During the American half of her life, Arendt worked variously as an editor, a journalist, a writer and a university teacher. She became known as one of the most formidable intellectuals of the twentieth century. Her books — The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) foremost among them — became hugely influential and have aged well. Her essays and published correspondence with key individuals in her life — including her lover Martin Heidegger, her mentor and friend Karl Jaspers, her first husband Günther Anders and her second husband Heinrich Blücher — provide yet more fascinating insights into a brilliant mind.

But it has never been easy to categorise Arendt. A famous interview she gave on West German television in 1964 began with a disagreement. “I think you are a philosopher,” the interviewer Günter Gaus said to her. “Well, I can’t do anything about that,” Arendt interrupted, “but I’m of the view that I’m not a philosopher. I think I’ve finally said farewell to philosophy. I studied philosophy, as you know, but that’s not to say that I stuck with it.”

The biographer is expected to fill in blanks, eliminate uncertainties, fit episodes into a cohesive story, and provide historical context. An intellectual biography should also relate a writer’s life to the texts she left behind and construct a narrative that makes sense of the trajectory of her thinking.

Thomas Meyer’s Hannah Arendt: Die Biografie, published last year in Germany to much acclaim and forthcoming in an English translation in October, does all that. He claims his is the first book about Arendt based on archival research, but even if it weren’t he has obviously done more than others to track down written sources. For many years, he has served as editor of Arendt’s collected writings in German. His understanding of her ideas and his extensive sleuthing has produced a comprehensive picture.

May 1941 also marked Arendt’s entry into an English-language universe. Until that point she had written in German, though she was also at home in French — from 1933 until 1941 she lived in exile in France — and read classical Greek and Latin as fluently as her mother tongue. English hadn’t been part of her world until she began lessons in 1940, but it didn’t take her long to write and publish in that language. She immersed herself in an Anglophone world in the second half of her life, though she never abandoned German; in the 1964 interview she told Gaus she knew a lot of German poetry by heart and the lines kept circling at the back of her mind.

Much to his credit, Meyer is interested in Arendt’s entire oeuvre. She wrote almost all her books twice, usually first in English and then in German (sometimes based on a text prepared by a translator). These aren’t German and English versions of the same text. It’s easier to express philosophical ideas in German than in English, Arendt once remarked, while the English language is better suited to thinking politically. When she imagined her German reader, she assumed some philosophical concepts needed little explanation; her American audience was better versed in a tradition of political thought.

Meyer is a diligent chronicler who avoids anachronisms. He discusses Arendt’s life and intellectual journey against the backdrop of the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, rarely filtering it through the lens of his own times. Only when he writes about the men in Arendt’s life does he become judgemental. He disapproves of her relationship with Heidegger (as do many Arendt admirers), is critical of Jaspers, and seems to consider Blücher, the love of her life and her husband for more than half of it, a philanderer who couldn’t hold a candle to her intellectually.

Meyer is thorough. It’s only after a twenty-two-page family history that readers learn Hannah Arendt was born at 9:15 pm, weighing 3.695 kilograms. I can empathise with him: of course he wants to share all the detail he has been able to unearth. And since Arendt’s life was complex and complicated, why not document all its twists and turns?

It’s time to come clean: I found Meyer’s book unwieldy and unnecessarily slow and his curiosity somewhat antiquarian. But I am being unfair, and I know why: I began reading Meyer’s book at the same time as I started on Lyndsey Stonebridge’s biography of Hannah Arendt, We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love & Disobedience. The plan was to consider these books in tandem, life chapter by life chapter. I soon abandoned that idea. Not because Meyer’s book is boring, but because Stonebridge’s is riveting. I was able to return to Meyer’s text sooner than expected simply because I couldn’t put down Stonebridge’s fast-paced narrative.

Her approach is as anti-antiquarian as could be. She is interested in Hannah Arendt as a companion in today’s dark times. And thus her narrative has two protagonists: the biographer and her subject. “I’ve tried to think my own thoughts in the place of Hannah Arendt,” Stonebridge writes, before conceding that “there may be moments [when she] also thinks her thoughts in my place.”

The two seem to have much in common: both come across as passionate, generous and at times opinionated. They complement each other: Stonebridge is not only Arendt’s interpreter but also the one who knows about the world almost half a century after Arendt’s death. It’s different from the one Arendt inhabited, but no less out of joint. Stonebridge convinces her readers that Arendt would have much to say about a world that “seems to be in the grip of a relentlessly awful plot.”

Stonebridge’s frequent references to her own times help the reader to understand why Hannah Arendt and her writings still resonate. The fact that she is read perhaps at least as much now as in the year she died may seem surprising. After all, Arendt hadn’t gathered followers around her who would take responsibility for her posthumous reputation. Her intellectual taste might be considered old-fashioned: with a few notable exceptions, she was not much interested in contemporary political theorists and philosophers, but instead engaged with Plato and Kant. She was one of the very few women in her line of work, but did not consider herself a feminist. Her writing doesn’t support the kind of identity politics that are so fashionable these days. She could come across as arrogant, if only because she often deemed it unnecessary to translate quotes from other languages.

Besides, Hannah Arendt didn’t leave a grand theory behind. It’s not possible to draw on an overarching “Arendtian” framework in the way some people purport to explain things from a Marxian or Freudian perspective. She is not somebody on whose writings we could comfortably lean. But we can take courage from her highly original attempts to understand the world. “What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing,” she wrote in the prologue to The Human Condition. Is there anything less simple than that? Thinking, though, was something Hannah Arendt was particularly good at.

“She wanted to think exactly like Rahel Varnhagen, to shadow her thought and experience as closely as she could so that she might better understand her own emotional, intellectual and at the time often perplexing life,” Stonebridge says about Arendt’s relationship with the German-Jewish writer and salonnière whose biography Arendt finished writing in Paris. Arendt once called Varnhagen her closest friend, although by then that friend had been dead for about a hundred years. Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka occupied similar roles in Arendt’s life.

Stonebridge’s relationship with Arendt is evidently also close, which makes hers a particularly personal book. Shadowing her biographical subject’s thought and experience, she followed literally in Arendt’s footsteps. Visiting Montauban in the southwest of France, the town where Arendt stayed in the summer of 1940 after her escape from the Gurs internment camp, Stonebridge “carefully counted the sixty steps across the square that it would have taken Arendt to get from her stuffy room to the cool companionship of the library.”

“Perplexing” is an attribute that appears more than once in Stonebridge’s book. For good reason: it characterises the twists and turns not only of Arendt’s life but also in her way of thinking. Stonebridge quotes Arendt quoting Plato’s rendering of a Socratic dialogue: “It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself I perplex other people,” Socrates reportedly said to Meno. “The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.” Whereupon Arendt adds: “Which, of course, sums up neatly the only way thinking can be taught.”

Of course? Arendt was an accomplished teacher who often performed her thinking in front of an audience — in fact the text Stonebridge uses here was labelled “a lecture” when first published in 1971 — but having been a teacher I know that many students resent being infected with perplexity. It requires skill not to lose them.

Skill is also on display when Stonebridge confronts her reader with the perplexities of Arendt’s ideas and life without trying to dissolve them. Arendt would have appreciated that. “I am often captured by the sense that there exists something she will not give up; something precious, mysterious even to herself, but very strongly present,” Stonebridge writes.

But isn’t that just the point of all of this? she might say now, chin resting in her smoking hand from her place in the bar in the underworld where the lost angels of the last century gather at dusk. That we are unknowable even to ourselves, maybe especially to ourselves, and yet capable of collective miracles? Isn’t that what you must fight for again now?

The subtitle of Stonebridge’s biography promises lessons. Arendt may have much to teach us: about indifference, about plurality and about racism, to name but three of the topics she wrote about. Stonebridge avoids turning Arendt into a Vordenker, somebody who does the thinking on others’ behalf. Arendt did not see herself in such a role either. She was principally interested in Nach-denken, in the exercise of chasing and thinking through issues that she found difficult. Such Nach-denken required close attention, patience, imagination and the willingness to leave well-trodden paths.

Without compromising her intellectual independence, Arendt relied on at least one Vordenker herself. Immanuel Kant taught her that our ability to think makes freedom possible and that how we think has moral consequences. From him she learned much else, including the idea that to think politically and critically required an “erweiterte Denkungsart,” which Arendt translated as “enlarged mentality.”

For Arendt, Kant was a familiar figure, and not just because she had read his Critique of Pure Reason when she was sixteen. Arendt grew up in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad), where Kant had spent almost his entire life. After having lived for more than twenty years in New York she admitted to a German journalist: “In the way I think and form judgements, I’m still from Königsberg.”

Perhaps the most important lesson provided by Arendt via Stonebridge is a challenge: Think! How not to think is also a key lesson of We Are Free to Change the World, and here the focus is on Arendt’s essay about Elizabeth Eckford and the other children known as the Little Rock Nine, who in 1957 dared to attend a racially segregated high school in Arkansas’s capital city. “As for the children, forced integration means a very serious conflict between home and school, between their private and and their social life, and… children cannot be expected to handle them and therefore should not be exposed to them,” Arendt wrote.

Here she was not mindful of the need for an “enlarged mentality.” She didn’t travel to Little Rock, she didn’t talk to Eckford and, most importantly, she didn’t take seriously the girl’s experience. Arendt didn’t to think empathetically about Eckford’s situation because she considered empathy an apolitical and therefore inadequate response. But she also failed to think critically about it. It says much about Arendt, however, that after her essay “Reflections of Little Rock” had been published she realised that she had been wrong and admitted as much in writing.

Although Arendt was a public intellectual par excellence in the second half of her life (and one who expertly used the media), she didn’t think it was her role to shape public opinion. Do you want to make an impact with your work, Gaus asked her in 1964. “To be honest with you, I have to tell you: when I’m working, I’m not interested in impact,” she replied. “And when the work has been completed?” he persisted. “Well, then I’ve finished it.” She explained that her main aim was to understand, and that writing helped her to do that. And anyway, asking her about her impact was something only a man would do: “Men are always so concerned about making an impression.”

I loved reading Stonebridge’s book because I felt that in at least four key respects she does justice to Arendt. For one, her biography is exceptionally well written. That matters because Arendt herself wrote well (in German more so than in English) and because she valued good writing. She frequently quoted poetry in her writings — and poets also appreciated reading her. The final passages of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the poet Randall Jarrell told her in 1950, “seem a sort of crushing unbearable poem, quite homogeneous, something the reader feels and understands at the same time… I feel as if I’d seen the other side of the moon.” She is well-served by a biographer whose prose is sharp, elegant and captivating.

Gaus was incredulous when Arendt insisted that she was not a philosopher. Stonebridge understands why she said “goodbye to philosophy for good.” Arendt might not have endorsed Marx’s dictum — “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it” — but she distinguished between philosophising, on the one hand, and thinking politically and critically, on the other.

Arendt was prompted to think not because of an abstract conundrum but because the world was out of joint. Her thinking was informed by her experience as a refugee and as a Jewish woman who had been lucky to escape the fate of the millions of other Jews murdered in the Shoah. All this provides her thinking and writing with a sense of urgency.

Stonebridge shares that sense of urgency. “Hers was not a call for a return to political reason (such as you often hear today),” Stonebridge writes, “but for a kind of emergency thinking that may, she said, in the end, be all we have.” Our world is in much need of the kind of emergency thinking that Arendt practised and Stonebridge advocates.

Yet even while thinking and writing about a world out of joint, Arendt was committed to living well. Friendship and love were important to her, a fact that we might easily lose sight of when reading Eichmann in Jerusalem or The Origins of Totalitarianism. Stonebridge’s biography keeps the loving and much-loved author of these books in focus. It ends with a call to her readers, which would, I am sure, have met with Arendt’s wholehearted approval: “Now pay attention and get on with the work of resisting the sorry reality that you find yourselves in. And for goodness’ sake — a puff of smoke, raising a glass of Campari — have some fun!” •

Hannah Arendt: Die Biografie
By Thomas Meyer │ Piper │ €28.00 │ 521 pages

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love & Disobedience
By Lyndsey Stonebridge │ Jonathan Cape │£22.00 │290 pages

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Many Americans, and many of those watching around the world, see American democracy cracking, freedoms being eroded and the political system breaking. Much of the blame is sheeted home to Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again followers, and the case against them can clearly and forcibly be made.

But the United States has faced such crises before: in the 1790s, with the intense standoff between Federalists and Republicans; before, during and after the Civil War; in the Jim Crow period of the 1890s, which also saw five consecutive presidents elected with a minority of the popular vote; and after the Watergate revelations. The problems inherent in the American political system are thus compounded by problems and leaders unique to each era.

Trump’s presidency clearly damaged American democracy. Just how damaged and how long-lasting the effect is up for debate (a detailed 2023 report from Brookings discusses the issues well). During his term the United States was labelled a “backsliding democracy” by International IDEA, a European democracy think tank, and for some years the Economist’s Democracy Index has ranked the United States among “flawed democracies” including Greece, Poland and Brazil.

In a recent interview for the Democracy Project at Johns Hopkins University, political scientist Robert Lieberman stressed that democracy exists on a continuum. The United States started out as a constrained democracy, with citizenship limited to white men and only property-owners entitled to vote. For Lieberman, the key question is not “whether we are a democracy, but in which direction are we headed. Are we moving forward or are we moving backward?”

The current situation is arguably more serious than previous democratic crises because there are so many concomitant threats. There’s the pervasive partisan divide; conflicts over racism, immigration and nativism; growing socio-economic inequalities; the erosion of voting rights, particularly those of minorities; lawmakers’ attempts to undermine reproductive health, the rights of LGBTQI+ people, school curricula and library books; and the endless promulgation of lies and distortions that quickly come to be treated as facts.

Some of these threats have been decades in the making. Americans have long been sceptical of the power of the federal government: trust in Washington, which began to decline during the Vietnam war and continued to decline amid the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, is at an historic low. Fewer than one-in-five Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always” (1 per cent) or “most of the time” (15 per cent) in 2023 Pew Research Center polls.

Individual institutions have suffered as well. The US Supreme Court’s  reputation has been damaged by recent rulings contrary to popular opinion, and trust in federal agencies like the Justice Department, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Reserve has eroded. It’s shocking to also see declining trust in the military, police and the medical system.

These troubles pile on top of problems intrinsic to American democracy: the unusual mechanism, an electoral college, for electing the president; equal representation for the states in the Senate regardless of vastly different populations; lifetime appointments for US Supreme Court justices; and the lack of a national system for overseeing elections.

Because of their distrust of the popular vote, the Founding Fathers created the electoral college and other structural protections against what they saw as the uninformed masses. Patently, this system no longer works. Twice this century the person elected president by the electoral college had lost the popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016), and it could happen again in 2024.

Because small, less-populous and mostly White states like Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota have the same number of senators as populous and diverse states like Texas, New York and California, Republican majorities in the Senate this century have never represented a majority of the population. The impact on confirmations of judicial nominees and senior executive branch appointees has been profound.

Finally, there is the deepening polarisation of the American political system. This began post-Watergate, was boosted by Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party, and is today exemplified by the House Freedom Caucus, the MAGA movement and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This deepening polarisation has been marked by an intensifying shift rightwards among each new cohort of Republican legislators, echoing the widening differences between red and blue states and the growing urban–rural political divide.

Bring an ambitious, narcissistic, embittered and malevolent Trump back into this setting and the weaknesses of both the political system and the guard rails of democracy will become very apparent. Trump has schemed to overturn legitimate election results (and is likely to do so again), encouraged violence and discrimination, attacked the media and government institutions, undermined the staff and bureaucrats who worked for him, courted dictators and appeared beholden to foreign interests, lied and denied, and profited from his public office. Most egregiously, he encouraged the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Three years on, amazingly, a majority of Republicans believe Biden was not legitimately elected. Despite Trump’s multiple indictments and legal jeopardy, they are willing to vote for him yet again. Republicans in the Congress increasingly follow his wishes on key pieces of legislation, and even those lawmakers he has belittled and besmirched end up endorsing him.

If Trump is re-elected he will be much less constrained and much more able to get his way than in his previous term. His rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail — dark, violent, authoritarian and vengeful — has generated alarm. We have been warned about a Trump kleptocracy.

Some observers think the worst cannot and will not happen (see, for example, this article by Elaine Karmack). But a Brookings Institution report, Understanding Democratic Decline in the United States, warns that “the electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive”:

People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts.

The most obvious preventive measure lies at the ballot box — though that can only get rid of Trump, not Trumpism. And American voters themselves display some worrying tendencies. The Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 75 per cent of Americans believe that “the future of American democracy is at risk in the 2024 presidential election” and the Democracy Fund found that more than 80 per cent of Americans see democracy as a “fairly good” or “very good” political system; but the latter study highlighted that only about 27 per cent of Americans consistently and uniformly support democratic norms across multiple survey waves. Perhaps not surprisingly, this response differs by political allegiance: 45 per cent of Democrats consistently support democratic norms but only 18 per cent of Independents and 13 per cent of Republicans.

Many voters acknowledge Trump’s true character but rationalise their actions as support for conservative judges, anti-abortion legislation, overturning unfair trade agreements, retaining tax benefits or protecting the Second Amendment. Yes, there are Republicans who consider Trump a “grotesque threat to democracy” and won’t vote for him again, but there are also former Obama voters who see Trump as “our last shot at restoring America.”

Even with Trump gone from the political stage (and that endpoint may result in further efforts to upset democratic processes), considerable effort will be required to restore individual rights and freedoms and deliver the blessings of democracy to all Americans. Ending Trumpism will require a massive effort by the Republican Party to reconfigure its base and operations and find leaders who will promote a different kind of conservatism. For their part, Biden and the Democrats must work to understand the anger and despair that has driven Trump’s MAGA supporters to adopt his bleak and autocratic views. •

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While he acknowledges the influence of Queensland’s bipartisan history of populist leaders, the best-known of whom was Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Blaine also suggests that John Howard has particularly influenced Dutton’s socially conservative culture-war focus on issues such as race and immigration. But while Howard used a dog whistle, he writes, Dutton uses a foghorn.

Blaine highlights the most contentious statements that Dutton has made about race and ethnicity, from his claims about African gangs terrorising Melbourne’s would-be diners to his criticism of Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser for letting in too many Lebanese. He also analyses Dutton’s most contentious ministerial actions in portfolios ranging from workplace participation and immigration to home affairs. Victims of Dutton’s “bad cop” toughness range from the unemployed and single mothers, who suffered from his demonisation of welfare recipients, to deportees, particularly Māori and Pacific Island New Zealanders, who encountered the sharp end of Dutton’s law and order push.

As a minister Dutton may have been an authoritarian populist, but Blaine reminds us that while he was home affairs minister his department awarded highly questionable and very expensive contracts to the companies chosen to manage offshore detention. Visa abuses involving those who came to Australia by plane — ranging from the exploitation of “modern-day indentured labourers” and “sex slaves” to the entry of “Albanian gangsters” — meanwhile went unheeded.

Dutton’s selective toughness has a clear strategic rationale. On numerous occasions he has set out his plan to win government especially by using culture war tactics to attract working-class voters in outer-suburban seats traditionally held by Labor. He claims that cost-of-living pressures and other challenges faced by workers have been neglected by a Labor government preoccupied with woke “frolics” on issues such as the Voice. He argues that crime (often associated by Dutton with racial or ethnic groups) is out of control, and often a particular threat to women. It is a strategy that draws on John Howard, Tony Abbott and Donald Trump.

Nonetheless, both Liberal and Labor critics believe that Dutton’s strategy is flawed for modern-day Australia. It might be suited to his own seat of Dickson, writes Blaine, where the vast majority of residents are Australian born, “but he has little experience speaking to electorates in Sydney and Melbourne with significant Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas.” Here, Dutton’s bad cop routine can come unstuck, as when his strongman rhetoric on national security issues alienated Chinese-Australian voters.

Nor, Blaine points out, does Australia have the equivalent of Trump’s “heartland states filled with rust belts, nor the political system that makes them disproportionately powerful.” Yet winning back affluent teal seats, whose voters are alienated by Dutton’s rhetoric, may still prove crucial if the Liberals are to win government in their own right.

Blaine is at his best analysing such issues. Nonetheless, some of his insights — particularly regarding Dutton’s strongman persona — could be developed further or in a different direction. He argues that Dutton’s “raison d’être” is to “Make Australia Afraid Again. Then he will offer himself as the lesser of two evils. A serious strongman for the age of anxiety.” Recent events — fears evoked by the Voice referendum, for example, and crime in Alice Springs, and offences committed by immigration detainees released by a High Court decision — have fed into that strategy.

Blaine argues that Dutton is attuned to key voters’ “deepest fears” not because he is “a genius or a psychic, but because he was also afraid of change.” Possibly “because he would have felt emasculated by the truth,” Dutton has never fully explained why he left the police force. Consequently he is “always displaying simplicity and strength. Because he feels so complicated and weak.” Indeed, Blaine depicts Dutton as an inherently fragile human being: “Tall and strong at first glance. But when you watch him for a long time, you can see that the man is small and scared.”

Blaine’s psychological assessment of Dutton is intriguing and possibly insightful. But additional or alternative interpretations would have been worth exploring in more depth. After all, as Blaine himself acknowledges, conservatives’ mobilisation of fear against Labor governments is far from new. Conservative ideology is inherently wary of change, so this doesn’t necessarily reflect Dutton’s own vulnerabilities.

Similarly, the Liberals have a long history of using strongman politics to try to emasculate their Labor opponents, so Dutton’s appearance of strength may not be concealing deeper insecurities about his own masculinity. As Blaine himself notes, Dutton’s comment that Albanese is “a weak and woke prime minister” evokes Howard’s description of Kim Beazley as lacking “ticker.”

The point about strongman politics is precisely that it is a performance of masculinity, and of protective masculinity in particular. Dutton is arguably not so much offering to be the “bad cop” who is the “lesser of two evils,” to use Blaine’s words, as offering to be a strong “good cop” who defends those he perceives as upstanding citizens from the dangers he argues weak Labor politicians are exposing them to. He is offering to be a traditional masculine protector who will keep his favoured voters safe from “woke” identity politics, from the elites, from criminals, from China, from reduced living standards and even from the undermining of gender binaries. He’ll only be the “bad cop” to those his would-be supporters resent and fear.

Dutton’s potential appeal is therefore also broader than Bad Cop credits. Blaine writes, for example, that Dutton is a “practitioner of right-wing identity politics” who highlights difference and has spent his career “persuading Australians to prioritise cultural belonging above egalitarianism.” Dutton does indeed have a narrow view of Australian cultural identity that marginalises some Australians and privileges others. Despite attempts to construct him as a “big gentle giant” who genuinely cares about people, his expressions of empathy are highly selective. Nonetheless, it is a bit more complicated than Blaine suggests.

For example, Dutton’s arguments against the Voice actually constructed him as a champion of egalitarianism, but one who argued that equality means treating all Australians the same regardless of their needs or circumstances. It is a longstanding argument by social conservatives. Dutton highlights difference when it serves his purpose but also denies its salience, arguing that he is defending the vast bulk of Australians from the “divisive” identity politics of the elites. Indeed, this argument lies at the heart of his populism. Dutton’s close association with Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, meanwhile, a National Party senator with a similar conception of equality, helps to defuse accusations of racial bias.

Dutton’s styling of himself as a strong male economic provider who will protect voters from rising living costs is a common political strategy that draws on the traditional role of the male head of household as protector and provider. It too channels Howard, Abbott and Trump. Trump’s campaign in particular has long targeted working-class males.

This is a gender politics that Labor needs to take seriously. Labor won office partly on the argument that the Liberals had a woman problem, as indeed they do. But Dutton wants Labor to have a men problem.

Albanese needs to tread cautiously. His emphasising of the fact that Dutton’s team “is dominated by blokes” and “they keep having preselections and putting up more blokes” will play well with many female voters and socially progressive men. But it could be phrased more strategically. Albanese needs to be careful that he isn’t depicted as being “anti-bloke” as well as woke, especially with the Coalition mobilising old climate wars rhetoric to suggest that real men don’t drive electric vehicles but do embrace nuclear power.

Despite Dutton’s claims, the Labor government has been making serious efforts to tackle wage stagnation, precarious employment and other working-class issues, often encountering business and Liberal opposition in the process. Many of the social equity reforms the government has pursued, including improving the pay of under-valued female-dominated jobs and lowering childcare expenses, have also had benefits for workers and have reduced living costs. Nonetheless, the government is vulnerable to Dutton’s charges of working-class neglect given that inflation and high interest rates continue to undermine many of its best efforts.

As well as successfully tackling living costs, Albanese will need to win the argument that his form of caring, socially inclusive masculine leadership is not a sign of weakness but is better for Australians in general than Peter Dutton’s alternative. After all, gender politics isn’t an aside in Dutton’s politics, it is central. Democrats successfully targeted Trump’s masculinity during the 2020 presidential election campaign by arguing for the benefits of a different kind of protective male leadership — although their task was made easier then by the politics of the pandemic and is made harder now by Biden’s frailty.

We wait to see how successful Labor will be in countering Dutton’s strongman politics, as well as his attempts to encroach on Labor’s heartland. •

Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics
By Lech Blaine | Quarterly Essay | $27.99 | 172 pages

The post Good cop, bad cop appeared first on Inside Story.

But behind the hyperbolic headlines — “Trump Racks Up Massive Wins in Super Tuesday GOP Races,” “How Trump Steamrolled His Way to the GOP Nomination” or “How a Fighting Biden Took on the State of the Union” — are the many twists and turns that will determine the campaign’s eight-month trajectory and its outcome in November.

The only thing the two putative candidates agree on is the significance and consequences of this year’s vote. Trump says, rightly for once, that the 2024 election will be the “single most important day in the history of our country.” Biden says the election is “all about whether America’s democracy will survive.”

In the days since Biden’s State of the Union speech, duelling campaigns in Georgia and other swing states have offered glimpses of the two candidates’ strategies for courting an electorate less than enthused by another Biden–Trump showdown. It’s clear that this re-run of the 2020 faceoff will test the limits of campaign financing and political decorum.

The endgame is the pattern of voting in the general election — and, more particularly, in the swing states like Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Using polling to make forecasts is complicated by the fact that the winner is the candidate who racks up the most electoral college votes, not the most votes.

Polls offer little in the way of accurate insight at this point in the election cycle. But as their current base of support stands, neither Trump nor Biden can win. The polling averages from FiveThirtyEight and 270toWin have them neck and neck, with their favourability ratings languishing in the mid-fifties.

The votes that will make the difference must be won from independent voters and those party voters who are not strongly committed to either Trump or Biden. Here, despite his age and the general lack of enthusiasm for a second term, Biden seems to have the edge. But he faces problems with some segments of the population: the Democrats’ longstanding advantage with Black, Latino and Asian American voters has shrunk to its lowest point in more than sixty years; his administration’s failure to end the Israel–Gaza conflict has upset young voters and especially Arab Americans and Muslims; and many young people are simply lukewarm about Biden. Nevertheless, the president has consistently gained more than 90 per cent of the Democratic vote in the primaries to date, and even in Michigan, where Gaza war sentiment led many to vote “uncommitted,” he scored more than 80 per cent.

Trump’s base is more galvanised, more rusted on, and smaller. His party’s “Never Trump” contingent remains strong, as seen by the support Haley attracted. On Super Tuesday she received more than two million votes across fifteen states. She pulled 37 per cent of the Republican vote in Massachusetts, 33 per cent in Colorado, 29 per cent in Minnesota, and a surprise victory in Vermont. A week later, after she suspended her campaign, she drew more than 77,000 votes in Georgia (a state Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes).

What is rarely pointed out is that Republican state primaries are increasingly a winner-take-all proposition for the convention delegates (a situation cleverly engineered by Trump campaign staff). On Super Tuesday Trump reaped 93 per cent of Republican delegates while winning only around 70 per cent of the vote.

Haley’s continuing support shows that Trump hasn’t been able to defuse his long-term problems with suburban voters (especially women), moderates and independents. These are the voters who cost him a second term in 2020 and could potentially cost him again in 2024.

A key issue for the Trump campaign is where the Republicans who voted for Haley will go in November. Quinnipiac University polling found that 37 per cent of Haley voters would vote for Biden and 12 per cent would stay home. Emerson College polling found 63 per cent of Haley primary voters would vote for Biden in the general election with 10 per cent undecided. Some exit polls have delivered even higher numbers of voters reluctant to commit to Trump.

Trump, who has derided Haley using sexist and racist language, has shown little interest in reaching out to her voters. In January he seemed to reject them outright, declaring that anyone who made a donation to Haley “will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them and will not accept them.” No surprise then that many of her supporters wonder whether they still have a place in the Republican Party, a perception that will only deepen as Trump, his campaign and his family take control of the Republican National Committee.

Trump’s efforts to appeal to independents have been desultory at best; he seems incapable of moving beyond the rhetoric of stolen elections, woke liberals, the deep state, threats from illegal immigrants and asylum seekers, and his own perceived victimisation. His speeches offer little more than a dark vision for his second term. His embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán and other authoritarians, his suggestion that he was open to making cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and the persistent efforts of conservative Republicans to undermine women’s reproductive rights won’t win over these independents.

This inability to broaden his support is the biggest threat to Trump’s efforts to reclaim the presidency. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Biden will have an easier time sweeping up the independents and undecideds. Will those concerned about the Israel–Gaza crisis who opted for “uncommitted” in the primaries vote for Biden in the general election, or will they simply stay home? (Given Trump’s vilification of Muslims they are unlikely to vote for him.) That will largely depend on what happens in Gaza between now and November. And can Biden and the Democrats reverse their declining support among minority groups and young voters?

The changing demographics of the United States has seen a decline in the White, non-college educated voters who have been the mainstay of the Trump Republican Party, an increase in politically active young voters, many of whom don’t see either party as dealing with the issues that matter to them, and an increase in racial and ethnic diversity at a time when race is a central political issue.

The Pew Research Center has reported that Biden received more 90 per cent of the Black vote in 2020 while Trump received just 8 per cent. But this year these voters are frustrated with Biden over a range of issues, including the lack of progress on racial justice and the economic impact of soaring inflation.

Latino voters, who make up some 15 per cent of the electorate, are a heterogeneous group politically, with divergent opinions on issues like immigration. A recent poll from the New York Times and Siena College shows 46 per cent of Latino voters supporting Trump and 40 per cent supporting Biden (albeit with a large margin of error).

Recently Trump has touted his support among the Black community, though not always in flattering terms. He does have a growing contingent of Black hip-hop artists among his vocal supporters and most recently resorted to using AI-generated pictures to build his credentials with the African-American community. But there’s little evidence of a major shift in support; a December poll showed only 25 per cent of Black adults had a favourable view of Trump.

Jaime Harrison, the African American chair of the Democratic National Committee, has accused Republicans of promoting “fairy tales about their plan to win over Black voters.” He made particular note of the fact that Trump “pals around with white supremacists.” Just days after the Trump campaign began its overhaul of the  Republican National Committee came the announcement that the party is closing all of the community centres it established for minority outreach in California, New York, North Carolina and Texas.

Ideology aside, the issues that will drive voters to the polling booths in November are common to all Americans: the economy and its impact on family budgets, healthcare costs, immigration, gun control and abortion. America’s role in supporting Ukraine and as a potential peacemaker in Gaza will also be important. These issues often play out very differently for Democrats and Trump Republicans: abortion and reproductive rights, immigration policies and gun control are classic examples. Perceptions of other issues, including the economy, interest rates and the outcomes of Biden’s national security and foreign policy efforts, will change — perhaps dramatically — between now and voting day.

For many Trump supporters, policies (or lack thereof) are of little consequence; like Trump, they are not interested in a united country or a bipartisan approach to legislation. They share Trump’s story, described by Biden in his State of the Union speech as one of resentment, revenge and retribution, and, shockingly, many of them embrace his authoritarianism. As one supporter posted on social media, “I’m not voting Republican, I’m voting Trump.”

For Democrats, kitchen table issues also include the erosion of freedoms and the future of democracy in the United States. Historian and presidential biographer Jon Meacham makes this stark statement about America today: “Historically speaking, the forces now in control of the Republican Party represent the most significant threat to basic constitutionalism we’ve experienced since the Civil war. That’s not a partisan point; it’s just the fact of the matter. And I’m not talking about particular policies, about which we can and should disagree. I’m talking about the self-evident willingness of a once-noble party to embrace lies and the will to power over essential democratic norms.”

The months ahead will be some of the most consequential in the nation’s history, with no guarantee this tense situation be overturned or resolved by the vote in November. •

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That was the year when Indira Gandhi ended her seventeen months of authoritarian rule (“the Emergency”) and called elections she expected to win. It was a make-or-break decision: if she prevailed, her opponents feared she would cement the authoritarianism of the Emergency.

Critics have described the spirit of prime minister Modi’s government during the past few years as “the Emergency you have when you’re not having an Emergency.” Techniques to harass your foes, pioneered by Mrs Gandhi and her cronies, have been deployed by the BJP with the efficiency of modern management and the relentlessness of digital technology.

In the elections of 1977, Indira Gandhi and her Congress party lost decisively to a hastily formed alliance of old politicians, some of whom had been jailed during the Emergency. A varied crew, they included fist-shaking socialists, heavyweight dropouts from Congress and future BJP prime minister Atul Bihari Vajpayee. They formed a government committed to undoing the excesses of the Emergency. India, they promised, would get a new start. Voters seemed to share their hope.

The top box-office film that year, Amar, Akbar, Anthony, had everything a Hindi film of its time needed: big stars, including the young Amitabh Bachchan, music, dancing, car chases, crime, murder, slapstick comedy and a happy ending. It was also cheap: filmed in a month entirely in Mumbai.

The plot carried a message. Three small boys are abandoned and separated. Amar is found and raised by an upright Hindu policeman, Akbar by a kindly Muslim tailor and Anthony (Bachchan) by a Catholic priest. Three filmic hours later, the brothers discover each other and together vanquish the criminals who have caused their distress; the family is reunited; the blind mother has her sight restored; the ne’er-do-well father repents, rejoices at the unity of the family — and is packed off to jail.

You don’t have to be into semiotics to get the message about national unity and “out of many, one.” Amar, Akbar, Anthony was so popular it got remade in three south Indian languages, each with a locally appropriate name change (including John, Jaffer, Janardhanan in Malayalam, the language of Kerala).

Today, a number of recent films and those announced for 2024 pack a different punch. They focus on international enemies working to destroy India. Pathaan, the box office favourite of 2023, is about international terrorists, viruses and cloak-and-dagger struggles between Indian secret agents and evil-doers in the employ of shadowy figures in Pakistan. It has earned hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.

This year’s previewed films don’t pussyfoot around when it comes to messaging. The new releases include Bastar, focused on the Naxalites, murderous would-be revolutionaries in a rugged district in central India who killed more than seventy paramilitary police in 2010. “Urban Naxalite” is a common term of abuse for human rights activists and critics of the BJP government. In the film’s trailer, a police officer says that those “supporting” Naxalites “are pseudo-intellectuals, Left liberals” and promises to gather them in the street “and shoot them in public view.”

Pro-government? On the contrary, says the producer, it’s “pro-India”: “Our film talks about what is good for India. Now, if the BJP speaks similarly, it is their political stand.”

Another example with a political kick: Swantantrya Veer Savarkar (“freedom warrior Savarkar”). A prolific real-life writer and translator, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) was imprisoned for years on the Andaman Islands for complicity in plots to murder British officials. He later became a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and a favourite ideologue of the BJP. Savarkar was never incriminated in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, but he didn’t much like Gandhi either. Savarkar “does not hate Gandhi but hates non-violence,” says film’s director.

Kunal Purohit, author of H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindu Pop Stars, an impressive new book on Hindu-supremacism in popular music and publishing, estimates that ten of the films due for pre-election release demonise Muslims and opponents of Hindu ascendancy.

Films like these highlight the political contest going on in Indian popular culture via the country’s digitisation and its almost 900 million broadband subscribers. The BJP and its many subsidiaries are drowning out other voices.

The film business offers another significant angle on electoral politics. The films mentioned above, all in Hindi, come out of Mumbai (Bollywood). But the south Indian film industry, based in Hyderabad and Chennai, has “taken over the commercial and critical reins,” according to one of India’s most experienced film critics. The south, on this view, is where the most original and successful films are being generated.

The south Indian film that made movie people around the world pay attention, and crowds flock to the theatres, is the Telugu-language RRR, set in colonial times. The British and a Muslim prince provide the main villains. It is an expensive production with spectacular fight scenes and box office collections estimated at A$230 million internationally. (“A Netflix top 10 hit in 62 countries,” according to the streaming service, which screens a Hindi version).

South India will be a key focus in the coming elections. Just as its films are enjoying wide success, the region is registering India’s most impressive economic activity and social statistics. The telling number is estimated GDP per person, which is more than four times greater for the southern states than for India’s two most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the Hindi-speaking north. Together, UP and Bihar are home to about 25 per cent of India’s 1.4 billion people; the five southern states have 20 per cent. Female literacy, infant mortality and life-expectancy data are all better in the south.

Mr Modi and the BJP have had notable success in only one of the five southern states, Karnataka (capital, Bengaluru), where they won twenty-five (out of twenty-nine) parliamentary seats in 2019. But the BJP lost state elections to the Congress last year and didn’t hold a single parliamentary seat from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu or Kerala in the 2019 parliament.

On the surface, this inability to win in the south doesn’t matter. The BJP doesn’t need the south to win national elections, and that advantage will grow if a redistribution of seats, which hasn’t happened for fifty years, is carried out next year. The number of seats will be increased and reapportioned on the basis of population. On those calculations, the five southern states together will elect only about fifteen more members than Uttar Pradesh alone.

To people in the south, this looks like power being embedded in regions with poor records in health, education and economic growth. The feckless will be rewarded at the expense of the virtuous. That impression doesn’t fit well with Mr Modi’s frequent proclaiming that his main mission is economic development and material prosperity.

With victories seemingly assured in much of the Hindi-speaking north, the BJP is throwing talent and money at the southern states and at West Bengal. All these states have their own languages written in distinctive scripts, and they don’t regard the BJP’s pressure to use Hindi as the national language of Bharat (the BJP’s preferred name for India) with great enthusiasm.

Opposition leaders around India have as much reason today as in 1977 to be apprehensive about their futures in the event of a thundering victory for the government. Nevertheless, an attempt last year to coordinate opposition election campaigning has fallen apart even before the election dates were announced. Key political leaders in West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha have either aligned with the BJP or, in West Bengal, decided to fight on their own. Elsewhere, the BJP picks off potential adversaries with offers they can’t refuse.

Congress, the only opposition party with national recognition, is frail and easy to deride. Rahul Gandhi, its fifty-three-year-old leader, has few qualifications other than being the descendant of three prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. His elderly Italian-born mother, Sonia, is still part of decision-making.

A big BJP victory will assure the party of fifteen years of power from 2014 to 2029. It will embolden the party to incorporate in the constitution provisions advocated before independence by the ideologues of Hindu supremacy. One of those goals was a centralised government in which the states would be simply implementers of the national program. Changing from a parliamentary to a presidential system has also been discussed in the past.

The long-term project of the BJP and the Hindu-supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh movement, of which Mr Modi was a member from adolescence, is an India in which all citizens subscribe to a common version of what it is to be a Hindu. Non-Hindus may continue to live in India but they must be prepared to be at the back of every queue and expect no favours from the state. In this way, Bharat will reclaim its pre-Muslim, pre-British glory.

Today, someone making an updated version of Amar, Akbar, Anthony might feel the need to recognise how the spirit of the times has changed. The film would tell how a brave Hindu boy saved his two hapless brothers, his blind mother and his country from powerful internal and external enemies. It might also be a good idea to call the film Modi! Modi! Modi! •

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While not mentioned by Schudson, nothing spoke to the rise of “objective journalism” more clearly than the rise of “scientific” polling: the attempt to document “the voice of the people” based on interviews that, in principle, gave every citizen an equal chance of being heard, of saying what they had to say, via questions free of bias, that bane of objectivity.

George Gallup, a figure central to the spread of polling, presented poll-takers, in his polling manifesto The Pulse of Democracy (1940), as people “moving freely about all sorts and conditions of men and noting how they are affected by the news or arguments brought from day to day to their knowledge.” Gallup took this model from James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth (1888), but his own polling, with its set questions and predetermined response categories, was far removed from the kind of observation Bryce favoured

In reality, Gallup followed a news-making model — the model exemplified by press conferences and media releases, where news is made for the press without being controlled by the press. Gallup not only created news, controlling what was asked, how it was asked and when; he also syndicated his results to a broad range of newspapers. Having his polls published by papers whose politics ranged widely shored up his claims to objectivity.

A parallel existed with the Associated Press, America’s first wire service. Since it “gathered news for publication in a variety of papers with widely different political allegiances,” Schudson notes, “it could only succeed by making its reporting “objective” enough to be acceptable to all its members and clients.”

While servicing a diverse range of outlets was central to Gallup in America, this is not what happened in Australia. When Keith Murdoch introduced the Gallup Poll here in 1941 he made sure that the company he set up to run it was controlled by his own Herald and Weekly Times and its associates in various states. Although Australian Public Opinion Polls (“The Gallup Method”) was notionally independent, executives from the Herald and Weekly Times, including Murdoch, could (and did) influence the questions Roy Morgan, APOP’s managing director, asked, including whether they should be repeated from poll to poll.

Whereas the American Gallup boasted subscribing newspapers that were Republican (as Gallup himself may have been), Democrat and independent, none of the newspapers that subscribed to the Australian Gallup Poll are likely to have ever editorialised in favour of federal Labor; for many years, Morgan himself was an anti-Labor member of the Melbourne City Council.

Much of the polling done in America and later in Australia, however, fits a third model: things that the press creates either directly (in-house polling; for example, of a newspaper’s own readers) or indirectly (by commissioning an independent market research firm to ask questions on the newspaper’s behalf). Media products that fit this category range from Clyde Packer’s creation of the Miss Australia contest in the 1920s (also copied from America) and the Australian Financial Review’s endless business “summits” in the 2020s, to the media’s ubiquitous sit-down interviews with politicians and celebrities. This is now the dominant model.

Creating news is the surest route to having an “exclusive” and creating “product differentiation.” If the “exclusive” is produced often enough, is highly valued, and prominently flagged — polling is now featured on the front page — it becomes a way of building “brand loyalty.” Newspapers that regularly commission polls from the same source, or that have a regular but non-financial relationship with a pollster, hope for all of this. Media that don’t commission their own polls — television and radio, especially — are often happy to recycle polls published in the press.

Brand loyalty is a way of building a readership. When it comes to polling, it generally means not citing polls generated by competing brands — especially polls that could raise doubts about one’s own polls. Where different polls produce different — even conflicting — results, this usually means that the rules of objectivity that require journalists to confirm their stories using more than one source are readily abandoned. While some newspapers are more brand-focused than others, journalists consulting their own polls and not others has become standard practice.

In polling, the strength of any brand — the reputation of the poll — depends on the prestige of the news outlet that publishes it. It also depends on the poll’s record, and that record is assessed against the few objective measures that exist: election results and referendums.

Polls that score well on these measures are more likely to be trusted on things other than the vote. That, at least, is the hope of the companies that poll for the press or have their polls publicised by the press. Companies involved in the prediction business try to ensure that their polls come as close as possible to predicting the actual vote — closer, certainly, than any of their rivals.

What pollsters hope to be trusted on, as a result of the accuracy on these measures, is everything else they do for the press — notably, reporting on the popularity of party leaders and taking “the pulse” (as Gallup liked to say) on issues of public policy. More than that, they are after a spillover or halo effect for their market research businesses more generally; financially, this is the point of involving themselves in the not particularly lucrative business of predicting votes. Trust is important because what companies report on matters other than the vote typically cannot be checked directly against any external measure.

