I have only ever seen Quadrant magazine in a few select newsagent in Mosman, Double Bay, at Sydney Airport, and in the newsagency in Parliament House in Canberra. That says to me that the niche which Quadrant magazine fits exactly into, consists of the few right-wing intellectuals that actually exist in Australia, and the wives of the members of ASX200 boards.