The offence of the Greens, especially Adam Bandt, in blaming the bushfires on Tony Abbott is not that they politicised a ghastly situation. Almost all commentators have scored political points. For every Green attack on the government there have dozens of attacks on the Greens for having made pre-emptive back-burning impossible in practice through restrictive ‘green tape’. The difference is that the Greens are shameless and wrong while their critics are sensible and right.

One of the best moments in Autopsy on a Dream — John Weiley’s 1968 documentary about the Sydney Opera House rebroadcast the other night as part of the fortieth anniversary — is Ove Arup’s anguished confession why he did not resign with Jørn Utzon in 1966. The theme of this candidly Utzonite doco is the perennial conflict between the great artist (Utzon) and the philistines (the Government). But Arup, the engineer, stands apart. He knew Utzon to be a genius — ‘the best I ever worked with’, as he once put it. He agreed the success of the opera house project depended on subordination of every detail to the architectural or aesthetic conception. He had told the Cahill government in 1963: ‘This strict enforcement of aesthetic control and striving for perfection is of the essence of the job.’ (See Michael Baume’s 1967 classic The Sydney Opera House Affair.) Arup would have preferred Utzon to finish the building — although he was not sure he ever would. His explanation of why he did not resign is deeply moving. He wanted to see the miracle happen. Historians have not yet done justice to Arup’s role in the Opera House story.

There is a lesson for us today in Michael Fullilove’s new book Rendezvous with Destiny about how President Roosevelt prepared a neutral United States for war and international leadership. Speaking to the Sydney Institute, Fullilove contrasted FDR’s ‘pivot to Europe’ with President Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’. Roosevelt knew his isolationist country did not want to go to war — against Hitler or anyone else. To transform public opinion, he did not rely on his State Department or his ambassadors. He sent five ‘envoys’ (Sumner Welles, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, Harry Hopkins, Wendell Willkie, Averell Harriman) to Europe on separate missions to assess the leadership in Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Russia, and report back to him personally. Reassured about Churchill’s determination to resist Hitler, he followed this up with countless speeches and fireside chats, many ambiguous but all Europeanist and anti-Hitler. By the end of 1941 America was rearmed, remobilised and ready for war. The pivot to Europe was complete. Compare all that with Obama’s proclaimed pivot to Asia. He has given fine speeches, like the one in Canberra in 2011, but in practice he has been pivoting not to Asia but back to the Middle East — to Syria, Iran, Egypt, Libya, Israel, Palestine. President Obama lacks FDR’s strategic vision and commitment. Fullilove tactfully blames circumstances rather than Obama. But the world interprets it as weakness.

This is certainly how it is seen in the Middle East, according to the Israeli political scientist Efraim Inbar, speaking at the Centre for Independent Studies during the week. The media report dramatic changes such as the Arab Spring. But little in fact changes. Despite riots and coups the moribund Arab states still fail to modernise or democratise. Their peoples still identify on religious, sectarian or tribal but not national lines. (Egypt is an exception.) Hence the appeal of transnational causes — pan-Arabism or pan-Islamism. They do not believe President Obama understands the Middle East and they do not expect leadership from him. The one country that is successful, democratic, Western and pro-American is Israel. The existential threat Israel faces is not the Arabs but Iran and its Bomb. Efraim Inbar hopes Obama will not be duped by Iran’s current charm offensive. But, he adds, once Iranians have you in a room negotiating, you have already lost. Since Israelis have no confidence in Obama, they may act alone against Iran’s bomb-making facilities. The hypocrites of the world will denounce Israel but many will privately applaud.

There are all sorts of stories about what happens when novelists sell their film rights. Some are horror stories, some have happy endings. Some, like Fay Weldon, just take the money and run. Less common is when filmmakers impose an interpretation deliberately opposed to what the writer intended. Take Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. At the Chesterton Conference at Campion College last weekend, Donat Gallagher examined three attempts to film it. The first, in 1947, failed completely. Waugh explained the religious theme (‘the operation of divine grace on a diverse group of people’) to the Hollywood producers but the censor found that Waugh took a far too light attitude to sin. The film was never made. But in 1981 the British 11-part television series was a triumphant success. It was faithful to the religious theme, although some critics claimed that it owed its success to a servile appeal to English class snobbery, while others denounced what they deemed to be its religious hocus-pocus. They had their revenge in the next or 2008 production — ‘a calculated attack’ on Waugh’s ideas, presenting Catholics as cold bigots and religious faith as undermining happiness. There have been other translations of Waugh’s novels into films, some well done like A Handful of Dust and Sword of Honour, and one badly done like The Loved One (‘unrecognisable and unwatchable’). Waugh himself never saw any of them. He died in 1966.