Absent any objective check, there is always a risk of polling that panders, consciously or otherwise, to the client’s agenda or the pollster’s preferences. Against this happening, the guardrails erected by industry bodies like the relatively new Australian Polling Council or the old (Market) Research Society are either weak or non-existent — the APC mostly concerned that pollsters explain their methods and post their questionnaires online, a very welcome development but one that stops well short of setting wide-ranging standards in relation to the questions members ask; the Research Society mostly concerned to reassure respondents about the way polling companies protect their privacy.

Newspoll — and other polls

Enter Newspoll, a brand owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Established for a high-end newspaper, the Australian — whose news and views are seen by some as exerting an out-size influence on conservative politics — Newspoll can claim a record of predicting national elections second to none.

In the course of conducting its most recent poll — a fortnightly event that usually grabs the headlines for what it has to say about national voting intentions, leadership satisfaction and preferred prime minister — Newspoll raised the issue of nuclear power. “There is a proposal to build several small modular nuclear reactors around Australia to produce zero-emissions energy on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired,” Newspoll told respondents (emphasis in the original). It then asked: “Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?” Respondents were invited to select one answer: “Strongly approve” (22 per cent); “Somewhat approve” (33 per cent); “Somewhat disapprove” (14 per cent); “Strongly disapprove” (17 per cent); “Don’t know” (14 per cent). In short: 55 per cent in favour; 31 per cent against; 14 per cent not prepared to say either way.

As Newspoll might have anticipated on an issue as contentious as this, its question generated controversy. Unimpressed, the economist John Quiggin proposed — tongue-in-cheek — a quite different way the question might have been worded: “There is a proposal to keep coal-fired power stations operating until the development of small nuclear reactors which might, in the future, supply zero-emissions energy. Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?”

A question on nuclear power could have been asked in any number of ways: by putting the arguments for and against nuclear power; by taking the timeline for getting nuclear power up and running and comparing it to the timeline for wind + solar + hydro; by asking who should pay (governments, consumers, industry, etc.) for different forms of energy with zero emissions, and how much they should pay; by qualifying the “zero-emissions” solution with some reference to the waste disposal problem; by omitting the words “small, modular” — not just descriptors but, potentially at least, words of reassurance; and so on.

Different questions might still have produced a majority in favour of nuclear energy. A question asked for the Institute of Public Affairs by Dynata, in April 2022, on whether Australia should build nuclear power plants to supply electricity and reduce carbon emissions,” found a majority (53 per cent agreeing), and an even lower level of opposition (23 per cent).

As with Newspoll, the IPA poll raised considerations that invited an affirmative response: “small modular,” “zero-emissions energy,” “on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired” (Newspoll); “to supply electricity,” “reduce carbon omissions” (IPA). Not a single consideration in either poll might have prompted a negative response.

The high proportion in the IPA survey neither agreeing nor disagreeing (24 per cent) — an option Newspoll didn’t offer — allowed respondents who actually had an opinion to conceal it, Swedish research on attitudes to nuclear power suggests. So, while the level of opposition recorded by the IPA might have been higher without the “easy out,” the level of support might have been higher too.

Other questions about nuclear power failed to attract majority support. Asked in September by Freshwater “if Australia needs nuclear power” (the precise question was not published), and presented with a set of response options similar to those offered by the IPA, 37 per cent of respondents supported nuclear power and 36 per cent opposed it, 18 per cent saying they were “neutral” and 12 per cent “unsure.” Apart from coal (supported by 33 per cent), every other energy source received wider support: hydrogen (47 per cent), natural gas (56 per cent), offshore wind (58 per cent), onshore wind (61 per cent) and solar (84 per cent).

Asked in the same poll whether “Australia should remove the ban on nuclear power development,” 44 per cent agreed. But asked whether they agreed or disagreed that “Australia does not need to generate any energy from nuclear power,” 36 per cent disagreed. Similarly, no more than 35 per agreed that “the federal government must consider small nuclear modular reactors as part of the future energy mix” — a much lower figure than Newspoll’s, even if the question isn’t necessarily better.

Freshwater also asked respondents to choose between two trade-offs: “Australia builds nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are replaced earlier” (44 per cent chose this one) and “Australia does not build nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are extended” (38 per cent); 18 per cent were “unsure.” Respondents opposed to both coal and nuclear power were left with only one place to go — “unsure.” But on the poll’s own evidence — 33 per cent supporting coal, 36 per cent supporting nuclear — the figure of 18 per cent appears to underestimate this group considerably.

Another question on nuclear power, this time asked by RedBridge, is said to have shown a 35–32 split over “the idea of using nuclear to provide for Australia’s energy need.” As yet, however, neither the question nor any figures have been posted on its website.

Yet another question, asked in February by Resolve for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, also failed to show majority support for nuclear power. Told that “there has been some debate about the use of nuclear power in Australia recently” and asked for their “own view,” respondents split four ways: “I support the use of nuclear power in Australia” (36 per cent); “I do not have a strong view and am open to the government investigating its use” (27 per cent); “I oppose the use of nuclear power in Australia” (25 per cent); and “Undecided” (15 per cent).

In reporting this “exclusive survey,” David Crowe, chief political correspondent for the two papers, made no reference to the Newspoll published the previous day. This, notwithstanding that in reporting the Resolve poll Crowe gave pride of place to “mining billionaire” Andrew Forrest’s attack on the Coalition’s nuclear policy — a policy the Australian suggested had received a “boost” from the Newspoll. Nor did Crowe refer to any other poll.

On one reading, most respondents (61 per cent in the Resolve poll compared to 39 per cent in Newspoll) had “a strong view” (the respondents who declined to say “I do not have a strong view…”), those without “a strong view” either being “open to the government investigating” the use of nuclear power or “undecided.” More likely, the question didn’t measure how strong any of the views were — some of those without strong views being “open to the government investigating its use,” others joining those who harboured strong views (respondents Resolve didn’t directly identify) to indicate either their support or their opposition to nuclear power.

Effectively, the Resolve poll rolled three questions into one — one, about support or opposition to nuclear power; another about the strength of these opinions; and another about “the government investigating” the “use” of nuclear power. But since responses to one of these questions would not necessarily have determined responses to any other, Resolve’s shortcut obscures more about public opinion than it illuminates; a respondent with a strong view, for example, might still have been “open to the government investigating its use.”

In October 2023, Resolve asked another question — this one reportedly commissioned by the consulting firm Society Advisory, and run “exclusively” by Sky News. The result suggested a degree of openness to nuclear power that was even higher than that indicated by Resolve’s poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Asked if “Australia should rethink its moratorium (ban) on nuclear power to give more flexibility in the future,” half (49 per cent) of the respondents were in favour, less than half that number (18 per cent) were against, opposition to “flexibility” requiring some strength, with an extraordinary 33 per cent “unsure” — a sign that this question too was a poor one.

Not only do answers depend on the question, they also depend on the response options. In an extensive survey — not just a one- or two-item poll — conducted in October–November 2023, the British firm Savanta asked respondents “to what extent, if at all,” they supported or opposed using nuclear energy “to generate electricity” in Australia? While 40 per cent said “strongly support” or “tend to support,” 36 per cent said “strongly oppose” or “tend to oppose,” 7 per cent said “Don’t know,” and 17 per cent said they “neither support nor oppose.”

As with the Resolve poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Savanta’s response options — which included “neither support nor oppose” — reduced the chance that its question, however worded, would yield a majority either in favour of nuclear energy or against it; almost as many opposed nuclear energy as supported it, a quarter (24 per cent) choosing to sit on the fence. In the Newspoll, where 55 per cent approved and 31 per cent disapproved, there was no box marked “neither approve nor disapprove.” If there had been, then almost certainly Newspoll would not have found majority support either.

The Savanta survey also shows what happens to support for a single option — here, nuclear power — when respondents are given a range of options. Asked to think about how their “country might shift its current energy generation mix” and given a list of five alternatives, only 23 per cent nominated “nuclear energy”; 41 per cent, almost twice as many, nominated “large-scale solar farms.” Of the rest, 15 per cent nominated “onshore wind farms,” 6 per cent “gas carbon and storage (CCS),” and 4 per cent “biomass from trees.”

Newspoll made no attempt to ascertain whether the public had heard of “small modular nuclear reactors” much less what the public knew about such things. In the Guardian, the proposal was described as “an uncosted Coalition thought-bubble”; in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, former deputy Reserve Bank governor Stephen Grenville noted that there were “just two operational SMRs, both research reactors” and that work on what “was expected to be the first operational commercial SMR” had “been halted as the revised cost per kWH is uneconomic for the distributors who had signed up.” Elsewhere, an academic specialising in electricity generation described SMRs as “not, by any stretch of the imagination, what most people would consider small.”

On what the public knows — or, more accurately, on how much it thinks it knows — the Savanta survey is again useful. When asked what they had heard of nuclear energy, few (8 per cent) said “I have not heard about this energy option” or “don’t know.” But just 18 per cent said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a lot about how it works.” Most said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a little about how it works” (41 per cent) or “I have heard about this energy option, but don’t know how it works (33 per cent).

In a poll conducted by Pure Profile, reported in May 2022, 70 per cent said they didn’t understand “the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.”

… and the Australian

Keen to publicise the result of its Newspoll — a result the paper openly welcomed — the Australian’s reporting of the poll and its commentary around it was tendentious.

The distinction between respondents’ having a view and their having a “strong” view was one it mostly ignored or fudged. The paper’s political editor Simon Benson, reported in Crikey to be “responsible” for the poll, ignored it. He repeatedly represented “majority” support as “strong” support. The fact that pollsters themselves regularly make this mistake shouldn’t make it any more acceptable. If support is a metre wide, it isn’t necessarily a metre deep.

The headline in the print edition — “Powerful Majority Supports Nuclear Option for Energy Security” — fudged the distinction. In itself, 55 per cent is not an overwhelming majority; in 2017, same-sex marriage was supported in the nationwide “survey” by 62 per cent. In itself,  55 per cent is hardly a “powerful” number — one that politicians ignore at their peril; in the lead-up to the same-sex marriage decision, both John Howard and Tony Abbott made it clear that they wouldn’t consider anything less than 60 per cent in favour to be a number that the parliament would have to heed. Had 55 per cent (not 36 per cent) “strongly” approved nuclear reactors, the Australian would have had a defensible case. But even in polls that offer a binary choice, “strong” majorities are rare.

Rather than representing a “powerful majority” in favour of the “nuclear option,” Newspoll’s figures might equally be said to show that most respondents (61 per cent) did not feel strongly one way or the other — a majority that the Australian would not have wanted to call “powerful.”

A highlight, Benson argued, was the fact that respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four — “the demographic most concerned about climate change” — was the demographic most likely to support nuclear power, 65–32. “There is no fear of the technology for most people under 40,” he concluded. This line was one that impressed shadow climate change and energy minister, Ted O’Brien, when he discussed the poll on Sky News.

It also resonated with opposition leader Peter Dutton. Attacking the prime minister for being out of touch with public opinion, which he was reported to have said was “warming to nuclear power,” Dutton noted that nuclear power was “supported by a lot of younger people because they are well-read and they know that it’s zero emissions, and it can firm up renewables in the system.”

The news that “NewsPoll [sic] showed a majority of young Australians supporting small-scale nuclear power generation,” even prompted a discussion of the pros and cons of nuclear power — not the pros and cons of the polling — on the ABC.

But eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds as the age group most favourably disposed to nuclear power is not what Essential shows, not what Savanta shows, and not what RedBridge shows. In October’s Essential poll, no more than 46 per cent of respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four supported “nuclear power plants” — the same proportion as those aged thirty-six to fifty-four but a smaller proportion than those aged fifty-five-plus (56 per cent); the proportion of “strong” supporters was actually lower among those aged eighteen to thirty-four than in either of the other age-groups.

In the Savanta survey, those aged eighteen to thirty-four were the least likely to favour nuclear energy; only about 36 per cent were in favour, strongly or otherwise, not much more than half the number that Newspoll reported.

And according to a report of the polling conducted in February by RedBridge, sourced to Tony Barry, a partner and former deputy state director of the Victorian Liberal Party, “[w]here there is support” for nuclear power. “it is among only those who already vote Liberal or who are older than 65.”

In the Australian, the leader writer observed that “public support for considering nuclear power in Australia is rising as the cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge becomes more real.” But Newspoll had never sought to establish what respondents think are the “cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge” so it could hardly have shown whether these thoughts have changed.

Benson’s remark, on the Australian’s front page, that the poll showed “growing community support” for nuclear power was also without warrant; “growing community support” is something that the poll does not show and that Benson made no attempt to document. Since the question posed by Newspoll had never been asked before, and since polled opinion is sensitive to the way questions are asked, “growing community support” is one thing the poll could not show.

Subsequently, Benson cited Liberal Party polling conducted “immediately after the [May] 2022 election loss” which “had support at 31 per cent.” The question? Benson doesn’t say. Is it really likely, as Benson believes, that in a “short space of time,” as he describes it — less than two years — support for nuclear power could have jumped from 31 per cent to 55 per cent? The considerable shift in polled opinion on same-sex marriage that Wikipedia suggests happened sometime between 2004 and 2007 is hardly likely to have happened since 2022 in relation to nuclear energy.

Peta Credlin, Australian columnist and Sky News presenter, argued the growing-support line by stringing together: a poll conducted in 2015 (by Essential, though she didn’t identify it as an Essential poll), which had support at 40 per cent; the IPA poll (which it was safe to name) from 2022, which had support at 53 per cent; and the Newspoll, which had it at 55 per cent. Not only was each of these conducted by a different pollster, hence subject to different “house effects”; each had posed their own question.

Had the Australian wanted to see whether support really was growing it might have considered re-running one of the questions it had asked years before — or, preferably, re-run more than one. But perhaps the point of the polling was not to show that support was growing but to create the impression that it was growing — that it had a momentum that might leave Labor, “in its fanatical opposition to nuclear power,” as Benson wrote, stranded on “the wrong side of history.”

This was not the first time the Australian has interpreted the results of a Newspoll as heralding a turning point on this issue. In 2007, shortly before prime minister John Howard announced that the Coalition would set up a nuclear regulatory regime and remove any unreasonable impediments to the building of nuclear power plants in Australia, the Australian told its readers that there had been a “dramatic shift” in support for nuclear power. The basis of its claim: questions asked by Newspoll — two in 2006, one in 2007. (In those days Newspoll was a market research company, not a polling brand whose field work had been outsourced first to YouGov and more recently to Pyxis.)

The questions asked in 2006 were not the same as the question asked in 2007. In May and December 2006, Newspoll told respondents: “Currently, while there is a nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney used for medical and scientific purposes, there are no nuclear power stations being built in Australia.” It then asked: “Are you personally in favour or against nuclear power stations in Australia?” The majority was against: 38–51, in May; 35–50, in December.

In March 2007, Newspoll changed the question, and framed it quite differently: “Thinking now about reducing gas emissions to help address climate change,” it asked, “are you personally in favour or against the development of a nuclear power industry in Australia, as one of a range of energy solutions to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions?” On this, opinion was fairly evenly split: 45–40. The majority were not against; in fact, there was a plurality in favour. The Australian’s interpretation: in just four months, Dennis Shanahan and Sid Marris concluded, the attitude of Australians to nuclear energy had “dramatically reversed.”

Not so. After commissioning Newspoll to ask the 2006 question again, in April 2007, the Australia Institute found that the level of support for “nuclear power stations being built in Australia” was 36 per cent (35 per cent in December 2006), the level of opposition was now 46 per cent (previously, 50 per cent), and the “don’t knows” were now 18 per cent (previously 15 per cent). In short, whereas opposition had exceeded support by fifteen percentage points, 50­–35, it now exceeded support by ten points, 46–36 — a decline of five points, but no reversal, dramatic or otherwise.

This time around, both the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald have asked questions similar to the one Newspoll asked in February, but in polls of their readers not in a public opinion poll. Asked, in July 2023, whether Australia should “consider small nuclear reactors as one solution to moving away from fossil fuels?,” the Financial Review’s readers favoured “consider[ing]” the idea, 58–30. Asked, in July 2023, whether “small nuclear power reactors should be part of Australia’s energy mix,” the Herald’s readers opposed the idea, 32–55. Even if these questions had been included in national polls, the Australian might have baulked at citing the results of either, since it would have given oxygen to another brand.

There is evidence of a growth in support for nuclear power between June 2019 and March 2022, but there is no convincing evidence that points to “growing support” in the two years since. When the Lowy Poll asked respondents, in March 2022, whether they supported or opposed “removing the existing ban on nuclear power,” 52 per cent said they supported it, an increase on the level of support in March 2021 (47 per cent). And in September 2021, when Essential asked respondents whether they supported or opposed “Australia developing nuclear power plants for the generation of electricity,” 50 per cent said they supported nuclear power, a sharp increase on the level of support (39 per cent) it reported in June 2019. However, when Essential asked the question again, in October 2023, the level of support hadn’t moved.

The only evidence for a recent shift comes from Resolve. In October 2023, when Resolve first asked the question it asked in February 2024, 33 per cent (compared with 36 per cent in February) supported “the use of nuclear power” and 24 per cent (23 per cent in February) opposed it. (Nine Entertainment appears not to have previously published Resolve’s result for October.) Its February poll represents an increase of four percentage points in the gap between the level of support and the level of opposition, from nine points to thirteen.

But a shift of four points is well within the range one might expect given the vagaries of sampling — the “margin of error” that pollsters regularly parade but just as regularly ignore. Non-sampling error — a much bigger problem than pollsters acknowledge — also might have played a part, especially given a question as complex and confused as the one Resolve asked. Errors of both kinds are compounded by the widespread use by pollsters of opt-in rather than probability-based panels.

Jim Reed, who runs Resolve, is reported as saying that voters “were increasingly open to the potential of nuclear power now the Coalition was advocating for existing technology in large-scale plants.” According to Reed, support has “swung towards at least openness to nuclear power.” But Nine did not reveal what change, if any, Resolve had detected since October in the number without “a strong view” and “open to the government investigating its use (27 per cent in February).” Support, Reed added, was “weak… at the moment simply because people aren’t being asked to approve an actual site.” Even if he had measured strength, which it appears he hadn’t, one could equally imagine support becoming weaker, not stronger, once voters were asked to “asked to approve an actual site.”

What sort of voters did he think were now supportive or at least “open’? “We’ve got a new generation of younger people who are quite positive towards nuclear power,” Reed said. Was this “new generation” evident in October or did it only become evident in February? If it was evident in October, was it responsible for February’s four-point shift? Nothing in what Nine published allows us to say.

While Reed restricted himself, largely, to interpreting the actual data, in the Australian the commentary strayed much further. It wrote, for example, of “the costs and risks of renewable energy” having “become clearer.” But it offered no evidence that those costs and risks had become clearer to the public — not surprisingly, since these too were things about which Newspoll had not asked.

Leveraging the Newspoll result to predict that “most Australians would back a move to small scale nuclear power,” the headline in the online edition of the Australian ignored another distinction — not between strong and weak opinion but between polls that showed un-mobilised opinion and polls that showed mobilised opinion; so, too did Sky News. Any “move to small-scale nuclear power” would be politically contested, and once contested opinion might shift.

Subsequently, Benson ventured a more sober assessment of the Coalition’s prospects of carrying the day. “For Dutton to win the argument,” an argument that would take “courage” to mount, “any Coalition energy policy must be framed in a cost-of-living context that can demonstrate how nuclear power will deliver cheaper and more reliable power into the future,” he wrote. For Dutton to position nuclear power as “a central component” of his energy policy, Benson declared, was “as big and brave as it gets.”

Others went further. In a rare note of dissent within News Corp, James Campbell, national weekend political editor for Saturday and Sunday News Corp newspapers and websites across Australia, called the idea of Dutton “going to the next federal election with plans to introduce nuclear power” as “stark raving mad.” One thing the Coalition should have learnt from the Voice referendum was that “support for anything radical in Australia shrinks the moment it hits any sort of concerted opposition.” And, he added, “there’s the unity problem. Do you really think Liberal candidates in ‘tealy’ places are going to face the front on this?”

Benson, meanwhile, had back-tracked. Pointing again to the distribution of opinion among eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds, he advanced a quite different assessment: “the onus is now on Labor to convince Australians why we shouldn’t have nuclear power.” Chris Kenny, the Australian’s associate editor, thought “the nuclear argument could play well in the teal seats where there is an eagerness for climate change and a high degree of economic realism.”

If Benson was right the first time, however, and the Coalition needs to take care over how it frames the debate, then the Savanta data suggest that it may face a few challenges. Asked what impact nuclear energy would have on their “energy bills,” about a third (35 per cent) of its respondents said it would make their bills “much cheaper” or “slightly cheaper,” less than a third (28 per cent) thought it would make them “much more expensive” or “slightly more expensive,” but more than a third (38 per cent) said they either didn’t know or thought it would make “no difference.”

In the Essential poll, conducted around the same time, respondents saw little difference in “total cost including infrastructure and household price” between three energy sources: “renewable energy, such as wind and solar” (38 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 35 per cent, the “least expensive”), nuclear power (34 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 34 per cent, the “least expensive”), and “fossil fuels, such as coal and gas” (28 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 31 per cent, the “least expensive”).

Supporters of nuclear energy may also have to address some of the concerns Benson didn’t mention. In the Savanta study, 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (45 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (32 per cent) about “waste management”; 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (47 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (30 per cent) about “health & safety (ie. nuclear meltdowns, impact on people living nearby)”; and 56 per cent were either “very concerned” (23 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (33 per cent) about the “time it takes to build.”

In another poll, this one conducted by Pure Profile in the first half of 2022, respondents were asked how they would feel if a new nuclear power station were built in their city. Around 50 per cent said they would feel “uncomfortable,” more than a quarter “extremely uncomfortable”; just 7 per cent would have felt “extremely at ease.”

It would be reassuring to think that any newspaper that wanted its polling taken seriously would need to commission better polling than the polling the Australian was so keen to promote. But the Newspoll results were taken seriously by a rival masthead. “The Newspoll published in the Australian,” the political editor of the Australian Financial Review, Phillip Coorey wrote, “found there was now majority support for the power source.”

A week after its poll was published, and its results — with a nod to the Coalition — described as “powerful,” the Australian’s front page led with another “exclusive,” this time courtesy of the Coalition: its “signature energy policy” to be announced “before the May federal budget” would include “a plan identifying potential sites for small nuclear reactors as future net zero sources.” The following day, Benson wrote that Newspoll had “demonstrated strong support for the proposal that Dutton is working on announcing soon.” But the policy Dutton was working on, apparently, was not the policy Newspoll had tested. “The Coalition energy plan,” Benson revealed the same day in another front-page “exclusive,” was “likely to include next-generation large-scale nuclear reactors — not just the small-modular reactors.”

A newspaper that has a position on nuclear power and thinks of polls as an objective measure of public opinion should make sure that the questions it gets (or allows) pollsters to ask, and the results it gets journalists to write up, look fair and reasonable to those on different sides of the debate. In effect, this was the discipline George Gallup placed on himself when he signed up newspapers with divergent views.

Even if a newspaper wanted to use its polling to gee-up its preferred party, it might also think about using its polling to identify some of the risks of pursuing a policy it backed — risks that no party wanting to win an election could sensibly ignore — not just the opportunities to pursue that policy.

Whether Michael Schudson left polling out of his account of objectivity because it didn’t fit with his argument about objectivity as an ideology, or because he didn’t think it a part of journalism — neither journalism nor market research being a profession in the sense that law or medicine are professions — or simply because of an oversight, is unclear.

Better, more comprehensive, polling wouldn’t end the political debate or the debate about the objectivity of the polls. Nor should it. Nonetheless, it might be a good place from which to progress these debates.

Of course, for those who don’t want to foster a debate about the policy or about the polls, any plea for do better is entirely beside the point. •

The post Nuclear power, Newspoll and the nuances of polled opinion appeared first on Inside Story.

Witty, smart, zealous for intellectual combat, Friedman enjoyed the University of Chicago classroom but reached well beyond it. Born in 1912, he was already a prominent economist by his early thirties. He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976, and continued to advocate his views until his death thirty years later. Through his Newsweek columns, television appearances, relentless cultivation of powerful friends, and frequent travel, he magnified the considerable influence he earned as an economic thinker. It was actually Stigler who came up with the line that “if you have never missed a flight you have wasted a lot of time at airports” but it was Friedman who most strikingly embodied the idea. Gifted with immense energy and verve, he hustled.

Readily conceding some of his big ideas didn’t work, Burns argues Friedman was nonetheless responsible for much of the shape of the world today. He created, she argues, modern central banking, floating exchange rates, and the “Washington consensus” on a universally applicable model of market economies. If she is right it was a considerable achievement for an economist who never ran a government department or held political office, and whose central theory, like that of Karl Marx, turned out to be just plain wrong.

And wrong it was. His big theory was that the rate of inflation — or more broadly nominal income — is always related to the rate of growth of the money supply. It was a claim with important implications. For Friedman, it meant a market economy was inherently stable except for variations in the money supply. If the money supply contracted it could cause a depression. If it expanded too quickly, it could cause inflation. Since the money supply could be controlled by government, it was government that was responsible for inflationary booms and deflationary busts. A capitalist economy would be stable if the money supply grew at a steady rate consistent with low inflation and reasonable output growth.

Friedman’s conviction was sustained by his 1963 finding, with Anna Schwartz, that the US money stock had plummeted during the great depression of the 1930s. Their observation stimulated debate, though it didn’t prove that a fall in the money stock caused the depression. After all, 9000 US banks had failed during the Depression, and the biggest component of money measures is bank deposits. It’s hardly surprising the quantity of money declined.

Put to the test by Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker in 1979, Friedman’s theory turned out to be wrong. To quell inflation, the Federal Reserve announced money growth targets aligned with Friedman’s rule. The targets proved very difficult to achieve. The US central bank did succeed in forcing up interest rates, however, creating back-to-back recessions and dramatically reducing inflation. Meanwhile the money supply continued to increase at much the same rate as before. Contradicting Friedman, interest rates mattered in controlling inflation; the money supply did not.

Though some have concluded that the swift rise in the money supply and the subsequent increase in inflation during the Covid epidemic bore out Friedman’s prediction, it didn’t. The episode was an even more telling repudiation. From 2020 to 2023 the US money supply (measured as M1, which is mainly bank transaction deposits) rose by 400 per cent, the result of the Federal Reserve creating cash to buy bonds and lend freely to banks and business. Over the same period US prices rose by 18 per cent, or less than one twentieth of the increase in the money stock.

(It is true, as Friedman maintained, that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. In a certain sense this must be true, since inflation is by definition about changes in the value of money. But changes in the quantity of money need not and evidently do not result in equivalent changes in inflation or nominal income.)

Once followed with eager interest by economists and market analysts, the money supply numbers these days are rarely mentioned. Friedman’s conception of the relationship with inflation survives in elderly conservative haunts (including the pages of Australia’s Quadrant magazine) and among some financial markets people.

It was still a widely discussed variable when I was working on a doctorate in economics in the US in the early eighties. Yet in later years on the Reserve Bank board I can’t recall the money supply being seriously mentioned, ever. Nor in an earlier four years as an economist in the office of the treasurer and then the prime minister. Nor yet was it taken seriously when I was working subsequently as an economist in financial markets. Though dutifully published by central banks, the money supply numbers contain no information useful for predicting inflation or nominal income growth.

But then some of Marx’s central ideas were also wrong. Demand hasn’t proved always to be less than supply, workers haven’t become increasingly poor, and the labour theory of value, which he adopted, has long been superseded by better ways of explaining prices. Yet Marx undoubtedly exerted great influence on the world. While conceding he was wrong on the central point of the “monetarism” he espoused, Burns argues that Friedman was similarly influential.

By 1979, when the central monetarist idea began to fail, Friedman had already given his famous 1967 presidential address to the American Economic Association in which he challenged many of his colleagues’ focus on a short-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. He succeeded in reorienting economic thinking back to a long run in which there was no trade-off and therefore not much room for stabilising the economy with government spending.

More than monetarism, that address changed scholarly economic thinking. The short-run trade-off survives today in economics teaching, but coupled now with a long-run story in which there is a certain minimum unemployment rate — often disputed — consistent with stable inflation.

Intelligent, well-researched, scrupulous, balanced and clearly written, Burns’s is an excellent biography. Her archival work on Friedman’s relationships with Chicago colleagues, Federal Reserve governors, presidential candidates and presidents is thorough, fresh and deeply interesting. Even so it credits Friedman with more than seems to me reasonable.

Much of Friedman’s reputation was based on a wonderful stroke of professional luck in the late 1960s. As Burns tells it, he observed an increase in the rate of growth of the US money supply and predicted an increase in inflation. In his 1967 address he argued there was no stable relationship between inflation and employment. When people observed that inflation was rising they would increase their wage demands and businesses would increase prices, taking inflation higher. When inflation took off in the late 1960s Friedman claimed to be vindicated. When unemployment also rose in response to a slowing economy, Friedman was doubly vindicated. He had predicted both rising inflation, and unemployment, and by the early seventies both were apparent.

It was also true, however, that the Johnston Administration was financing both the war in Vietnam and its ambitious Great Society program of social spending and infrastructure. Federal spending rose from 16 per cent of GDP in 1965 to 19 per cent in 1968, with almost all of the increase funded by an increased deficit. Inflation rose from 1.6 per cent in 1965 to 5.5 per cent in 1969. During the next decade, helped along by a tenfold increase in oil prices, inflation and unemployment would increase very much more. Even so, the increase at the end of the sixties was a disorienting shock, one that burnished Friedman’s repute as an economic seer. Through the seventies, a decade of high inflation and an intermittently rising unemployment rate, Friedman’s reputation grew.

They were his best years. By the early eighties, with Volcker’s disinflation efforts demonstrating that a money supply target was a lot harder to achieve than Friedman supposed — and unnecessary to combat inflation — his professional reputation lost some of it shine. Even at Chicago, a new school of “rational expectations” pioneered by younger economists was displacing Friedman at the centre of classical economic thinking. At the same time, though, his public reputation became more lustrous with popular books and a television series lauding capitalism, markets and the freedom Friedman argued capitalism encouraged.

Friedman could claim some singular successes, as Burns points out. He was an advocate of floating exchange rates at a time when orthodoxy predicted global chaos if exchange rates were not fixed against each other and the price of gold. When the big market economies were forced to move to floating rates from the end of the 1960s, Friedman was proved right. Markets adjusted, and more importantly monetary policy could refocus on targeting inflation rather than the exchange rate.

Friedman could claim considerable credit not only for arguing in favour of floating exchange rates, which have become nearly universal in major economies, but also for several proposals that for one reason or another were not widely adopted. One is school vouchers, a government payment which would allow parents to choose their children’s school. Another is the negative income tax, which in Friedman’s version would replace other welfare payments with a single payment.

It is harder to praise Friedman alone for widely shared ideas that also proved useful. For example, Burns credits Friedman for insisting on the role of prices as the central mechanism in a market economy. But in this respect he was by no means unique. He deployed a style of economic analysis that Adam Smith called the invisible hand and was most coherently developed by the British economist Alfred Marshall in the 1890s. The technique was used by Marshall’s pupil Keynes and taught at Harvard in much the same form as at Chicago. It is still taught today and remains one of the most powerful tools in economics. Friedman was good at it, but not as good as his contemporaries and colleagues, Stigler and Gary Becker, or many other microeconomists of his era.

Friedman did successfully contest the supremacy of fiscal policy over monetary policy, a lingering legacy of Keynes’s advice for dealing with deep slumps such as the Great Depression. The fiscal emphasis was rooted in Keynes’s notion that the circumstances of the Depression and the fear it engendered meant lower interest rates would not make much difference to spending. It was the “liquidity trap” in which people conserved cash rather than buy things or invest. Direct government spending was a better option to sustain demand and jobs. This aspect of Keynes’s thinking dominated economic thought in the United States, particularly among supporters of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Friedman insisted on the important role of central banks, a reorientation that remains.

Friedman’s enduring contribution, Burns argues, was to remind the economics profession that money matters. She is certainly right, even if the particular mechanism he had in mind proved to be wrong. Even so I am not at all sure of her argument that Freidman resurrected interest in money among economists, or that it had ever ceased to be of interest. After all, Keynes wrote his Treatise on Money before the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and the General Theory has much to say about money and interest rates. John Hicks’s famous simplification of the General Theory, still taught as the ISLM equations, is all about interest rates, the public penchant to hold money, and the quantity of money. Friedman himself acknowledged the contributions of an earlier American monetary theorist, Irving Fisher.

Burns also credits Friedman with an important role in creating the “Washington consensus,” the nineteen nineties notion that began as a description of a widespread change of economic policies in South America away from import replacement. Friedman made some contribution, though not as important as that of his trade theory colleagues. Japan, then Korea, then Taiwan, then most of Southeast Asia had in any case focused on export strategies decades before Chicago economists, including Friedman, advised Pinochet regime in Chile to adopt one.

Generalised with Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat into a view that democracy, capitalism and economic globalisation had become the more or less universally agreed elements of human societies, it moved well beyond Friedman’s scope. Friedman certainly welcomed it, but did he create it? A world of liberal market economies had, after all, been an American foreign policy ideal since the end of the second world war. The creation of the modern global economy rested on successive GATT trade rounds, the European common market, the reconstruction of Japan and Germany and other changes Friedman may have applauded but had nothing to do with him. He welcomed China’s accession to World Trade Organization in 2001 but was not an important player in removing the US veto. China’s economic success with considerable state ownership and direction ran opposite to Friedman’s prescriptions. On the Washington consensus, there is anyway today no consensus.

As he became more involved in Republican politics, Friedman’s moral compass became unreliable. Supporting Barry Goldwater’s campaign for the presidency, Friedman opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His argument, according to Burns, was that people have a right to racially discriminate if they wish. With economics, you need to know when to stop.

His fans claim Friedman’s ideas also had a big impact on Australia. According to economist Peter Swan, speaking at a Friedman tribute in Sydney in 2007, Friedman’s ideas arguably spurred not only “the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Soviet Union and of communism [and] the rise of Maggie Thatcher in the UK” but also the “magnificent success of the early Hawke–Keating government,” which “freed up the financial system, floated the dollar, and deregulated and privatised much of the economy. And Friedman’s ideas surely laid the foundations for the great prosperity enjoyed by Australians under the Howard government.”

Putting aside his suggestions about the Berlin Wall and the demise the Soviet Union, Swan’s attribution of the success of the Hawke and Keating governments to Friedman is hard to see. Writing about those governments, researching the archive of Keating’s files, I cannot recall coming across Friedman’s name once.

The Hawke and Keating governments were indeed adherents of what was then broadly known as economic rationalism, but it is fanciful to credit Friedman. It was just regular economics. The Hawke government put in place an Accord with the trade unions which, with the cooperation of the wage arbitration tribunal, restrained the growth of wages. That idea was anathema to Friedman. The Hawke and Keating governments legislated tariff cuts, long advocated by Australian economists and drawn from mainstream economic thinking that long preceded Friedman. (Influenced by Bert Kelly, Whitlam had also been a tariff reformer.) Friedman was an advocate of the sort of privatisations effected by the Hawke and Keating governments, but so were many other prominent economists.

There is perhaps more of a Friedmanite influence in financial deregulation. Australia’s efforts were in some respects more thoroughgoing than in the United States, but somewhat later — as was the float of the currency. In Australia, as in Britain and the United States, deregulation was prompted by the increasing success of unregulated financial businesses, cross-border competition and the opportunities offered by computing and communications technologies. Friedman advocated financial deregulation but, again, so did others.

And while Australia’s Reserve Bank continued with monetary targets until 1985 the operating instrument and the real focus of policy was always the short-term interest rate. The bank anyway had no more success than other central banks in meeting its money targets. The targets were seen as aspirational projections rather than outcomes that had to be attained. Not long after the float of the Australian dollar, the bank (and the government) dropped what had by then become fictional monetary targets. As the bank’s then deputy governor, Stephen Grenville, pointed out in a canonical 1997 paper, by the late eighties it was widely recognised that the relationship between money and nominal income had broken down. He approvingly quoted a remark of the Bank of Canada governor: “We didn’t abandon monetary targets, they abandoned us.”

For all that, Burns rightly points out that Friedman could claim a good deal of the credit for many of the characteristics of contemporary central banking. One is explicit targets, though now expressed as an inflation range rather than a rate of growth of money. Another is openness, expressed as public information about the monetary policy decisions of the central bank, and its economic forecasts. A third might be the greater independence of central banks from the rest of the government. In the United States all three were in varying degrees absent from the Fed when Friedman began drawing attention to the role of money and monetary policy from the later 1950s onward. He could claim to have had a big influence on central banking, and for the better.

Freidman’s most thorough intellectual biography is the magnificent two volume study by Edward Nelson, an Australian economist working at the Federal Reserve in Washington. At over 1300 pages Nelson’s Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States 1932-1972 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) demonstrates in detail the range of Friedman’s professional impact in the long-running disputes between economists broadly aligned with Keynesian views, and those adhering to the Chicago classical tradition.

As Nelson noted in 2011, some of Friedman’s views have been put to unexpected uses. The then Fed chair Ben Bernanke cited Friedman’s criticism of inactivity of the central bank during the Great Depression to justify the large-scale intervention of the Fed in the 2008 financial crisis. But it is also true that the 2008 crisis was caused by a grotesque failure of financial businesses to control risks. Alan Greenspan’s misplaced confidence that financial markets would correctly price the risks of mortgage securitisation, the most expensive error in the history of central banking thus far, had a distinctly Friedmanite or at least Chicago ring.

Perhaps Friedman’s most enduring legacy is his support for the notion that market economies usually work reasonably well. They occasionally crash but by and large the price mechanism, the invisible hand, guides efficient decisions much better than state control of prices, labour and capital. Friedman argued for this view but it was, after all, the fundamental tenet of economic theory as developed in Western Europe and Britain from the eighteenth century onward, and not a view that Friedman either invented or much improved. A brilliant advocate, an important scholar — that should be enough for one very distinguished career in economics, without also being held responsible for the shape of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. •

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative
By Jennifer Burns | Farrar Straus Giroux | $59.99 | 592 pages

The post The free market’s brilliant frontman appeared first on Inside Story.

“Would you please send me one of your pipes that you may have laid aside and you will not be likely to be using again,” wrote Mr Reece. “If it should be a bit strong, no matter. I know of a process that will overcome that. I have not been able to get a decent pipe for years.”

A quick glance was enough to tell me that this was not what I was looking for. But I printed the letter out for a closer look anyway. The writer was an aged pensioner, he said, twenty days short of seventy-five years, living alone in New Norfolk, Tasmania. He has raised a family of six daughters and three sons. All of the sons had served in the recent war, he added, with one still with the occupying force in Japan.

Reece had “battled for Labour” since he joined the Amalgamated Miners Union in 1889. “I started in poverty and I’m ending ditto, but I’ve no regrets and have no apologies to offer for my support of the ‘Grand Old Labour Movement.’”

If Mr Chifley were to visit Hobart during the forthcoming federal election campaign, and if Reece is spared that long, he promises to be in the audience. He is very optimistic that the Chifley government will be returned with a strong majority (it was). “I wish you and your good colleagues all the good luck that wishes can express.”

I was busy that day and so, having studied the letter for a few minutes and enjoying a giggle about the pipe thing (what was that all about?) I tossed it aside and moved on. Fortunately, the pile I tossed it into was the “do not throw out under any circumstances” pile, where it stayed until the inevitable desk clean-up late last year when, at last, Mr Reece finally had my full attention.

This is my favourite thing, the deep study of a single archival record. It could be a letter, a telegram or a bunch of postcards discovered in a junk shop. It is remarkable what can be gleaned from seemingly insignificant clues, especially now that these clues can be run through so many newly digitised sources. Becoming deeply immersed in someone else’s life, trying to see the world through their eyes, must be my form of meditation.

Why this Mr Reece though? What is it about him in particular? Partly it was his surname that guided my hand that day towards the “do not throw out” pile rather than the recycling bin. I grew up in Tasmania and I remember my parents talking about the redoubtable Eric Reece, a former long-time Labor premier known as “Electric Eric” because of his ardent support for hydroelectric projects. Surely it had to be the same family.

But mainly I was captivated by what I perceive as a yearning on Reece’s part to stay connected with the world. It’s unintentionally expressed, but it’s there. Looking back over his long life, this proud and, I think, lonely man tells of the things that most matter to him: his work, his family and the labour movement. Not only that, he also imagines Labor’s next victory even if he is not alive to see it.

And the pipe thing? Chifley made his pipe a signature accessory and was rarely seen without one, but it does seem awful cheek to expect him to simply hand one over on request. Chifley wrote back: “Dear Mr Reece, thanks for your letter… I am sorry that for the present I haven’t a suitable pipe to send you. As you say, good pipes are very scarce these days.” (Actually Chifley usually had several on hand, gifts from family and well-wishers.) “I was interested to read of your lengthy support of the Labour Movement. You must have many memories to look back on.” And he signed off with best wishes.

Reece didn’t get his pipe but I doubt he was disappointed. Pipe smoking was a companionable habit the two men shared but Reece’s request, I suspect, was just an opening gambit. It has been said of Chifley that he used the lighting of his pipe as a stalling tactic while he thought through a response to a problem. And so, preliminaries over, Reece felt perfectly free to address his prime minister as an equal, one Labor man to another, to tell his story.

The letter wasn’t really about the pipe, and — fair warning — this essay is not really about it either.

William Henry Reece (often known even in official records as Will Harry Reece) was born in 1872, and he was indeed an uncle to Eric Reece. Fortunately for me, there is a biography of Reece the younger, Jillian Koshin’s Electric Eric: The Life and Times of an Australian State Premier (2009).

Koshin’s book begins with an examination of the Reece family’s working-class origins in mining towns in the northeast and west of Tasmania. The discovery of minerals — gold, silver, copper, tin — in the 1870s brought a sudden and massive economic boom to the colony based on interstate investment, higher export income, higher wages and increased incoming migration. In his 2012 history of Tasmania, Henry Reynolds describes the 1880s as one of Tasmania’s “sunniest” decades.

Patriarch Owen Charles Reece established himself as a miner in the 1870s but was frequently on the move looking for work. Koshin is at pains to show how the wealth that enriched investors and beautified the cities rarely trickled down to the poorest folk who had laboured to produce it. Across three generations, even in so-called good times, little changed for the Reece family.

Owen and his wife Jane had fourteen children but the first three, triplets, died in infancy. Jane was thirty-eight when she died in Scottsdale hospital giving birth to twins, who also died. Owen was left a widower with nine children to raise; our man Will (“I started in poverty…”) was the eldest. A few brothers down the line was George, eventually to become the father of Eric, who was born in 1909.

The Reeces’ lives were characterised by insecure and dangerous work and the strain and expense of constantly moving from one primitive slab-and-shingle hut to another in remote and isolated settlements. Because these clusters of dwellings were expected to be temporary, authorities would rarely invest in public amenities. Close-knit families relied on one other.

Out of these struggles emerged a writer, Marie E.J. Pitt. Originally from Victoria, she was married to a miner, William Pitt, and for about a decade beginning in the 1890s went with him to mining settlements in the northeast and west of Tasmania. They had four children, one of whom died.

Scribbling by lamplight, Pitt wrote of “an austere land of mountain gorges of ice and snow, and raging torrents of creeping mist and never-ending rain.” The land spoke another language, “superb in its silence, appalling in its melancholy grandeur.” Her pen was also driven by anger. This is how she begins her poem “The Keening”:

We are the women and children
Of the men that mined for gold:
Heavy are we with sorrow,
Heavy as heart can hold;
Galled are we with injustice,
Sick to the soul of loss —
Husbands and sons and brothers
Slain for the yellow dross!

Over nine more bitter stanzas she attacks mine owners, politicians and churchmen for having averted their gaze from the misery right in front of them. “The Keening” was published in 1911, but by then the Pitts had moved to Victoria because William had contracted miner’s phthisis. He died in 1912.

Will Reece, his siblings, nieces and nephews were among those children of the men that mined for gold. All the Reece men became union men. Poetry aside, trade unionism was the practical agent of change, the structure within which to advocate for safer working conditions, better wages and political representation.

Reece was a seventeen-year-old apprentice blacksmith at the tin mine in Ringarooma when he joined the Amalgamated Miner’s Union in 1889, the year of its formation in Tasmania. For some reason, though, he broke away from the family and left the mines behind. His parents were married with Baptist rites but Will appears to have converted to Catholicism, a most unusual thing to do in those sectarian times, and certainly enough to cause a family rift.

From the late 1890s he roamed through several agricultural districts in the northeast and in 1909, at St Mary’s, he married a woman named Catherine Cannell. In 1912 they went south to New Norfolk, a town nestling in the Derwent valley thirty-five kilometres northwest of Hobart. The landscape was far kinder than anything Will Reece had known growing up, and here the family settled for good.

Literate, articulate and gregarious, Reece would join anything. He played cricket and football, would swing an axe at a local woodchopping event and was always ready to chair a meeting, MC a church fundraiser or write a letter to an editor about some local grievance. Forced in 1915 to give up blacksmithing because of an accident, he opened a photographic studio; it failed, and he was declared bankrupt in 1921.

Clearly this man had bucketloads of self-belief. He stood twice, unsuccessfully, for the municipal council and then, undeterred, turned to state politics and was a candidate for Labor in the elections of 1919, 1922, 1925 and 1928. He failed each time.

Meanwhile he became an organiser for the Australian Workers’ Union, and here he found his métier. His nephew’s biographer noticed Will Reece signing up shearers, shed-hands, miners, labourers and roadmen across the state, including in mining centres on the west coast. New heavy-industry projects provided fresh fields for the AWU, and there was Will Reece, visiting the new carbide factory at Electrona in the south and the hydroelectricity works at Waddamana in the central highlands. With regular reports (this one is typical) he made himself well-known to the readers of the AWU’s national paper, the Australian Worker.

But the 1930s brought reversals. In 1931, more than a quarter of Tasmanian trade unionists were unemployed because of the depression. All the Reece men let their union membership lapse. Will Reece returned to manual labour and in 1934, aged sixty-two, was severely injured in an explosives accident while quarrying for gravel. He sustained burns to his face and temporarily lost his sight. In 1935 his wife Catherine died suddenly, leaving him with a clutch of children and teenagers.

In 1939 Will’s fifty-year commitment to the labour cause was celebrated at a special meeting of the New Norfolk branch of the Labor Party. Local MP Jack Dwyer spoke Reece’s work to “uplift” the condition of the masses. Many of the privileges now enjoyed by the workers were due to his efforts, Dwyer noted, and the party was much indebted to him.

At about that time Will’s nephew Eric was embarking on his own (in his case spectacularly successful) political career. After failed attempts in 1940 and 1943, Eric was elected Labor member of the state House of Assembly in November 1946. He was in office as premier between 1958 and 1969, and again from 1972 to 1975, and was federal president of the Labor Party between 1952 and 1955.

His formative years had been similar to his uncle’s: he’d worked in mines and on farms from his early teens — joined the AWU at fifteen — spent most of the 1930s depression unemployed — got a job at the Mount Lyell copper mine in 1934 — was appointed organiser for the AWU there in 1935. Strangely, there does not seem to have been a strong association between uncle and nephew. In his 1946 letter to Ben Chifley, Will could have mentioned Eric as a promising youngster to keep an eye on, but he does not.

Still, Will and Eric Reece — and Ben Chifley as well, of course — were haunted by memories of hardship, and all strove for the same things: economic growth, full employment, increased standards of living, and social welfare for those who needed it.

There was nothing in Eric Reece’s makeup to prepare him for the social upheavals and cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s. He had grown up believing that the state’s natural resources — its water, timber and minerals — were there to be used for the common good. Famously, he rode roughshod over opposition to the hydroelectric scheme in southwest Tasmania that was to flood Lake Pedder in 1972–73.

Where some people wept at Pedder’s beauty, Eric Reece was belligerent and autocratic. In 1966 he taunted his opponents with the remark that Tasmania’s southwest contained only “a few badgers, kangaroos, wallabies, and some wildflowers that can be seen anywhere.” (Badgers? Did he mean wombats?) Tough old trade unionists like Reece knew what destitution looked like and were lit with a determination to do more than just overcome personal hardship; they were committed to structural reforms to improve the lives of all working people.

By this time, however, there had begun a great grinding of gears in progressive politics as young, idealistic, tertiary-educated people drifted away from Labor to the green movement. While this also happened elsewhere, perhaps the grinding came earlier in Tasmania.

Will Reece didn’t live to see any of this. Perhaps, as promised, he made it to Hobart in September 1946 to hear Ben Chifley’s two-hour campaign speech given to a capacity crowd at the town hall. “The whole country is prosperous,” Chifley declared that night. “That is the first ideal we have, and we go to the people on that record.”

Labor’s election loss in 1949 and Chifley’s death in 1951 must have saddened Reece. He died in 1953, with his boots on (so to speak) I hope, and his certainties still intact. •

The post Ben Chifley’s pipe appeared first on Inside Story.

If you live in Frankston and you’ve got a problem with Victorian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.

If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.

Send Labor a message.

— Sussan Ley (@sussanley) February 29, 2024

Having happened to watch question time that day, I can attest that she (or her staffer) was fully on song with the opposition’s chief theme: that Melburnian women should be terrified of being assaulted by convicted sex offenders — foreign (ie. dark-skinned) ones to boot — released into the community by the Albanese government.

It’s a very Peter Duttonesque message, but he and his team usually deliver it with more subtlety — it sticks better if recipients have to join a few dots — and, crucially, with deniability. By blundering in with the quiet bits out loud, Ley made it more obvious, if not necessarily more objectionable.

It’s all part of the Dunkley frenzy, of course. As with all federal by-elections seen as contestable between the major parties, this one, caused by the death of Labor MP Peta Murphy, has gone from being cast as a useful indicator of how the parties are “travelling” to something incredibly important in its own right: massive tests for the prime minister and opposition leader.

Whenever I write about a by-election I devote some words to explaining why these events are useless predictors of anything and why they only matter because the political bubble believes they do. Readers familiar with these observations can skip the next few pars.

There are two main reasons. The first is that the sample, while huge, is neither random nor scientifically weighted. It’s just one electorate. At the 2022 general election a national 3.7 percentage point swing comprised a spread of 151 seat swings, from 14.2 points to Labor in Pearce (Western Australia) to 7.2 points to the Liberals in Calwell (Victoria). (The 8.3 points to the Lib in Fowler (New South Wales) was bigger, but that was an independent–Labor contest and the two-party-preferred figure comes from an Electoral Commission recount for purely academic purposes.)

So even at a general election, one seat’s swing will rarely approximate the national one.

But perhaps more importantly, by-elections (except in the rarest of cases) are not about who will form government. It’s true that a proportion of the electorate — probably still a majority, but a shrinking one — will always vote for a particular major party out of loyalty, but for the rest the triviality of the contest liberates them to act on other impulses. “Sending a message” is tried and tested (see tweet above).

Candidates also make more of a difference at by-elections. So might the weather. Low turnout is a feature of this genre, worth potentially a couple of percentage points one way or the other.

Still, by-elections do end up being important, precisely because the political class believes they are. They can influence the future, particularly leaders’ job security, but only because of how they’re interpreted. (Would we have ever seen a Bob Hawke prime ministership if Liberal Phillip Lynch had not resigned in Flinders in 1982?)

The magic number here is the margin: 6.27233 per cent to be precise. A swing to the opposition above that figure would shake parliament’s walls, generate shock and awe in the press gallery and even, perhaps, send Labor’s leadership hares out for a trot. After the Voice “debacle,” Anthony Albanese fails another electoral test!

A swing to the government would similarly damage Peter Dutton, rendering his chances of surviving until the next election worse than they are now. And anything in between will be energetically spun by both sides and their media cheersquads.

So what can we say about Dunkley? Antony Green’s page is up, and I’ve followed his lead when calculating average swings by restricting the time period to 1983 onwards. But I’ve also excluded by-elections caused by section 44 of the Constitution — of which we had a slew around six years ago — because in all of them (or at least those with identifiable with two-party-preferred swings) the disqualified MPs ran again. These deserve their own category given that the absence of the personal votes of sitting MPs is the big driver of the difference between swings in opposition-held seats and government-held seats.

That leaves twenty-three by-elections in the past forty-one years with two-party-preferred swings. In the ten opposition-held seats (including Aston and the low-profile Fadden last year) the average swing was an almost negligible 0.8 points to the opposition.

Those caused by resignations by government MPs (eleven in total, the most recent in Groom in 2020) average to a much bigger number, 7.6 points to the opposition. And when they’re brought on by the death of a government MP — it’s a tiny sample of two (Aston 2001 and Canning 2015) — the swing is 5.5 points to the opposition. If we include that pair with the resignations we get 7.2 points to the opposition from thirteen events.

(There were no opposition by-elections caused by death with two-party-preferred swings in that period.)

So you might want to use that 5.5, which would see Labor retain the seat, or 7.2, which wouldn’t. Or you could slot in any other number, because another feature of by-elections is that they’re unpredictable.

The graph below shows Labor two-party-preferred votes in Dunkley since 1984. To adjust for redistributions, notional swings are subtracted from results going backwards. The blue dots show the actual vote at each election; the fact that so many are below the orange line reflects a 2018 redistribution that favoured Labor by an estimated (by the AEC) 2.5 points after preferences.

The big gap between the orange and red lines from 1998 to 2013 (particularly from 2001) is largely because of the big personal vote built up by the energetic Liberal Bruce Billson, first elected in 1996. He ended up in Tony Abbott’s shadow cabinet and then in cabinet; he was subsequently dropped by new prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2015 and retired at the 2016 election. See the dramatic narrowing between red and orange at that election with the absence of his name on the ballot.

Dunkley was retained by the Liberals’ Chris Crewther, but the aforementioned redistribution saw the electorate going into the 2019 poll as notionally Labor. In that year Victoria was the only state to swing to the opposition, and Murphy (who had also contested in 2016) took Dunkley (or retained it vis-à-vis its notional position) with a swing slightly above the state average. If Crewther generated a sophomore surge in that single term, it was counteracted by other factors, perhaps including the Labor candidate and campaign. Murphy seems to have enjoyed a surge in 2022, registering a swing well above the state average. Which takes us to where we are now, and that margin of 6.3 points.

Note that the orange line is above 50 per cent in 1998, 2010 and 2016. All else being equal, this suggests Labor would have won on the current boundaries in those years. All else ain’t equal, and the assumption gets more questionable the further back we go because of demographic changes and compounding errors in those post-redistribution estimates of notional margins. (Notional margins are rather hit and miss. For one thing they can’t take into account postal votes; for another they ignore personal votes in booths from neighbouring electorates.)

But it is reasonable to believe that Dunkley, as it is defined today, would probably have been won by Labor in 2010 and 2016. So although Dunkley was long held by the Liberal Party it’s not really accurate to call it a natural Liberal seat.

Other factors?

Federal electorates tend to be pulled by state tides. One element is the standing of those second-tier governments, and while Victoria’s Labor government under new premier Jacinta Allan is still ahead in opinion polls, the leads are more modest than under Dan Andrews. Put less clinically, Andrews was an accomplished communicator, including on behalf his federal counterparts, and he is gone.

Working the other way, Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto still seems as pitiably bogged down by his party’s right wing as he was eleven months ago during Aston.

Then there’s the personal vote. On the evidence, which isn’t substantial, Murphy had a good one. (The bigger her personal vote, the worse for Labor’s chances on 2 March.)

The Liberal candidate is the Frankston mayor Nathan Conroy, who should bring a ready-made personal vote in parts of the electorate. Labor’s Jodie Belyea has long been involved in the local community but from reports lacks his profile. As noted above, attitudes to candidates can matter a lot at by-elections.

Conroy drew the top ballot spot and Belyea the bottom. That’s got to be worth a point or two for the Liberal overall.

Dutton is reported to be spinning “that a swing of between 3 per cent and 5 per cent would be a respectable outcome,” which suggests his party is expecting something bigger. YouGov, with a small sample, puts the Liberals on 51 per cent after preferences (about a 7 point swing). Polling before by-elections, including surveys conducted by the parties, is notoriously rubbery.

Anything can happen at by-elections, but if forced to choose I would tip a Liberal victory. If that does eventuate, the media frenzy about Labor’s leadership, including whispers from unnamed party sources, will not be for the faint-hearted.

December’s “one-term government” sightings will certainly make a comeback. •

Further reading, in alphabetical order

• ABC’s aforementioned Antony Green
• Kevin Bonham
• Pollbludger (William Bowe)
• Tallyroom (Ben Raue)

The post Dunkley’s Rorschach test appeared first on Inside Story.

Well-known to Lindsay enthusiasts, Cranny-Francis has written articles and organised conferences about his life and work, maintains a website, arranged the publication of his “political autobiography” The Fullness of Life and edited a volume of selected poems. In this first book-length single-author study of Lindsay’s life and work she has hit on an elegant solution to the problem of the hyperactively full life of her subject. He was someone whose works demand attention to his ideas, and whose ideas demand attention to his life. Jack Lindsay is structured around a core of six chapters, each dedicated to Lindsay’s book-length studies of English authors: John Bunyan (1937), Charles Dickens (1950), George Meredith (1956), William Morris (1974) and two on William Blake (1927 and 1978). This frame is filled in with chapters that provide biographical and intellectual context and discuss his other relevant works, helping the reader to understand, without being overwhelmed, how Lindsay’s approach to writing was influenced by his experiences and ideas.

This structure works well to illuminate Lindsay’s eclectic, self-fashioned life-philosophy, with its associated preoccupations, values and imagery: the struggle for unity, culture as expressive work, the archetype of death and renewal. The system evolved over time, but many elements were present from the first.

Inevitably Cranny-Francis omits or barely glances at much of Lindsay’s output. She makes barely a mention of his forty-three novels and seven biographies of artists. It would be hard to guess from it that Lindsay’s most cited study is about alchemy in Roman Egypt, or that the one most discussed by academics is a historical novel set in the British civil war.

Depending on what counts as a book, Lindsay published about 160 in his lifetime, as well as hundreds of articles, stories and poems. About a half of his writing was historical and biographical, a quarter fiction, and the remainder criticism, social theory, translations, polemics and poetry. Most of his publications were concerned with the past, usually the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Lindsay’s classical training is apparent in the eclectic character of works in which history, mythology, philology, archaeology, anthropology, aesthetics and philosophy are seamlessly blended.

All of Lindsay’s mature writing was underwritten by a self-fashioned philosophy or credo. Its most fundamental principle was what Cranny-Francis describes as the “embodied connectedness” of things. He often called it “vital unity,” “wholeness,” “Life” or “the fullness of life.”

In Lindsay’s thought the concept of vital unity assumes as many guises as energy does in physics. One of his symbols for it was Dionysus, the mysterious deity of wine and rebirth, leader of a disorganised band of enthralled creatures — satyrs, maenads, nymphs, centaurs, Pan the god of shepherds — who found no place on Mount Olympus. Another symbol was the figure of “the people,” which he sometimes called “the folk,” and occasionally “the masses,” each term with its particular political inflection. Human unity implied solidarity, equality, ethical responsiveness and mutual aid.

As Cranny-Francis observes, Lindsay extends the idea of unity to all spheres of human activity, including the natural world. John Bellamy Foster, noting Lindsay’s evocations of a “patient earth… ‘eternally reborn’ through labour and ritual practice,” identifies him as a forerunner of Marxist ecology.

Lindsay found the origins of the idea of unity in Plato, or even further back in Parmenides and Pythagoras, but a slightly less distant inspiration was the sixteenth-century excommunicated priest Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who melded Renaissance humanism with materialism. Lindsay was stirred when he encountered Bruno in the early 1930s, subsequently writing a novel about him (Adam of a New World, 1936), and translating De la causa, principio e uno (Cause, Principle, Unity, 1962). Later he would claim that reading Bruno led him directly to Marxism.

Lindsay’s intense awareness of the interconnectedness of the living world had implications for his everyday life. Cranny-Francis quotes from an episode in The Fullness of Life during his years with the poet Elza de Locre in the early 1930s, when he lived in desperate poverty.

A local farmer had gifted a couple of rabbits to them as a neighbourly gesture. Confronted with the reality of having to skin and disembowel the animals before cooking, Lindsay found himself unable to proceed. He contemplates the economy of death on which a meat-eating society is based, particularly when social organisation has reached a point where meat protein is no longer essential to the diet: “One’s symbiosis with the earth is therefore in terms of unceasing violence and murder; and one knows, deep in one’s being, that one lives only by a system of blood-victims.”

“A communist society which is not vegetarian,” he concluded, “seems to me a hopeless contradiction.”

The young Lindsay called the absence of unity abstraction or dissociation; later, under the influence of Hegel and Marx, he favoured the word alienation. He argued that alienation has always been present in human life and has always provoked resistance. Throughout history that resistance has taken many forms — initiation rituals, shamanic flights, alchemy, art and poetry, and political revolt. The struggle against alienation shapes people’s relationships with one another and the world, motivates the protests of the wretched and exploited, and underlies attitudes to nature. Great thinkers and creative artists throw light upon its diverse manifestations.

Blake’s prophetic books explore the “world of false consciousness, of alienation,” according to Lindsay, and he praised Dickens for “the discovery of dissociation and the alienation of man from his fellows and his own essence, the stages of struggle against the dissociative forces, and the intuition (uttered in symbolic forms) of the resolving unity.”

Lindsay regarded religion as both a product of alienation and a form of protest against it. His vision of the world was also infused with hope for a fulfilment somehow always just out of reach. In a letter to Edith Sitwell on her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1955 he confessed to having been at times “very close to the catholic creed… indistinguishable perhaps from ekklesia of the faithful — the people who are Christ.”

Affinities between his system and Christianity are not difficult to uncover: sin as alienation, humanity crucified, Life the Eucharist, Paradise a vision of love and freedom. He was familiar with such syncretisms in the Ancient World: in a book about Roman Egypt he references a tomb in the Roman catacombs of Pretextatys on which Dionysus is identified with the Lord Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, and burials in the Vatican Necropolis of Christians who also worshipped Isis and Bacchus.

Alienation has become all-pervasive in the modern world, chiefly because of money and science. Following Thomas Carlyle, Lindsay often referred to the institutions and customs associated with money as the “cash-nexus.” From all the possible elements of human relationship associated with the exchange of goods, money abstracts a single factor, that of utility, and makes the remainder redundant. The dehumanisation implicit in the use of money reaches its apogee with capitalism, which turns life itself into a commodity. In his study of William Morris he declares that “a genuinely new society can be born only when commodity-production ends, and with it division of labour, money, market-systems, and alienation in all its many shapes and forms — above all alienation from labour.”

The other powerful alienating factor of modernity is the scientific method stemming from Galileo and Descartes, which Lindsay consistently attacked as “mechanical,” “divisive” and “quantitative.” Cranny-Francis notes that “Lindsay returns repeatedly… to Blake’s criticisms of science and the post-Enlightenment rationalism on which it is based.” Lindsay was not at all opposed to scientific inquiry, nor wholly dismissive of the achievements of post Enlightenment science. But in Marxism and Contemporary Science (1949) and a later trilogy on alchemy, astrology and physics in Greco-Roman Egypt he refused to separate knowledge of “nature” from other kinds of knowledge. There is a single interconnected world, and all ways of knowing it are likewise interconnected. The “sciences” discussed in Marxism and Contemporary Science are not physics, astronomy or chemistry, but biology, anthropology, art criticism, psychology and history.

For Lindsay, decisive proof that contemporary science has taken a wrong turning was the atomic bomb, the culmination of alienation’s will to self-destruction. Today he would no doubt make the same criticism of the digital revolution and genetics.

But there is a nagging problem with alienation, though Lindsay, more of a poet than a philosopher, seems never to have addressed it, and neither does Cranny-Francis. It parallels the problem of evil in religions that postulate a benign creator. Where does alienation come from? How can the world be a vital unity and at the same time a site of struggle against division?

Some cosmologies have an explanation. An idealist can say that the world of the senses is a flawed copy of a perfect and eternal world that is glimpsed only in thought. The unity is “above,” the struggle “below.” But Lindsay was trenchantly opposed both to idealism and to hierarchy. For him mental and spiritual phenomena are autonomous, but in the final analysis dependent on matter. Cranny-Francis mentions his debt to the Sydney-born philosopher Samuel Alexander. Alexander was an early twentieth-century advocate of emergence, the theory that complex systems produce attributes and activities that do not belong to their parts. Could emergence explain the origin of alienation? It isn’t clear how.

At a psychological level, though, Lindsay’s biography provides a paradigm case of a conflict between longed-for unity and actual division. Lindsay’s father was the writer and artist Norman Lindsay, one of Australia’s best-known humourists and artists in the first half of the twentieth century, notorious for his sexual libertarianism and hostility to Christianity. Cranny-Francis dwells sensitively on Jack’s difficult relationship with Norman. “The story of father-son relationships threads through all of Lindsay’s writing, fiction and non-fiction,” she writes. When Jack was nine years old, Norman left his wife and three sons. The fatherless family moved to Brisbane, where young Jack lived in a state of genteel but disorganised impoverishment, loved but neglected by his vague and increasingly alcoholic mother until her sister’s family finally took charge and sent him to school. Unsurprisingly, the theme of a lost birthright appears often in Lindsay’s novels and histories.

Norman renewed contact with his son only after his academic achievements had earned him scholarships to Brisbane’s elite Grammar School and the University of Queensland. Lindsay, ecstatic to be restored to his famous father’s attention, was Norman’s devoted acolyte for the next decade. Then they fell out bitterly.

Norman’s entire life was a fierce act of will to sustain the exhilarating freedom of his adolescence, when he had followed his older brother out of a shabby mined-out gold town to marvellous Melbourne and lived in careless poverty, pursuing a self-directed course in drawing, reading, flaneuring and witty companionship until Jack’s conception brought that delightful life to a sudden end. For the rest of his life Norman acted out his ambivalence, alternately praising and denouncing his son. In 1967 he wrote to him, “I can’t help but laugh when I think of what our biographers are going to make of the break and reunion of our relations. They will have to do the best they can with its human dramatics for it is quite impossible for them to realise the compulsions behind them.”

Jack Lindsay did not have children until his late fifties. He was an anxious, self-critical parent, and never ceased to yearn for his father’s distracted attention.

Turn for a moment I say
Turn from your obdurate place
In that clarity of stone,
That terrible folly of light,
Turn for a moment this way
Your abstracted face.

Lindsay understood the importance of this personal history for his literary career, confessing to a close friend that “if my parents hadn’t parted I doubt if I should have become a writer at all.” Cranny-Francis suggests that his description of William Morris also applies to himself:

From one aspect there never was a more impetuously frank man than Morris; he lives restlessly in the open and follows his convictions out without concern for the consequences to himself or anyone else. From another aspect he appears a hidden figure, moved by a passion of which the multiple effects are plain but the central impulse obscured. I suggest that along the lines I have sketched we can bring the man and the artist into a single focus, and see the way in which his personal dilemma was transformed into a dynamic of acceptance and revolt, of deepening insight into the nature of his world and into the ways in which the terrible wounds of alienation can be healed.

A succession of recent British scholars has sought to recover Lindsay as a forerunner of practitioners of cultural studies, an influential field of interdisciplinary research instigated by British theorists — among them Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams — in the 1970s. Although they didn’t reference Lindsay, the founders of cultural studies were almost certainly familiar with some of his work, and there are strong points of similarity in their ideas. In particular, they all affirmed the political significance of culture.

Marx had suggested a base–superstructure model of social formation, according to which economic relationships ultimately determine the organisation of politics, law, religion and creative expression. The implication was that economic interests always trump cultural factors. The practical effect was to concentrate efforts to build socialism in workplaces, which in effect meant and trade unions. This left little place for cultural creators. Like cultural studies, Lindsay steadfastly rejected that model.

Another tenet of cultural studies that Lindsay anticipated was the idea that significant cultural change comes from “below.” Lindsay believed that plebeian practices and values, and their fraught and contradictory clashes with the practices and values of ruling elites, are the major source of cultural innovation. He made the point forcefully in a letter to his friend and fellow critic Alick West:

The concept is that culture is created by the expropriators, fundamentally expresses their position and needs, and has no close relation to the concrete labour-processes and the producing masses. I should like to suggest that something like the reverse is the truth. The people are the producers and reproducers of life, and in that role are also the begetters of culture in all its shapes and forms — though in a class-divided society the ruling class expropriates culture.

Lindsay’s view stemmed from the conviction — shared with Ruskin and Morris — that work and aesthetic production had once “been harmoniously united, and that they still ought to be, despite the general movement towards degradation and mechanisation.” Before commodity production alienated workers from the products of their labour — in this historical sketch uncommodified slavery is conveniently forgotten — work was done in order to create both necessary means of living and pleasing or profound emotions. Each was a joyful undertaking. Once, communal work had always been accompanied by singing and chanting. Understanding this had motivated William Morris to take on, in Lindsay’s dated language, “the full political and social struggle which alone could have as its aim the achievement of brotherhood and the ending of commodity-production.”

In A Short History of Culture Lindsay traced the essential identity of art and work back to the movement of bodies in space. From the classicist Jane Harrison he took the observation that the repetitive, rhythmic behaviours that create the necessities of life — poundings, liftings, plantings, weavings, cuttings, stalkings, throwings — are shared with dancing. Like her, he considered dance to be the primal kind of cultural creativity. Citing another book of Lindsay’s criticism, After the Thirties, Cranny-Francis writes:

Lindsay identifies in dance the rhythmical control of movement that characterises human activity and being. It bodily enacts the purposive behaviours that enable the group to maintain social coherence, engaging them through the rhythm of the breath: ‘Body and mind are thus keyed together in new adventurous and interfused ways.’ The dance becomes an exploration of the embodied being required to achieve a specific purpose, such as a hunt. It lifts the dancer (and observer) into the realm of ‘pure potentiality’ where ‘desire and act are one’; where the bodily disposition required to engage successfully in a particular activity is achieved and communicated. In this process, Lindsay argued, human beings imaginatively engage aspects of everyday life and rehearse the modes of being, thinking and acting that enable them to achieve their needs and desires. For Lindsay this is the role of culture in the formation of being and consciousness, whether it be the ritual art of early societies or contemporary literature, visual art, theatre and dance.

If communism means opposition to capitalism and desire for a future free of oppression and exploitation, Lindsay was certainly a communist. No one seems to know exactly when he joined or if he ever left the British Communist Party, but he was actively affiliated with it from the late 1930s until at least the 1970s. MI5 put him under surveillance. He stayed in the party when it demanded he recant his ideas, and again after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s brutality in 1956. There is no doubt about the strength of his allegiance. But was Lindsay a Marxist communist? He certainly called himself one. Cranny-Francis, along with just about everyone else who has written about him, takes it for granted.

Yet there are grounds for wondering about Lindsay’s Marxism. What kind of Marxist converts on account of a Renaissance philosopher? Marxism profoundly shaped his thinking but it was not Lindsay’s foundational postulate. He came to it as a plausible derivation from a more fundamental constellation of ideas about culture and history that he had already arrived at. Some of his creed was shared with Marxism, some was dissonant with it. If, in the manner of a party apparatchik, one were called on to prepare a list of his heresies, it would be an easy brief: he largely discounts or ignores economic forces, flirts with idealism, sees revolutionary potential in “the people” rather than “the working class,” and has a Romantic, even reactionary, understanding of Communist aims.

Late in life, Lindsay began to concede the point. The Crisis in Marxism (1981) is highly critical of most prominent twentieth-century Marxist theorists, particularly Adorno and Althusser. In one of his last essays he declared that he was “diametrically opposed to all closed systems,” including Lenin’s. “I have found all Marxists, orthodox or not, to be hostile.” Among an eclectic list of influences ranging from Keats to Harrison to Dostoyevsky, only two Marxists appear: Lukacs, and Marx himself.

In a sense, of course, debating whether Lindsay was “really” Marxist is as futile as debating whether Mormons are Christian or Alevis Muslim. In another sense, though, it matters. As long as Lindsay is seen as first and foremost a Marxist, his ideas remain submerged beneath the complexity and weight of a hundred and fifty years of Marxist theorising. To perceive what is most original in his thought, it needs to be disentangled from what has become a distracting integument.

Promised a scholarship to Oxford after he graduated from the University of Queensland but told that he would have to wait a year, Lindsay refused to enrol. For most of his life the lack of a higher degree and his oppositional politics would have made it difficult if not impossible to work as an academic. He gave no sign of wanting to. Even his most esoteric books were not aimed primarily at academics, nor did they please many of them. Ironically, today it is chiefly they who keep his memory alive. Anne Cranny-Francis’s book is no exception, but it deserves a broader readership. We need not agree with Lindsay’s controversial opinions to hope that this remarkable thinker will become better known. •

Jack Lindsay: Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary
By Anne Cranny-Francis | Palgrave Macmillan | €119.99 | 416 pages

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He’d been born in Mississippi in 1968 and lived there in his formative years, so obviously he was a racist. He’d been raised in New Jersey, where he played centre on his high school football team, and then went on to play rugby in college, so of course he was brutish and crude. He had spent twenty-eight years in the US Army and had been in combat, so surely he had killed people.

Obviously, of course and surely, Brent Cummings eludes these reductive inferences. In An American Dreamer, Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for the Washington Post, unfurls Brent’s inner complexities and outer contradictions.

Brent appeared fifteen years earlier as an army major in Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, an embedded account of the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, and Finkel’s long connection to him has built the foundation for a work of gripping intimacy. An American Dreamer gets inside Brent’s skull, and those of his wife Laura and neighbour Mike, to capture the emotional landscape of contemporary American life from three diverging vantage points.

Brent is now working stateside at a college with his retirement from the army looming. His soul is troubled. He feels his country has lost its way in the last couple of decades, as if he’s come “out of one war and into another” against enemies on the home front. In a revealing slip, he remarks that the earlier time “felt… clean. No that’s not the right word… It’s slipping.”

What the pollutant might be is not clear to him. Trumpism is part of it. Despite being “probably more Republican than Democrat, probably more conservative than liberal,” he loathes the man for his egotism, ill-discipline and bullying more than for his policies. But the problem runs deeper: Brent has lost confidence in his country’s goodness and shared purpose. “Everything was fraying. That’s what it felt like.”

Brent’s concerns have more to do with meaning than with material or political realities. His belief in American virtue and progress is shaken, and while that abstract dream is disintegrating a real one disturbs his sleep. Not the post-traumatic image of desert horrors we might expect but a chorus of mocking voices from a profound darkness.

His sense that the ground has shifted under him is reinforced by a series of bafflements. He is shocked by the lack of support he receives from colleagues when he challenges the use of a confederate flag on an insignia, upset by activist attacks on his beloved military, appalled by the unthinkable assault on the Capitol. He finds himself in a vanishing middle where the mental habits of a lifetime, grounded in ideas of honour and fair play, have lost their traction. “Am I the one who’s wrong? Am I the one who’s missing something?”

Laura and Mike play second and third fiddle to Brent, but Finkel gives voice to them with the same empathic immediacy. Laura’s main register is anxiety rather than disorientation. She fears violent crime, feels a rising sense of menace in her neighbourhood and worries about the fate of her intellectually disabled daughter when she is no longer around.

Mike, for his part, overlays fear with anger, going full-bore MAGA while railing against the “socialist and communist” treachery of the Democrats. Why Mike, a quadriplegic of modest means, would set aside his early doubts about Trump and come to see him as his infallible saviour is a mystery. His political conversion creates tension with his neighbours, a microcosm of the severing of connections that has played out across the country.

Finkel is a wonderful guide to the inner terrain of his characters. He shows rather than tells, keeping their dialogue and the private thoughts behind it direct and relatable. Brent in particular is brought to vivid life through confrontations with events that confound him. Very occasionally these episodes seem a little forced, notably in the parallels between an encounter with the security wall on a visit to Jerusalem and Trump’s border wall. Mike’s characterisation can also appear ever so slightly two-dimensional by comparison with Brent’s, but the book as a whole is a triumph of compassionate and sympathetic attention.

Finkel inhabits Brent in a rare way, better than a life-long friend could hope to do. More a finely tuned recording instrument than a buddy, he makes no attempt to elevate Brent, hide his flaws or turn him into a morally instructive Everyman. He is an ordinary guy, standing somewhere on the slippery hump of the political bell curve, but he is also a creature of a specific time, place and tradition, not just a symbol of averageness. Witnessing his puzzlement at how things have changed, we might wonder how much his sense of loss comes from occupying a political centre that cannot hold and how much it is a sign that he is getting older and his generation is being unseated.

We hear so much about the growing polarisation of American life. Books like this one help to humanise the conflict, not only by plucking individuals from their political tribes but also by exploring the quieter emotional dimensions of their experience. Beyond the primal fears and hatreds, Finkel suggests, there are people seeking solutions to big, existential questions about purpose, meaning, legacy and value. An American Dream shows us that behind all the yelling and distrust and there is vulnerability and hope. •

An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country
By David Finkel | Scribe | $36.99 | 256 pages

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The modern era has seen many kinds of traditional authority come under challenge, but until now the “right of managers to manage” has remained largely immune. If anything, the managers’ power has increased as the countervailing power of unions has declined. But the rise of working from home and, more recently, Labor’s right to disconnect legislation pose unprecedented threats to the power of managers over information workers — those employees formerly known as “office workers.”

To see how this might play out, it’s worth considering the decline of another once-powerful authority, the Catholic Church. In the early 1960s, following the development of reliable oral contraception, the leaders of the church had to decide whether to accept the Pill as a permissible way for married couples to plan their families. Pope John XXIII established a pontifical commission on birth control to reconsider Catholic doctrine on this topic.

It was a crucial decision precisely because marriage and sex were the most important areas in which the authority of the Church remained supreme and precise rules could be laid down — and generally enforced — among the faithful.

Most people, after all, have no trouble observing the commandments against murder, and other sins like anger, pride and sloth are very much in the eye of the beholder. But the rules regulating who can marry whom and what kind of sexual behaviour is permissible are precise and demanding, to the point that the term “morals” is commonly taken to imply sexual morals. The official celibacy of priests, who thereby showed even more restraint than was demanded of ordinary Catholics, added to the mystique of clerical power.

By the time the commission reported in 1966 John XXIII had been replaced by Pope Paul VI. The commission concluded that artificial birth control was not intrinsically evil and that Catholic couples should be allowed to decide for themselves about the methods they employed. But five of the commission’s sixty-nine members took the opposite view in a minority report.

In the encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI made his fateful rejection of all forms of artificial contraception. As an attempt to exercise and shore up authority it failed completely. The realities of raising large families and dealing with unplanned pregnancies were far removed from the experience of priests and theologians. And the church’s evident demographic motive (the desire for big Catholic families to fill the pews) further undermined the legitimacy of the prohibition.

Previously loyal Catholics ignored Pope Paul’s ruling, in many cases marking their first step away from the Church. Doctrines restricting marriage between Catholics and non-Catholics, including the requirement that children be raised as Catholics, also became little more than formalities commanding at most notional obedience.

The breakdown of clerical authority set the scene for the exposure of clerical child abuse from the 1990s on. Although accusations of this kind had been around for many years, the authority of the church had ensured that critics were silenced or disbelieved.

It is hard to know for sure what would have happened if Pope Paul had chosen differently. The membership and social standing of Protestant denominations, nearly all which accepted contraception, have also declined, though not as much as a Catholic Church that pinned its authority on personal morality. Humanae Vitae’s attempt to exercise papal authority succeeded only in exposing its illusory nature.

In the struggle over working from home and the “freedom to disconnect” we’re seeing something similar happen to the authority of managers.

Following the arrival of Covid-19 in early 2020, working from home went from being a rare indulgence to a general necessity, at least for those whose work could be done with a telephone and a computer. Hardly any time was available for preparation: in mid March, Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese were still planning to attend football matches; a week later, Australia was in lockdown.

Offices and schools closed. Workers had to convert their kitchen tables or (if they were lucky) spare bedrooms into workstations using whatever equipment they had available. And, to make things even tougher, parents had to take responsibility for the remote education of their children.

Despite the already extensive evidence of the benefits of remote work, many managers expected chaos and a massive reduction in productivity. But information-based work of all kinds carried on without any obvious interruption. Insurance policies were renewed, bills were issued and paid, newspapers and magazines continued to be published. Meetings, that scourge of modern working life, continued to take place, though now over Zoom.

Once the lockdown phase of the pandemic was over, workers were in no hurry to return to the office. The benefits of shorter commuting times and the flexibility to handle family responsibilities were obvious, while adverse impacts on productivity, if any, were hard to discern.

Sceptics argued that working from home, though fine for current employees, would pose major difficulties for the “onboarding” of new staff. Four years into the new era, though, around half of all workers are in jobs they started after the pandemic began. Far from lamenting the lack of office camaraderie and mentorship, these new hires are among the most resistant to the removal of a working condition they have taken for granted since the start.

Nevertheless, chief executives have issued an almost daily drumbeat of demands for a return to five-day office attendance and threatened dire consequences for those who don’t comply. Although these threats sometimes appear to have an effect, workers generally stop complying. As long as they are still doing their jobs, their immediate managers have little incentive to discipline them, especially as the most capable workers are often the most resistant to close supervision. Three days of office attendance a week has become the new normal for large parts of the workforce, and attempts to change this reality are proving largely fruitless.

The upshot is that attendance rates have barely changed after more than two years of back-to-the-office announcements. The Kastle Systems Back to Work Barometer, a weekly measure of US office attendance as a percentage of February 2020 levels, largely kept within the narrow range of 46 to 50 per cent over the course of 2023.

This fact is finally sinking in. Sandwiched between two pieces about back-to-the-office pushes by diehard employers, the Australian Financial Review recently ran up the white flag with a piece headlined “Return to Office Stalls as Companies Give Up on Five Days a Week.”

This trend, significant in itself, also marks a change in power relations between managers and workers. Behind all the talk about “water cooler conversations” and “synergies,” the real reason for demanding the physical presence of workers is that it makes it easier for managers to exercise authority. The failure of “back to the office” prefigures a major realignment of power relationships at work.

Conversely, the success of working from home in the face of dire predictions undermines one of the key foundations of the “right to manage,” namely the assumption that managers have a better understanding of the organisations they head than do the people who work in them. Despite a vast literature on leadership, the capacity of managers to lead their workers in their preferred direction has proved very limited.

The other side of the remote work debate is the right to disconnect. The same managers who insisted that workers should be physically present at the office in standard working hours (and sometimes longer) also came to expect responses to phone calls and emails at any time of the day or night. The supposed need for an urgent response typically reflected sloppiness on the part of managers incapable of organising their own work schedules to take account of the need for work–life balance.

Once again, managers have attempted to draw a line in the sand. Opposition leader Peter Dutton has backed them, promising to repeal the right to disconnect if the Coalition wins the next election. It’s a striking illustration of the importance of power to the managerial class that Dutton has chosen to fight on this issue while capitulating to the government’s broken promise on the Stage 3 tax cuts, which would have delivered big financial benefits to his strongest supporters.

Can this trend be reversed? The not-so-secret hope is that high unemployment will turn the tables. As Tim Gurner (of “avocado toast” fame) put it, “We need pain in the economy… and employees need to reminded of who is boss.” US tech firms have put that view to the test with large-scale sackings, many focused on remote workers. But the other side of remote work is mobility. Many of those fired in the recent tech layoffs have found new jobs, often also remote.

In the absence of a really deep recession, firms that demand and enforce full-time attendance will find themselves with a limited pool of disgruntled workers dominated by those with limited outside options.

Popular stories — from King Canute’s attempt to turn back the tide (apparently to make fools of obsequious courtiers who suggested he could do it) to Hans Christian Anderson’s naked emperor — have made the point that the best way to dissipate authority is to fail in its exercise. Pope Paul ignored that lesson and the Catholic Church paid the price. Now, it seems, managers are doing the same. •

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January’s rejigged Stage 3 tax cuts announcement — warmly received in voterland, it seems, and made an ostentatious meal of by the opposition — has turned a new page. Now the political class has all but unanimously declared the return of the prime minister’s mojo. Albanese is in control again, looking and acting confident. But the Dunkley by-election on 2 March could change all that, of course, potentially dramatically.

So what’s the point of these incessant, whiplash-inducing analyses of how the parties and leaders are “travelling”? At core they must be about the next election; they can have no purpose otherwise. But once we’ve voted, this term of government will be viewed through the lens of the 2025 result and all today’s twists and turns will be forgotten. The caravan will move on to how the next election is shaping up.

One popular school of thought sees the media’s incessant horse-race adjudications as self-fulfilling. It is in a party’s interests to be described as being on track for electoral victory because the happy vibes will help it get there. With apologies to Sting, I don’t subscribe to this point of view. The narrative certainly influences reality, even around the edges of opinion poll results, but its effects on elections are usually minor and unpredictable.

The idea matters a lot to politicians and their staffers, though, partly because many of their jobs are dedicated to generating good reviews and partly because those reviews can ultimately affect their professional survival.

Peter Dutton, who was always facing a battle to remain Liberal leader for the full term, went into the summer break looking rather happy, but now he’s biting his nails about Dunkley. Albanese, who as prime minister enjoys more institutional fortification, would be harder to shift in the event of a bad result, but government MPs and staffers still imbibe the commentary. No leader enjoys forlorn troops and nervous backbenchers.

Judgements about how the participants are travelling are largely driven by opinion polls — and most of all, far ahead of the others, by Newspoll in the Australian. The tendency reached a nadir of sorts back in 2015 when Malcolm Turnbull talked about Tony Abbott “losing” all those Newspolls. (Albanese borrowed that formulation on the ABC’s 7.30 this month to point out his government has never “lost” one.)

The first Newspoll of 2024, in early February, found 62 per cent believed the government “did the right thing” by rejigging the tax cuts, with just 29 per cent saying they “should have kept their promise and implemented the tax cuts without changing them.”

Voting intentions and personal ratings were virtually identical to Newspoll’s final 2023 survey, which is widely seen as evidence the government didn’t “take a hit” for breaking that election promise. Along with the problems the decision caused (and will continue to cause) for the opposition right through to the next election, and along with the fact that the government was taking control of its destiny, the figures were enough to make it a “win.”

Just between us, though, Labor was a bit lucky with Newspoll’s phrasing. The fact that the changed policy represented the breaking of an ironclad, repeated promise was hidden in one of the responses, the one very few people nominated.

When another pollster, Redbridge, conducted a big survey at about the same time, it posed several questions about those Stage 3 tax cuts. The first (on page 21) simply asked if the government should stick to its repeated promise not to change them; it received a slight plurality in support of sticking with the cuts designed by the Coalition. The second (page 26) described the reported changes and asked about approval; this time the rejigged policy received large support, rather like that found by Newspoll.

All these pollsters’ questions are valid; the point here is that different wording can produce different headlines. A Newspoll question that resembled Redbridge’s first one would have generated very different perceptions about how the changed policy had been received by punters.

Redbridge also found a decrease in the government’s two-party-preferred support from 52.8 per cent in December to 51.2 per cent in February. Yet despite this “swing” the survey was reported very positively for the government in News Corp tabloids. Perhaps it can be difficult to break from the press gallery consensus.

Note that the prime minister is a bare relic of the figure, a year ago, who could do no wrong. How might voters have reacted if he’d announced these changes back then? He might well have taken that “hit” from those sky-high poll numbers. We’ll never know.

Broken election promises are as old as politics itself. From electors’ point of view Albanese is now just another politician; perhaps he had already become one last year. All prime ministers end up like that. “My word is my bond” is henceforth a punchline, like “Honest John” Howard in a previous era.

Like his predecessors, the prime minister is relying on the allure of incumbency: yes, I’m less than honest at times but I get the job done; I make the hard calls for the nation, and that’s what matters.

He even trotted out, also on 7.30, the sense of “trust” reclaimed by both Howard (in 2004) and Gillard (2012). “Australians,” he told Sarah Ferguson, “can trust me to be prepared to have the strength to take the right decisions that are needed.”

It was an overly long sentence, with spits, starts, lulls and twists, but he got there eventually. Rather like the government’s path to Stage 3 Mark II. •

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Prabowo and his running mate, president Joko Widodo’s eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka, need to get more than 50 per cent of the vote to avoid a late June run-off with the second-placed candidate. Opinion polls put them just above this threshold, or tantalisingly close to it.

Jokowi, as the current president is known, hopes to extend his dynastic foothold in the system by supporting the Indonesia Solidarity Party, or PSI, which is trying to enter parliament for the first time under the leadership of his second son, Kaesang Pangarep. PSI’s ubiquitous television adverts feature Kaesang’s image alongside that of his father, with the slogan “PSI is Jokowi’s party.”

This is no doubt news to Indonesia’s Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, which for now still counts Jokowi as a member. But a breakdown in president–party relations in 2023 accelerated Jokowi’s shift of support to Prabowo, capped with the appointment of Gibran as his running mate. PDI-P’s candidate, former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo, has seen his support collapse over the three-month campaign period as Jokowi’s supporter base has followed the president’s lead and defected to Prabowo.

The irony is that Jokowi’s betrayal of PDI-P in favour of Prabowo and his son’s candidacy has worked almost too well for the president’s own good. Ganjar has been overtaken for second place by former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan, a government critic who maintains ties to conservative Islamic opposition groups and is now attracting support from progressives who see him as the candidate best placed to challenge the Prabowo–Widodo alliance. But polls show Prabowo with a huge lead in a head-to-head with Anies, and PDI-P, despite its anger with Jokowi, would likely endorse Prabowo in a second round in exchange for an advantageous deal on representation in Prabowo’s cabinet.

But Jokowi is understandably not eager to see a four-month run-off campaign that would offer Anies a platform to dial up criticisms of his policy legacy and his government’s erosion of democratic norms. Efforts by Jokowi to use the levers of state to drum up support for Prabowo have become a major point of controversy in the media. Both Ganjar’s and Anies’s campaigns have alleged behind-the-scenes intimidation of voters, donors and campaign workers by police and other officials.

A more above-board mode of government favouritism is occurring in plain sight. During the campaign, Jokowi has wheeled out close to US$1.3 billion worth of cash transfers and food aid, justified as an emergency response to El Niño–related disruptions to food security. Nobody sees it as anything other than a well-timed attempt to boost goodwill towards the administration — and by extension, to Prabowo and Gibran.

Jokowi wants to reduce the risk of an unexpectedly tight run-off to zero, but a hole-in-one for Prabowo isn’t without its downsides if Prabowo enters office with too forceful an electoral mandate. No non-incumbent president has won a multi-cornered contest without a run-off since the introduction of direct presidential elections in 2004.

Not only does Prabowo have a strong chance of scoring an unprecedented first-round victory. His personal-vehicle party, Gerindra, could also beat PDI-P for first place in the legislative elections — allowing it by custom to claim the strategic speakership of parliament. If all breaks well on election day, Prabowo could become the most authoritative incoming president in the democratic era.

For Jokowi, such a landslide would only bring forward the point at which Prabowo no longer owes him anything. One son in the vice-presidency and the other as the head of a minor parliamentary faction would offer him only limited avenues to push back against any effort by Prabowo to sideline the Widodos in the course of asserting his authority over the political elite.

There remains uncertainty over the ends to which that authority might then be put. Prabowo’s 2024 campaign has been premised on continuity with the Jokowi era. His television advertisements and campaign speeches have featured Gibran prominently, listing off the hugely popular social programs that have been built by the Jokowi administration and promising to continue and expand them.

Yet the hallmark of Prabowo’s political career has been shifts in his political persona and alliances to serve his presidential ambitions. In 1997–98 he posed as a bitter-ender for former president Suharto’s foundering dictatorship, forging links with a rising Islamist civil society as part of his manoeuvring to succeed his then father-in-law. In the post-reformasi era he reinvented himself as a Sukarnoist ultranationalist, then later posed as a friend of political Islam in his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns against Jokowi.

More than twenty years of trial and error have now led Prabowo to mimicry of Jokowi’s secular, technocratic populism, with very successful results. But nobody — including Jokowi — can assume that this persona will hold fast if, or when, Prabowo has at his fingertips the powers of the overbearing presidency Jokowi has created, with the added bonus of a strong electoral mandate Jokowi helped him earn.

Prabowo has lately become proud of talking about how much he has learnt from Jokowi while serving as his defence minister since 2019 — and as PDI-P knows all too well, nobody but Jokowi is a better teacher of the art of the double-cross. •

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We need to focus on the institution, not the individual priest. Practice and policy. Show me the church manipulated the systems so that these guys wouldn’t have to face charges. Show me they put those same priests back into parishes time and time again. Show me that it was systemic, that it came from the top down. We’re going after the system. I think that’s the bigger story.

The team, led by Walter Robinson, kept digging and eventually revealed not only the shocking extent of the abuse but the lengths to which the church hierarchy went to protect the abusers. The team’s 600-plus stories during 2002 eventually led to the resignation of Boston’s archbishop, Bernard Law.

The dramatisation of these events, Spotlight, was released in 2015 and won the Academy Award for best picture. Perhaps even more than All the President’s Men, it is a film that makes journalists feel proud of what their work can achieve.

Less than a decade later, though, Spotlight feels like a relic from a bygone era. Since 2015 the size and influence of the legacy news media have diminished markedly within a media ecosystem in which the majority of people in the United States and Australia get their news from social media.

As Brian Stelter documents in his books Hoax (2020) and Network of Lies (2023), news from established outlets like the New York Times sloshes around the internet alongside the toxic swill from Fox News and elsewhere. This tsunami of news and opinion is further polluted by torrents of misinformation and disinformation on social media, whether it’s about vaccines, the 2020 US presidential election or the Voice referendum.

Into this changed, and changing, environment comes Collision of Power, Baron’s memoir of a forty-five-year career in journalism that took him from the Miami Herald via the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times to eleven years editing the Boston Globe and eight years as executive editor of the Washington Post. He stepped down from that last posting, aged sixty-seven, in February 2021.

Baron has spent his entire career in newspapers and is resolutely old school in his belief in the continuing value of public interest journalism and orthodox notions of journalistic objectivity. Collision of Power reads as something of a collision between the world he grew up in, inspired by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s 1970s reporting on Watergate for the newspaper he eventually edited, and a world in which countless journalistic disclosures about Donald Trump’s manifest unfitness for office made not a jot of difference to his supporter base.

Does this mean Baron’s memoir should be consigned to the dustbin of history along with the dinosaurs of print? Well, unlike many journalists’ memoirs, this one is not marinated in tales of derring-do and all-night drinking marathons. Baron spent most of his career as an editor rather than on-the-road journalist and his book is all about the work.

I only know that Baron rarely drinks because he said so after winning the 2016 Christopher Hitchens prize, and then only to compare himself with the famously lubricated Hitchens and make a larger point — that they might have approached life differently but they shared the same journalistic values. But he does wryly acknowledge the accuracy of Schreiber’s portrayal of him in Spotlight as “humourless, laconic, and yet resolute.”

The three main threads running throughout Collision of Power are flagged in its subtitle: “Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post.” Baron was appointed executive editor of that newspaper in 2013, a time when Donald Trump’s name was still good for a laugh, courtesy of Barack Obama, at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. He stepped down the month after Trump left office still proclaiming he had won the previous November’s election.

Baron reflects that the Post, like the rest of the mainstream news media, had underestimated Trump’s appeal to many Americans. After the 2016 election he resolved to devote more resources to getting reporters out across the country to tap into ordinary people’s experiences and concerns. He also concedes that the Post put too much weight on Hillary Clinton’s slipshod secrecy about her emails during her presidential campaign.

Before the election, Baron and his journalists had learnt how Trump dealt with the media — how he alternated between feeding them stories and gossip, as he had done for years as a New York property developer, and threatening to cut off access or, worse, if he became president, change the libel laws to make it easier for public figures to sue journalists. As Trump railed about “the fake news media” and levelled personal insults at individual journalists, Baron stressed that “We’re not at war with the administration. We’re at work.”

The “work” was published continuously, including in a multi-authored book, Trump Revealed, that covered many aspects of the candidate’s life, from real estate to allegations of sexual harassment, and from his business ventures to his television career. The newspaper’s fact-checking unit tracked Trump’s runaway capacity for exaggeration and deceit, finding that during his presidency he told 30,573 lies.

When the Post’s David Fahrenthold decided to test Trump’s self-seeded reputation as a philanthropist, for instance, he found fallow ground. The Trump Foundation had received US$5.5 million but claimed to have pledged US$8.5 million to various causes. Notoriously, one donation made by Trump was for a portrait of himself that Fahrenthold’s citizen sleuths on social media found in his Florida golf resort. Fahrenthold also broke the story of the notorious Access Hollywood tapes.

Throughout the Trump presidency, the Washington Post and the New York Times competed hard to break stories that would hold Trump and his staff to account. The sheer number of important disclosures they made is easy to forget, partly because there seemed no end of chaos in the Trump administration and partly because no matter what Trump did he was exonerated because the Republicans had the numbers in the Senate. Almost without exception, they refused to examine issues on their merits and voted out of blind, fearful loyalty to Trump.

Baron’s careful recounting of the many scandals of the Trump administration is both a salutary and a dispiriting experience for the reader. Salutary because we may have forgotten how damaging Trump’s presidency was to so many (remember the one million–plus US deaths from Covid-19?) and dispiriting because he continues to evade responsibility for his actions.

As Trump heads towards the Republican nomination for the 2024 election, the various court cases brought against him are mired in process, delays and appeals. Baron’s memoir reminds us that it was the Post’s reporter Amy Gardner who broke the story that led to one of the most serious post–2020 election cases: how Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, received a phone call from Trump urging him to “find” enough votes to reverse Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the southern state.

According to the recording Gardner obtained, Trump said to Raffensperger: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” Trump faces thirteen criminal charges for trying to undo the Georgia result.

Baron’s acute awareness of the threat posed by a second Trump presidency explains why he feels compelled to go over events in such detail. What he doesn’t reflect on is how and why Trump has been able to recover from the ignominy surrounding his 2020 loss. It is a commonplace of commentary to say that Trump’s rise is a symptom of disease in the Republican Party. But has there ever been a symptom so potent and deep-seated, given that the Republican Party is now the Trump Party in all but name?

The media’s role in aiding and abetting Trump’s rise from the ashes of 2020 is something Baron could also have reflected on. Trump is an attention magnet, and the news media has been unable to resist the pull of a figure who sees politics in the hyperventilating, hypermasculine style of pro wrestling. Unable but also, perhaps, unwilling: Les Moonves, the chairman of the CBS television company, infamously said in 2016 that Trump’s rise “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

The evidence is in on the “may not be good for America” part, so it is truly galling to see the news media rushing to cover Trump’s every recent move in classic horserace style. Left behind at the starter’s gate is context, history or a strong enough sense of the grave risk to democracy.

As New York journalism professor Jay Rosen says, the organising principle for the news media as it covers the 2024 presidential election should be “not the odds, but the stakes.” That is, “not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy, given what’s possible in this election.” He points to a 2023 piece by Brynn Tannehill in the New Republic as an example of “stakes commentary” whose analysis is both plausible and terrifying. It’s well worth reading.

Collision of Power’s second thread is Jeff Bezos’s surprise purchase in 2013 of the Washington Post from the Graham family, which had owned it since 1933. Like many other media outlets, the Post was struggling to adapt its business model to survive commercially in the digital media age.

One of the world’s richest men (he was worth US$25 billion at the time), Bezos bought the paper out of his own pocket for US$250 million rather than through the company he founded, Amazon. According to Baron, he did so out of a commitment to sustaining public interest journalism.

Bezos’s motivation and plans for the paper attracted a lot of scepticism at the time. Why would a leader of one of the global tech behemoths that had laid waste to the print media’s business model want to buy one of these financially ailing newspapers? Would he allow the Washington Post to report without fear or favour on Amazon, especially given the company’s long history of stonewalling journalists probing its hostility to labour unions, to take one example among many? Would he be an interventionist proprietor?

Soon after buying the paper, Bezos met staff in the “windowless, cavernous and thoroughly charmless ‘community room’” next to the newspaper’s auditorium and fielded questions, including one from famed veteran investigative reporter, Bob Woodward: “How and why did you decide to buy the Post?” (“Hardball,” cracked another journalist.) Bezos answered that he had asked himself three questions before making the decision. Was the newspaper an important institution? Yes, of course. Did it have a future? Yes, in the right circumstances. Did he have anything to contribute, especially as he lived on the opposite coast, in Seattle? Yes, he could provide “runway”; that is, long-term investment that would allow time for experiments to succeed or fail.

And on the question of the newspaper’s coverage of him and his company? “Feel free to cover Amazon any way you want. Feel free to cover Jeff Bezos any way you want.” According to Baron, the newspaper did just that. Its resolve was tested in 2019 when the National Enquirer revealed Bezos had been conducting an affair with a media personality, Lauren Sánchez, including sending her “dick pics.” Baron says the Post covered the issue professionally but acknowledges it could not quite nail down whether the National Enquirer’s story was a political hit job.

The Enquirer, known to be close to Donald Trump, is a supermarket tabloid that engages in “catch and kill”: using a legally enforceable non-disclosure agreement, it buys exclusive rights to “catch” the damaging story from an individual before “killing” it for the benefit of a third party. Trump had been pursuing a vendetta against Bezos and what he called “the Amazon Post.”

On the question of proprietorial interference, though, Baron is adamant: “Bezos never interfered in the Post’s journalism during my seven years plus under his ownership, even if coverage of Amazon put the company in an unfavourable light. For all the speculation that Bezos would use the Post to exercise influence, I never saw any evidence he had or would. I got the sense Bezos relished the challenge of turning around the Post.”

Not that Bezos initially understood exactly how journalism is produced. Like Fred Hilmer, the management consultant who was Fairfax Media’s CEO between 1998 and 2005, Bezos was, and is, obsessed by metrics. He wanted the newspaper’s online website to devote more of its resources to “aggregating” other outlets’ stories into shorter pieces with clickbait headlines, and he wanted each story done in fifteen minutes.

Baron could see the idea’s commercial savvy — it was a “bargain-basement way to profit off the work of others” — but found it intensely annoying that the readers he wanted to consume the newspaper’s original reporting would be drawn in by these “digital gillnets.”

Bezos separated journalists into two categories: those whose work had a “direct impact on the product” (reporters) and those who had an indirect impact (editors). Hire more of the former and fewer of the latter, Baron was told, but he resisted. He believed good editors were essential to “directing and coordinating coverage and ensuring that it meets our quality standards.”

Baron tussled with Bezos on these issues throughout his tenure. He came to appreciate Bezos’s genuine insights into improving the company’s efficiency, and he welcomed Bezos’s commitment to deepening and broadening coverage by hiring more journalists. The number of political journalists at the paper doubled during Baron’s time there, and before the 2016 election an eight-person “rapid-response investigative team” was established. In time, improvements in how the paper’s stories were packaged and delivered to readers reaped rewards in both reach and subscription numbers.

Bezos also came to appreciate the particular role newspapers play in society and the particular culture a newsroom needs if its staff are going to publish stories that anger and upset powerful people, including presidents. When Ben Bradlee, a legendary predecessor of Baron who oversaw the paper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, died in 2014, Bezos was not planning to attend the funeral until he received an email from Bob Woodward reminding him not only of Bradlee’s importance in the paper’s history but also that he was “the soul of the institution that’s now yours.” Bezos attended, and afterwards described it as an “awakening” for him.

The new owner imbibed the example of Katharine Graham, publisher between 1963 and 1991, whose steadfast support of the paper during Watergate earned her the ire of the Nixon administration, which planned payback by encouraging its allies to challenge the licences of the Graham family’s television stations.

Trump initially tried charming Bezos before asking him to use his position to secure favourable coverage. When Bezos rebuffed his demands, Trump launched a ferocious campaign against Amazon. He claimed the company should pay higher postal rates for its goods and more tax — a bit rich coming from someone who had boasted about not paying much tax.

Partly because of Amazon’s public unpopularity, many underplayed what Trump was doing. Baron, however, cites a 2019 article by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine: “The story here is almost certainly a massive scandal, probably more significant than the Ukraine scandal that spurred impeachment proceedings. Trump improperly used government policy to punish the owner of an independent newspaper as retribution for critical coverage.”

Running alongside commercially oriented discussions are sharpening challenges to Baron’s sense of journalistic ethics. In the third thread in Collision of Power he discusses his stewardship of an important newspaper during what has been, and continues to be, a difficult period for the news media. He illustrates the challenges with detailed accounts of the cases of Wes Lowery and Felicia Sonmez.

Lowery won a Pulitzer for his reporting on police shootings in 2015; Sonmez was a breaking news reporter. Both fell foul of the newspaper’s social media policy by tweeting their views on various controversies, including Trump’s racist comments about four progressive congresswomen of colour (Lowery) and sexual assault allegations against high-profile sports stars and other journalists (Sonmez).

Lowery left the newspaper and began speaking out about what he saw as the bankrupt nature of objectivity in journalism. Last year he wrote a thought-provoking essay, “A Test of the News,” for the Columbia Journalism Review in which he highlighted how journalists from diverse backgrounds are feeling increasingly frustrated and disenchanted by how news stories are chosen and framed from what Lowery sees as a predominantly upper-class, white, male perspective.

The lack of diversity in American (and for that matter Australian) newsrooms has been a problem for many years. In 1971, according to the American Journalist Project, just 3.9 per cent of those working in newsrooms were Black. By 2013 the percentage figure had still only nudged up to 4.1.

Journalistic objectivity has also been the subject of controversy for many years. Historically, journalists and editors liked to think their decisions about news selection were arrived at dispassionately. At best they were discounting, and at worst they were oblivious to, the values — personal, cultural and ideological — underpinning their decisions. Even the language of the newsroom, with its talk of “a nose for news” or, more formally, “news values,” gives the game away. Whose nose, what values?

Behind the cloak of objectivity are hidden all sorts of journalistic shibboleths. The horserace coverage of electoral contests, for instance, has been analysed in the academic literature since at least 1980, but the news media seems unable or unwilling to recognise the problems of reporting politics as if it were a sporting event.

Another example: people in positions of power and authority, especially presidents and prime ministers, are accorded at least 50 per cent of space in news items simply because of their status. When an allegation is made against them, they must be asked for a response. When president George W. Bush built the case — spurious as it turned out — to invade Iraq in 2003, he was able to game the journalistic requirement for balance. Donald Trump, of course, has pushed that game several moves down the board.

Objectivity in a scientific sense is unattainable. Journalists are human beings. The news media industry’s relentless pushing of the idea that news reporting can be objective has simply sent an open invitation to everyone to play spot the bias.

What journalists can and should pursue is an objective method of verification, as is cogently outlined in Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s essential guide, The Elements of Journalism. At its simplest, this means seeking out all perspectives on an issue, especially a contentious issue, and reporting viewpoints dispassionately. Drawing on a range of views blunts a journalist’s tendency to serve up their biases or simply opine.

That doesn’t mean accepting any and every view. As the quote variously attributed to Jonathan Foster and Hubert Mewhinney has it: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.”

First published in 2001, Kovach and Rosenstiel’s book has been revised three times to keep up to date with trends and debates, including on newsroom diversity. They cite a Black business executive, Peter Bell, who says arguments for greater diversity in newsrooms presuppose that all Black people or all women think alike. “What is the Black position on any given issue? The answer, of course, is that there isn’t one.”

Conversely, a Black journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, says the rage she feels about racial injustice drives her reporting. Rather than the word objectivity, she talks about meticulous research, evidence and transparency as guiding principles that strengthen her storytelling.

For Kovach and Rosenstiel, “Independence from faction suggests there is a way to produce journalism without either denying the influence of personal experience or being hostage to it.” As much as greater diversity along racial, gender or gender-identity lines is needed, they argue that newsrooms also need intellectual and ideological diversity.

In 1971, 26 per cent of American journalists identified themselves as Republicans, 36 per cent as Democrats and 33 per cent as independents. By 2013, the number of Republicans had dropped to 7 per cent while the number of Democrats had fallen slightly to 28 per cent and the number of independents had risen to 50 per cent.

In practice, according to Kovach and Rosenstiel, this means “on the crush of deadline, journalists often expect everyone in the newsroom to think the same way rather than embracing debate inspired by personal background… It has been safer to default to a vision of journalistic consciousness that pretends politics doesn’t enter into it.”

Baron, for his part, supports the need for greater newsroom diversity and has seen the benefit of journalists using social media for their work. But he is also a socially conservative person for whom the story is what matters, not him or his opinions. As much as anything, that was what he disapproved of when Lowery (whose work he greatly admired) took to Twitter.

This is a valuable book by a self-effacing but outstanding editor. It is no small irony that, having been inspired by the newspaper’s Watergate reporting, Baron seems blind to the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were the first newspaper journalists to become celebrities. It was their book, All the President’s Men, and the film adaptation starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (with Jason Robards as Bradlee) that created the Watergate legend.

The horse known as the unheralded journalist has long since bolted. The doors of the stable containing the social media horse were also flung open several years ago. The question now is whether media outlets and their journalists can find the balance between opinion and reporting and between free speech and company loyalty. •

Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post
By Martin Baron | Flatiron Books | $74.99 | 548 pages

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By the beginning of 2024 a record-breaking 21.3 million Americans had signed up for health coverage through Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges — five million more than a record high at the same time last year. Intriguingly, the largest increases have come in Republican-dominated states. In Florida, one in four people under the age of sixty-five are enrolled in an exchange plan; in Georgia, Texas, Utah and South Carolina the figure is more than one in ten.

Much of the recent increase can be attributed to the unwinding of Covid-era rules that made it easier to gain access to Medicaid, the healthcare scheme for people on low incomes. Under Biden, marketplace subsidies for health insurance premiums have been increased and eligibility widened, although this enhanced assistance will expire after 2025 without an extension from Congress. The administration has also boosted publicity about how the insurance exchanges work — publicity substantially reduced under Donald Trump — and removed a glitch that deprived some families of subsidies.

Fourteen years on, the data show that Obamacare is increasingly doing what Obama and the Democrats wanted — not just providing the security of health insurance but also reducing income inequality and racial disparities in healthcare. It has reduced the out-of-pocket costs of preventive healthcare for all Americans and the burden of medical spending on families, particularly those on low and middle incomes. America still doesn’t have the universal coverage standard in other wealthy nations, but some states, including Massachusetts and New York, are getting close.

Trump and Republicans in Congress couldn’t repeal Obamacare in 2017 largely because it had become too popular. It’s even more popular now. Around 60 per cent of Americans support the healthcare law and the figure is even higher for some of Obamacare’s specific provisions, including protections for pre-existing health conditions.

When Trump vowed late last year to “never give up” his call for Obamacare’s repeal — claiming it is “too expensive, and otherwise, not good healthcare” and promising to come up with “a much better, and less expensive, alternative!” — he was offering a campaign gift to Democrats. The promise, which Trump has made frequently since his 2016 campaign without ever detailing a replacement, has contributed significantly to Republican electoral defeats since then. On this issue he has failed to attract a groundswell of support even among Republicans: polling last December by independent healthcare analysts KFF showed that only 32 per cent of self-identified Republican voters considered it very important for candidates to talk about the future of Obamacare, compared with 70 per cent of Democrats.

But that same polling indicates voters are eager to hear the presidential candidates discuss healthcare affordability. Eight in ten voters describe this topic, and the future of Medicare (the federal insurance program for older people) and Medicaid, as “very important.” They regard access to mental healthcare as a healthcare priority too, along with prescription drug costs, gun violence, the opioid crisis, abortion and climate change. (The pandemic barely makes it to the list — only 22 per cent of those surveyed said it was very important.) All these issues and more show up among Biden’s election commitments, whereas Trump’s election statements are vague or absent. (A recent article from KFF Health News outlines what a second Trump presidency could look like for healthcare based on Trump’s previous record.)

Abortion, gun control, immigration, LGBTQ rights and climate change — all issues relating to health — are now seen as “litmus test” issues that drive voting choices. Ironically, though, the most potent policy decisions in these areas in recent years have been made not by elected politicians but by the courts, with the US Supreme Court, now dominated by conservative Trump appointees, as the final arbiter.

This sort of policy rule-making has not always worked well for Trump, Republicans or voters. A classic example is the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the federal guarantee of abortion rights. This ruling delivered Trump and Republicans one of their most significant victories and one of their biggest political vulnerabilities.

Americans’ support for abortion is now at a record high; 69 per cent believe abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy and 61 per cent think that overturning Roe v. Wade was a “bad thing.” Voter anger over abortion restrictions was widely credited with Democrats’ wins in the 2022 midterm elections. This is expected to be the case again in 2024, with abortion on the ballot in many states, even those where abortion rights are legally enshrined.

When asked which party best represents their views on abortion, more people say the Democratic Party (42 per cent) than the Republican Party (26 per cent). Women of reproductive age and young voters see abortion as a factor galvanising them to vote — and American women consistently vote more often than men. Some analysts believe angry Republican women could spell trouble for the party vote in 2024.

Litigation over abortion restrictions and access to reproductive health services is nevertheless proceeding in many Republican-controlled states, and the US Supreme Court is set to rule before November 2024 on two cases involving reproductive rights and healthcare: one on access to mifepristone, the pill used in more than half of US abortions, and another on emergency, life-saving abortions in hospital emergency departments.

Both Trump and his surviving rival in the primaries, Nikki Haley, struggle to articulate a coherent position on abortion that is acceptable to both conservative Republican Party officials and voters. Biden, by contrast, has put reproductive rights squarely in the middle of his re-election campaign. He has committed to enshrining abortion rights in federal law and has issued an executive order aimed at strengthening access to contraception.

The Affordable Care Act and its regulations guarantee coverage of preventive services, including birth control and contraceptive counselling, at no cost for women with health insurance. In 2020 the US Supreme Court upheld a Trump administration regulation that allowed employers with religious or moral objections to limit the birth control cover provided by Obamacare. Last month the Biden administration released proposed rules that would remove the moral exemption but retain the religious exemption, potentially restoring free contraception coverage to 126,000 women.

Abortion and contraception in the United States — a country where maternal and infant mortality rates and healthcare and pharmaceutical costs are shamefully high — are often economic decisions rather than moral or ideological ones. Even in some of the most conservative states with very few abortion services, rates of legal abortions are high. Access to reproductive healthcare services is crucial for many women, regardless of political affiliation, and especially those who are poor. Reproductive health researchers at the Guttmacher Institute say 75 per cent of American women seeking an abortion are either in poverty or just above the poverty line.

It’s worth noting that over the past forty years the sharpest drops in abortion rates have been under Democratic presidents, presumably because of their greater focus on delivering comprehensive healthcare services.

A study released in September 2023 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace provides an interesting insight into partisanship more broadly in the United States. Since the Tea Party era there has been almost no policy overlap between the two major parties in Congress (and the situation grows more partisan by the day). Among voters, by contrast, considerable agreement exists even on hot-button issues like abortion and guns.

But voters’ policy views are not strongly held and the American political system doesn’t easily allow them to express their policy preferences. What is strongly held is a sense of identity: what is referred to as emotional or affective polarisation. Voters don’t like people from the other political party — largely based on misbeliefs, misinformation and misperceptions — and will alter their policy preferences to match their partisan identities. In this respect, media like Fox News and Newsmax are seen as having a bigger impact than social media and political campaigns.

The fate of the Affordable Care Act sees two key issues — rising economic pressures and the polarisation of politicians and voters — come together. The act was initially very unpopular because of poor messaging from Democrats and misinformation and disinformation from Republicans and the conservative media. Confusion about a complicated law that took years to come into effect was widespread. And many Americans didn’t realise that the Affordable Care Act (which they liked) was the same as Obamacare (which they despised and/or feared), though those who benefited soon became supporters.

The situation in Florida (an increasingly Republican state) exemplifies the split. Florida has far more people enrolled in Obamacare’s federal health insurance marketplace than any other state. Floridians, bombarded with misinformation from then governor Rick Scott (“everyone now realises that Obamacare was a terrible notion”) and from current governor Ron DeSantis (who wants a healthcare plan that would “supersede” Obamacare), were initially loathe to take up government-subsidised health insurance, deriding it as “socialism.”

But Medicaid has never been expanded in Florida, which ranks among the five most expensive states for healthcare, many local employers don’t offer health insurance, and many retirees are younger than sixty-five and not yet eligible for Medicare. Obamacare offers affordable options for all these groups. Its increasing uptake and popularity has been driven by Republican-leaning Hispanics in the Miami area, where it’s described as “ingrained in the community” and the Obama campaign logo is routinely used to promote insurance.

Despite all this, a November poll showed Florida’s Hispanic voters backing Trump. While only 30 per cent of those surveyed indicated they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for Biden, 36 per cent opted for Trump. Results like these suggest that emotional polarisation will continue to drive voting patterns in November, even if this risks the loss of healthcare insurance and associated benefits.

On the upside, the Affordable Care Act no longer faces quite the same existential threat that once loomed. Despite Trump’s renewed threats, the scheme’s popularity continues to increase and Republican hostility is fading. It has become deeply embedded in the US healthcare system. (It would be no easy task to untangle its provisions from Medicare.) And it will be hard to sell voters a promise to take away the health insurance they know and value — even if there is a replacement, with all its own complicated and time-consuming details. •

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There was no fraud. The postmasters’ lives were destroyed because of faults in the Post Office’s Horizon computer network. But much like Australia’s robodebt system, Horizon was regarded as infallible. Attempts to raise the alarm were ignored; people who sought help were hounded for non-existent debts. As in Australia, those whose lives were turned upside down struggled to gain the attention of established media outlets; it was individual journalists and smaller publications that kept digging and probing, and refused to accept Post Office spin.

It wasn’t until January this year that prime minister Rishi Sunak conceded it was one of Britain’s greatest-ever miscarriages of justice. He has committed his government to a “blanket exoneration” of hundreds of wrongfully convicted individuals and promised them “at least £600,000 in compensation to rebuild their lives.”

Three compensation schemes have already been set up and around one hundred convictions overturned by appeal courts. A public inquiry led by a retired High Court judge began hearings in February 2021 and is likely to continue at least until September this year. In the meantime, many former postmasters remain destitute or seriously out of pocket. They are waiting not only for redress but also for the full truth about what went wrong in the executive ranks of the Post Office.

While details continue to dribble out, so far no senior managers have been held to account, though former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells has offered to hand back the CBE she was awarded in 2019.

Vennells said she was “truly sorry for the devastation caused to the subpostmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted.” Whether or not Vennells loses her gong is up to King Charles. The union representing Post Office employees reckons if she were truly remorseful then she’d offer to repay her performance bonuses as well.

Solicitor Neil Hudgell told a January hearing before the parliament’s business and trade committee that the Post Office spent £100 million “defending the indefensible” through the courts yet he has clients who are still waiting on reimbursements of a few hundred pounds. He said the contest between postmasters and Post Office was characterised from the start by an inequality of arms. “You are facing this big beast in the Post Office, with all the machinery that sits behind it,” he added. “You have some poor person who is being accused of doing something hideous who does not have that.”

On top of the financial losses comes the psychological toll. Hudgell says his firm has more than a hundred psychiatric reports for clients diagnosed with depressive illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoia. At least four former postmasters are thought to have committed suicide, and more than thirty have passed away while awaiting justice in their cases.

The saga goes back to 1999, when the Post Office began rolling out a new computerised accounting system to its thousands of branches and sub-branches, many of which operate as franchises run by subpostmasters. Essentially, the subpostmasters are independent contractors delivering services under an agreement with the Post Office. Many also operate a shop, cafe or other small business on the side.

As in Australia, people go to their local post office for much more than stamps and parcels. Branches offer banking and bill payment services, and handle applications for passports and other critical official documents. Subpostmasters play a central role in villages and small towns. They are often trusted as advisers and confidants, especially for older, less digitally connected citizens. To be accused of putting their hands in the till was a mortifying experience.

The new Horizon computer system, developed by Fujitsu, was meant to make it easier for postmasters to balance their books. But problems were evident from the start. In 1998, Alan Bates invested around £60,000 to buy a shop with a post counter in the town of Llandudno, in north Wales. After Horizon was introduced, discrepancies quickly appeared in his accounts, and Bates found himself £6000 short.

“I managed to track that down after a huge amount of effort through a whole batch of duplicated transactions,” he recalled. Meticulous record keeping enabled Bates to show that the problem lay with the computer system and was not the result of carelessness or fraud. Still, in 2003, the Post Office terminated his contract, saying £1200 was unaccounted for.

Unlike other postmasters, Bates was not prosecuted or forced into bankruptcy, but the injustice and the lost investment cut deep. Post Office investigators insisted that he was the only subpostmaster reporting glitches with the computer system, but Bates was certain that there must be others. He was right. RAF veteran Lee Castleton challenged the Post Office in court after it suspended him over an alleged debt of almost £23,000. In the first instance, the Post Office failed to show up at court and he won. Months later, the Post Office raised the case to the High Court. Castleton represented himself, lost, had costs awarded against him and was rendered bankrupt.

Castleton managed to convince a young journalist at the trade publication Computer Weekly to investigate. Rebecca Thomson found six other examples of people who’d been accused of stealing from the Post Office, including Alan Bates, who had tried a few years earlier to interest the same magazine in his case.

National newspapers and broadcasters failed to pick up Thomson’s 2009 story. “It really did go out to a clanging silence,” Thomson told the Sunday Times in 2022. “I was super-ambitious, and I was disappointed and a bit confused about the fact that there had been so little reaction to the story, because I still continue to feel like it was incredibly strong.”

What Thomson achieved, though, was to confirm Alan Bates’s hunch that he was not alone. Bates reached out to other subpostmasters in Thomson’s story and discovered they’d been told the same thing as him: no one else has had a problem with Horizon, you’re the only one. This Post Office mantra was a bare-faced lie.

Bates and his newfound allies founded the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance with the aim of “exposing the failures of Post Office, its Board, its management and its Horizon computer system.” Their campaign for truth and justice is the subject of the four-part television drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, starring Toby Jones as Alan Bates, that aired on British TV in January.

The series put the scandal and the ongoing public inquiry firmly back in the headlines (Rishi Sunak’s belated response to years of revelations came a few days later) but it would not have been possible without fourteen years of dogged, dedicated journalism. Since Thomson broke the story in 2009, Computer Weekly has published about 350 follow-up articles on the issue. Separately, freelance journalist Nick Wallis has pursued the story since 2010, at times relying on crowdfunding to finance his work.

In 2010, Wallis was working at a local BBC radio station when a flippant response to a tweet put him in contact with Davinder Misra, the owner of a local cab company, who told him his pregnant wife had been sent to prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Seema Misra had been convicted of theft and false accounting and sentenced to fifteen months jail. The Post Office claimed she had misappropriated almost £75,000 from her branch in West Byfleet in Surrey.

With roots stretching back to 1660 and the reign of Charles II, the Post Office is in many respects a law unto itself. It doesn’t have to jump through the hurdles of police investigations or case reviews by a public prosecutor to launch prosecutions. It has huge resources to employ top silks to represent it. Against its might, people like Seema Misra didn’t stand a chance.

Unaware at the time of Thomson’s article in Computer World, Wallis decided to investigate. He has been writing and broadcasting about the Post Office scandal ever since. He has been a producer, presenter or consultant on three episodes of Panorama, the BBC’s equivalent of the ABC’s Four Corners, he has written a book, The Great Post Office Scandal, he made a podcast series, and he maintains a website dedicated to continuing coverage of the story.

Wallis also acted as a consultant on Mr Bates vs the Post Office. He told the Press Gazette he was “blown away” by the program and what it had achieved. Yet he stressed that it is Bates and the other postmasters who should take the credit for getting the scandal into the open and convictions overturned.

Seven screens Mr Bates vs the Post Office in Australia this week. If you can put up with the ad breaks, the series is well worth watching. It’s an engaging, heartwarming story of decent, ordinary folk standing up against the powerful and the entitled and eventually winning against the odds. If you want to understand the story more fully, though, and to hear directly from those most affected — people like Alan Bates, Seema Misra and Lee Castleton — then I’d recommend The Great Post Office Trial, Nick Wallis’s podcast for BBC Radio 4. It’s a compelling tale that shows what good journalism can achieve. •

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The sheer volume of material continues to fuel efforts to document and analyse the career of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. The latest is a multi-author, multi-volume (four are promised) appraisal edited by the Menzies Institute’s Zachary Gorman. Based on a series of conferences, the books aim to promote “discussion, critical analysis and reflection on Menzies, the era he defined and his enduring legacy.” Contributions are not limited to those of unabashed admirers; writers from the other side of the political fence also offer their assessments, as do ostensible neutrals.

The first volume, The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942, covers the period from Menzies’s birth in 1894 to 1942, though not all chapters fit neatly within those boundaries. James Edelman and Angela Kittikhoun’s useful chapter on Menzies and the law, for example, takes in the Communist Party Dissolution Bill, eight years beyond 1942.

Following political scientist (and ex-MP) David Kemp’s introduction, the book’s early chapters focus on the family environment into which Menzies was born and the social and political culture of the era. As most readers will be aware, his father ran a general store in the western Victorian town of Jeparit, saving the son from any credible charges of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But while the small business ethos had a crucial impact on Menzies’s political philosophy, he was exposed to a different worldview by his maternal grandfather, John Sampson, an active trade unionist, though without being persuaded to change his own emerging outlook.

Menzies’s academic record in Melbourne University’s law faculty was outstanding and he also took part in student politics and campus journalism. His failure to enlist during the first world war — a family decision prompted by the fact that two brothers were already serving — is well known, and journalist Troy Bramston reveals how it may have contributed to Menzies’s fiancée’s ultimate decision to break off their engagement. Menzies had no doubt that his failure to enlist propelled him away from a brilliant legal career and onto the parliamentary path. He needed to offer “public service.”

For this reviewer, one of the most interesting chapters is historian Greg Melluish’s account of Menzies’s advocacy of liberal education and its connection with his ideas about democracy. That Menzies was a “scholarship boy” at both school and university is reasonably well known and, Melluish argues, helps explain his support for “meritocracy” rather than inherited and entrenched privilege (with an obvious exemption for the monarchy). This commitment seems crucial in explaining Menzies’s insistence that he (and later, his party) was liberal, not conservative.

Of course, conservatism existed (and exists) in Australia, and the parties Menzies joined and led garnered the vast preponderance of that vote. He revered English political and legal institutions as springing from liberal values, but their defence surely entailed a conservative outlook. Melluish stresses that Menzies understood English democracy as reflective of a specific common culture; in contrast to the Americans, “he did not see democracy as being universally applicable.” This could help explain why conservatives may view multiculturalism as a problem, undermining the necessary foundations of their version of democracy — a question that will perhaps be tackled in later volumes. Of course, Menzies’s view could also lend itself to the darker idea that democracy is not suitable for all, especially those viewed as “backward.”

Among other prime ministers, probably only Gough Whitlam could be as closely identified with the case for liberal education. For Menzies, writing in the 1930s, British history demonstrated that such an education “would produce the sorts of people who possessed the capacities to make that system of government [Westminster] work properly.” Ironically, in view of today’s emphasis on utilitarian degrees, Menzies can be seen as enlisting the (now) maligned bachelor of arts in defence of the practical aim of good government.

Melluish also usefully distinguishes between Menzies’s idea of a liberal education and the wider idea of “Western civilisation.” Menzies was fixated on Australia’s British heritage; the Greek and Roman stuff could, it seems, be left to people like Whitlam.

Menzies’s version of the university was obviously not the “oppositional” one. But, as Melluish points out, this critical variant was emerging at the time Menzies was writing. It would probably approach its zenith during the second half of Menzies’s long term in office — which should make for an interesting discussion in the final volume in this series.

Political scientist Judith Brett explores the parallels between Menzies and Alfred Deakin, sons of small businessmen, both of them influenced by the liberalism of the Victorian goldfields, both following very similar educational paths, and of course, both having more than one go as prime minister. It is Deakin, she writes, “whom Menzies might have looked to as an exemplar of national leadership.”

A useful reminder of the important role religion could play in forming political beliefs comes in historian David Furse-Roberts’s chapter on the impact of Menzies’s Presbyterianism. The connection between his faith and his political philosophy seems so strong that a liberal atheist might have felt less than welcome in the party Menzies would form. And, had he been around, Menzies may well have been puzzled to observe some Liberal staffers take an affirmation rather than an oath when they appeared in the defamation case brought by Bruce Lehrmann against Network Ten and one of its journalists.

By contrast, it would be an oddity today if any senior politician identified mainstream religion (as opposed to the “prosperity gospel” variant embraced by some prominent conservatives) as a key factor in their political outlook. As judged by Furse-Roberts, Menzies’s version of Presbyterianism emphasised a “selfless individualism,” acknowledging the ameliorative role of the state but also its limitations: “it fell primarily to the compassionate spirit and self-sacrifice of individuals to succour the needy and further the common good.” This clearly eschews socialism, but Furse-Roberts suggests it goes “far beyond John Stuart Mill’s minimalist ethic of ‘no harm’ to others.” One might observe how that reference to the “common good” contrasts with the overwhelmingly individualist emphasis of the more recent version of the Liberal Party.

Historian Frank Bongiorno’s chapter, “Menzies and Curtin at War,” is a finely balanced contribution, acknowledging the positives of Menzies’s first prime ministership and also (in anticipation) recognising his “postwar nation-building achievements,” which “look better every year, as we contemplate the policy failures of our own century and the conspicuous absence of compelling vision.” This generosity from a Labor-leaning historian suggests that the defensiveness of Liberal partisans in certain chapters may to some extent have been directed at a shrinking target.

Anne Henderson mounts a characteristically robust defence of Menzies from charges of appeasement and softness on Nazi Germany, stressing the absence of a perfect record among any of the key players. Mindful of the passage of time, I was left wondering how many Australians would know to whom “Pig-Iron Bob” refers. How many in the press gallery?

Journalist Nick Cater examines the role of Menzies’s famous “The Forgotten People” radio address in 1942, highlighting the importance of the family home as the central focus of that talk. While a Labor minister could deride this support for increased home ownership as turning workers into “little capitalists,” Menzies’s philosophy emphasised the “social, economic and moral value of home ownership.” Saving for a home was a “concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving.” National patriotism, in other words, “inevitably springs from the instinct to defend and preserve our own homes.” How might the renters on the battlefields in 1942 have responded to this observation, I wonder?

Political scientist Scott Prasser sums up the learning experiences that would enable Menzies to resurrect his career and become Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. This involves some projection, for he still had much learning to do (during seven more years as opposition leader) after the notional end date for this volume. That quibble aside, Prasser’s contribution is a useful one since Menzies’s success can’t be attributed mostly to luck and dud opponents. The checklist: modest promises, sound coalition relations, a willingness to adopt new directions, and an awareness of the nation’s political architecture. His return to power and the use to which he put his learning experiences await us in the next volume.

In his introduction to the second and latest of the series, The Menzies Watershed, editor Zachary Gorman acknowledges the limitations of the “call for conference papers” method the project employs, which risks missing “certain topics of great interest and relevance.” This dilemma is reflected in the ensuing chapters, with some likely to be of appeal to the general political scholar–aficionado and others more in the niche category. My focus will be largely on the former.

In his chapter on Menzies and the Movement, Lucas McLennan makes the case for a good deal of similarity of emphasis between Menzies’s Anglo-Protestantism and the version of Catholic social teaching (and consequent public policy) embraced by lawyer–activist B.A. Santamaria and his disciples in the (Catholic Social Studies) Movement. It is certainly the case that both men would have seen their vigorous anti-communism as having a strong religious component, especially reflected in the anti-communist foreign and defence policies embraced by Menzies’s party and endorsed by Santamaria and (after the Labor Party’s split in 1955) his political creation the Democratic Labor Party.

McLennan’s case is possibly less convincing on the domestic front. While the Movement may have preferred subsidiarity over centralism, it seems unlikely that Menzies would have seen much merit in the (frankly weird) land settlement proposals advanced by Santamaria. And we can be fairly confident that the Movement’s view (as expressed in 1948) that Christians should seek “to break up concentration of wealth” would not have secured much support at a meeting of the Kooyong branch of the Liberal Party. Ultimately, even Santamaria’s version of Catholic social teaching necessarily involved an element of collectivism that would not have appealed to Menzies.

Anne Henderson’s brief chapter on Menzies’s successful opposition to Labor’s bank nationalisation plans possibly tells the reader as much about the Chifley government’s ideological rigidity (or commitment to principle — take your pick) and misreading of the public mood as it does about Menzies’s deft exploitation of the issue. Two decades after the Depression, the anti-banks sentiment was clearly not what it used to be, although Henderson’s depiction of the banks battle as “class war as Australia had never seen it” might have been challenged by some survivors from that period. In passing, it might be observed that since Labor lost the double dissolution election it provoked on this issue in 1951, it has not held a Senate majority on any occasion.

Tom Switzer evidences and reinforces the generally accepted wisdom that Menzies was no radical right-wing reformer. He retained and relied on several of the senior bureaucrats who had advised Chifley, and his economic policies were of the Keynesian variety, reflecting a consensus that would persist until the end of the Fraser period. In his introduction to this volume, Gorman had noted Menzies’s good fortune in not being “exposed to a centre-right echo chamber of policy advice,” insulating him from big overreaches (with the exception of the attempt to ban the Communist Party).

Keynesianism is again a key theme in David Lee’s chapter on economic management. It also contains a useful outline of cabinet and public service structures and processes in the early years of the Menzies government.

Troy Bramston’s chapter, “The Art of Power,” draws on his well-received biography of Menzies and hence comment here will be minimal: Menzies had been an effective political campaigner, “but campaigning is not government” (wise advice). Building on his previous experience, consultation, reflection and wide reading, he developed a capacity for management and administration that served him well.

Charles Richardson examines aspects of Menzies’s approach to the crown and imperial relations, the Statute of Westminster and the office of governor-general, drawing some comparisons with the attitudes of his nemesis H.V. Evatt. In referring to Menzies’s concern about the “separate status of the crown in right of the different dominions”— the question of how the monarch could be at peace and war at the same time in relation to the same foreign power — Richardson delightfully describes this as an “absurdity” that we still live with. The fact that most wars are now waged without formal declarations of war may help, at least at a technical level.

Richardson endorses the view that Menzies should have made the switch from a British to an Australian governor-general before Casey’s appointment in 1965, but notes the prime minister’s quaint criterion that it was essential with any appointment that “the Queen knew them.”

Lyndon Megarrity seeks to correct the misconception that Australia’s involvement with overseas students only commenced with the Colombo Plan. He outlines the history of such activity (which could involve some fancy manoeuvring round the White Australia policy) and describes policy before the second world war as “ad hoc and reactive.” The Chifley government entered the soft diplomacy business of scholarships, but Megarrity sees any potential benefits as being negated by immigration minister Arthur Calwell’s notorious hardline attitude on deportations: no grey areas in the White Australia policy for him.

The role of the new external affairs minister Percy Spender in the creation of the Colombo Plan in 1950 is well known. While acknowledging the Chifley government’s creation (pre-Colombo) of a relevant policy management framework, Megarrity credits the Menzies government with a defter handling than Labor of tensions between the Plan and the White Australia policy, assisting with the overall enhancement of Australia’s reputation in the region. In the cold war context, the scheme could “help maintain stability in Southeast Asia and increase resistance to Communism.”

Chapters on the creation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and on the role of Spender in (among other things) negotiating the ANZUS treaty serve to highlight the electoral supremacy the Menzies government would establish as the guardian of national security, an advantage his party has largely retained to the present day. Nicolle Flint revisits the issue (it probably no longer qualifies as a “debate”) over whether Menzies’s role in the Liberal Party’s creation has been overstated (spoiler alert: no). Lorraine Finlay, addressing the dilemma of “what liberty should be provided for the enemies of liberty,” focuses on the attempts to ban the Communist Party, though current trends may remind us of the timelessness of that dilemma. Andrew Blyth provides an account of think tanks’ influence on the Menzies government, but to some extent the title is misleading: the Institute of Public Affairs was effectively the only player in that game, although pressure groups and committees of inquiry are also covered in the chapter.

Christopher Beer’s chapter uses the federal electorate of Robertson on the central New South Wales coast to make some observations about the impact of early Menzies government policies. He includes useful electoral information about the seat, which serves (for this reviewer) to highlight the absence of comparable nationwide electoral data and commentary on the elections of the period. Clearly, the “call for papers” did not evince the relevant interest.

By the end of the period covered in this volume, Menzies had won three elections as Liberal leader, disarming his internal critics, and even greater dominance lay ahead: Labor partisans might like to look away now. •

The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942
Edited by Zachary Gorman | Melbourne University Publishing | $44.99 | 222 pages

The Menzies Watershed: Liberalism, Anti-Communism, Continuities 1943–1954
Edited by Zachary Gorman | Melbourne University Press | $45 | 256 pages

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It’s been like that for more than three weeks since investigative journalists from the independent newsroom Correctiv revealed a “secret plan” hatched at a “secret meeting” in November last year. According to the report, twenty-two far-right politicians and businesspeople met in a hotel outside Berlin to talk about expelling millions of people living in Germany, among them “non-assimilated” German citizens. The attendees included office holders of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and members of the Werteunion, an organisation set up in 2017 by ultraconservative Christian Democrats unhappy about the refugee policies of then chancellor Angela Merkel.

A few hours after news of the meeting broke, eighty people protested in front of Hamburg’s local AfD headquarters. Two days later, 2000 took to the city’s streets. All over the country, the protests quickly gathered momentum. When a Turkish-born member of the Hamburg state parliament called for another protest on 19 January, he expected 4000 to join him. According to the police, 50,000 turned up, and the rally had to be cut short because the riverside venue was so overcrowded it was a miracle nobody ended up in the icy water. The following weekend around 100,000 people rallied in Hamburg.

Protests have continued every day in all parts of the country. Many of those taking part haven’t been to a demonstration in many years or are protesting for the first time in their lives. Altogether, millions have taken to the streets. The protests give no sign of fizzling out.

What exactly has prompted such outrage? The proposal to deport asylum seekers, other non-citizens and “non-assimilated” Germans to North Africa came as part of a master plan presented by Martin Sellner, a prominent far-right activist from Austria, at the November meeting. Sellner is known for propagating French writer Renaud Camus’s Great Replacement myth, which claims that Western elites are trying to replace white European populations using mass immigration, particularly from Africa and the Middle East.

The term “great replacement,” first used in Camus’s 2010 book L’Abécédaire de l’in-nocence, is a reference to an ironic poem by Bertolt Brecht. After the 1953 popular uprising in East Germany, Brecht asked in his poem “The Solution” whether, as the people had seemingly forfeited the confidence of their government, it might not be easier “for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?”

It was the proposed deportation of German citizens that may have startled many Germans most. But Camus and others from the European and North American far right have long advocated a Great Repatriation, or “remigration,” as a response to the Great Replacement. The concept of “remigration” shouldn’t have been news in Germany: Dresden’s Pegida movement and other far-right activists have long called for a cleansing of the nation by means of “remigration.” Nor was it a surprise that prominent members of the AfD want to turn Germany into a country only for ethnic Germans. Björn Höcke, the most influential AfD politician — a leader of its Thuringia state branch and occasional speaker at Pegida rallies — has made no secret of his intention to rid Germany of many of its current residents should he ever be in a position to do so.

The idea of Höcke as Thuringia’s state premier, let alone in power in Berlin, has long seemed fanciful. No more. It seems almost certain that the AfD will emerge as the strongest party in three forthcoming state elections in East Germany. In Saxony, it’s possible that only the Christian Democrats and the AfD will reach the 5 per cent threshold required to enter parliament. Provided the latter polled more votes than the former, the far right would command an absolute majority in parliament and form government. In Thuringia, where the left-wing Die Linke is particularly strong, the Christian Democrats could be tempted to strike a deal with the AfD rather than allow Die Linke’s Bodo Ramelow to remain as state premier.

The AfD’s performance is particularly alarming in East Germany, where the pollsters have the party at between 28 per cent (in Brandenburg) and 35 per cent (in Saxony). News of November’s “secret meeting” was just the trigger needed to prompt millions of people to protest.

At the Hamburg rallies I attended, the main focus was squarely on the AfD. “Ganz Hamburg hasst die AfD” (All of Hamburg hates the AfD) was the most popular battle cry, “FCK AFD” the most common slogan on placards. Judging by their hand-painted signs, many of the demonstrators equate the current mood with that of the early 1930s, before the Nazi party’s electoral success prompted the German president to appoint Adolf Hitler chancellor. “It’s five to ’33,” some demonstrators claimed. Although many explicitly rejected “remigration,” other elements of the AfD’s program attracted comparatively little critical attention.

Besides, the focus on the AfD is not entirely justified. In Saxony, a party even more extremist than the AfD, the Freie Sachsen (Free Saxonians), is gaining ground. It may well win seats at the local elections in June. At the other end of the spectrum, the left-wing Die Linke, the successor of the East German communists, split last year. A group led by the charismatic Sahra Wagenknecht has since established their own party, the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, or BSW. It is as populist as the AfD and its migration and asylum policies hardly differ from those of the far-right party. The Werteunion too has decided to form a party ahead of the three state elections in East Germany in September. Some of its policies are likely to mirror those of the AfD.

Germany’s intake of refugees has been the number one political issue for the past six months or so, with most public commentators and politicians claiming that the country’s capacity to take in refugees has been exhausted. They say the number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany needs to be drastically reduced, despite the fact that the overall number of refugees arriving in Germany was much lower in 2023 than the year before. The authorities in Hamburg, for instance, registered 23,000 new arrivals in 2023, compared with 54,000 in 2022, the year Germany accommodated approximately one million Ukrainian refugees.

In response to Russia’s attack, the European Union invoked the European Council’s 2001 mass influx directive “to establish minimum standards for giving temporary protection in the event of a mass influx of displaced persons from third countries who are unable to return to their country of origin.” More than 4.2 million Ukrainians currently benefit from the EU’s temporary protection mechanism. On a per capita basis, most have been taken in by the three Baltic states and by Poland, Czechia, Slovakia und Bulgaria.

About 1.2 million of those Ukrainians are living in Germany. They are not required to apply for asylum, have immediate access to the labour market and receive the same social benefits available to Germans. Overall, their arrival has been surprisingly uncontroversial, not just in Germany but also in the other EU member states.

It’s not the Ukrainians who have prompted the current panic about new arrivals but refugees from elsewhere, who must go through the standard asylum process. Last year, about 330,000 new protection claims were lodged in Germany, compared with about 218,000 in 2022. Ordinarily, Germany should be able to cope with such numbers. But federal funding hasn’t kept pace with the rise, giving local authorities good reason to complain. Of course, capacities would be freed up if Syrian and Afghan refugees, who still make up almost half of all asylum seekers, were treated like the Ukrainians: if they too were granted temporary protection with immediate work rights and access to social benefits.

The AfD, whose success is linked to its vilification of asylum seekers, has tried hard to create a moral panic about the number of new arrivals. That it was successful has been due in no small part to the fact that other parties jumped on the bandwagon in the hope that they too would benefit from scare-mongering.

Michael Kretschmer, the Christian Democrat premier of Saxony, was among them. He demanded that Germany establish stationary controls at its borders with Poland and the Czech Republic, abolish the last remnants of the constitutionally guaranteed individual right to asylum, transfer asylum seekers to third countries, set an upper limit on the annual number of asylum applications, and cut benefits paid to refugees. His proposals were either unfeasible or would have little effect, but they added to the sense of a situation spiralling out of control. The much-evoked “firewall” against the AfD may still work when it comes to forming coalitions, but it’s permeable as far as political rhetoric is concerned.

Kretschmer was backed by his party leader Friedrich Merz, who last September said of asylum seekers: “They go to the doctor and have their teeth done, while Germans can’t even get an appointment.” Members of Germany’s hapless Ampel coalition — the Social Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens — have also talked of emergencies and crises rather than trying to steer the public conversation towards a rational debate about Germany’s responsibilities and its record of meeting them.

Ampel politicians have endorsed the idea that all those whose asylum claims were rejected need to leave Germany. In October, the cover of the news magazine Spiegel depicted a serious-looking Olaf Scholz demanding ramped-up deportations. It is true that about 300,000 people living in Germany are technically supposed to leave the country, mainly because their protection claims were rejected. But four out of five are not — indeed must not be — deported, because (for example) the country they hail from is not safe.

New legislative measures in Germany aim to reduce asylum seeker numbers, as do new EU-wide changes to the Common European Asylum System, or CEAS. The EU wants to set up Australian-style centres at Europe’s external borders to detain applicants while they’re being screened. Unsuccessful applicants would be swiftly removed. Several EU governments — and some prominent German Christian Democrats — want to go further by transferring protection claimants to third countries such as Rwanda.

Germany last experienced a comparable momentum — albeit with far fewer street protesters — in 2018 and 2019, when many cities and towns hosted demonstrations in support of search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean. Since then, relatively few protests have been held in support of migrant and refugee rights. When the European Commission and the European Council agreed on the CEAS reforms last year, dozens rather than hundreds of protesters rallied in Hamburg.

For the last movement of a similar size we need to go back to the early 1990s. Between 1990 and 1993, Germany experienced a wave of racist violence. Asylum seeker hostels were torched, and many “foreigners” assaulted. According to an investigation by journalists, fourteen people died as a result of racist violence in the first two years after German reunification on 3 October 1990 alone. On 23 November 1992, two men associated with the far right firebombed a house in the small town of Mölln in northern Germany. A woman and two children of Turkish descent died. The murders startled Germans as much as the revelations about the “secret” deportation plans startled them more than three decades later. Large spontaneous demonstrations took place all over the country. In Munich alone, 400,000 people attended a candlelight protest.

Then, as now, the protests were triggered by an attack on long-term residents of Germany. Then, previous murders of asylum seekers had not prompted similar demonstrations of solidarity. Now, too, calls for the deportation of everybody whose asylum claim has been rejected have prompted little opposition. Then, the protests followed the opposition Social Democrats’ agreement to restrict the constitutionally guaranteed right to asylum. Now, the protests followed the Scholz government’s introduction of a harsh new law to expedite deportations and backing for the far-reaching CEAS reforms.

There are also key differences between the events of late 1992 and early 2024. When the Social Democrats met for an extraordinary party congress to decide whether to change the constitution and restrict the right to asylum, hundreds of thousands of people protested against the proposed reform; when parliament voted on the change in May 1993 large numbers of people once more descended on the German capital. And some Social Democrats and Free Democrats did actually vote against the changes.

This year’s protests against the CEAS reforms have been insignificant by comparison. And while some Greens and Social Democrats have publicly grumbled, their opposition is not as principled as that on display in 1993.

Millions of people have rallied over the past few weeks and railed against the AfD. But have they also expressed solidarity with asylum seekers threatened with deportation under the Scholz government’s new regime? Have they spared a thought for the refugees pushed back at the Polish and Croatian borders or in the Aegean? For those who drowned in the Mediterranean? Or have the demonstrations rather been an exercise in self-reassurance?

The postwar architects of the Federal Republic’s constitution were convinced that the Weimar Republic failed because it gave its enemies too much leeway. They thought that those out to undermine or destroy democracy must not abuse democratic rights and freedoms to achieve their aims.

Thus, the constitution makes this provision: “Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.” The High Court has twice deemed a party to be unconstitutional: in 1952 a party of the far right, and in 1956 the Communist Party. More recently, in 2017, the High Court ruled that the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany aimed to abolish democracy but that its influence was not substantial enough to warrant its prohibition.

The AfD has been monitored by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency to gauge whether it is seeking “to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order.” In three East German states, including Saxony, the state intelligence agencies have already ruled the AfD’s respective state branches to be “without doubt extremist.”

Since the revelations about the “secret meeting” in November, calls for the government to make use of the constitutional provisions and initiate a High Court ruling about the AfD’s unconstitutionality have become louder. A petition signed by 1.69 million people is requesting that the government make use of another constitutional provision. According to Article 18, a person who abuses civil and political rights (such as the freedom of expression) “to combat the free democratic basic order shall forfeit these basic rights.” In this instance, too, only the High Court can order such a forfeiture and the proceeding needs to be initiated by the federal government, a state government or federal parliament.

It’s tricky, to say the least, to declare a party unconstitutional when it’s supported by a third of the electorate, or to target one of its most influential leaders. As the attempt to ban the National Democratic Party demonstrated, the High Court case would take a very long time and its outcome would not be a foregone conclusion. Using the constitution to restrict Höcke’s democratic rights and outlaw the AfD would also allow him and his party to portray themselves as victims of “the system” and “the elites.”

The constitution is, however, an asset in the fight against the AfD. Thus far, its opponents have tended to focus on the alleged similarities between the AfD and Hitler’s Nazi party and to suggest the AfD’s leaders aim for a return to the dark days of the Third Reich. But politicians like Höcke aren’t unreconstituted Nazis. They even claim that the German army officer who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944 is their role model.

Their critics’ focus ought instead to be on how they deny the constitution’s most important principle, expressed in the first sentence of Article 1: “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” But that may get some of those currently applauding the demonstrators into trouble, because AfD politicians aren’t the only ones who disregard that line or pretend it applies only to German citizens.

Will the demonstrations against the AfD have any impact on its electoral performance at the local and European elections in June and the three state elections in September? Italian researchers have shown that Italy’s anti-far-right Sardines movement in late 2019 and early 2020 muted the electoral showing of Matteo Salvini’s Lega. But if such an effect resulted only in a better-than-expected performance of politicians such as Michael Kretschmer, who have tried to deprive the AfD of oxygen by endorsing key concerns of the party’s followers, then little would have been gained.

“Nie wieder Faschismus, nie wieder Zweite Liga!” proclaimed a speaker at the rally in St Pauli on Saturday. It was a double-headed hope: never again should Germany experience fascism, and never again would the St Pauli Football Club play in the second division. For many St Pauli supporters the club has returned to Germany’s first division in all but fact, but in reality, more often than not, the Zweite Liga has been where St Pauli has played its football.

While “Never again second division!” gives the impression that the St Pauli Football Club has already left its past behind, “Never again fascism!” suggests that fascism was buried on 8 May 1945 and must not be resurrected now. But the break with the past was never complete. Elements of Nazi Germany survived well beyond the end of the second world war. The AfD would not have thrived in the past ten years if it hadn’t been able to exploit the widespread acceptance of — or even longing for — authoritarian structures. Racism was not only alive in the early 1990s when asylum seeker hostels burned, but has been an enduring feature of postwar German society.

From Lörrach to Kappeln, the admonition “Never again!” defines the current protests. Often the protesters don’t name the past that must not reappear, because to them it is obvious they are referring to the twelve years from 1933 to 1945. It’s highly unlikely that Germany will experience a repeat of that time. But an unholy alliance of the AfD on the one hand and Christian Democrats and Ampel politicians on the other could pave the way for a re-run not of Nazi Germany but of the early 1990s, when fear-mongering engendered racist violence.

For the current movement to have a lasting impact, the protesters will need to identify what exactly they do not want. There is more to the AfD’s wishlist than “remigration.” A close reading of the party’s program could prompt more startlement.

I also wish the protesters were less preoccupied with the past. Germany is in crisis not because it is moving backwards but because it lacks a positive, widely shared vision for the future. Surely the St Pauli supporters won’t be content with avoiding relegation once the club has been promoted to the Bundesliga. What comes after “Nie wieder Faschismus!”? It’s easy to understand what those millions who rallied in recent weeks do not want. But it’s unclear what they are hoping for. •

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As it happens, I don’t think we did ever find a story the Rudd government could tell the Australian people. Nor do I recall hearing anything further about this grand mission afterwards. A year or so later, of course, Rudd was gone and, at the 2010 election, so — almost — was the government itself. Julia Gillard, who led Labor to minority government, called Rudd’s “a good government… losing its way.”

It has recently been hard not to wonder: is Albanese’s going the same way?

In many respects, the comparison is unfair. This Labor government has plainly learnt a great deal from the last and has gone out of its way not to repeat its errors. Many of its ministers were there, in more junior roles, last time. Albanese himself, as a rising figure during that era and leader of the House for almost the entire period before ending up as deputy prime minister, sometimes seemed traumatised by the infighting that more than anything wrecked Labor in government.

The differences matter. Rudd wanted to win the media every day. Albanese often seems more like Malcolm Fraser in his aspiration to keep politics off the front page. Rudd talked a big game in opposition about keeping government accountable but then failed to follow through by calling inquiries into the grand failures and scandals of the Howard era such as the Iraq war and the Australian Wheat Board affair. Albanese’s government, by contrast, has called one inquiry after another, most of them exposing the sheer badness of the Coalition on issues ranging from immigration policy through to robodebt.

Barely six months into the life of his government, Kevin Rudd was being called Captain Chaos by the Australian’s John Lyons. Albanese has gone out of his way to emphasise the careful, orderly and process-driven nature of his government. Albanese probably intends such remarks as a rebuke of Scott Morrison, but they often sound equally applicable to Rudd.

The Albanese government has a right to consider itself a good government, even allowing for the fairly low standards we have so often seen this century in Canberra. It has fulfilled many election promises. It has grappled effectively with key areas of Coalition failure and neglect, including stagnant wages and a shambolic immigration policy. It has responded to the general challenge of rising inflation and the particular one of spiralling energy costs. It has conducted that bewildering range of inquiries — not, seemingly, just to kick a can down the road but with the apparent aim of consulting widely and doing good policy — which gives substance to its commitment to evidence and process.

If good government receives its due reward, you might imagine that this is a government coasting to a comfortable election victory next time round. It is remarkable to consider that Labor won a resounding victory in the Aston by-election as recently as 1 April 2023; at the time, it seemed unassailable.

But politics is rarely so simple, and it tends not to be terribly fair either. Recent opinion polling has been discouraging for the government: Newspoll had the two-party-preferred vote at 50–50 in November, and then Labor at 52 to the Coalition’s 48 just before Christmas. That’s not disastrous — the middle of a term often looks grim for incumbents — but it would have given Labor Party strategists plenty to worry over.

Three issues have figured in the commentary. Almost everyone gives significant weight to the cost of living, which is hitting lower- and middle-income families hard. Pollsters and pundits argue that Labor’s support in the outer suburbs is fragile and it needs to do more to show it is on the side of struggling families. Peter Dutton and the Liberals, meanwhile, see these same voters as their only serious pathway back to government. November’s Victorian state election gave signs that Labor’s vote on Melbourne’s suburban frontiers might be a little more fragile than many assumed at the 2022 federal election. The forthcoming Dunkley by-election will test some of the claims made in recent months.

The second issue was the defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Labor championed this cause: it became part of the government’s brand from the moment of Albanese’s victory speech on the evening of 21 May 2022. When, therefore, it went down, it was inevitable that the government’s reputation should go down with it. Governments have not historically been thrown out of office on the back of such a defeat, but failure at a referendum can wrong-foot a government struggling under other pressures — as the defeat of its attempt to ban the Communist Party in 1951 did to a Menzies government grappling with 20 per cent inflation.

Third, there is the Gaza war. The horrors that have occurred in Israeli border communities, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and in Gaza will move anyone with a sense of humanity, but the political reality is that they have tended to move different groups of people in rather different ways. Labor’s problem here is that for large parts of the left, the Palestine issue is the defining cause of the age; for them, it divides pretend progressives from real ones.

There are parallels here with the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, which was also a divisive issue for a Labor Party that contained secular leftists and others who supported the Republican government, and Catholic right-wingers who leaned towards Franco and the Nationalist rebels. It was a part of John Curtin’s achievement as federal Labor leader that he was able to steer a course through these turbulent waters, largely by committing his party — then in opposition — to isolationism.

That kind of approach isn’t available to Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong. But they still must steer a course that takes into account Australia’s alliance commitments, its support for the so-called rules-based order and international law, the pressures of the domestic political scene and challenges of electoral politics, and its attachments to basic decency, humanitarianism and justice. The government’s hostility to Hamas is taken for granted everywhere except among the unhinged populist right, whose extremism nonetheless now often finds a platform in parts of the commercial media.

But we can be equally certain that it gives Australia’s Labor government no great pleasure to be seen as too close to the present government of Israel, a regime that is for very sound reasons deeply unpopular in Israel itself as well as among many Australian Jews. There is little doubt that in negotiating these pressures, which it has actually done with fair success, the government has nonetheless at times sounded windy and looked wobbly.

By Christmas, I would not have been alone in wondering if this government was going the way of Rudd’s and Gillard’s amid these pressures. A great part of the difficulty has seemed to me the particular combination of policy wonkery and electoral opportunism that has come to hold too much sway in the Labor Party this century. We all like good, evidence-based policy, and we all like electoral professionalism. Successful political parties need both to get anywhere.

But politics is also an aspect of culture. Otherwise highly intelligent Labor politicians can sometimes appear very naive about such matters. The Rudd and Gillard governments are a case in point: who in the Gillard government, for instance, came up with the idea of appointing a former Liberal Party leader, Brendan Nelson, as director of one of the country’s leading public institutions, the Australian War Memorial — in the lead-up to the centenary of the first world war, of all times? And under this government, which seems to support a new direction for the memorial on the issue of representing frontier warfare, it reappointed to the council a former Liberal prime minister, Tony Abbott. Such statesmanship!

These matters might seem trivial beside the problem of ensuring that millions of Australians can pay for their next power bill. But the political right has fewer illusions — Coalition governments stack boards as if their very existence depended on it. Labor shouldn’t follow that lead, but it should pay much closer attention than it does to the points of intersection between civil society, cultural authority and state power.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony to explain how power and culture work in capitalist societies. The “common sense” of the ruling class — coinciding with its interests — comes to be seen as that of society as a whole — the “national interest,” to use some contemporary parlance. Conservatives apply Gramsci’s ideas faithfully in their relentless efforts to dominate culture. Their success in the recent Voice referendum was testament to such efforts. Labor governments imagine that so long as they can get that cost-of-living relief through the parliament next week, winners are grinners. That notion rests on a remarkably shallow understanding of how power operates in a society of any serious complexity.

This is why January has been a good month for the Albanese government. Two things happened almost at the very same time, one in “the economy,” the other in “the culture.” In the economy, it recast the stage three tax cuts to ensure that there was a redistribution of benefits towards low- and middle-income earners. Alan Kohler, so often a devastatingly astute commentator on such matters, was right to point out that this was somewhat of an argument over loose change: the tax system as a whole continues to favour those who are best-off. Yet it was something. Albanese, in a National Press Club speech and elsewhere, has framed the shift as a response to changed circumstances, and especially the cost-of-living crisis. A bolder leader would also have said that social democratic governments support progressive income tax and oppose massive hand-outs to those who already have enough.

At the same time as the upholders of national political integrity were launching philosophical disquisitions about Albanese’s “backflips,” “lies” and “betrayals” — often the same journalists and politicians who met far worse from Scott Morrison with vigorous shrugging or lavish praise — Labor was also attending to the culture. The appointment of Kim Williams as new chair of the ABC suggested a government that has an interest in ensuring that one of the country’s most influential public institutions is led by someone who has not only impeccable professional credentials but also sufficient commitment to public culture, the arts and the goals of excellence, independence and balance to align with values supposedly supported by the government itself.

The government can’t expect an easy run over the second half of its term. Media hostility has been increasingly uncompromising and will be relentless on the issue of tax cuts. The cost-of-living crisis, moreover, doesn’t lend itself to easy solutions.

On broader issues of policy, Labor’s Achilles heel seems to me to be housing. It has acted, but it has not done enough, and the Greens have made this one their own. It is ideally calculated to appeal to anyone under forty, and others too. The Coalition will also continue to pretend it has the solution, which involves allowing people with virtually no superannuation savings to use the little they have for a home deposit. The real estate industry will be delighted.

Labor would be well advised to craft a radical solution to housing in the spirit of the 1945 Commonwealth–State Housing Agreement — one that involves not only bold solutions to private provision but also a renewed emphasis on social housing. Even more than the “backflip” on taxes, a bold, evidence-based, well-costed housing policy could set Labor up for an extended period in office and a genuine opportunity to reinvigorate social democracy in this country. •

The post Gramsci’s message for Anthony Albanese appeared first on Inside Story.

Half a dozen members of Marape’s 105-strong multi-party coalition have already peeled off, blaming the government for poor handling of the pay dispute that sparked the police strike. But Marape says he is confident of withstanding any no-confidence motion likely to be proposed in the 118-member chamber.

What has been called a payroll glitch resulted in sharp cuts to many public servants’ fortnightly pay, including cuts of around half for low-ranking staff in the police, prison service and other agencies. Victims of the error in Port Moresby walked off the job on 10 January and besieged the national parliament.

After word spread by mobile phone, mobs took the opportunity to plunder shops and trading stores, some of which were set on fire. Extra police were flown in and a call-out of the battalion at Port Moresby’s Murray Army Barracks restored order that night, reinforced by a two-week state of emergency that has now expired. Damage is estimated at approaching one billion kina (A$406 million) and the bodies of twenty-two victims have been found, some presumed killed by store owners and their security guards, others trapped in buildings set on fire.

The belief that government bungling lay behind the strike is not much questioned. “The lack of dialogue by the police with their police association, let alone with management or other agencies over an issue that could be fixed in days, if not hours, was certainly strange,” says Paul Barker, director of the Port Moresby–based Institute of National Affairs.

Soon after the riot, conspiracy theories raced through social media. Why were some businesses targeted while others, including large adjoining businesses without heavy protection, were left untouched? What will the police and troops do with the stolen goods they seize in their house-to-house searches? Was the looting somehow instigated to rattle confidence in Marape ahead of the expiry of the grace period?

Former prime minister Peter O’Neill, ousted by Marape in a 2019 no-confidence vote and soundly defeated in the 2022 election, is among those calling from the opposition bench for Marape’s dismissal. With business interests including an electronics chain, a hotel and a brewery, O’Neill has ample resources to cultivate parliamentary backing.

Another possible contender is Belden Namah, who quit Marape’s Pangu Pati in mid January. A Duntroon-trained army officer convicted of mutiny over the hiring of British and African mercenaries to deal with the Bougainville rebellion, his parliamentary career has been stormy. As the representative of a constituency where Malaysian loggers are active, he appears not to lack resources either: he was once readmitted to Sydney’s Star Casino despite an allegation of sexual harassment because he was classified as a high roller.

Government leaders, meanwhile, are casting around for short-term remedies. Telecommunications minister Timothy Masiu has threatened to shut down social media platforms. Marape says he and National Capital District governor Powes Parkop will look at applying a vagrancy law to restrict “unnecessary” movement into Port Moresby. “People have proven they are not fit to live in the city,” he said.

This kind of response shows that politicians are refusing to recognise the changes in the capital that are making it more difficult to govern. Most of all, they are ignoring growing population pressures on government services and agencies.

Just over a year ago, Port Moresby’s main hospital was revealed to be storing the bodies of deceased patients in an open shed because the morgue was full. A hasty mass burial was organised, but the bodies have no doubt continued to overflow. As PNG doctors’ association head James Naipao pointed out, the hospital was designed for the capital’s official population figure of about 400,000, but in reality the population is more than three times that number.

The same goes for the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary, as the police are named. Numbering about 7200, including civilian staff and reserve officers, it has grown by only about 2000 officers since independence in 1975, a period in which Papua New Guinea’s population has trebled to an estimated eleven million. The last census was in 2011, its findings flawed partly because thieves at one stage stole the central tally room’s computers. A census due in 2021 was postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic and is now planned for later this year.

Annual population growth is generally put at 3 per cent, meaning the present population will double in less than twenty-five years. The pressure of numbers heightens the likelihood of more explosions of opportunistic looting in Port Moresby and similar unrest in the crowded port city of Lae.

The population estimate means PNG has one police member for about 1500 citizens, a third of the widely recommended ratio of 1:450. Marape’s announcement last month that police numbers will be expanded to 10,000 within five years, backed by Anthony Albanese’s pledge of A$200 million for a new police college and specialist training, is a belated attempt to remedy the security problem.

Whether the PNG government can put up its share of the necessary funding remains to be seen. In 2020 the international consultancy Deloitte said the present force needed an additional 126 million kina annually to cover its funding gap and a one-off capital injection of about 3.9 billion kina to deliver its service mandate. Neither happened.

Despite recent panics in Australian and American defence circles over China’s offers of security aid to Pacific island nations — which Marape happily countered by signing defence pacts with Canberra and Washington — recent events in Port Moresby show that PNG’s main security problem is internal.

Meanwhile, life in Port Moresby divides into two classes. Well-off visitors and wealthy expatriates and local residents stay in hotels or live in apartment blocks barricaded against the city’s poor and its raskol gangs by razor wire, armed guards and Dobermans. These well-off people, institutions and commercial enterprises are protected by at least 30,000 private security guards, about three times the number of police and troops combined. A further unknown number of people work for unregistered security groups. Even so, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks Port Moresby as the sixth “least liveable” city in the world.

Outside, many if not most locals live in settlements with uncertain land tenure rights and limited water, sanitation and electricity services. They journey to workplaces and markets constantly alert to possible theft and assault. Bags, phones and watches are snatched; sometimes the thieves use homemade pipe guns to relieve office workers of a few kina or even the shoes on their feet.

“If you need the police and you want them to come to your village or wherever, you’ve got a real problem,” says Sinclair Dinnen, a specialist on Pacific crime and security at the Australian National University. “The first thing they will ask for is a payment, ostensibly to pay for fuel, and they do need fuel, but there’s quite a lot of rent-seeking behaviour across the police force — given the fact they can get away with it and people expect to pay the police to assist them, particularly if it involves travelling.”

In urban settlements, local committees often provide their own security. “Most people do not rely on the uniformed police for their policing needs,” says Dinnen. “If something goes missing, you go to your local networks, the committees. Sometimes for a small fee, they will eventually find out who stole your radio and maybe arrange for it to be returned. The police would not be interested in that kind of stuff.”

This lack of support partly reflects a widespread feeling that living in a city is somehow un-Melanesian. Founding prime minister Michael Somare argued against urbanisation in the 1970s, and academics have written of “ambivalent townsmen.” But the “new generations of people who have grown up in towns and who are not familiar with the day-to-day rhythms of village life are now growing in number,” say contributors to Papua New Guinea: Government, Economy and Society, a recent book by ANU and University of PNG researchers. “These people have made cities their permanent homes,” they add, while feeling obliged to note that “in some ways, the legitimacy of Melanesian urbanism is yet to be established.”

Urban investment often worsens inequalities, say the researchers, because government funds are “co-opted by political patronage.” Funds are spent on iconic projects valued by the urban elite rather than on housing, water supply and sanitation, especially in the settlements.

The elite want to position Port Moresby as a global city and Papua New Guinea as a middle power in its region. Money goes into the international airport, new roads to the top hotels, facilities to host regional games, and a shorefront pavilion to host the 2018 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit (accompanied by the baffling purchase of forty luxury Maseratis and three Bentleys).

As well as the neglect of settlements, international events directed at global audiences have often entailed “intensified policing of marginal groups seen as undermining the modernist aesthetics of orderliness and prosperity,” say the researchers, and in some cases forcible relocation. The informal economy is also a target, notably the roadside betel-nut traders catering to the widespread fondness for this mild narcotic.

In 2022, newly re-elected prime minister Marape and capital governor Parkop turned up for the launch of a twenty-two-storey apartment building on reclaimed foreshore land obtained for ninety-three years by a Malaysian entrepreneur for an annual fee of just 8400 kina. Police evicted the previous squatters on adjacent Paga Hill and dumped them on unserviced land far on the city fringe.

Parkop thanked the developer for having trust in the capital city and ensuring modern facilities for accommodation. The city government had devised the “Amazing Port Moresby” global branding to promote it as a liveable city, he said, “but the government can’t do it alone.”

The governor has also announced several initiatives to improve the livelihoods of ordinary residents, including a Settlements into Suburbs project and a Yumi Lukautim Mosbi (Let’s Care for Moresby) community awareness drive. As Paga Hill shows, though, the wealthy tend to get the breaks while the poor risk being deported as vagrants. A reshuffle in parliament is unlikely to change this anytime soon. •

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The prime minister was to put the potato in his pocket, specifically in his left pocket if he was right-handed. In “a few weaks time” it will get a bit soft, Curtin was told. Take no notice of that but leave it there and it will flatten out “like a half crown” and then go “has hard as a pice of wood.” After three years it will “whear away to nothing.” And then the prime minister should repeat the process. “While you carrie a Potato in your pocket you will never suffer with any Pains.” Frith himself had been doing so for the previous twenty-seven years, he said, and suffered no akes or Pains.

The prime minister’s private secretary wrote to Mr Frith acknowledging with thanks — but no further comment — the arrival of the package. Frith’s letter was carefully filed with hundreds of other personal and official representations under “Correspondence F” for the year 1942.

In 2017, while I was working at the National Archives of Australia, a colleague of mine stumbled with delighted amazement upon the Frith correspondence. John Curtin was a popular prime minister, yes, but to send a potato as a gift? There were peals of laughter in the office that day, let me say, at the thought of a potato-induced protuberance in the prime ministerial pocket.

When one of us finally got around to doing some actual research, we discovered that carrying a potato in one’s pocket was a Victorian-era cure for rheumatism. Exactly how it was thought to work is unclear — folk remedies and superstitions do not admit of much close investigation anyway — but it was commonly believed that the potato had to have been stolen for it to work. (Frith makes no mention of this in his letter to Curtin.) The Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University includes a number of withered therapeutic potatoes — here’s one — among its holdings of folkloric material.

So, would Curtin have given the potato cure a try? Could a potato have been a silent witness at the next war cabinet meeting, in Canberra on 21 September 1942? I suspect not. Curtin’s health was poor, but rheumatism is not known to have been one of his afflictions. If he knew about Mr Frith’s gift — and his staff may well have thought he would enjoy the diversion — Curtin may simply have kept it in his pocket until he could hand it to domestic staff at the Lodge for use in the kitchen. Nothing was allowed to go to waste in those austere times.

Surprised to learn that folklore and superstition still lingered in 1940s Australia, I wondered if Frith’s offering to Curtin was considered odd at the time. As it turns out, yes, just a little. In late 1942 and early 1943, several major newspapers ran stories poking gentle fun at the weird and wonderful letters and packages Curtin often received. Each of these pieces — here’s one — was essentially the same, and probably drew on a compilation of letters (writers’ names withheld) offered to the press by Curtin’s indefatigable press secretary, Don Rodgers. His aim, I imagine, was to rub some edges off his boss’s rather stern public image.

Christians sent religious tracts, widows sent wedding rings (goodness!), a lot of people sent money (which went straight to Treasury), inventors sent war-winning suggestions, and one woman sent a cushion embroidered “God Bless Our Prime Minister.” The public was entertained with excerpts from letters to Curtin from various charmers and crackpots, among whom Mr Frith comes off as comparatively sane. Who knows if a copy of any of these ever reached him at Wattle Flat?

Years later, Frith’s words still come back to astonish me yet again with their specificity and conviction. Tempting though it is to dismiss him as a bit of a weirdo, it’s good to remember that few of us are completely rational all the time. Even though the evidence for its efficacy is slender I keep a bottle of echinacea on hand for when I feel a cold coming on. Which of us has not done something similar? A well-known chain of Australian discount chemists devotes several aisles in its enormous stores to complementary medicines and dietary supplements, and people obviously buy them. If we laugh at Mr W. Frith of Wattle Flat via Bathurst, we also laugh at ourselves.

The other reason I often think of Mr Frith is that he reminds me of when I first met the peasant Bodo during my undergraduate days. I still have my copy of Eileen Power’s wonderful book Medieval People, which was first published in 1924 and went through many subsequent editions. Power chose six people and wrote a chapter on each to personify ordinary life in the Middle Ages. Bodo is the first. He was a peasant living in the early ninth century on an estate attached to an abbey near Paris, owned by the emperor Charlemagne. Because of Charlemagne’s close interest in how his lands were managed, the records are extremely rich.

Power discovered Bodo, his wife Ermentrude and their three children, Wido, Gerbert and Hildegard in the abbot’s estate book. With enormous skill and imagination she presents them to us as living, breathing people. We learn of a typical day in their lives by watching Bodo as he sets out on a frosty morning with his ox for a day’s ploughing, little Wido coming along to help. Ermentrude’s morning was spent at the big house, where she had to pay the chicken rent (a fat pullet and five eggs), and her afternoon at home weaving cloth. Power goes further, boldly proposing not just what her people did but how they thought and felt about it. Bodo wasn’t happy on that cold morning, having to plough the abbot’s fields when his own were crying out for attention, but he sang lustily to cheer himself and Wido.

We learn that Bodo and Ermentrude spent Sundays and saints’ days singing and dancing to ribald pagan songs, a practice that greatly annoyed church authorities. Frankish Christians such as Bodo still clung to much earlier rites and superstitions, but these the church wisely left alone. Charms were said over sick cattle and incantations over fields to make them fertile. The cure for a stitch in one’s side, or any bad pain, was to lay a hot piece of metal next to it and say a charm to draw out the nine little worms that were eating one’s bones and flesh. (The sensation of the hot metal probably distracted the mind from the stitch, thus making this cure a mite more rational than Frith’s potato remedy.)

If Eileen Power speculated beyond the evidence in conjuring up the inner lives of her medieval people, her thorough immersion in a broad range of sources enabled her to, as she put it, “make the past live for the general reader.” She was a pioneering social historian and for her book’s epigraph she quotes a famous verse in the book of Ecclesiasticus: “Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us.” The problem for many of her fellow historians, she said, was that they had forgotten the fathers that begat us. Her aim was to recognise the “unnamed, undistinguished mass of people, now sleeping in unknown graves,” upon whose slow toil “was built up the prosperity of the world.”

John Curtin is absolutely one of those famous men, and William Frith one of the toilers. What can be learned about him? If I have my genealogical research correct — and there is some ambiguity in the records — William Thomas Frith was born in the small town of Hartley, in central west New South Wales, in 1869, the son of British migrant parents. His father Oscar was a labourer who, in 1882, appeared before a magistrate for failing to send thirteen-year-old William to school. Probably the boy’s labour was needed at home. I have not discovered any evidence that it was a large family, but not all parents bothered to register the births of their children then.

Frith’s story can be told only through snippets; in fact we probably know less about him than we do about peasant Bodo. The Friths were living in the Carcoar region in 1904 when Oscar and William were charged with assault; William was found guilty but the case against Oscar was dismissed. In 1907 Oscar, aged sixty-six and still working, was seriously injured and nearly lost an ear when his horse and cart toppled over an embankment. The first world war offered an escape (of sorts) for rural families living on the edge of poverty but not so much for the Friths. William was too old to enlist, although his younger brother John did scrape in at age forty-four, in 1915. He was returned to Australia medically unfit in 1917.

By 1930 their parents had died and the brothers were living in Wattle Flat, a village thirty-two kilometres north of Bathurst. This, of course, is the famous region of New South Wales where gold had been discovered in 1851, and Wattle Flat apparently once boasted a population of 20,000. A small renewal of mining activity during the Depression might explain why the Friths were living there, listed as miners (“fossickers” might be more accurate) on the electoral roll. John gave up eventually and “went on the track,” but William stayed.

He was apparently unmarried and had no evident involvement in any church, sporting club, trade union, friendly society or any other of those organisations that were the glue that held society together in those times. In 1935 the National Advocate, Bathurst’s main newspaper, noted that Mr W. Frith of Wattle Flat had been admitted to hospital for “medical attention” (for something beyond the powers of a potato, we assume), suggesting that he did have some standing in the community, but in general he appears to have been a loner.

He must have been paying attention to what was going on in the world, however, or he would not have written to John Curtin. The National Advocate was a left-leaning newspaper (it had future prime minister Ben Chifley on its board of directors) and would have been his main source of news. In its pages Frith could have learned of the Japanese entry into the war in December 1941, its aggression in the Pacific in 1942 and the gravity of Australia’s position as a consequence. He could have read Curtin’s exhortations to his people to expect that each and every Australian would have to make sacrifices. The paper covered Curtin’s appeal to the United States for support and his declarations about the need to reorganise labour and industry, introduce rationing and raise funds through war loans. The Advocate supported Curtin throughout. He was one of the “greatest leaders in Australian history,” the paper claimed.

Historians have noted how Curtin’s background as a journalist helped him craft the messages he needed to gain the nation’s support for the unprecedented interventions in social and economic life necessary to win the war. In this he was assisted by press secretary Don Rodgers, but Curtin already had a natural ease with journalists and was frank and informal with them in his twice-daily briefings. He also spoke directly to millions of people in his frequent radio broadcasts, and by adopting a plain and direct style of address came across as a hardworking, humble and honest man.

Not everyone could have afforded a wireless I suppose. I wonder if William Frith had one in Wattle Flat, or could have joined a neighbour to listen in. If so, back in November 1941, shortly after Curtin became prime minister, Frith might have heard Curtin proclaim that:

This Australia is a land of cities and golden plains, of great rivers and vast spaces. It is a land in which countless thousands of plain, ordinary men and women have toiled long, mostly for little reward; who sacrificed and who built our heritage. If this heritage was worth their lives to build, it is worth ours to preserve.

It’s almost as if whoever wrote the broadcast script (Curtin? Rodgers?) had read and remembered Eileen Power’s Bodo and Ermentrude, those slow toilers who built the prosperity of the world. In any case, rhetoric of that kind was exactly what was needed to inspire people like William Frith, whose family had indeed toiled long for little reward. He may have felt (yes, I am speculating beyond the evidence) that now, at last, there was a place for them in the national story.

The effect of that could have been profound, certainly enough for Frith to decide eventually to devise something out of his own small means, in the form of a curative potato, as an offering back to Curtin. And quite possibly he also gave something that Curtin would have valued much more: his vote. In the federal election of August 1943, Curtin’s Labor government defeated the Country–United Australia Party coalition by a landslide. It remains one of the greatest victories in Labor history.

History, as Eileen Power said, is largely made up of Bodos. •

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The DPP’s main opponent is the Kuomintang, or KMT, a party with roots deep in pre-revolutionary China and members that are far more inclined than their DPP counterparts to claim Chinese heritage. The KMT’s presidential candidate, New Taipei mayor Hou Yu-ih, is a centrist pragmatist from a local Taiwanese family, but both his running mate and the first-placed candidate on the party’s list are “deep blue” — strongly pro-Chinese figures from families that fled to Taiwan after the communist victory in 1949. Intra-party tensions reflecting these different views could complicate legislative processes after the election.

The third party fielding a presidential candidate, the Taiwan People’s Party, is predicted to retain its present strength in the legislature. It has feistily courted younger voters during the campaign.

On current predictions the next president of the legislature will be the KMT’s Han Kuo-yu, whose position on the party ticket assures him of a win despite his having made history in 2020 as the only mayor ever recalled from office by popular petition.

Outside Taiwan, the election is attracting interest more for its international than its domestic repercussions. The war in Ukraine alerted the world to the possibility of a matching war on the opposite side of Eurasia. The dramatic increase in incursions by Chinese fighter jets into Taiwanese airspace over the past two to three years resonates with the build-up of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border in the months ahead of its February 2022 invasion. From London to Tokyo, commentators have been speculating on the potential for a bellicose response to the election in Beijing.

Not surprisingly, the prospect of war has been a theme in the election campaign. KMT posters show Hou Yu-ih declaring “Peace on each shore; we don’t want war.” The fact that all candidates agree with this sentiment doesn’t stop it being invoked as a point of difference between the DPP on the one hand and the Kuomintang and the Taiwan People’s Party on the other. A widely read article by influential American commentators advocating greater restraint in Washington’s approach to Taiwan has been weaponised by the opposition parties to attack the DPP for a China policy they portray as flirting with war. China’s defence ministry has weighed in, criticising the DPP for “deliberately hyping up the so-called ‘military threat from the mainland’” for electoral purposes.

In fact, says the DPP’s Lai Ching-te, “In the eyes of Beijing, the three of us [running for president] are all supporters of Taiwan’s independence.” In this sense, Taiwan seems to have passed a point of no return in its journey towards resolving its political status. China’s claim to Taiwan is grounded largely in the historical struggle between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang, a struggle that culminated in the flight of the Kuomintang to Taiwan and its reconstitution there of the shattered government of the Republic of China. The government in Taipei has now long since ceased to be a government-in-exile, waiting for the Communist Party of China to collapse.

People in Taiwan have also stopped thinking of themselves as Chinese. Mostly, they don’t know very much about China. Research by Chinese social scientists suggests that the more they know the less they like it. Taiwanese businesses are withdrawing from China, taking their money and nous elsewhere.

All this has had a profound effect on electoral politics in Taiwan, where there is next to no interest in becoming part of the People’s Republic of China and no advantage for politicians in pro-China policies. At best, critics of the DPP can claim they will manage relations with China better than has Tsai Ing-wen, who has presided over extremely frosty cross-strait relations.

But when Hou Yu-ih’s “deep blue” running mate Jaw Shau-kong declared himself and Hou at one in their rejection of Beijing’s “one China, two systems” policy, the legacy of Tsai Ing-wen was apparent. “Regarding the ‘one country, two systems,’” said Tsai, ahead of the 2020 election, “our answer is: that is not possible.” Tsai won that election in a landslide. Now, all three current presidential candidates have put defence as their top priority.

Neither US restraint nor Taiwanese domestic politics necessarily have much bearing on the prospects of war or peace in the Taiwan Strait. If the Kuomintang were to be victorious in the presidential election, Beijing would be gratified but might not greatly alter its present course. On the 130th anniversary of the birth of Mao Zedong on 26 December, and again five days later, on New Year’s Eve, Xi Jinping declared yet again what he has often stated before, that the reunification of Taiwan with China is a historical necessity.

On this point Xi is in no danger of outraging China’s netizens, who naturally share his conviction that Taiwan belongs to China. A majority, though not an overwhelming one, supports “recovery” of the island by force. Xi has reassured Taiwanese that “Chinese people will not strike Chinese people” but left himself with a way out: “if [Taiwanese] don’t want to be Chinese, we just can’t look on and do nothing.”

Voters in Taiwan display a remarkable insouciance in face of such threats. While jets scramble overhead they go about their daily lives with barely an upward glance. They are nonetheless alert to the need for skilful management of Taiwan’s international relations. If the DPP retains the presidency despite the electorate’s favouring a rotation of power, it will be partly because Tsai Ing-wen’s assertion of the sovereignty of Taiwan and its separateness from China satisfies the views that most Taiwanese hold of themselves and their country.

Opinion polls also suggest that voters have confidence that Lai Ching-te, at heart a strong supporter of independence, will adhere to the status quo in cross-strait relations. And they have a high opinion of Lai’s running mate, Hsiao Bi-khim, who performed spectacularly well as Taiwan representative in Washington during 2020–23. With Lai focusing on domestic issues on the campaign trail and Hsiao responding on international issues, the electorate has been presented with an image of complementarity and compatibility that distinguishes the DPP’s candidates from their rivals.

Yet, in the final analysis, maintaining the status quo in Taiwan — by far the preferred option among Taiwanese voters — is likely to depend more on Xi Jinping than on the election. Xi’s dream of national rejuvenation, articulated at the beginning of his time in power, has a territorial aspect that is manifest in tensions on many of China’s borders. The conflict over Taiwan is significant partly because China’s entire diplomatic relations framework is premised on the accommodation of the politically powerful claim of “one China.”

War games conducted in the South China Sea by China and by a US–Philippines alliance just a week ahead of the Taiwan election are a reminder, however, that Taiwan forms part of the “First Island Chain,” which includes islands of Japan in the north and of the Philippines in the south. Control of the chain would give China a commanding position in the Pacific. More than Taiwan is at stake in any change in the status quo.

There are many reasons why Xi might hesitate to start a war in the Taiwan Strait. These include the dispiriting example of Russia in the Ukraine; the People’s Liberation Army’s lack of combat experience, flawed missiles and corrupt generals; the potential loss through wartime casualties of tens of thousands of “only children,” the products of China’s former one-child policy; and the parlous state of the Chinese economy in combination with the impact of the inevitable trade sanctions.

Weighed against Xi’s personal ambitions, however, all these might count for nought. Last year, Xi turned seventy. In Chinese lore, this is the age for “pursuing the heart’s desire,” but by anyone’s calculation the window of opportunity for doing so is shrinking. He has time to play with: his father lived till eighty-nine and his mother is still alive. But Mao Zedong, born an auspicious sixty years before him, died at eighty-two. Xi will want to achieve his heart’s desire before he reaches a comparable age.

A shrinking population, a slowing economy, and an underperforming global infrastructure project — the Belt and Road Initiative — mean that much on which Xi has staked his prestige is beginning to slip away. It is not impossible that he will see the election in Taiwan as offering an opportunity to respond to the call of history, reunify the nation, and establish an enduring legacy for himself. •

The post The call of history appeared first on Inside Story.

Beard, a deeply read classicist, is also a commentator, TV star and bestselling author; one of the great populist-scholars of our time, she has brought the ancient world into contemporary consciousness like no other.

She is right to insist that the inhabitants of the past can’t be expected to project any sort of ready-made solution onto our troubles. Besides, judging by the findings of her latest research, the kinds of suggestions the Romans themselves would make might not be palatable; they might indeed hasten the decline of our familiar institutions and make the slide towards one-man rule inexorable.

Beard’s third book-length analysis of Rome — following her narrative history of Rome SPQR (2015) and the quirkier art history of Twelve Caesars (2021) — focuses on the emperors who ruled Rome for more than 300 years from Augustus to Alexander Severus. Her latest book, Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World, is not a chronological narrative of the careers of individual emperors but a thematic, institutional description of what Beard calls the “category” of emperor: the Roman system of one-man rule.

This institutional approach allows her to discern patterns and themes, and to ask questions like: How did one-man rule work? How did the emperors get things done, in Rome and abroad? And, more pertinently, how did they get a republic — albeit a deeply flawed oligarchy already succumbing to warlordism and civil war, and a slave state to boot, but a vibrant political and social culture all the same — to accept, comply with, and ultimately embody a system of autocracy, a culture of political strongmen?

The first part of Beard’s answer is that the emperors purchased stability by bringing the military under close personal control. Under the Roman republic, legions had theoretically been controlled by the Senate but increasingly, in practice, by wealthy warlords. From Augustus, the emperors put the legionaries, auxiliaries and veterans on the state budget and acted as commander-in-chief — to use the American term — to exert force against external enemies on the distant frontiers and to protect the regime against internal ones in Rome.

This did not mean Rome was “full of men in uniform and march-pasts… such as Trooping of the Colour or Bastille Day,” Beard notes. “The city of Rome itself was strikingly demilitarised even by the current standards of Western capitals.”

Indeed, a second part of Beard’s answer is that the emperors were also careful to preserve the trappings of republican norms and institutions. Even if the Senate became a powerless debating forum, and even if the consular officials served for only two months instead of twelve as formerly, they kept the wealthy “senatorial elite,” as Beard calls them, busy, respectable and ever looking to promotion and proximity to imperial power. And, as Beard dryly notes, replacing elections with imperial appointment saved the elite the tedium and expense of populist politics.

With the imperial palace now the real source of executive authority, who did the actual work of running the city and the empire? Beard describes a system of “government by correspondence,” with letters flowing between the emperor and governors around the empire. The emperor was also personally involved in receiving petitions and adjudicating tricky lawsuits. Literate and loyal staff were needed.

But this kind of work was too menial for the wealthy elite. They would rather govern a province or command a legion than push paper in the palace. Besides, allowing a powerful citizen to become established in the back rooms of the palace was a risk an emperor might well have wanted to avoid.

Better, it seems, to rely on trusted and tractable slaves. In the imperial court, it was slaves and ex-slaves, or freedmen, who did most of the actual work. Cooks, doctors, footmen, hairdressers, gardeners and the all-important food-tasters: they provided the personal service to keep the ruler, and his family, comfortable and alive.

And they also provided the administrative, managerial and clerical muscle that the imperial system — the financial controllers, secretaries, letter writers in Latin and in Greek, librarians, petitions clerks, advisers and counsellors, and trusted emissaries — needed to control a boisterous city and a huge empire. Skilled and experienced officials provided administrative continuity from one emperor to the next.

But this politico-administrative logic generated what Beard calls “pressure points” in the imperial system. Senators were aghast that freedmen could enjoy imperial trust and exercise imperial power. Ultimately, it forced the question: who was really running the show? Pliny complained that the “chief sign of a powerless emperor was powerful freedmen.” As Beard acutely observes, that “d” in freedman is crucial.

Ultimately, though, even strongmen weaken and die, highlighting the ultimate vulnerability of one-man rule: mortality and the problem of succession. All despots are would-be dynasts, but hereditary succession can be messy when it involves feckless sons or scheming brothers; mutinous generals and seditious senators pose further risks. Augustus hit upon a novel solution. His natural heirs having all died, he ended up choosing his wife’s son by a former marriage, Tiberius, and made his wishes clear by “adopting” him as his son.

Adoptive succession became the norm. It served to widen the talent pool, even creating the impression of an imperial meritocracy, Beard observes, “while still presenting the transmission of power in family terms.” It was not until 79 CE, after more than a hundred years of imperial rule, that a biological son (Titus) actually succeeded his father (Vespasian); it didn’t happen again for another century. Meanwhile, for eighty years, five emperors in a row from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius “adopted” their successors.

It is as if an American president could nominate a vice-president into a powerless but prominent role on the explicit understanding that she will succeed when the president dies (and not before). There is no “lesson” in this for today’s politics, of course.

Though plenty of assassinations and two further civil wars caused rapid turnover in the imperial throne, the practice of adoption did stabilise and strengthen the imperial system.

Beard’s entertaining style conceals the seemingly effortless command of the scholarship that underpins Emperor of Rome. She ranges across time and across source material; she tirelessly draws on the archaeological evidence of palaces, statues and coins, the literary evidence of poetry, speeches, letters and histories, the epigraphic evidence of tombstones and miraculously preserved legal documents; she takes nothing at face value, and is constantly challenging received historiographical wisdom. A particular pleasure are the bibliographical essays that summarise the relevant scholarship of each chapter in place of footnotes.

But at times the great populariser is guilty of over-popularising. Her focus on the institution of the emperor doesn’t prevent her from indulging some of the juicier tales. “This was a world of toddlers and teenagers as well as grown-ups and greybeards” is one of several sentences that could safely have been subbed out. Mary Beard is also unaccountably mean to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, retitling the great Stoic’s philosophical autobiography as Jottings to Himself.

Anyone familiar with the murderous court intrigues of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor Court in Wolf Hall, or the tamer Windsor jostling in The Crown, will be right at home in Beard’s imperial Rome. Less fictionally, the cronyism and flattery of Trump’s (first?) White House, its performative bombast and self-indulgent fakery, may also be recognisable in Beard’s account of the same pathologies displayed by the ancient autocrats. Don’t forget that Rome, cynical and secular, even posthumously declared some of its emperors as divine.

As one-man rule arrived and stayed, Beard points out, scarcely anyone complained. Senators became, in the words of Tacitus, ineffective dissidents or cowards, flatterers and job-seekers; “power dining” with the emperor became, as she brilliantly demonstrates, an occasion of risk and uncertainty as well as an opportunity for promotion and proximity to power.

In short, “despite the loud protests against the crimes and misdemeanours of individual rulers, or the discontent with some aspects of one-man rule, there is hardly any trace of significant resistance to one-man rule as such.”

Indeed, as Beard observes in the closing paragraphs of this book, autocracy throughout history has depended on people at all levels accepting and adjusting. “It is not violence or the secret police, it is collaboration and cooperation — knowing or naive, well-meaning or not — that keeps autocracy going.” This is the lesson we are to mark. •

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World
By Mary Beard | Allen & Unwin | $65 | 512 pages

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Let me give you the Hollywood pitch. In his youth, a boy develops a crush. As a young man, he pursues the desire of his fledgling heart by achieving several eye-catching successes. Approaching middle age, and seemingly running out of time, our hero finally declares his hand and consummates this life-long infatuation. And then, in less than a decade, love lies bleeding.

Since early boyhood, the former British cabinet minister Rory Stewart has been romantically inclined to regard the political life as the sine qua non of existence. Taking charge, getting a grip, getting things done, touring the facility, picking up slack, making the world a better place, fulfilling one’s destiny: these were the ideas that sent Young Rory’s heart aflutter.

And the portal to this personalised Narnia was hidden somewhere in the Palace of Westminster.

From his birth in 1973 until he entered parliament in 2010 — as he tells it in his new memoir, Politics on the Edge — Stewart led a privileged, fulfilling and adventurous life.

His father was the British war hero and spy Brian Stewart, who every morning gave him fencing lessons in Hyde Park. He boarded at Eton, then spent a short stint in the Black Watch, his father’s old regiment, before going up to Oxford, where he attended Balliol, said to be that university’s oldest college. Around this time he became a friend to the future King Charles, and a tutor to his two sons.

After a teenaged dalliance with the Labour Party, Stewart returned to the party of his class. Politics for Stewart is about respect for British tradition and history; the importance of grace under pressure; and the majesty of His Majesty.

His book is filled with beautifully written passages about the natural world and the symbolism of architecture that you don’t normally find in books by politicians. “My office had been that of the Secretary of State for India,” he explains at one point. “A Mughal domed ceiling, plastered in gold leaf, soared above my head. The two curved doors were doubled so that two maharajahs could enter simultaneously with no problem of precedence.”

Stewart is no boorish right-winger; he’s an instinctive One Nation Tory — firmly planted on the left of the Conservative Party — and writes without embarrassment about the need for honour in public life.

For all his veneration of the fruits bestowed on Britain by its long-gone imperial past, he is also a modern human, with an appealing self-deprecatory wit. (During a stoush between his faction and the Tory hard right, he comments, “We felt like a book club going to a Millwall game.”)

He’s free of the racism usually associated with his class and nation. He’s supportive of gay marriage; convinced about climate change; genuinely curious about Earth and the people who live on it. He is also admirably suspicious of his own desire for power.

After university Stewart joins the Foreign Office — naturally — and serves in Indonesia in the lead-up to East Timorese independence, and in Montenegro during the Balkans wars.

In 2000 he makes an eccentric but telling career choice: he leaves the FO and spends eighteen months trekking across Iran, Pakistan, the Himalayas and then, just after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan. Walking stick in hand, an Afghan blanket across his shoulders, and relying on the ingrained culture of Afghan hospitality, he lives off the kindness of strangers as he strides through this roadless landscape like a character out of Kipling.

He writes a bestseller about the journey; Brad Pitt buys the film rights. By luck or design, Stewart has acquired an interesting patina of fame — and in a peculiarly British way.

Like his hero T.E. Lawrence, he enjoys travelling to exotic places, where — occasionally — he’s shot at by the locals. In 2003 he is appointed to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, where he runs a province at the ripe old age of thirty. Like many Eton-educated Balliol men before him, he is commanding a dangerous outpost of Empire; but as this is the twenty-first century, it’s the American Empire.

He begins as a supporter of the Iraq war but is soon disillusioned. It is a telling moment. Stewart is too insightful and intelligent, and too wedded to his values, to trim his jib to the prevailing winds. He doesn’t recognise it at the time, but it’s a sign that he might not be best suited to modern politics. Screenwriters would call this an example of foreshadowing.

Stewart is immensely talented, but his talents — for writing, debating, organising and enthusing others — don’t satisfy him. He wants, he says, the power to do good in the world. After a stint setting up and running a charity in Kabul, and then some teaching of human rights at Harvard, he takes the plunge.

In 2010 he gains preselection for the rural seat of Penrith and the Borders, located far away from London in chilly Cumbria. Typically, one of his first acts is to set out on foot and visit every village in the electorate. But the tougher footslog awaits him in London: it is the beginning of the end of the affair.

Stewart must have committed some terrible crime in a previous life: as a junior minister, his first three bosses are Liz Truss, Priti Patel and Boris Johnson.

Truss — who will later become the shortest-serving prime minister in British history — is like the Queen of Hearts made incarnate: capable of thinking up six impossible policies before breakfast. And then not caring if anything happens, so long as a press release is generated.

Stewart attends a meeting with Truss after rushing to the bedside of his gravely ill father. She asks how his weekend was. “I explained that my father had died,” he writes. “She paused for a moment, nodded, and asked when the twenty-five-year environment plan would be ready.”

After a reshuffle he falls into the orbit of Priti Patel, who’s been made Secretary of State for International Development, a department she had frequently called to be abolished. When Stewart — who genuinely believes in giving aid to poor nations — tries to engage her about policy, Patel, who has a habit of enunciating every syllable of key words, tells him: “Look Rory, I want you to roll the pitch. Okay? In the end this is about ac-count-a-bi-li-ty.”

Stewart’s time working under Boris Johnson during the future PM’s short and unlamented tenure as foreign secretary is equally instructive. He finds Johnson, ruddy of cheek and untidy of hair, in his magnificent office, his “air of roguish solidity, however… undermined by the furtive cunning of his eyes, which made it seem as though an alien creature had possessed his reassuring body and was squinting out of the sockets.”

Stewart is an expert on the Middle East, so Johnson naturally wants him to become the minister in charge of Britain’s Africa policy. “You’ll love it Rory,” Johnson assures him. “A Balliol man in Africa.”

Stewart had the misfortune to arrive in British politics at a time and place when the performative side of the job was viewed as the only necessity for political success. Like right-wing populists everywhere, Truss, Patel and Johnson loved the spotlight but couldn’t be bothered actually running the show.

And then there’s Brexit. Stewart was a Remainer, and after the disastrous referendum vote he becomes an advocate for a soft Brexit.

The final scenes of a film are the most important. As Sam Goldwyn probably never said, “Start with an earthquake, then build up to a climax.”

The last chapters of Politics on the Edge tell the story of Stewart’s quixotic bid in 2019 to become leader of the Conservative Party and — in his view — save it from itself. Like an episode of Survivor, prospective PMs, including Stewart, fall by the wayside in a series of votes until only Boris the Hutt remains.

Brexit has finally delivered its apotheosis: a man without a moral compass has been chosen to set a new course for Britain.

Meanwhile, somewhere in China, a virus is born. Its hour come at last, Covid-19 slouches towards the old and the weak. Prime Minister Johnson responds with all the alacrity of a distracted sloth.

Soon after losing the leadership ballot, Stewart resigns from the cabinet, the government and the Tory Party and retires hurt from political life. He returns to his family home in Scotland and learns to breathe again by becoming a flaneur of nature.

“One morning” as Stewart is out walking “a roe deer, leaping from the lower field, lands next to me. Startled eyes meet startled eyes.” And then with a bound, “the veins straining against the tight surface of his frightened body,” the deer heads for freedom. •

The post A love gone wrong appeared first on Inside Story.

The mass adulation came as Albanese — like a swathe of Australia’s politicos, strategic thinkers and business leaders — embraced India as the best available escape from dependency on China. Add to that the fact that the fast-growing Indian community is made up of the ideal sort of migrant: well-educated, professionally skilled, prosperous, English-speaking, pious but moderate and even cricket-loving.

India may well turn out to play a key economic role for Australia one day, and the Indian community, now nearly 800,000-strong and the second-largest foreign-born component of the population (after those from Britain), has all the qualities claimed for it.

But since the mass rally in Sydney’s former Olympic stadium in May, the lustre has come off Narendra Modi. Longstanding concerns about where he is taking India are getting more air, and other members of the Quad grouping lined up against China, and their Five Eyes intelligence allies, are questioning his scruples.

Most pointedly, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau revealed in September “credible allegations” that India was responsible for the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist gunned down in British Columbia in June. Canada immediately expelled India’s chief intelligence official in Ottawa

India called the allegations “absurd” and responded to the expulsion by sharply cutting the number of Canadian diplomats in New Delhi. But the following month, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess told the ABC he had “no reason to dispute what the Canadian government has said in this matter.”

Then, on 29 November, the US Department of Justice announced the prosecution of an Indian man allegedly commissioned by a senior intelligence official in New Delhi to organise the assassination of another Sikh separatist, US citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, on American soil. The plot was thwarted when the hired gunman turned out to be an undercover anti-drug agent.

According to a contributor to the respected US journal Foreign Affairs, any intelligence plans to kill Pannun and Nijjar would most likely have been cleared with Ajit Doval, Modi’s national security adviser: “He is known to be hands on, and the Indian intelligence bureaucracy is too hierarchical for something as high stakes as an international assassination to happen without Doval’s approval.”

The ripples spread further. A well-regarded Indian news outlet, the Print, reports that the British government asked a senior official of India’s Research and Analysis Wing, the external intelligence agency reporting to the prime minister, to leave his station in London. The US also expelled a senior official with the same agency from his station in San Francisco and blocked the agency from replacing its station chief in Washington. US president Joe Biden, has since declined an invitation to be chief foreign guest at India’s big Republic Day parade on 26 January.

That kind of foreign interference, and its alleged source, was not what Australia’s government and security apparatus had in mind when they introduced controversial laws to criminalise clandestine influence-building in 2017. Their aim was to keep an eye on Australia’s Chinese-origin community, numbering about 1.2 million, and on efforts by Beijing’s spy agencies and Communist Party “united front work” operatives to manipulate its members and recruit gullible or venal figures in the wider population.

Now it appears our spooks and analysts need to worry about the possibility of India’s intelligence service working in illegal ways to further the political aims of its ruling party. They need to educate themselves about how Modi’s brand of communal politics plays out in the diaspora, and reassess the lengths to which they believe New Delhi is ready to go.

This isn’t likely to be a short-term problem either: after nearly ten years in office, polls show Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, to be as popular as ever and his Congress Party–led opposition failing to gain much traction, pointing to another Modi victory in elections due early next year.

Modi’s campaign to turn India away from the secular, minority-inclusive model of its modern rebirth into a Hindu-majoritarian state is likely to get fresh impetus after that likely win. At the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, he seemed to float a name change from India to the ancient, pre-Muslim, pre-British Bharat. The new Indian parliament building, opened in April this year, includes a mural showing India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and part of Afghanistan as forming Akhand Bharat (“unbroken India”), an idea pushed by the far-right, Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Order), or RSS, the movement from which Modi sprang.

On 22 January, Modi will inaugurate a lavish new temple at Ayodhya to mark the legendry birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. To hundreds of millions of poorly educated Hindus, mainly in India’s north, the new Ram Birthplace Temple marks a historical truth rather than a legend. It is described as a replacement for an ancient one torn down centuries ago by a Muslim conqueror and replaced with a small mosque. That mosque was notoriously destroyed in 1992 by Hindu mobs fired up by earlier BJP leaders, initiating decades of communal strife and friction between Hindus and Muslims.

No wonder Biden didn’t want to chance standing alongside Modi four days after the new temple is opened. If he did, he might also have gazed down New Delhi’s majestic Edwin Lutyens–designed avenue — the avenue that ends in a memorial arch to the Indian dead of the British forces in the world wars — and noticed a new structure alongside, inaugurated by Modi last year. Under a stone canopy is an 8.5 metre black granite statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, the independence fighter who rejected the non-violent campaigns of Nehru and Gandhi and aligned himself with the Axis powers. After being smuggled by Nazi agents to Germany, where he met Hitler and Himmler, Bose was delivered by U-boat to the Japanese, for whom he raised an anti-British army among Indian prisoners of war. In Modi’s eyes, Australians, the British and the Americans were on the wrong side in the Pacific war.

Although Indians have been in Australia since first British settlement, the community’s present numbers were reached by a fivefold expansion only in the last twenty years. Its social and political streams are still in formation. But pointers to emerging internal pressures can be found in British historian Edward Anderson’s important new book, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora.

Of an estimated thirty million worldwide, Anderson focuses on those living in Britain, making comparisons with the United States, in both cases communities that grew large a generation earlier than Australia’s. If our diaspora follows the same pattern, a Hindu identity will grow in importance over an “Indian” one, and even more than a “South Asian” one, for its members of that faith. And that identity will increasingly be flavoured by a Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) wider than religious belief and worship.

Hindutva is almost synonymous with the Hindu nationalism pursued by Modi and his BJP: a majoritarian, conservative and militant political ideology and ethno-religious movement (in Anderson’s description) that rejects pluralistic secularism and is ascendant in contemporary India.

Strangely, Hindutva also has wide support among Hindus living outside India, who simultaneously favour a chauvinistic, majoritarian ideology in India while negotiating recognition and rights in their new homes as a “model minority” noted for peaceful and prosperous integration. “Why is it that some of the most outspokenly patriotic Indians are those who have chosen to live outside of their motherland, or may have never lived in India at all?” Anderson asks.

It’s not just an assertiveness masking insecurity or guilt about leaving for a better material life, he says, but the result of decades of cultivation by Hindutva idealogues centred on the RSS. Founded in the 1920s, the RSS has nurtured generations of pracharaks (cadres) dedicated to hardening up India’s Hindu population to throw off the influence of Muslim and then British overlords.

“The life of a pracharak,” Anderson tells us, “is in many ways modelled on an ascetic: itinerant (as and when required), abstinent and unmarried, and renouncing of material possessions (receiving no salary, but provided with accommodation and vegetarian diet).” They are often from middle-class and upper-caste backgrounds, university-educated and English speaking, and well travelled, though they don’t mix much outside RSS circles.

Although he comes from a low caste, from where he was put into a teenage marriage (apparently unconsummated), Modi spent his early adult years as an RSS pracharak. He was then placed as the BJP’s chief minister in Gujarat, just ahead of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom there that stained his reputation and kept him barred from the United States until he became prime minister. His humble origins count as a plus for a BJP often accused of trying to keep the Hindu upper castes in charge.

The RSS began its external proselytising in the 1940s among the Indian communities in East Africa, mostly from Gujarat, which thrived as commercial intermediaries between the British and the Africans. Expelled after independence, they were able to settle in English cities, notably London, Birmingham and Leicester, by virtue of their British passports. The RSS followed them, setting up in 1966 in England as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, or HSS, an organisation that remains active today.

Living in group housing in Leicester, the pracharaks organise rank-and-file recruits, the swayamsevaks, at regular shakhas that start with a Sanskrit prayer and hoisting of the saffron-coloured flag of Hinduism, followed by marching drills and practice with bamboo staves, sessions of the Indian game kabaddi, closing prayers, and singing of the RSS anthem “Namaste Sada Vatsale Matrubhoomi” (Hail to Thee O Motherland).

Physical development is very much part of the ethos. The aim, Anderson says, has been “to ‘rebuild’ a population of strong Hindu male figures, largely to countenance (while simultaneously justifying) the threatening construction of the Muslim Other…” Tolerance and Gandhian non-violence have been shelved in favour of warrior models from history and legends.

“The promotion of physical training, toughness, and group unity also relates to the perception that individualism and material comforts of the West constitute a danger for Hindus,” he writes:

Second-generation Hindus overseas are considered particularly susceptible to picking up bad habits from morally bankrupt host societies, and many have discussed the “disdain” South Asian migrants have for the lax ethics of the West, its declining parental authority, licentiousness, culture of instant gratification, weakening family units, and so on. The HSS has performed a specific role in this context, providing segregated spaces for socialisation away from “corrupting influences,” in which curative “Indian” values can be transmitted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the following is not large: the eighty-two shakhas operating in Britain have an average weekly total attendance of 1903. They are notably more casual than those in India (where volunteers turn out in uniforms), many participants are female, and the dropout rate is high. The local volunteers often find visiting RSS cadres from India possessed of a much more hard line against Muslims than they themselves feel, or are willing to express.

Recognising this tension, the cadre-based RSS and its mass affiliate the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) have slipped into the background in recent decades, pushing forward more worldly figures to head councils claiming to speak for the one million Hindus among the 1.8 million Indian-origin residents of England and Wales. The same trend is found in the Indian diaspora of the United States, which has grown to 4.2 million from one million in 1990.

The message is also much the same, expounding the virtue of ancient Hindu theology and social organisation. All religions that began in India — Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism — are claimed to be branches of Hinduism. The theory that Hinduism itself flourished among Indo-Aryan migrants from Central Asia, imposing the caste system on darker-skinned Dravidians, is portrayed as being wrong. The real invaders were the Muslim conquerors of the last millennium. Marriage and the rearing of children are the principal roles of women. The ideal diet is vegetarianism. Homosexuality is “against nature.” Caste provides social space and closer identity, and was much more tolerant and accepted until the British raj started classifying everyone. And watch out for those young Muslim men waging a “love jihad” to seduce and convert Hindu girls.

Any criticism of these historical distortions and attendant social ills is increasingly attributed to “Hinduphobia.” In fact, Hindu councils in both Britain and the United States consciously borrow the example of Jewish organisations using charges of anti-Semitism to deflect criticism of Israel. Indeed, India’s previously lukewarm, sometimes hostile relations with Israel have been transformed under Modi, who made the first visit by an Indian prime minister in 2017 and often speaks of his friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Beyond defence and corporate interests (Modi’s favoured entrepreneur Gautam Adani runs Haifa’s port) and shared suspicion of Muslims, Modi would like to follow Netanyahu’s pathway to a state with two-tiered citizenship that gives the religious majority more rights than minorities.

Alongside this assertive victimhood, which Anderson calls a “soft” neo-Hindutva, have been occasional flare-ups of a harder version, often attributed to new arrivals from India. In 2006, a vandal forced the closure of a London exhibition of paintings by the Mumbai artist M.F. Husain, a Muslim forced into exile for his depictions of Hindu goddesses. In Leicester last year, hundreds of masked young Hindus paraded through a Muslim neighbourhood shouting Jai Shri Ram (Hail Lord Ram) after watching an India vs Pakistan cricket match.

Internet trolls in India and among the diaspora fire threats of murder and rape at academics who criticise Modi and Hindutva. In 2014, Wendy Doniger, an eminent Indologist and Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, came under attack by a US-based online firebrand, Rajiv Malhotra, for her book, The Hindus. Malhotra’s campaign eventually resulted in Penguin India pulping its local edition.

Although Hindu activists often accuse Muslims of living in ghettos, the Hindus in Britain are remarkably concentrated and have low rates of marrying out of their communities. Given the first-past-the-post voting system, this has made some British constituencies and their MPs captive to the Hindu vote. Periodically, British ministers invited to their functions are embarrassed when pictures circulate showing them standing next to dubious communalists visiting from India.

Where Indians were once more inclined to the Labour Party because of its warmer embrace of migrants, Hindu organisations have swung behind the Conservatives in the past decade. The diaspora’s advance into higher income brackets would have something to do with this, but the Tories are less likely to worry about human rights issues in India and have shelved a Labour initiative to outlaw caste discrimination in Britain itself. Britain’s first Hindu prime minister, Rishi Sunak, might be more representative of the secular, US green card–holding CEO class, but he does wear his Hindu identity as a temple thread on his wrist.

Conceivably, the United States could get a president of Indian ancestry in Nikki Haley, a US-born daughter of Sikh migrants (although she converted to Christianity when she married out of the community), or a part-Indian one in Kamala Harris if she were to take over from Biden.

Australia is probably a generation off seeing an Indian-Australian close to national political leadership, though many are already at the top levels of professions and corporations. But the diaspora’s generally sunny picture is already showing some of the tensions Anderson portrays.

The RSS has a local outfit, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh Australia, running forty-nine regular shakhas with an average combined attendance of 1230 volunteers. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad is also well established, as is a self-proclaimed umbrella body, the Hindu Council of Australia, which fits Anderson’s definition of soft neo-Hindutva. For Modi’s visit in May, a new body calling itself the Indian Australian Diaspora Foundation, which claimed to include 367 professional, caste, regional, religious, cultural and local groups as well as RSS and BJP branches, organised flights and buses for thousands of attendees at the Sydney meeting.

Hard neo-Hindutva showed up in 2019 when hecklers forced the Australia India Institute at Melbourne University, set up by Kevin Rudd’s government to further bilateral relations and knowledge, to revert from public lectures to closed seminars on issues relating to Modi and Hindutva. More than a dozen India scholars severed links with the institute in protest at the decision.

Probably in response, the Albanese government announced during Modi’s visit a new body to take over the task of promoting the bilateral relationship, implicitly leaving the Australia India Institute to function as an academic think tank. The new Centre for Australia–India Relations has a banker, Swati Dave, rather than an academic as its advisory body’s chair. It will be located in Sydney’s Parramatta, a focus for the city’s Indian diaspora, whose newly elected federal MP, economist Andrew Charlton, has just written an upbeat book about the India relationship, Australia’s Pivot to India.

But there’s an important reason to think that Hindutva’s appeal might never be as great among the Indian diaspora in Australia. Our Indian population is more diverse than the British one, with Hindus barely 50 per cent of the Indian-born population and many of them drawn from India’s southern states, which are resistant to the BJP message.

As well as a large number of Christians, the diaspora also includes as many as 200,000 Sikhs, some of whom support the movement for a separate Sikh state of Khalistan in India’s Punjab. In their meetings, Modi has ambushed Albanese with charges that these elements have vandalised Hindu temples with separatist slogans. Albanese doesn’t seem to have responded by pointing out that police suspect some of these to be “false flag” operations, or that the most violent clash so far has been an attack with bats and hammers on a Sikh group in Western Sydney in February 2021 by men recognised from a BJP–HSS rally. Or if he has, we have not been told about it.

In Sydney, as in London, New York and Texas, Indian groups opposed to Modi’s Hindutva campaigns picketed outside his mass reception. This book will help our politicians understand why. •

Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism
By Edward T.G. Anderson | Hurst | $57.99 | 488 pages

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Of course, DeSantis and Newsom would each willingly take up residency in the White House in January 2025. But DeSantis’s chances of victory in November next year appear sufficiently marginal that his presidential aspirations must now be deferred until 2028 — and that’s assuming his current campaign hasn’t already undermined that postponed effort, or will do so in coming months.

The consequences of a primary challenger to a sitting president are ingrained into the Democrats’ psyche. (The most recent, Ted Kennedy’s challenging of Jimmy Carter in 1980, was widely believed to have opened the way for Ronald Reagan’s win.) And Joe Biden has long cast himself as uniquely positioned to defeat Trump. Precedent and decorum require Newsom and anyone else with presidential ambitions to wait until Biden has concluded his presidency before they announce their aspiration to replace him.

There are, however, at least two elephants in the room that could upset the status quo, both in the upcoming election and in four years’ time. The first is the possibility that Trump will come under such legal duress that he is replaced as Republican nominee. Admittedly, a party so much in his thrall is unlikely to act in even those circumstances. And if Trump is elected in 2024, it isn’t far-fetched to assume he will subsequently refuse to leave the White House, try to declare himself president for life and/or undermine the 2028 elections. Former Representative Liz Cheney has warned of this threat.

The second, much larger elephant, is Biden’s age, which creates the possibility that an unforeseen health crisis could end his candidacy before November 2024 or his second term before 2028. Health issues aside, it’s just possible — perhaps after a family intervention over the Christmas break — that Biden will be persuaded not to run and instead declare that he will focus on managing current, pressing domestic and foreign policy issues to the end — as Lyndon Johnston did in March 1968. But it’s late in the election cycle to change candidates and doing so would raise fraught questions. Would Biden endorse his vice-president Kamala Harris? If so, would the kingmakers in the Democratic Party follow his lead?

Yet another elephant — for whatever reason dismissed by the media and the pundits — is that an unexpected health event is just as likely for Trump, only three years younger, visibly overweight and under severe stress as his business prospects falter in New York.

Trump’s departure from the scene before election day would most likely see Nikki Haley become the Republican nominee, although it’s not clear she could bring along the rusted-on, Make America Great Again gang she would need to win. Recent polling shows Haley leading Biden in a hypothetical head-to-head race by four points, but Trump leads Biden by a seven-point margin in the same poll.

If Biden dies or steps down in office during his second term, Kamala Harris automatically becomes president. Her nominee for vice-president would need to be confirmed by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress. (The last time this happened was after Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, when Gerald Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller to serve as his vice-president.) If Biden serves out his term then the 2028 race for the Democratic nomination is wide open and Harris must join the field.

The line-up of Democrats eager for the presidential candidacy highlights both a recognition that any one of them could have the chance to step up ahead of 2028 — an incentive to strengthen their national profiles — and the fact that there’s a wealth of well-credentialled candidates. “So many people, it’s breathtaking,” says veteran Democratic strategist James Carville. “The level of talent in the Democratic Party in 2023 — and I say this with great confidence — is as high as any political party has ever had in my lifetime.”

Carville goes on to list party figures including state governors Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania), Andy Beshear (Kentucky), Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), Jared Polis (Colorado) and Roy Cooper (North Carolina), senators Raphael Warnock (Georgia) and Mark Kelly (Arizona) and former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu. Other names can be added to that list: New Jersey senator Cory Booker, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who all ran in 2020, along with Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and, of course, Newsom. Still others are likely to emerge, some with real chances and some who would be very long shots.

It’s impossible to predict four years ahead of time who will win a presidential race. Barack Obama, for example, was just a first-term senator when he first came to prominence courtesy of his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. As 2007 ended, his chances against Hillary Clinton, the early frontrunner, were considered slim. But in January 2008 he won the surprise victory in the Iowa primary that began to alter the contours of the campaign. Then African Americans, having previously looked to Clinton and hesitant about Obama, delivered him a stunning victory in South Carolina. After that he began to break away, gaining delegates and undermining Clinton’s claims of superior electability.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Senate — which has been called the “presidential incubator” and the “presidential nursery” — is a major launching pad for presidential contenders. In recent generations it propelled John F. Kennedy, Obama and Biden into the White House (but didn’t guarantee the success of the Bob Dole/Jack Kemp team in 1996). These days senators risk being tagged with the unfavourability ratings voters from both parties assign to Congress as a whole, now the highest in nearly four decades. Those voter sentiments might not bode well for Klobuchar (who has been in the Senate since 2007) and Booker (since 2013); both Kelly and Warnock are relative newcomers, having taken up their seats in 2020 and 2021 respectively.

State governors, especially those from the larger states, bring to presidential races their governing records. Seventeen of forty-five American presidents (counting two-timer Grover Cleveland only once) had been state governors. In the fifty-nine quadrennial elections held to date, governors have captured a total of fifty-five presidential nominations; the most recent are Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who all ran hard and successfully on their records in that job.

Once you factor in other key determinants of a viable presidential candidature like personality, ideology, fundraising capabilities, and the ability to gain early momentum by doing well in early primaries (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina) and then win in the states with large numbers of electoral college delegates (California, Texas, Florida), and then add — dare we say it — appearance, sexual orientation, race and religion, the potential winners’ list among the governors looking to run becomes much shorter.

Three people stand out: Shapiro, Beshear and Whitmer. Newsom could be added to this list — there is no denying his name recognition, donor base and political talent — but he comes with more baggage than the other three. California is troubled by an economic malaise; Newsom has pursued a salacious love life; his popularity in the state is falling. Regardless, and despite his claims to be campaigning for Biden, Newsom almost certainly sees himself as the leading candidate, and he has been busy playing that role by making official trips, with photo opportunities, to China, Israel and a series of prominent events in red states.

Having only taken office this year, Shapiro is still in the honeymoon phase of his gubernatorial stint. It remains to be seen whether the fifty-year-old moderate has staying power. Previously state attorney-general, he gained prominence by handily beating far-right Trump-backed Republican Doug Mastriano in the governor’s race by a fifteen-point margin, becoming the first Pennsylvania Democrat to succeed a Democratic incumbent in sixty-four years.

Pennsylvania’s status as a critical swing state has only enhanced Shapiro’s profile in national circles. He is seen as an ambitious politician with a history of playing the long game, as evidenced by the fact that he was a keynote speaker at the New Hampshire Democratic Party Convention in September.

Beshear became a Democratic hero in November when he won a second term as governor of Kentucky, defying the usual political leaning of his red state. The forty-five-year-old, who was first elected as governor in 2019, has emulated his father, also a two-time Kentucky governor. In his first term Beshear was credited with having responded well to a series of natural disasters — the devastating tornadoes and horrific floods that ravaged parts of Eastern Kentucky — and the pandemic.

Beshear’s opponent, Daniel Cameron, the first African American to be elected attorney-general of Kentucky, was backed by Trump. Beshear blunted Cameron’s strategy by painting himself as above the partisan fray, touting an “economy on fire” and his commitment to “Team Kentucky” and public education, and warning about the future of abortion rights under the Republicans. These messages resonated well with voters; it’s an approach that should also work well on the national stage.

Whitmer, fifty-two, has been governor of Michigan, an important swing state that voted Trump in 2016 and 2020, since 2019. She was re-elected in 2022, winning by nearly eleven points over her Republican opponent. Her signature causes are infrastructure, healthcare and abortion access. With Democrats in control of the governor’s office and both the state’s legislative chambers following last year’s election, Whitmer has pushed through tax cuts, gun control measures and protections for abortion and gay rights. She has served as one of the vice-chairs of the Democratic National Committee since January 2021.

Whitmer was recently described in the Atlantic as having a “foul-mouthed irreverence, goofy humour, and ability to pound beers and disarm adversaries.” That may not play in Peoria or Washington, DC, but one thing is clear: she knows how to deal with Trump and his ilk. As a target of his nasty rhetoric, she has accused Trump of helping to incite, and later condoning, an October 2020 plot to abduct her. The planned kidnap by a group of men associated with the Wolverine Watchmen, a Michigan-based militia group furious over tough Covid-19 rules and perceived threats to gun ownership, was thwarted by the FBI and undercover agents — something for which Trump took credit, while simultaneously downplaying the threat to Whitmer.

Biden’s campaign team vetted her as a possible running mate in 2020 and Biden confirmed she was on his shortlist in March that year. According to reports, Whitmer removed herself from consideration, urging Biden to choose a Black woman instead — a smart and thoughtful move at a time when the nation was still in the midst of a reckoning over race and inequality following the death of George Floyd at the hands of white police.

Whitmer might be the best of the three, but she faces one clear obstacle — she’s a woman. On that basis alone she would be ruled out of consideration as Harris’ vice-presidential nominee if one were needed.

Is America finally ready for a woman as president? A paper published on the website of the distinguished political scientist Larry Sabato offers an in-depth analysis of the obstacles female candidates face on their paths to the White House. On balance, it finds, Democrats are more likely to support female candidates than are Republicans. A PRRI poll found in 2016 that more than two-thirds of Donald Trump supporters believe society as a whole has become “too soft and feminine.” And Trump has used the worst aspects of masculinity as a political strategy.

With each of the potential Democratic candidates already receiving donor support, it’s useful to look at where the money is going. Whitmer, Newsom and Pritzker have all recently launched national political groups. Whitmer has created a federal political action committee called “Fight Like Hell” to boost abortion rights as a plus for Biden and congressional candidates next year, giving her a visible role in the 2024 campaign. Newsom has “Campaign for Democracy,” which is focused on gun control; Pritzker’s “Think Big America” aims to protect reproductive rights and fight extremism.

For the moment, all of the Democrats who harbour presidential ambitions (hidden and not so hidden) must focus on the task at hand — getting Biden elected next year. Everyone’s political ambitions will end up in the dustbin if Trump is re-elected.

An opinion piece for CNN Politics artfully describes the current low-key jockeying as a “delicate and sometimes uncomfortable dance.” For the next eleven months, it goes on, “they are stuck being intriguing but not enticing, stoking flames but not fanning them. That task has been made more fraught when their very existence reminds voters — who have made consistently clear that they want another alternative to an eighty-one-year-old president — about what could have been.” •

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The gold in Anthony Albanese’s Midas touch, meanwhile, has turned to something of a slightly different colour, and the flat, syllable-mangling delivery that was once the secret to his connection with unpretentious middle Australia is now dreary and uninspiring. It gets worse: apparently he’s “weak,” a “follower, not a leader” and a “beta male” (ouch), according to focus group quotes plastered over News Corp’s Sunday tabloids.

Last week I did a very challenging thing: I watched question time, or at least large chunks of it, over a couple of days. I wanted to see how both major parties are behaving within this new Labor-is-acutely-mortal paradigm.

I expected cost of living to be on high rotation among opposition speakers. After all, it’s the biggest and most intractable problem the government faces. To my surprise Dutton instead asked question after question of the prime minister about his supposed failure to “stand up to China,” as he and Scott Morrison dedicated so much time to doing, with little evident damage other than to themselves, in the dying days of the last government.

Other questions focused on the repercussions of the High Court decision that set free a refugee child sex offender and all the other “hardened criminals” now in the community. Exactly the sort of thing you’d expect this former home affairs minister to jump on, and something that is at least more likely to hit a short-term nerve in voterland.

And in the government too: if there’s one issue that produces a sinking feeling in the collective Labor gut it’s the whole asylum seeker, refugee and immigration tangle. Unlike with the questions about China, the government’s response — and not just under parliamentary privilege — was completely over the top: hysterical and desperate, with some frontbenchers even bellowing about Dutton being soft on paedophiles.

It’s one thing to chip away at the opposition leader’s self-proclaimed toughness on the issue by revealing home truths about incompetence on his watch. Digging up letters to the current immigration minister from WA Liberal senator Dean Smith requesting the release of a convicted child sex offender certainly highlights the opposition’s disingenuousness.

But “protecting paedophiles” sounds grubby and deranged. It tells voters the government is scared. And who would believe it of any opposition leader in living memory?

Unlike during the Rudd era, Albanese’s Labor has managed to keep the boats stopped. Assuming it remains that way up to the election, “boat people” won’t be an issue. The extent of this general topic’s impact on past election results is generally overstated anyway. And why play on Dutton’s preferred terrain?

There’s a strand of Labor that yearns for the pre-Whitlam days, before Kim Beazley Senior’s famous “dregs of the middle class” hijacked the party of workers and White Australia. We saw it when Julia Gillard replaced Rudd and immediately started channelling John Howard. Some thought it awfully clever politics, at least at first, but it ended up reinforcing Tony Abbott and Morrison’s messaging and normalising their gross behaviour.

I still believe Dutton is unlikely to be opposition leader at the next election, assuming it’s in 2025. Just today Nine papers carry a piece about his deputy’s plan to win back teal seats. Sussan Ley is everything Dutton is not, and the obvious replacement should one be needed.

As pathetic as it sounds, it’s likely both sides are desperate to do well in the final Newspoll of the year so they can relax over the summer. But a truly clever prime minister would try to keep Dutton in place, because when he goes the government will sorely miss him.

Which is, I suppose, what he’s doing, if inadvertently. But there are better ways than lowering your own stature to raise your opponent’s.

Perhaps that’s being too simplistic, though. Troops need to be kept happy. Bill Shorten still has a lean and hungry look, and while the chances of a comeback are not even minuscule, we have seen many times how unsuccessful challengers (on the Coalition’s side in 2018, for instance) can make an incumbent’s position unsustainable.

It was only in June this year (though it feels a lot longer ago) that I finished a piece with these words:

We are only one year in, which as past governments have shown tells us nothing about how things will pan out. And we’ve not seen how Albanese copes under pressure, in difficult times. They will come, sooner or later.

Those times have arrived. And the answer to how he’s coping? Not well. •

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But Kissinger’s pleasure was surely mixed with bitterness at the outpouring of vitriol from the anti-imperialist left, who have long condemned him as a war criminal who deserves prison rather than praise. Marking the centenary birthday, Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC said he wanted to talk about “the many, many people around the world” who didn’t get to live even to the age of sixty because of Kissinger. He should be “ashamed to be seen in public,” Bhaskar Sunkara and Jonah Walters wrote in the Guardian.

They and many others trotted out the usual charges from his days as top foreign policy adviser to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: brutally and unnecessarily prolonging the Vietnam war, bombing neutral Cambodia, trying to help overthrow a democratically elected leader in Chile, greenlighting the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, abetting genocide in East Pakistan, winking at state torture and killings in Argentina, and more.

The former secretary of state has heard this line of criticism for half a century, and the evidence suggests that it stings. Deeply protective of his honour, he has typically reacted angrily to challenges to his integrity and intelligence. In early 1970, for example, at Johns Hopkins University, a student asked whether he considered himself a war criminal — presumably referring to heavy civilian casualties in the Vietnam war. Kissinger walked out and refused to speak there again for the next twenty years.

In later years, his reaction to such questions changed very little. What did change was his willingness to be put in situations where he could be asked such questions. Being grilled about “crimes” was something that happened only when Kissinger was taken by surprise.

In 1979, for example, British journalist David Frost shocked Kissinger by posing hard-hitting questions about the bombing and invasion of Cambodia. Frost suggested that the policies Kissinger promoted had created conditions that led to the Khmer Rouge takeover and the genocide that left up to two million Cambodians dead. After the first taping, an irate Kissinger complained long and hard to the top brass at NBC, who leaned on Frost to go softer on the famed diplomat in the next taping.

There is little evidence that his skin has thickened since then. In 1999, when Kissinger was plugging the third and final volume of his memoirs, British journalist Jeremy Paxman challenged him about Cambodia and Chile. Kissinger answered, testily, and then walked out. At a State Department event in 2010, historian Nick Turse asked him about the number of Cambodians who were killed in the US bombings. “Oh, come on,” Kissinger said angrily. When Turse followed up later, Kissinger became sarcastic — “I’m not smart enough for you,” he said — and stalked off.

Last month, when Kissinger sat down to talk about his hundredth birthday with his long-time friend Ted Koppel, former host of the popular television show Nightline, he probably expected a softball interview like the ones the American media usually serve him. But Koppel felt obliged to point out that some people consider him a war criminal. He brought up the bombing of Cambodia, intending to suggest that Kissinger had valid strategic reasons for supporting it. “You did it in order to interdict…,” Koppel said, heading to the explanation Kissinger has always given: it was not so much Cambodia that was being bombed, and certainly not Cambodians, but North Vietnamese supply lines.

Kissinger heard only criticism. “Come on,” he interjected in an irritated tone. When Koppel tried to press him on the price Cambodia paid, Kissinger again interrupted with “Come on now.” For Kissinger, the topic is not worthy of discussion.

As this exchange indicates, Kissinger’s belief in his own righteousness is unbudgeable. In his view, then and now, the bombing of Cambodia was a strategic necessity. He long claimed, falsely, that bombs hit areas “either minimally populated or totally unpopulated by civilians.” In fact, American bombs killed and wounded tens of thousands of innocent Cambodians who were simply trying to live their lives in their own villages.

It’s not that Kissinger wants to argue that the costs of his (and Nixon’s) policies were worthwhile. He prefers to ignore the costs altogether. To him, counting the lives lost, in Cambodia and elsewhere, is a distraction. What matters is that the policies he advocated, in his perception, prevented American deaths and led to a more peaceful world order that saved millions of lives — indeed, potentially saved humanity from nuclear conflagration.

Detractors obsessed with the costs are, in his view, disingenuous and even deranged. In the 1970s he sneered at anti-war protesters as driven by “self-hatred.” Dismissing their arguments as irrational, he has said that leftists just want to “feel sorry for themselves.” Those who talk about his alleged criminality, in his view, merely show their “ignorance.” If you question the bombing of Cambodia, he told Koppel, you simply don’t want “to think.”

Hurt and resentful at being denounced, Kissinger has as little empathy for his critics and their perspectives as he had for the Cambodians and others who bore the brunt of his choices. If he had shown anything other than smug indifference to the price paid for his diplomacy, he might have diminished some of the zeal of his tormentors. But he remains locked in a maximalist position: unwilling to express any remorse, he ensures that his antagonists see only his guilt. •

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Might it continue dropping? (The rather jumpy Roy Morgan had Labor support dipping to 49.5 earlier in November before bouncing back to 52.5 per cent. Let’s see what December brings.)

Coming after the Voice result, the trajectory has led at least a couple of excited commentators to anticipate a one-term Albanese government. The Australian’s Peta Credlin has penned a rallying of the troops and a hoorah for Liberal leader Peter Dutton. In the Nine papers, Shaun Carney’s rather tendentious offering, aimed squarely at prime minister Anthony Albanese, even implies the PM might not last until the next election.

A fortunate by-product of the narrowing is that we no longer need to endure stories of the Coalition’s existential crisis because of low support among young voters.

But how much do surveys this far before an election tell us about the upcoming result? The answer: nothing at all. This was true when the Labor government was way ahead, and it’s true today. It’s only big, sustained leads for oppositions that should give us pause, and even then we’ve seen the last-minute government comebacks getting bigger over recent decades.

Can we treat this as routine midterm doldrums? Dutton “cutting through”? Damage inflicted by the Voice referendum and the perception that it was an expensive indulgence? Kudos for the opposition leader for backing the right horse?

Or is it the economy — with hip pockets screaming about high inflation, particularly among that not-insignificant minority of voters with variable mortgages?

Or was this always going to happen once the honeymoon ended?

Everyone with a keyboard can explain what the government’s been doing wrong, but that’s all post hoc rationalisation of the polls, much as we saw in the Voice campaign. The next election will be decided by voters’ perceptions of the alternatives on offer, not illusory poll-generated “momentum.”

Still, as the year comes to a close, Mr Albanese must be a rather gloomy prime minister. For election watchers and the political bubble, opinion polls tell us how parties are “travelling” — and who doesn’t want to be seen to be “travelling well”? It makes for an easier life in the media and keeps MPs, most importantly marginal seat holders, and the wider party content. Most would agree that the current polls don’t predict the next election result, but they do measure something approximating the electorate’s happiness with the government.

It’s all indisputably good news for Dutton. The polls, and the interpreting of them, buttress his leadership. And if more friendly ones arrive in December he’ll be able to relax over summer.

But is what’s good for Dutton’s position good for the Coalition — specifically, its chances of forming government after the next election?

The Liberal leader has explicitly repositioned his party away from big business, with its “woke” attitudes and “virtue signalling” — and implicitly away from voters in wealthy, urban, formerly blue-ribbon electorates too — towards the “outer suburbs and regions.” Such politicking, politely referred to as “values”-driven, involves encouraging a fear of the outside world and, at home, resentment towards ethnic minorities. This is Dutton’s political comfort zone and indeed his brand. It’s what drove his rise to the top of his party.

In olden days the Liberals had to tread carefully on this path lest they alienate voters in wealthy blue-ribbon electorates. Now they’ve lost most of those seats, the constraint has loosened. It’s easier to forgo potential gains than consciously sacrifice current sitting MPs.

The six teal 2022 wins were all at the expense of Liberal “moderates.” Each of those Liberals supported Malcolm Turnbull against Dutton in the 2018 leadership spill, for instance. Who in the current party room is vulnerable to teal-like incursions? Paul Fletcher (Bradfield) and Julian Leeser (Berowra) on Sydney’s north shore come to mind. They also supported Turnbull, so perhaps would be no great loss from Dutton’s point of view.

The strategy might work, but it would probably require a very big national vote for the Coalition. Anything around 51–49 either way would likely produce a hung parliament, and while the teals won’t necessarily vote as a bloc, it’s difficult to imagine the six, and independents Zali Steggall (Warringah) and Helen Haines (Indi), supporting a Dutton-led Coalition.

Put simply, Peter Dutton is not a Liberal leader the teals would be likely to elevate to the prime ministership.

And then there are voters in teal seats. We don’t know what the crossbench will look like in 2025. If Steggall’s 2022 re-election is any guide then the six will romp home. But that was against a poor Liberal candidate, and Scott Morrison as prime minister.

Detestation of Morrison was a core driver of the teals’ success. And many of the characteristics those voters couldn’t abide in Morrison are shared by the current Liberal leader.

We do live in unpredictable times, with low primary vote support on both sides leaving more to the vagaries of preferences and how-to-vote cards. With those teal seats in the way, the Coalition will very likely need a lot more than 50 per cent of the national two-party-preferred vote to form government at the next election. More like 52 or 53 per cent.

Or another leader. One the crossbenchers felt they could work with. •

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The great thing about Joe Biden as a subject is his verbosity. He does a terrible job at suppressing his internal monologue. His staff and friends have a clear understanding of his mind, because they are exposed to so much of it.

Biden’s tendency to bloviate — a word that has failed to establish itself this side of the Pacific despite favourable conditions — and his habit of veering dangerously off-script at critical moments are the stuff of legend. His ascent to the presidency drew a collective eye roll among some Democrats, but also the hope that his ordinariness would bring about a period of dull but competent politics. The nation might at last have a chance to catch its breath and lick its wounds.

Despite that hope, tedium has been in short supply. Beginning shortly after the Capitol riot, his administration had to cope with the continuing Covid crisis, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not to mention punishing domestic battles over immigration, inflation and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The Last Politician leads the reader through the first two years of Biden’s presidency with an occasionally breathless immediacy. Foer’s liberal use of fabricated dialogue and rapid shifts of perspective among a large cast of key players enliven his book, which has become a bestseller in the United States. The product of around 300 interviews, it offers West Wing–style personal conflict and colour, and the same semi-heroic portrayal of the sleep-deprived governing elite.

Foer conveys the limitations and quirks of his protagonists without falling into easy cynicism or caricature. Criticism of politicians is muted except when their wrongdoing is blatant, the petulant obstructionism of the Trump administration during the transition of power being a case in point. The depiction of Joe Manchin, the senator for West Virginia who repeatedly held his party hostage as the fiftieth vote in the Senate, might have been scathing. Instead, Foer offers a humanising sketch of a self-important geezer with one eye on his legacy and another on his easily bruised sense of honour.

Biden is drawn in an equally generous light. He can be short-tempered when challenged but swallows his pride and breaks bread to bring legislative combatants back to the negotiating table. He is occasionally caught flat-footed, notably in response to the Supreme Court’s dismantling of abortion rights, but quickly finds his way back to clarity. His oratorical aspirations are undermined by faux pas, as when an off-script remark suggested he was seeking regime change in Russia. He owns his administration’s failures in the chaotic evacuation from Kabul and steers a steady course between his party’s progressive wing and what the electorate will tolerate.

To Foer, Biden has been consistently underestimated, partly for reasons of social class. As a “lunch-pail cornball” he lacks Obama’s Ivy League lustre but can arguably connect to people more authentically. (Biden told a friend that his former boss couldn’t even say “fuck you” properly.) For all his chronic “indiscipline and imprecision,” Biden’s term has seen significant achievements. He stood firm against Putin, helped to corral European states in defence of Ukraine, began to restore America’s global reputation as a responsible power, and averted the expected Republican “red wave” in the midterm elections.

The domestic achievement that draws the most attention from Foer but is less well known in Australia is the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides a transformational boost to solar and wind energy and other green technologies. The act’s path was littered with obstacles, and Foer credits Biden with the perspective, farsightedness, persistence and willingness to compromise that made it possible.

In praising these geezerly virtues Foer offers a partial and unconvincing defence of American gerontocracy. Age brings wisdom, but not reliably. Biden may have a rare and insufficiently acknowledged gift for getting things done within the political institutions he loves, but The Last Politician reveals those institutions to be open to abuse precisely because of their reliance on the transactional deal-making at which Biden excels.

Two senators can meet secretly to carve hundreds of billions of dollars from a piece of legislation to meet one senator’s idiosyncratic demands. Vast, nation-shaping agreements can be made on a houseboat over beer and pasta. Deals can be undone by perceived slights to a congressman’s honour. War efforts can be endangered because the leader of an embattled country’s tweets convey insufficient gratitude to his American funders. Members of Congress can be made to demonstrate their trustworthiness by looking one another in the eye.

The denizens of Washington can be divided into hacks and wonks, Foer writes. “You were either a political animal or a policy nerd.” Biden, he says, is an “old hack,” one of the last, wisest exponents of the dying art of congressional horsetrading. The Last Politician mounts a convincing case for Biden’s presidential achievements, but it is less clear that we should mourn the passing of his generation’s style of politics. •

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future
By Franklin Foer | Penguin Press | US$30 | 432 pages

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In an election noted for the number of male candidates promising to take on a female running mate, Hsiao was not the first woman to make an appearance. In September, independent presidential candidate Terry Gou, billionaire founder of Foxconn, made headlines with his choice of running mate: actress and motivational speaker Tammy Lai, familiar to Taiwanese Netflix subscibers as the fictional presidential candidate in the series Wave Makers. Gou has withdrawn from the race but Terry and Tammy posters can still be seen on buses all over Taipei.

In contrast to Tammy Lai, Hsiao Bi-khim’s political experience is firmly grounded in Taiwanese party politics. She first came to prominence in 1999, when at the age of twenty-seven she was invited to serve as international affairs director for the DPP. Appearing on television for the first of many such interviews, she explained who she was: born in Japan in 1971 to a Taiwanese father and American mother, educated in the United States, Taiwanese in her heart. In transliterating her personal name into English, she uses the Taiwanese pronunciation, Bi-khim, not the Mandarin.

Her career unfolded within the occasionally uncomfortable embrace of the DDP. She grew up under martial law in Taiwan, before multi-party elections were a possibility, and left for the United States in 1986, the very year the DPP was founded. By the time she returned as an adult, Taiwan was in transition to democracy and the DPP was beginning to challenge the ascendancy of the ruling Kuomintang, or KMT.

Hsiao was working for DPP leader Chen Shui-bian in 2000 when he inflicted on the KMT its first crushing defeat in a general election. She surrendered her American citizenship that same year in order to qualify for public office. The following year, aged thirty, she was herself elected to the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s parliament. She has now spent close to quarter of a century working in political or para-political roles in or for Taiwan.

This second homecoming comes at a crucial time in the political cycle. The 2024 election is less than two months away. President Tsai Ing-wen, who brought the DPP back to power in 2016, has completed two terms of office and by the terms of the constitution is ineligible to stand again. Next May she will hand over to whoever wins the 13 January election. The DPP will be hoping that it is Lai Ching-te, and so far opinion polls have him in the lead.

Although the lead is steady, it is slim, and popular sentiment favours a change of government. If Taiwan had a two-party preferred system of voting, Lai would be staring at defeat. Last week that possibility seemed closer to realisation when the dynamic new Taiwan People’s Party, or TPP, signed an agreement with the KMT to run a unity ticket. In the lead-up to the agreement, support for Lai dropped to well below the 35 per cent “safety bar.” This marriage of convenience quickly collapsed, but with Lai’s approval ratings so low, even a victory in the presidential election would mean political chaos if a correspondingly low number of DPP legislators were to be returned.

Under these circumstances, Hsiao Bi-khim’s appearance at Lai’s side on Monday could not have been better timed. For the preceding five days, the media had been in a frenzy first over the deal between the KMT and the TPP and then over its spectacular collapse. For longer still, the potential deal and its brokers had dominated the local political news. The DPP’s loss of visibility over this period contributed to its decline in opinion polls. With the deal in shambles, the sight of the high-achieving and well-regarded Hsiao standing alongside the current vice-president should have been reassuring to more than simply DPP supporters. That has yet to show in the polls.

Disaffection with the DPP government in the electorate is attributable to Taiwan’s economic slowdown. Projected growth this year is the lowest in eight years — since Tsai Ing-wen took office, that is. Outside an enviable high-tech industry, manufacturing on the island is disappearing. Salaries are stagnant and prices are rising. The workforce is ageing. Youth unemployment is high and job security low. A young male “precariat” is flocking to alternative parties.

Adding to the malaise are sanctions by China, including bans on tourism to the island and imports of Taiwanese produce, which are slated home by critics government to the deterioration of relations with China under Tsai Ing-wen. Markets responded positively to news of the opposition unity ticket — while it persisted — last week.

If the economy were booming, other things would matter less. As it is, opposition parties have found plenty of other targets for attack: the government’s handling of Covid; corruption on the part of legislators; incidents of sexual harassment and their cover-up (not limited to the DPP but particularly damaging to it as the party in office); food safety; energy security; sleeping with the enemy; and even the shelf life of eggs.

Hsiao, who is close to the current president as well as the wannabe future one, can’t avoid being associated with the DPP’s failures, such as they are. But she has a strong record as a legislator and political campaigner, and strong ties to the south and east, important factors in a country where the capital and much of the population are in the north. She grew up in Tainan, where her father served as pastor in the Presbyterian church. Between 2012 and 2020 she was the DPP representative in Hualien, on the east coast, once a “deep blue” KMT stronghold. Hsiao is credited with weakening the KMT’s grip there in 2012 and breaking it in 2016, when she won the seat.

In the Chinese press she stands accused of serving American rather than Taiwanese interests: the expression “running dog of the Americans,” so often used in Mao’s time, has been used of her. But in a country with a favourable view of the United States, her native-level English, American heritage and strong performance as Taiwan’s representative in Washington all count in her favour. Her commitment to Taiwan is unassailable. She speaks Taiwanese as well as English and Mandarin.

True to her Presbyterian upbringing (Presbyterian being synonymous with progressivism in Taiwan), she stands for progressive politics. Taiwanese society is socially conservative and in a referendum in 2018 a majority voted against marriage reform. When the legislature nonetheless passed the reform bill, Hsiao didn’t brush over the contradiction but pointed to the responsibility of a government to all its citizens. “We need to take responsibility for the referendum last year,” she declared, “and we need to take responsibility for people who have suffered from incomplete laws or faced discrimination.”

If she is more progressive than the majority of her compatriots on social issues, Hsiao is at one with them on the issue of Taiwanese sovereignty. A majority of people in Taiwan now identify as Taiwanese rather than as hybrid Chinese–Taiwanese and hostility to China is deep-seated among DPP supporters.

It follows that China regards the DPP in general as anathema. As de facto ambassador in the United States, Hsiao was subject to vitriolic attacks in the Chinese media. News of her pending appointment as presidential running mate was criticised as portending a phenomenon of “independence on top of independence” in Taiwanese politics. Ever responsive to signals from China, the KMT called the announcement a recipe for disaster, bringing “troubles at home, perils abroad.”

It is difficult to tell how greatly China features as a factor in the minds of electors. Taiwanese have virtually no appetite for unification under the Chinese Communist Party but they have lived for a long time with the threat of forced unification hanging over their heads. It is impossible not to be struck by a certain sangfroid in the attitudes of people on the street. As they will point out, they have no means of preventing a war. While they wait for the threat either to eventuate or to evaporate, they want to be able to buy fresh eggs, see a doctor when they need to, and house their families if they have them. The birth rate in Taiwan has itself become a political issue, with rival candidates offering rival policies to get women to have more babies (KMT) or get more women to have babies (TPP).

The dangers of provocation posed by the DPP’s leaning towards independence nonetheless make cross-strait relations an obvious issue for opposition parties. Accordingly, KMT campaign posters are running the slogan “We don’t want war; peace on two shores.” Both the KMT and the TPP have promised to resurrect the Cross Straits Services Agreement in the interests both of boosting the economy and easing political tensions. This very agreement inspired a massive protest in 2014 and helped to bring down the KMT government in 2016. During the 2014 student occupation of the Legislative Yuan, Hsiao Bi-khim was one of the legislators who supported the protestors by keeping watch at the premises. But times have changed since then, as everyone knows. One of the leaders of the 2014 protest is now himself running for the TPP.

Hsiao won’t be able to avoid talking about cross-strait relations in the lead-up up to the election. At an international media conference on Thursday she had to field a barrage of questions on exactly this issue. Contrary to statements from China, however, she is not one of the independence diehards of the DPP. To the extent that Lai is regarded as leaning just a bit too far in that direction, Hsiao may help give balance to his campaign and claw back some middle ground. This would be true to her established image as a “cat warrior” who — in contrast to China’s “wolf diplomacy” — treads a delicate line between self-determination and confrontation.

Election campaigns in Taiwan are restricted by law to a period of twenty-eight days counting backwards from the eve of the election day. The pre-campaign has been rumbling on for most of this year, pending the formal registration of candidates on or before Friday 24 November. Lai Ching-te and Hsiao Bi-khim registered on Tuesday.

On Wednesday and Thursday this week it still seemed possible that the KMT and TPP would patch things up, but the chance was faint. TPP presidential candidate Ko Wen-je had said publicly that he hates three things: “mosquitoes, cockroaches, and the KMT.” Granted that he was in a bad temper, it was a difficult statement to unsay. A poll taken in the middle of the week showed, moreover, that the gap between the DPP and KMT had narrowed to less than one percentage point, reducing the KMT’s incentive to seek an alliance.

On Friday morning, all speculation ended when separate TPP and KMT tickets were announced.  Ko Wen-je would team with TPP legislator Wu Hsin-yeh — a woman, as he had promised. The KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih had also said he provisionally favoured a woman as running mate, but in the end he came up with senior party figure, Jaw Shaw-kong. If the mid-week poll is right, the contest will boil down, again, to a two-party race between the DPP’s Lai-Hsiao team and the KMT’s Hou-Jaw.

Seventy-two years old, the son of a KMT soldier and an advocate of unification, Jaw could hardly provide a starker contrast to Hsiao Bi-khim. More clearly than the presidential candidates themselves, the two symbolise the different choices facing the electorate in January. •

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Curtin’s famous statement came in late December — and I will quote it because it is meet and right so to do. The prime minister said: “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with Britain.”

With those carefully chosen words — “inhibitions,” “pangs” and “kinship” — Curtin acknowledged that this geopolitical pivot carried an emotional cost for Australians. The population was still overwhelmingly of British descent and “home” was Britain, even for many of those born here. Curtin’s words therefore implied a national coming of age, a relinquishment of childhood dependence, a step into maturity. A British dominion was asserting an independent foreign policy. Australia, facing peril, was insisting on a direct, unmediated relationship with the United States of America.

When we think of Curtin, it is so often this declaration that comes to mind for it represents a cool Australian assessment of geopolitical realities at a moment of existential threat for the nation. My predecessors as lecturers in this series have often revisited this declaration too. They have analysed the geopolitical world of Curtin and its transformation through the decades that followed: superpower rivalry and the cold war, the reconstruction of postwar society, the strengthening American alliance, the rise of China, empire and decolonisation, the reckoning with a settler nation’s colonial past, Australia’s defence and security in a globalised world. These are all extrapolations of the world Curtin knew; he either played a part in bringing them about or might reasonably have foreseen them. His words echo down the years with enduring meaning.

But there is a dimension of the future that he could not possibly see or even imagine. Indeed, it has blindsided us all. That is my subject tonight.

When John Curtin died in office in 1945, his legendary status was confirmed and his words gained even more weight. The year of his death became another turning point: the loss of a revered prime minister, the end of the second world war, a new era of social reconstruction in which Curtin had invested, the beginning of a long economic boom such as Australia had not known since the 1880s, and the unleashing of the atomic bomb.

The atomic era was born eleven days after Curtin’s death. On 16 July, the world’s first nuclear device was exploded at the Trinity test site in New Mexico. Stratigraphers identify geological eras by residues in rocks, and 1945 is marked in sediment by the abrupt global geological signature of nuclear fallout.

Curtin was acutely conscious of Australia’s place in the world. “World-mindedness” was a common phrase in the 1940s, expressing an aspiration for peace and understanding after decades of war. Curtin also thought globally, for he was a citizen of an empire that spanned the Earth, a pacifist and a politician keenly aware of the international labour movement. He was conscious that a land at the bottom of the globe could not isolate itself from an increasingly connected world. He revived and extended immigration and joined international negotiations leading to global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. His colleague, Dr Evatt, would later serve as president of the United Nations General Assembly.

So there was world-mindedness and there were global social and political perspectives, but did Curtin ever think in terms of the planet, a living, breathing, vulnerable Earth? Probably not. This requires environmental thinking in deep time and deep space, a consciousness that has evolved in our own lifetimes. It’s a perspective and an understanding that Curtin and his contemporary leaders could not have foreseen or even imagined.

John Edwards writes beautifully in the first volume of his book, John Curtin’s War (2007), of Curtin’s sense of time and space. Edwards reconstructs Curtin’s regular commute across the Nullarbor — his crossing of the vast treeless plain by train from Perth to Canberra, a journey that took him five nights and four days on six different trains with five changes of gauge. He describes Curtin and his fellow passengers smelling “the faint dry fragrance” of saltbush and mallee scrub “as it had been for millions of years.” When stretching their legs during the stops, they walked the bed of an ancient sea and “crunched fossils of sea creatures underfoot.” Edwards reminds us that “In its entire length the Trans-Australian track did not cross a single permanent stream of water.”

What a path to the parliament! There were 500 kilometres of “precisely straight track” surrounded by desert where Curtin “could see the circle of the plain around him from horizon to horizon.” At night through the right-hand windows he could pick out the points of the Southern Cross. He preferred not to fly, and anyway, the air services were neither frequent nor comfortable. But later during wartime, when he was forced to fly the Atlantic, Curtin told his secretary that he placed his hopes of making the crossing in the skill of the pilot, the rotation of Earth, and God Almighty. That is, human ingenuity, the steady old reliable planet, and God.

It is that view of the steady old reliable planet, the unchanging Earth, that has been disrupted in our lifetimes. How has our understanding of the world — the planet — changed since John Curtin’s death?

In the first decades of the twenty-first century we are living in “uncanny times,” weird, strange and unsettling in ways that question nature and culture and even the possibility of distinguishing between them. The modern history of the Western world — the Renaissance, the expansion of European peoples across the globe, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dawning of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution — these are chiefly stories of the separation of culture from nature; indeed, they are stories of the mastery of culture over nature. Now in our own time we find nature and culture collapsing into one another all around us. No wonder it feels uncanny.

The Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh uses the term “uncanny” in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). For him, the word “uncanny” captures our experience of what he calls “the urgent proximity of non-human presences.” He’s referring to other creatures, insects, animals, plants, biota, the very elements themselves — water, earth, air, fire — and our renewed and long-forgotten sense of dependence upon them.

The planet is alive, says Ghosh, and only for the last three centuries have we forgotten that. We have been suffering from “the Great Derangement,” a disturbing condition of wilful and systematic blindness to the consequences of our own actions, when we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support the survival of our species. That’s what’s uncanny about our times: that we are half-aware of this predicament yet also paralysed by it, caught between horror and hubris.

We inhabit a critical moment in the history of Earth and of life on this planet, and a most unusual one in terms of our own human history. To understand the implications of the present, we have to learn to think in deep time.

It’s very hard for us humans to comprehend or even imagine deep time. If you think of Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, that is, the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand, then one stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases all of human history. The discussion of deep time is full of these sorts of metaphors — human history as the last inch of the cosmic mile, the last few seconds before midnight, the skin of paint atop the Eiffel Tower. Metaphor is possibly the only level on which we can comprehend such immensities of time.

In the last couple of decades we have developed three powerful historical metaphors for making sense of the ecological crisis we inhabit. One is that we live in the Sixth Extinction. Humans have wiped out about two-thirds of the world’s wildlife in just the last half-century. Let that sentence sink in. It has happened in less than a human lifetime. This is an extinction rate a hundred to a thousand times higher than was normal in nature.

There have been other such catastrophic collapses in the diversity of life on Earth, five of them sudden shocking falls in the graph of biodiversity separated by tens of millions of years, the last one in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. We now have to ask ourselves: are we inhabiting — and causing — the Sixth Extinction? In 2014 the American journalist Elizabeth Kolbert wrote an influential book called The Sixth Extinction, and she subtitled it An Unnatural History. It is unnatural because the Sixth Extinction involves, to some extent, our consciousness and intent.

Another metaphor for the extraordinary character of our times is the idea of the Anthropocene. This is the insight that we have entered a new geological epoch in the history of Earth and have now left behind the 12,000 years of the relatively stable epoch known as the Holocene, the period since the last great ice age. The new epoch of the Anthropocene recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, its atmosphere, oceans, climate, biodiversity, even its rocks and stratigraphy. It places humans on a par with variations in Earth’s orbit, glaciers, volcanoes, asteroid strikes and other geophysical forces.

There is debate about exactly when the Anthropocene began, but one definition is that we were first jolted into the new epoch by the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, when we began digging up and burning fossil fuels. That brilliant and profligate exploitation of a finite, buried resource underpinned population growth and economic expansion — and it also unleashed carbon on a massive and accelerating scale and began changing the atmosphere of the planet.

Another date given for the beginning of the Anthropocene is around 1945, the year of Curtin’s death. It was, as we’ve seen, the beginning of the atomic era. It also initiated an exponential shift in the impact of humans on the planet. In the mid twentieth century, the human enterprise exploded dramatically in population and energy use and rapidly began to outstrip its planetary support systems. World population, water use, tropical forest loss, ocean acidification, species extinction, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, fertiliser consumption and so on, all soared after 1950. This turning point is known as the Great Acceleration.

So I’ve talked about the Sixth Extinction and the Anthropocene. And there is a third potent metaphor for the moment we inhabit. It concerns the history and future of fire. It suggests that we are entering not just the Anthropocene but also a fire age that historian Stephen Pyne has called the Pyrocene. The planet is heating due to human greenhouse gas emissions and it is heating so quickly that it threatens to tip Earth into an escalating cycle of fire. In other words, we are entering an extended fire age that is comparable to past ice ages.

Let’s take a moment to think about those ice ages.

Some 2.6 million years ago, Earth entered a period of rhythmical ice ages — a geological epoch called the Pleistocene — and during this epoch average global temperatures dropped 6–10°C and ice sheets at the poles extended dramatically across Eurasia and North America. These repeated glaciations were harsh and demanded innovation and versatility; they were a selective pressure on evolution and promoted the emergence of humanity on Earth. Throughout the Pleistocene, the ice ages were punctuated by brief warmer periods known as interglacials, which generally lasted about 10,000 years.

We are living in an interglacial right now; geologists have separated it off from the Pleistocene and called it the Holocene, which means “recent.” But it is really part of the same rhythmic pattern that has prevailed since we evolved. We humans are creatures of the ice. The Pyrocene — the fire age — is something we’ve never seen before. The Pyrocene threatens to knock Earth out of the steady planetary rhythm that has seen the birth of our own species.

How do we know about these ancient rhythmic ice ages? By reading the rocks, of course, but now also by studying the ice itself. I’m fortunate to have visited both of Earth’s ice caps, and the most awesome one is definitely ours, the southern one, Antarctica. I twice voyaged south with the Australian Antarctic Division, on the second occasion at the invitation of the Australian government to mark the centenary of Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14. After a long wait for a break in the weather, we held a ceremony on the ice at the historic huts, the place Mawson called “the home of the blizzard.” Through the years of Curtin’s political life, Antarctica was becoming a primary site for Australia’s world-mindedness, and in 1959 our nation was one of the original twelve signatories to the Antarctic Treaty, which was effectively the first disarmament treaty of the nuclear age.

Antarctica is where nine-tenths of the world’s land ice resides. Seventy per cent of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in that ice cap. That’s a discovery humans made in my lifetime. Antarctica is not only the coldest and windiest continent; it is also paradoxically the driest — and it is the highest. It has the highest average height of any continent because it is a great dome of ice four or five kilometres thick that has built up over millions of years. In the 1950s we discovered that the driest of all continents is actually a vast elevated plateau of frozen water. The implications of that discovery are immense: it means that world sea levels are principally controlled by the state of the Antarctic ice sheet. If the southern ice cap melted, oceans would rise by more than sixty metres.

As we enter the Pyrocene, Antarctica is vulnerable and fragile, more brittle than we expected. This year the expanse of winter sea ice around Antarctica diminished dramatically below its average by the size of Western Australia. The continent of ice is a precious glistening jewel that holds the key to our future and to our past. It’s a giant white fossil, a luminous relic, a clue to lost ages: it enables us to travel through time to the Pleistocene Earth. The ice is an amazing archive. Embedded in an ice cap are tiny air bubbles from hundreds of thousands of years ago. When you drill into an ice cap kilometres thick, you can extract a core that is layered year by year, a precious archive of deep time. I think of ice cores as the holy scripts, the sacred scrolls of our age.

The deepest Antarctic cores currently retrieve 800,000 years of climate history. Right now, the search is on for the first million-year ice core, and Australia is involved in the quest.

In the 1990s, a long 400,000-year Antarctic ice core was extracted from the inland ice sheet. It produced a rhythmic, sawtooth graph of past ice ages, revealing the heartbeat of the planet. The brief peaks on the graph represented warmer interglacials; the extended troughs were the cold ice ages. The ice core charted four full cycles of glacial and interglacial periods and established that the carbon dioxide and methane concentrations in the atmosphere moved in lockstep with the ice sheets and the temperature. It’s the barometer of the planet’s health — a graph of its nervous system — through hundreds of thousands of years.

Ice cores also revealed that present-day levels of greenhouse gases are unprecedented during the past 800,000 years. The level of carbon dioxide in the historical air bubbles has leapt since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since 1950. So, before Antarctica was even seen by humans, it was recording our impact. And it was this glimpse of the deep past as revealed in the archive of ice that shocked people into a real sense of urgency about the climate crisis.

These three metaphors — the Sixth Extinction, the Anthropocene and the Pyrocene — are historical concepts that require us to travel in geological and biological time across hundreds of millions of years and then to arrive back at the present with a sense not of continuity but of discontinuity, of profound rupture in our own time. That’s what Earth system science has revealed: it’s now too late to go back to the Holocene. It may even be too late to hang onto the Pleistocene, the long epoch that birthed our species. We’ve irrevocably changed the Earth system and unwittingly steered the planet into an uncertain future; now we can’t take our hand off the tiller. We have to use our awesome power wisely.

The metaphors of deep time that we’ve been considering have some visual counterparts in deep space that have also emerged in the last half-century. In 1968, the historic Apollo 8 mission launched humans beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time, out and across the void and into the gravitational power of another heavenly body. For three lunar orbits, the three astronauts studied the strange, desolate, cratered surface below them and then, as they came out from the dark side of the Moon for the fourth time, they looked up and gasped:

Bill Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!

Frank Borman: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.

They did take the unscheduled photo, excitedly, and Earthrise became famous, perhaps the most famous photograph of the twentieth century, the blue planet floating alone, finite and vulnerable in space above a dead lunar landscape. Frank Borman said, “It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life.” And Bill Anders declared, “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

A few years later, in 1972, a photo taken by the Apollo 17 mission and known as The Blue Marble became one of the most reproduced pictures in the world, showing Earth as a luminous breathing garden in the dark void. Earthrise and The Blue Marble had a profound impact on environmental politics and sensibilities.

Within a few years, the American scientists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock put forward “the Gaia hypothesis”: that Earth is a single, self-regulating organism. In the year of the Apollo 8 mission, Paul Ehrlich published his book The Population Bomb, an urgent appraisal of a finite Earth. During the years of the Moon missions, British economist Barbara Ward wrote Spaceship Earth and Only One Earth, revealing how economics failed to account for environmental damage and degradation, and arguing that exponential growth could not continue forever.

Earth Day was established in 1970, a day to honour the planet as a whole, a total environment needing protection. In 1972, the Club of Rome released its controversial and enormously influential report The Limits to Growth, which sold more than thirteen million copies and went into more than thirty translations. Authors Donella Meadows and Dennis Meadows wrestled with the contradiction of trying to force infinite material growth on a finite planet. The cover of their book depicted a whole Earth, a shrinking Earth.

Two decades later, on Valentine’s Day 1990, the Voyager spacecraft was tracking beyond Saturn, six billion kilometres away, when it unexpectedly glanced over its shoulder. Again, Voyager was not programmed to look behind as it journeyed into the unknown, but scientists decided to take a risk and commanded the spacecraft to look back. And so we have a picture of Earth as a mere speck of dust in space, an image that astronomer Carl Sagan called Pale Blue Dot. “Look again at that dot,” wrote Sagan. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

These images from outer space of the unity, finiteness and loneliness of Earth helped escalate planetary thinking. From a colossal integration of Earth systems data came a keen understanding of planetary boundaries — thresholds in planetary ecology — and the extent to which the human enterprise is threatening or exceeding them. Three identified thresholds have already been crossed: changes in climate, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle. At least we now understand our predicament even if we are perilously slow to act. The fossil fuels that got humans to the Moon now endanger our civilisation.

Now let’s bring this story back home to our place on this Earth. Australia is uniquely exposed to the grim, rough edges of these new world narratives. Shockingly, we are leading the world into the Sixth Extinction. Modern Australian history is like a giant experiment in ecological crisis and management. Ecologists working in Australia today often feel like they are ambulance drivers arriving at the scene of an accident. The southwest of Western Australia, for example, is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots and it is experiencing an exceptional loss of habitat. It is the site of what literary historian Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has called a “radical disappearance,” “an extinction event on a grand scale.”

And we inhabit the continent of fire, the driest inhabited continent, a land of drought and flooding rains that is held in the grip of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which means that Australia is on the frontline of the Pyrocene. Southwest Western Australia, with its sudden 30 per cent decline in rainfall since the 1970s, is one of the first places to experience the climatic shift expected with global warming. The Black Summer fires — when more than twenty-four million hectares of Australia’s southern and eastern forests burnt, including a million hectares of the Great Western Woodlands — were a symptom of our condition and became a planetary event. Smoke from those fires encircled the globe.

Furthermore, our modern history is a by-product of the Anthropocene. The British invasion of Australia was part of the age of empire and took place as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum in England. Thus ancient Australia’s transformation into a colony coincided with the start of the fossil fuel era. The Endeavour was a repurposed coal ship. The new nation became highly dependent on fossil fuels, especially on coal, and in recent decades it drew world attention by persisting with the political denial of climate change. Modern Australia, we have to remember, was built on denial: the denial of Aboriginal sovereignty and cultural sophistication, the denial of frontier violence and warfare. At the recent referendum about the Voice, we witnessed a further national expression of denial.

But we have many opportunities here too. Our robust democracy, our active citizenship, our capacity for creativity and innovation, our impressive community leaders (many of them young, most of them women), our unique and inspiring environment, our destiny as a renewable energy superpower. And the continent’s deep Indigenous human history. In just a generation we have turned upside down the way we understand the history of Australia.

When I was in primary school, the history of this country was told as a footnote to the story of the British empire. In my classroom, the book we used was A Short History of Australia, written in 1916 by Professor Ernest Scott. It began with what he declared was “a blank space on the map” and it ended with “a new name on the map” — that of Anzac. So the story of Australia climaxed with a national sacrifice on a beach on the other side of the world. Australia at that time was seen as a new, transplanted society with a short and derivative history, a planned, peaceful and successful offshoot of imperial Britain. Aboriginal peoples, depicted as non-literate, non-agricultural, non-urban and non-national, could have no “history” and did not constitute a “civilisation” — thus they could find no place in the national polity or the national story or even as citizens of the Commonwealth.

But in the half-century that followed, Australians realised that the New World they thought they’d discovered was actually the Old, and that the true “nomads” were themselves, the colonisers who had come in ships. From the early 1960s, archaeologists confirmed what Aboriginal people had always known: that Australia’s human history went back eons, into the Pleistocene, well into the last ice age, earlier than Europe’s. The timescale of Australia’s human history increased tenfold in just thirty years and the journey to the other side of the frontier became a journey back into deep time.

We now recognise the first Australians as the most adventurous of all humans, pioneer sea-voyagers who, over 60,000 years ago, saw the beckoning, burning continent of eucalypts glowing over the horizon of the ocean. The island continent girt by sea was transformed into a complex jigsaw of beloved and inhabited Aboriginal Countries and ecologies. Aboriginal societies were — and are — diverse, innovative and adaptive; over 300 languages flourished here. Now our histories of Australia strive, as the Uluru Statement puts it, to let “this ancient sovereignty… shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.” This challenge is not going away, no matter how many toddler tantrums the nation has. Reckoning with our colonial history is a daily responsibility of living on this continent.

Therefore we can now see more clearly that, on Australian beaches in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there took place one of the greatest ecological and cultural encounters of all time. Peoples with immensely long and intimate histories of habitation encountered the furthest-flung representatives of the world’s first industrialising nation. The circle of migration out of Africa more than 80,000 years earlier finally closed.

This is a land of a radically different ecology, where climatic variation and uncertainty have long been the norm — and now those extremes are intensifying. Australia’s long human history spans great climatic change and also offers a parable of cultural resilience. The history of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia takes humans back, if not into the ice, then certainly into the ice age, into the depths of the last glacial maximum of 20,000 years ago and beyond, into and through periods of average temperature change of 5°C and more, such as those we might now face.

When Europeans and North Americans look for cultural beginnings, they are often prompted to tell you that humans and their civilisations are products of the Holocene and that we are all children of this recent spring of cultural creativity over the last 10,000 years. By contrast, an Australian history of the world takes us back to humanity’s first deep sea navigators and to the experience of people surviving cold ice-age droughts even in the central Australian deserts. It brings us visions of people living along fast-retreating coastlines as they cope with the dramatic rising of the seas.

Human civilisation here was sustained in the face of massive climate change. This is a story that modern Australians have only just discovered, and now perhaps it offers a parable for the world. The continent of fire will lead the world into the new age of fire. But it also carries human wisdom and experience from beyond the last ice age.

Living on a precipice of deep time has become, I think, an exhilarating dimension of what it means to be Australian. We can now see that the modern Australian story, in parallel with other colonial cataclysms, was a forerunner of the planetary crisis. Indigenous management was overwhelmed, forests cleared, wildlife annihilated, waters polluted and abused, the climate unhinged. Across the globe, imperial peoples used land and its creatures as commodities, as if Earth were inert. They forgot that the planet is alive.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is clear that Australia is facing a new existential threat, quite different from that which Curtin addressed in 1941. We are embroiled in a climate emergency and biodiversity crisis that threaten to destroy our security and way of life.

It’s not just a threat; it’s actually going to happen unless we act swiftly and decisively. It is a planetary event, but Australia and its region are especially vulnerable to its effects. National security assessments and reports from Australian defence chiefs have acknowledged our predicament, identifying the climate crisis as “this clear and present danger,” “the greatest threat to the security and future of Australians” and “the Hundred Year War” for which we are seriously unprepared. To meet the challenge, we will need to recognise that we do indeed face a crisis, an emergency, and that we will be required to mobilise with a grave sense of urgency as if in a war.

In that December 1941 address to the people, Curtin sought to wean Australians off a subconscious cultural reflex to trust to luck, isolation and Britain. “I demand,” he said, “that Australians everywhere realise that Australia is now inside the firing lines.” He spoke of the need to shake citizens out of false assumptions of security; he talked of awakening “the somewhat lackadaisical Australian mind” and of the “reshaping, in fact revolutionising, of the Australian way of life until a war footing is attained quickly, efficiently and without question.” “We can and we will,” he promised.

What would a brave but realistic geopolitical pivot look like in our own time? What would constitute a Curtinesque act of visionary leadership now?

I think it would entail a recognition that, because of our extreme ecological and economic vulnerability in this escalating crisis, Australia needs to lead the world into the energy transition. Not to drag its feet, not to wait for other nations, but actually to demonstrate the path to zero emissions. To provide global direction and inspiration. And to do so out of intelligent national self-interest as well as out of “world-mindedness.”

Australia needs to grasp its opportunity as a renewable energy superpower. It needs to wean itself swiftly off its fossil fuel dependency, not cling to old, polluting forms of power and vested interests. A Western Australian like John Curtin would have to take on that challenge in the mining state, reminding constituents of the long-term significance of minerals in the renewable future. Of course it will be difficult and fraught. But that is what leadership is about: stepping wisely into the future that is coming for you.

Yes, it will be difficult but it is also simple. The physics of the planet are simple and we know what we have to do and what will happen if we don’t. The enemies of action are either ignorant and short-sighted or selfish and greedy. The pathway to electrification has been laid down clearly. The technologies are there or fast developing, as is the business momentum.

But the free market can’t move fast enough and government must lead. Even funding for the transition is readily available in the form of massive government fossil fuel subsidies that can be diverted, and windfall profits to the oil and gas industry that demand to be taxed. The economic, social and environmental benefits to the nation will be immense. I believe that the people are ahead of government on this and that they will welcome bold leadership. To paraphrase John Curtin, we should step into that future now, quite clearly, without any inhibitions of any kind, and free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with coal, oil, gas, Murdoch and Rinehart. •

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From the stand, Manasseh Sogavare, the Solomon Islands prime minister, looked on with relief and satisfaction. “Sports is the glue that holds the nation together,” he had told local reporters earlier. “It binds and unites us. It brings out the best of us, as individuals and collectively as a nation.” Regardless of “misinformation and shallow opinions” about the Pacific Games, “especially by a few foreign media,” Solomon Islands was united and proudly telling its games story to the world.

The games, which kicked off at that ceremony last Sunday night, have lifted the mood here after three years of turmoil and hardship. A dispute in November 2019 over Sogavare’s switch of diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing led to ethnic-influenced rioting that trashed Honiara’s old Chinatown — the unrest ended, Sogavare’s government saved, by Australian troops and police flown in from Townsville. Then came Covid-19 and two years of isolation that shrank the economy by around 5 per cent.

Economic growth returned this year, but the mood was still gloomy. Along with the daily struggle for their livelihoods, people were mostly concerned about how their home provinces were doing, rather than the Solomons more widely, says veteran Honiara journalist Dorothy Wickham. “The only time you see Solomon Islanders proud of their own country is when there are things like this,” she says, referring to the games.

“I think that was one of the reasons the government wanted to go ahead,” Wickham adds. “They felt this country needed a unifying event. Even though it has come at a big cost, it was needed at this time. Especially after we’ve come through the ethnic crisis and people are fragmented.”

The cost of building facilities and hosting 5000 athletes is a big one for a country of 720,000 people with a per capita GDP of about A$3500, its deficit in trade and government spending covered largely by foreign aid and growing remittance flows from the 7000 seasonal workers now in Australia and New Zealand.

But the games have also became the focus of another competition that Solomon Islanders sum up in one word: geopolitics. China spent around A$120 million building playing courts, pools and the main stadium. While some feared that Honiara would be left with facilities unduly expensive to use and maintain, the stadium is far from grandiose — more like a typical Australian sporting club’s home ground than a grand final venue. New or improved halls of residence for visiting athletes are attached to seven colleges and schools around the city and will be a legacy for Solomon Islands students.

In the lead-up to the games, Chinese chargé d’affaires Ding Yonghua was dispatching influential Solomon Islanders off for tours of his country: all the provincial premiers for two weeks in October, a group of journalists for nine days in November. Two ambulances and four dental chairs arrived from a city in Guangzhou that has old trading links with the South Seas. In mid November, a squad of Chinese police installed metal detectors and video cameras at the games venues. Though only about fifteen-strong, their presence led to some overheated reports of Chinese police “patrolling” the city.

Big projects are being rolled out by Chinese contractors. One has just completed a new terminal and tarmac resurfacing at the airport in Munda, a tourism hub in the country’s west, which will enable direct Airbus flights from Brisbane. Huawei, the much-suspected Chinese telecommunications giant, will build 161 new mobile telephone towers funded by a A$96 million soft loan.

Not to be outdone, Australian high commissioner Rod Hilton has been in diplomatic overdrive, dispensing A$17 million in games assistance, including teams of sports medicine specialists. Together with Sogavare, he flew to Taro, the main town in the prime minister’s home province of Choiseul, to mark completion of the local airport’s hard surfacing and night-landing lights.

The Australian navy’s amphibious ship Choules arrived in early November to deliver two 4WD ambulances, vast numbers of uniforms and much other paraphernalia for the games, along with rolls of newsprint to keep Honiara’s two papers on the streets. A hundred Australian Federal Police officers flew in, on top of the fifty stationed in the Solomons since the 2019 troubles. New Zealand brought in two helicopters. The day the games opened, the US navy hospital ship Mercy arrived as part of the United States’ annual Pacific Partnership exercise, its great white bulk anchored off the city.

Australia won the VIP stakes at the opening ceremony, fielding governor-general David Hurley, who also used the opportunity to open new Australian aid projects. China came up only with Cai Dafeng, an architecture professor who is a vice-chairman of its National People’s Congress and leader of the China Association for Promoting Democracy, one of the eight tiny parties allowed in the NPC alongside the Chinese Communist Party. Despite the mission implied in his party’s name, Cai figures in the US sanctions list of officials alleged responsible for subverting Hong Kong’s limited democracy.

“The switch to China? I see some benefits in it,” Wickham says. “The best thing is the Americans have come back in, and the Australians are making more effort now. They are falling over themselves.”

Sogavare has played a hard game to fight back from his troubles of four years ago. Those troubles were driven by Daniel Suidani, then premier of Malaita, the country’s most populous island and historically the one that has sent out the most ambitious people to take advantage of the modern world.

Suidani, alone of the premiers, refused to back the switch to Beijing and cultivated continuing links to Taiwan. At one point he talked of a referendum about seceding. Sogavare’s supporters in the provincial government put up three motions of no-confidence to unseat him. The first failed. Street protests in the Malaita capital Auki prevented the second from getting to a vote. Early this year, though, the third was passed. Soon after, the central government used its supervisory powers to banish him from the provincial assembly, a move Suidani is still contesting in the courts.

While it lasted, Suidani’s defiance won support from anti-China hawks in Washington and Canberra. In a perhaps ill-judged move, the US government announced a US$25 million aid program for Malaita focused on sustainable village and forestry development. Honiara insisted such aid had to come through the central government, and when the US tried to send the funds via a civil contractor posing as a non-government organisation, the central government delayed work permits for its managers and experts.

Though some of those projects are visible in Malaita, Sogavare’s relationship with the Americans is still testy. A proposal from Washington in 2019 to resume sending Peace Corps volunteers, after a twenty-five-year absence, is still awaiting approval by Sogavare’s cabinet.

Although accusations of bribery have flown thick and fast around the votes of no-confidence that kept Sogavare in office and unseated Suidani — with sums of up to A$10,000 allegedly offered to MPs to switch sides — Ronnie Jethro Butala, the speaker of the Malaita assembly, says he saw no evidence of corruption. The explanation, he tells me, was simpler: Malaitans could see they were losing out.

“A lot of the Malaita public were getting tired of geopolitics,” he says. “No more funding was coming from the national government, and also the national government diverted all the projects from Malaita to other provinces. So it came to a stage where a lot of people said, ‘Okay, we are fed up of geopolitics, politics of different countries. We want the [provincial] government to go back to joining the [national] government so they look to ways to improve Malaita, especially with the roads and infrastructure.’”

As well as lacking development funding, Malaitans were being passed over for senior positions in the central government. Officials from the island used to be strongly represented among departmental secretaries, police commissioners and heads of authorities. Under Sogavare, preference has gone to officials from the Western and Choiseul provinces, the prime minister’s home ground. “A lot of experienced Malaitans now, most have found their way back to the village,” says Butala.

Still, Malaitans were used to being singled out and resented for their pushiness. “The black sheep within the flock,” he says. The idea of withdrawing from the Solomon Islands and going it alone isn’t dead. “My private view is that when you look at the resources in Malaita, [it] can become a very rich country if we have our independence,” he says. But a huge improvement in infrastructure would be needed first.

If the Pacific Games conclude successfully, Sogavare still faces the challenge of a severely stretched government budget and looming national elections, which have been postponed six months until next April. At sixty-eight, he is in his fourth period as prime minister and said to be anxious to finish his career with big achievements in infrastructure to bind the islands together.

The son of a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, Sogavare is admired for his discipline and focus. His main problem, says Wickham, is that his parliamentary supporters have little understanding of economics. “That’s his biggest downfall: he’s surrounded by politicians who just want to get rich out of the system.”

Like elections in surrounding Melanesian countries, next year’s vote  will be a contest of personalities and patronage networks. Formation of government will start only after results are declared in the country’s fifty electorates (fourteen of them in Malaita, where Suidani is forming a ticket) and MPs arrive in Honiara.

As for the geopolitics, voters will no doubt be swayed by the projects they see being built in their provinces and electorates. A good Chinese-built project would overcome the widespread antipathy this highly Christianised population feels towards China, says Wickham. “It’s like throwing a coconut into the sea — it will roll with the waves. That’s how we are reacting now.” •

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In 2008, Michael Wolff published a book called The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch. Wolff had benefited from far greater access to Murdoch and his family than any of the magnate’s earlier biographers. He taped more than fifty hours of interviews with Rupert himself, spoke to all immediate family members, and put questions to senior company executives.

In an article in GQ three years later, Wolff revealed that he received this level of cooperation because Murdoch and others close to him didn’t want Murdoch’s legacy “forever yoked” to Fox News and its powerful head, Roger Ailes. The biography would be a weapon in the “increasing war” against Ailes. Wolff acknowledged that he had made “a devil’s bargain not to talk to Ailes.”

It is plausible that Murdoch’s inner circle was disillusioned with Fox News and Ailes. Rupert’s main focus during 2007, dwarfing everything else, was his long-cherished dream of owning the Wall Street Journal, and he was keen to ease fears among the paper’s board members that he would dumb it down.

Moreover, Fox was on the losing side of the election that swept Barack Obama to victory. Even before his inauguration, the network was abandoning professional standards, becoming more propagandistic and, as the election had shown, increasingly out of touch with majority opinion. Fox went on to nurture and support the extreme-right Republican faction, the Tea Party, even helping it appeal for funds. It aired the groundless “birther” theories that Obama wasn’t born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president.

Yet the only member of the family to publicly express any criticism during this period was Murdoch’s son-in-law, Matthew Freud, husband of Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, who said in 2010, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corp, its founder and every other global business aspires to.”

Those comments were immediately and forcefully disowned by Rupert, and he subsequently gave Ailes a large bonus and a pay rise. Any lingering internal disillusion with Fox News was snuffed out by the results of the 2010 midterm elections, in which the Republicans gained an extra sixty-three seats in the House of Representatives, the biggest success of its kind since 1948. Fox News hosted a televised victory party with many Republican candidates and officials. Never again during Ailes’s tenure were there internal rumblings of any significance.

While Murdoch’s defence of Ailes at the time may have been a commercial necessity, he never in subsequent years showed any inclination to distance himself. In 2016, following Ailes’s resignation in disgrace after allegations of sexual harassment, Murdoch had the chance to change the network’s approach, as his son James was reportedly urging him to do. Instead, he kept change to the minimum. “We’re not changing direction,” he said a few months later. “That would be business suicide.”

But if Murdoch’s aim was to enhance his own legacy, then selecting Wolff as authorised biographer was wrong-headed in every respect. Wolff — once described in the New York Times as “a prime piranha in the Manhattan media pond” and by high-profile magazine editor Tina Brown as “the sour savant of American media” — had demonstrated much greater skill at tearing down reputations than at building them up.

Wolff’s main attempt to distance Murdoch from Fox News comes in the last few pages of the book when he suddenly asserts that the Murdoch children, his wife Wendi Deng Murdoch and even Murdoch himself were all “liberals,” a term he conspicuously fails to define. The claim is made without elaboration or any evidence (except that some of them supported Obama). It is a lame and unconvincing note to end on.

Rupert was widely reported to dislike the book. Ailes, on the other hand, had no reason to be disappointed. Wolff notes several times that the one person in his employment whom Murdoch never interferes with is Ailes. He even says Ailes is “possibly the one man of whom Murdoch is afraid.” Going further, he claims that Murdoch had “a crush on Ailes. For a very long time, having dinner with Ailes is the most galvanising thing in Murdoch’s life — it makes him feel in the game, it’s pure pleasure.” There’s more: “Murdoch backs [Ailes] all the way” because of Fox News’s success.

Whoever suggested Wolff could write a book distancing Murdoch from Ailes must have been unaware of just how strong the relationship between Ailes and Wolff already was. Wolff describes how he got to know Ailes in 2001:

I’d written something about him that he didn’t like, but then he invited me to lunch. At that first lunch I thought, Oh my God, this is gold. First thing, he’s incredibly knowledgeable about the media business, insightful about everybody, couldn’t stop talking. The gossip flowed in a non-stop way, and I took every opportunity in the subsequent years to sit down with him. So we became friends.

Wolff had another blockbuster success in 2018; again his degree of access was marvelled at, and again Ailes played a central part. Fire and Fury was probably the biggest-selling book on the early years of the Trump presidency. At the book’s centre is an individual who is intellectually, emotionally and morally unfit to be president. Wolff’s access to Trump’s staff and his revelation of their intensely negative view of the president are the book’s core.

Even before it was published, Fire and Fury created a furore. When Trump threatened to sue Wolff for defamation and invasion of privacy, the publisher simply brought forward the release date. High sales were guaranteed.

Graydon Carter, ex-editor of Vanity Fair, summed it up: “The mystery is why the White House let him in the door.” Once again Ailes figures prominently. According to Wolff, Steve Bannon and Ailes were guests at Wolff’s home for dinner in January 2017, and Wolff suspected that Ailes told Bannon that Wolff was someone he could trust. Up until his death Ailes was a “terrific source” for Wolff, who also had many conversations with Bannon. His closeness to the two men opened other doors.

Now Wolff has published The Fall: The End of Fox News — and the hero of this book is, yes, Roger Ailes. Ailes is an absentee hero: forced to resign from Fox News in 2016, his departure sweetened by a US$40 million payout, he died after a fall in 2017. But not only is he the most quoted figure in the book, he sets the standard by which others are judged and inevitably found wanting.

For Wolff, Ailes was the key to the success of Fox News: his “bravura leadership” created “brilliantly marketed and packaged news for the better part of twenty years.” Moreover, “the ousting of Roger Ailes in July 2016 presaged the end of Fox and conservative media’s industry dominance.” Ailes was “a sui generis talent [and] without him the playing field was suddenly level.”

This last claim proved inaccurate. For the four years of the Trump presidency — the years following Ailes’s departure — Fox had bigger audiences and more influence than at any other time. The direct line into the White House gave the network a centrality in the news mix that it had never enjoyed before.

Since Trump’s defeat, the network has hit much rougher times, and a lack of leadership, vision and strategy has become more obvious. The certainties of the Ailes era are being recalled nostalgically. But it is far from clear how Ailes would have responded. Would he have peddled election fraud to please the audience’s prejudices? Would he have responded differently to the Dominion Voting Machines lawsuit, which produced the biggest corporate defamation payout in American history?

Or are the network’s problems simply the result of his successors’ lack of ability? Ailes’s widow Beth is in no doubt. Wishing her husband a happy heavenly birthday last May, she said, “It took you twenty years to build Fox News into the powerhouse that it was and only six years for the Murdochs to wreak havoc. Rupert thought he could do your job. What a joke. He has the chequebook but could never come close to your genius.” The Murdochs “weren’t born here and don’t have the same pedigree” as Roger.

Wolff is also dismissive of the Murdochs. Rupert is too old, is often disengaged for long periods, and isn’t capable of sustained leadership. Lachlan and James — Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, according to Ailes — are even worse. Lachlan “is so absentee, fundamentally, living in Australia and running an American company,” more interested in spearfishing than running the company, incapable of making decisions. James, who left the company in early 2018, is aggressive and arrogant, and becomes furious when anyone contradicts him; his empty rhetoric about making Fox a force for good has no business sense or strategy behind it. The other key managers, both of the business and its journalists, lack vision, courage and ability.

Wolff was approached a decade and a half ago to write a book that would distance Murdoch from Ailes. In the latest book he has come full circle, a spear carrier for the Ailes legacy, and part of that involves demeaning the Murdochs. •

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“There’s something dangerous happening in America now,” said Biden. “There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy. I don’t think anyone today doubts democracy is at stake in 2024.”

If we’ve learned anything in the last seven years, it’s that democracy can’t be taken for granted. A 2021 report, Democracy Under Siege, listed the United States among twenty-five countries that have experienced a massive deterioration in freedoms fuelled by political corruption, conflicts of interest and lack of government transparency. The report describes the final weeks of the Trump presidency — as the incumbent strove to illegally overturn his election loss — as an illustration of the parlous state of American democracy.

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has identified twin threats facing the nation’s democratic status. The first (acute) threat is the growing movement inside the Republican Party to refuse to accept defeat in an election. In 2022, more than 300 Republican candidates for state and national offices either denied or questioned the outcome of the presidential election. This, says the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University, is unprecedented in American history and seemingly unique in the history of mature democracies around the world.

The second (chronic) threat is that the power to set government policy is increasingly disconnected from public opinion. Just a few examples highlight the trend. The US Supreme Court, dominated by Republican appointees, seems poised to shape American politics for many years with decisions on issues like abortion and gun rights that don’t reflect the views of anywhere near a majority of the population. Polls routinely show most Americans are alarmed or concerned about climate change, but its causes and impacts are denied by Republican lawmakers. A supermajority of Americans support voting rights with equal access for all eligible adults, but many states are working to limit voting access and some Republicans, led by Trump, have admitted that expanding voting hurts their party’s election prospects.

Other, equally disturbing, threats exist: the rise of political violence and intimidation; the erosion of rights for LGBTQI+ people, asylum seekers and other minority groups; book bans and political intrusions into educational institutions and curricula; increasing division along racial, religious, socioeconomic and political lines. It’s easy to see the long reach of Trump and Trumpism in every one of these threats.

Most recently, Congress was brought to a halt for three weeks because House Republicans caved in to MAGA extremists. They threw out House speaker Kevin McCarthy but then couldn’t agree on who should replace him. Trump’s social media criticisms of successive nominees and his loyalty tests carried more sway with House Republicans than a new speaker’s ability to oversee the House’s work.

Representative Mike Johnson from Louisiana was finally elected speaker after three others had been nominated but then withdrawn. Known as MAGA Mike and active in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, he is a self-described evangelical Christian who is staunchly anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQI+ rights, anti-union and anti-immigration. He has embraced the far right’s culture wars and backed the House Republicans’ inquiry aimed at impeaching Biden.

Elected to Congress just seven years ago and having never held a committee chair, Johnson is the least-experienced speaker in more than a century. Senate Republicans openly admitted they didn’t know who he was. But experience and expertise are scorned and devalued by Trump and his cohort. As the Nation’s John Nichols wrote, Mike Johnson’s main qualification for the job was that he’s neither a Democrat nor a democrat.

In fact, Johnson has insisted the United States isn’t a democracy — a system he defines as “two wolves and a lamb deciding what is for dinner” — but rather a constitutional republic based by its founders on a “biblical admonition.” He shares this view with a number of his lawmaker colleagues who are eager to stress the republic’s restraints on democracy. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are,” posted Utah Senator Mike Lee in 2020. “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

Johnson’s role in attempting to overturn the 2020 elections and his position as speaker, which places him second in line to the presidency behind the vice-president, has raised concerns about how he might seek to influence the outcome of the next presidential election (assuming he is still in that position in January 2025) should Trump (almost certain to be the Republican candidate) lose again. No wonder Trump is happy to claim credit for his election to the speakership.

Much has been written about the extent of Trump’s influence over the Republican Party. (Perhaps takeover is a better description.) That he played such a pivotal role in determining who was finally elected as speaker and was endorsing candidates for upcoming primaries even while campaigning on his own behalf and attending to his legal troubles explains why he is courted, feared and rarely out of the news.

Merging his campaigning with his courthouse appearances seems to be working. Legal woes that would distract or destroy most candidates are now marketed as a feature of his 2024 presidential run. So too is his ostentatious disrespect for legal processes and precedents. He has been castigated by several judges and fined twice for verbal attacks on courthouse staff. Judge Arthur Engoron even threatened to lock him up. “Why should there not be severe sanctions for this blatant, dangerous disobeyal [sic] of a clear court order?” he asked.

Trump’s brand of authoritarianism, demagoguery and populism has deep roots in American history, but his spin on the tradition is amplified by his wily command of the media and fears among a segment of voters (primarily white, religious and without a college education) who see themselves and their values left behind in a racially and ethnically diverse economy and nation. Trump plays off what they see as an existential threat to their way of life.

In the aftermath of the 2022 elections, when the Republicans’ lacklustre performance could be read as a repudiation of Trump, the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb argued — correctly — that Trump is not solely responsible for the current levels of intolerance, racism, nativism, belligerence and anti-democratic behaviour in the Republican Party, and there is no reason to believe his absence would cause these to evaporate.

Presidential candidates like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy might be lagging forty or more points behind Trump in the polls, but they are promulgating the same ideology and are keen to be seen as equally fierce cultural warriors. Those Republican candidates who aren’t toeing the Trump line — namely Nikki Haley and Chris Christie — are lagging even further behind.

Republican states, meanwhile, have mounted a frightening series of anti-democratic efforts. They are manipulating election administration by controlling secretaries of state and other executive offices. They are giving partisan state legislatures greater control over elections. They are reducing ballot drop box access for early voting. Several states, among them North Carolina and Louisiana, have resisted court decisions based on the Voting Rights Act that aim to make congressional district maps more accurately reflect the makeup of their population.

There is no such loss of the right to own guns. Nationally, thirty-five mass gun killings — incidents in which four or more people died, not including the perpetrator/s — have been recorded so far this year. More and more people are using guns to harass and intimidate others, including lawmakers, elected officials, school board members, voters and election workers. Although a significant majority of Americans support universal background checks, an assault-weapons ban and other priorities of gun-control advocates, stronger state and federal controls are elusive.

Links can be made between gun violence, democracy and trust. Research shows how eroded democratic institutions and declining trust in social structures lead to more lethal violence and increases in gun ownership. The Pew Research Center has shown that many Americans think the public’s trust in the federal government and in their fellow citizens has declined and that the interplay between the lack of trust in the public and the interpersonal spheres has made it harder to solve some of the country’s problems.

The latest Pew polling figures put trust in the federal government at almost its lowest in nearly seven decades of polling. Just 1 per cent of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” and only 15 per cent trust the government “most of the time.” Writing in Politico, Max Stier and Tom Freedman argue that this statistic is more concerning than the rise of anti-democratic movements or efforts to steal an election: it reflects very poorly on the nation’s primary democratic institution, Congress, and its ability to deal with social, economic and foreign policy challenges.

Reviving American democracy means reversing the decline in political rights and civil liberties, improving public discourse, and reforming political institutions and practices to persuade Americans that politicians are representing them fairly and governments are working to solve pressing problems. Key among the essential reforms is a remaking of the Republican Party — or at least a rejection of its Trump-cult elements. That brand of right-wing populism may not be the only threat to democracy in the United States, but it is the biggest. •

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This split, he believes, is “a threat to a cohesive and successful Australia as it tries to adapt to the globalised economy.”

Wait, apologies, I jumbled my notes. That was Kelly after the 1999 vote on the republic, a cause he was very much in favour of.

This time round his columns have run passionately against the proposed Voice, and his tea-leaf reading of very similar voting patterns — the Yes vote fading the further from CBDs — sits on a much more ideological plane.

Once again the big No vote points to a “divided nation,” but now the goodies and baddies are very clear. That “confident, educated, city-based middle class” cohort has become something malignant, purveyors of “progressive sophistry” and “progressive values” and “experiments… tampering with the once accepted but now eroding universal norms that defined the Australian nation.”

The fourteenth of October, to underline the point, was a “repudiation of elite morality and assumed moral superiority.” On and on Kelly goes, for more than 2300 words; quoting various “experts” to categorise this as our Trump/Brexit moment, the revenge of everyday, ordinary citizens tired of being scolded and looked down on.

The Professor has been castigating “elites” (with all the unacknowledged irony this encompasses from a person of his means and position) since at least the late Howard years, but whereas the group once largely consisted of inner-urban Labor and Greens supporters working in academia and the arts, big business — with its public pronouncements in favour of marriage equality and tackling climate change — seems also to now stand in Paul’s naughty corner. “Elite(s)” appears no less than seventeen times in last month’s tirade, along with thirteen mentions of “progressive(s).”

That pattern of higher support in the inner city ebbing lower as you approach the bush can actually be observed in every referendum this side of Robert Menzies’s attempt to ban communism in 1951. It was more pronounced in the 1999 vote (both for the republic and for a new constitutional preamble) and more pronounced again in 2023.

A Labor–Coalition city–rural split has also been growing at general elections, reaching its apogee in May last year. There is change afoot in the electoral arena, and it is also seen dramatically in the ever-plummeting support for major parties.

Kelly’s bitter deep dive is worth citing because it conveniently contains most elements of the gloating-dressed-as-analysis that has emerged from the No-supporting commentariat. Even more than most political journalists, he seems to be a hostage to the present, inhaling the current zeitgeist and reciting it with deep meaning and drama — and often at great length.

So what does the 40–60 Voice outcome tell us about the country? That Australia is racist? Or colour-blind? Or doesn’t like elites?

I don’t think this result should change or even reinforce anyone’s opinion about the nature of this country. Instead it verifies that Australians can be relied on to bury Labor government midterm referendums, regardless of the topic. Set your watch by it: early opinion polling shows overwhelming support; Liberal leader eventually opposes (because to do otherwise would be professionally fatal); the government, encouraged by the polling, still presses ahead. Then it all becomes an orgy of scarifying tales about the danger of messing with the Constitution — the blueprint of this country, the envy of the world. Former judges are exhumed to warn of the risk. Why are the government and its mates so desperate to do this? They’re spending how many millions on it? Such self-indulgence, such arrogance, who can resist reminding them who’s boss?

With counting over, the Voice slots in fourth out of Labor’s eleven midterm attempts to change the Constitution since federation. That’s not particularly bad.

What does set this vote apart is its makeup. Last century, decent statistical correlations could be observed between Labor two-party-preferred support at the previous election and Yes votes. Traditional high-income Liberal electorates reliably took their party’s cue and joined outer-suburban and regional Coalition supporters to deliver, overwhelmingly, above-average Nos.

This time around, that high-income territory is mostly in teal hands (but the locals still vote Liberal over Labor in two-party-preferred terms), and those electorates voted a higher-than-average Yes. It was much like the republic vote, when they could still be loyal Liberals by siding with treasurer Peter Costello rather than prime minister John Howard.

This change in behaviour in the former Liberal heartland was a major driver — perhaps the major driver — of the record city–bush divide.

That might have been because, as Kelly writes, the Voice was seen as a “moral” issue. How might a referendum on something mundane, like recognising local government, have gone? As a Labor midtermer it would have been thrashed, but would it have exhibited those heightened geographic differences or settled back to something more predictably partisan?

Kelly was just as strongly against marriage equality, and that 2017 survey also exhibited the city-to-bush pattern (overlaid by outsized No votes in some suburban electorates with high numbers of people from non-English-speaking backgrounds), but the overall outcome, a big win for Yes, precluded triumphalism. On that occasion, the elites were apparently vindicated.

There is one other tendency in the recent analysis, and not just on the No side. Some people see the referendum as an electoral test failed by the Albanese government. It was so out of touch on this issue, can it recover?

The vote has certainly brought Anthony Albanese, who evidently believed his special skill set would bring this home, thuddingly down to earth. It’s damaged him in the eyes of the political class — they will no longer marvel at his prowess — but does that matter in the long run? Probably not; he had to get real sometime. It was something people were forced to vote on, a tenth-order issue for the overwhelming majority, and won’t feature at all in the next campaign. There’s nothing in the historical record to suggest referendum losses portend the same at subsequent elections.

Kelly was at it again last week, presenting a strategy for Peter Dutton’s path to the Lodge — courtesy of the Voice vote. Acknowledging that it “is easy to exaggerate the meaning of the referendum,” he proceeded to do just that, finding in it a “strategic pathway” for the opposition and piling on advice for the Liberal leader’s “approach post-Voice.”

The old pro-business warrior now sounds decidedly blue Labo(u)r (or should that be “populist”?): companies get a serve for “defending their economic bottom line while doubling down on their promotion of social and environmental values.”

That tedious old chestnut, Menzies’s “forgotten people,” gets an awfully long workout in the context of an imaginary two-term strategy for Dutton, à la (without mentioning him by name) Tony Abbott. Back on terra firma, Dutton will be lucky to survive for just one term as opposition leader, let alone two. •

The post Getting the referendum wrong appeared first on Inside Story.

Its reforms to Medicare have the potential to transform the operation of a system that, despite its reputation for good health outcomes, is creaking if not yet collapsing. Much more healthcare would be delivered through general practitioners and much less through hospitals and emergency departments. Fee-for-service remuneration for doctors, long a barrier to reform, would be diluted by alternative funding models based on the needs of individual patients.

In turn, GP practices would take on nurses, nurse practitioners, physiotherapists and other professionals, enabling doctors to focus on the more complex cases for which their training qualifies them. Continuity of care would be given greater emphasis, particularly for the rapidly rising number of patients with chronic conditions.

That is the ambition. The announcements in the May budget were a first cautious step down this path. Given the history of false starts in health reform in Australia, the challenge will be implementation, and that means overcoming resistance from the medical lobbies. As health minister Mark Butler put it in May, stakeholders in health “have sharp elbows and loud voices and they don’t always agree.”

In the same speech Butler characterised the Medicare scheme introduced by the Hawke government as a great system for the 1980s but wholly inadequate forty years later. That makes a change from the traditional political boast that Australia has one of the best, if not the best, health systems in the world.

Butler said that chronic conditions were now the leading cause of illness, disability and death in Australia. More than 13,000 patients went to hospital ten or more times a year. Rather than sporadic visits to the doctor, he argued, they need a coordinated team of health professionals — GPs, allied health workers, nurses and specialists, among others.

The statistics are confronting. Chronic conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and mental illness comprised 12 per cent of GP case loads in 1962, had more than doubled to 27 per cent by 2015 and are now close to 50 per cent. A fee-for-service system that results in average GP consultations of fifteen minutes is unsuited to such a reality, as are regulations that discourage the involvement of other health professionals.

Butler argued that general practice was in its worst state since the introduction of Medicare, with a fall from 50 per cent to 14 per cent in medical graduates choosing it as a career. Rebuilding general practice is the government’s highest priority, he added, including reversing the substantial decline in bulk-billing.

The biggest gripe among doctors has been the refusal of successive governments to increase Medicare rebates, which remained frozen for a good part of the past decade. Despite that, profit margins for GP practices, which have in many cases expanded from small or solo enterprises into large businesses, have remained at about 35 to 38 per cent of turnover over the last decade, according to the Melbourne Institute. And despite the shortages of GPs in rural areas, OECD figures for 2020 showed Australia with 123 GPs per 100,000 people compared with an OECD average of eighty-eight. One reason for this difference is the dominance of GPs in Australia, compared with a greater reliance on other health professionals overseas.

May’s federal budget funded a small general increase in rebates but also included a more targeted approach, tripling bulk-billing incentives for consultations involving families with children under sixteen, pensioners and Commonwealth concession card holders. That increase translates to an extra $13.80 for a standard consultation in metropolitan areas up to an extra $26.50 in very remote areas. It applies from 1 November, so its effectiveness remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, bulk-billing rates have been falling and the Australian Medical Association has recently recommended higher fees for patients. In some areas outside the big cities the challenge is finding any GP, let alone one who bulk-bills.

Steve Robson, president of the Australian Medical Association, is offering no guarantees on the bulk-billing incentive. “My sense is that it will probably stabilise things,” he tells me. “In the longer term the question is if we are to make care available, equitable and affordable for the patients who are most vulnerable, there are going to need to be more strategies in place than bulk-billing incentives.” Elizabeth Deveny, chief executive of the Consumers Health Forum, is slightly more hopeful. Though the incentive is no silver bullet, she believes bulk-billing rates will rise.

The government is promising fifty-eight urgent-care clinics as alternatives to overburdened and costly hospital emergency departments. Extra funding will help bring what is still an antiquated system of digital health records into the modern age with the aim of ensuring ready access to patient information.

Perhaps of greatest longer-run significance are the other measures announced. The budget provides funding for more nurses, including those working in primary care with GPs, and offers incentives for practices to employ them and other health professionals such as physiotherapists. Again, the idea is to free doctors from tasks that others can perform — signing off on repeat prescriptions, for example, which currently involves four million GP visits a year — enabling them to concentrate on more complex services, including treating chronic conditions. The Grattan Institute estimates that every ten GPs in Australia are supported by three nurses or other clinicians, compared with ten in Britain.

Extra funding is promised for consultations of sixty minutes or more, which are typically required for chronic conditions. Rebates will rise for nurse practitioners, the highly qualified professionals who play a major role in many countries but have been marginalised in Australia.

Under a new MyMedicare program, the government is encouraging patients to enrol with general practices — a system widely used overseas — to provide continuity of care and funding based on patient needs. As Butler said in his May speech: “MyMedicare is the foundation upon which we can build a range of blended funding models to better serve the needs of patients that fall through the cracks of our 1980s Medicare.” It will extend to multidisciplinary care for chronic diseases and frequent hospital users.

The Grattan Institute’s blended funding model would provide multidisciplinary medical practices with 70 per cent of their existing funding through “capitation payments” — payments per patient rather than per consultation — and 30 per cent through fee-for-service. (In other words, the fee-for-service component would be 30 per cent of the current rate.) Capitation is calculated according to the health, risk and socioeconomic profile of patients who enrol with a practice. Practices would be encouraged to opt into this model with a $25,000 grant from the government.

Blended funding, together with many of the government’s other announcements are not so much new as recycled ideas or extensions of existing programs. Stretching back to 1997, several rounds of coordinated care trials have tested multidisciplinary care for mainly complex cases. But they were not continued. Blended funding models were tried in different programs between 2011 and 2014 and between 2017 and 2021.

The Grattan Institute study, which noted that health has seen “more pilots than Qantas,” found that many trials suffered from design problems and insufficient implementation time. It also reported concerns about “stakeholder capture” — a polite way of describing doctors defending their patches.

Creating multidisciplinary teams of health professionals and more alternatives to expensive hospital care harks all the way back to the community health centres established by the Whitlam government in the early 1970s, for which funding was cut by subsequent governments.

“Other countries have reformed general practice and their rates of avoidable hospital visits for chronic disease are falling,” says Grattan. “Australia has spent twenty-five years on a merry-go-round of tests and trials that have not changed the system and our rates are holding steady. We are spending more and more on hospitals, while neglecting general practice: the best place to tackle chronic disease.”

The OECD also stresses this point in its latest economic review of Australia. Noting the relatively high cost of hospital treatment, it points out that hospital admission rates in Australia for diseases that can be treated by GPs are close to the highest in the developed world.

If the history of healthcare in Australia shows anything it’s that reforms are hard-won. When the recently departed Bill Hayden, as health minister in the Whitlam government, moved to bring Australia into line with every developed country apart from the United Sates by introducing a universal national health system, doctors’ groups ran a campaign against “nationalised medicine” that would make Donald Trump proud. One article in an AMA journal compared the threatened “enslavement” of the medical profession to that of Jews in Germany, and a poster featured the slogan “Heil wHITLAm.” Maliciously false rumours were spread that Hayden had been a corrupt policeman and was mentally ill.

Although the Fraser government systematically dismantled Hayden’s Medibank it was resurrected as Medicare by the Hawke government in 1984 — although not without another nasty campaign by doctors spreading false rumours about health minister Neal Blewett, who successfully sued for undisclosed damages.

The Coalition kept campaigning against the scheme until shadow health minister Michael Wooldridge persuaded John Howard to support it in the 1996 election because it had become too popular to oppose. That didn’t stop the Howard government from chipping away and undermining it.

Despite their periods of paranoia, doctors have generally done well out of Medicare, notwithstanding funding cuts under Coalition governments. Not only are they no longer campaigning against Medicare, but they are voicing support for the Butler reforms. The minister’s decision to include representatives of all the main health professions on his taskforce no doubt helped, with its report paving the way for the subsequent announcements. It gave doctors a stake in the plans and allowed them to claim some of the credit.

As AMA president Steve Robson put it, “something unexpected happened” following the AMA’s campaign to modernise Medicare. “Government listened,” he added, and went on to recite a list of budget initiatives.

Nicole Higgins, president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, was positively effusive, welcoming the budget as “a game changer… For the first time in decades we have a government that’s committed to strengthening Medicare and general practice care.”

Former federal health department head Stephen Duckett, until recently health program director at the Grattan Institute and now an honorary professor at Melbourne University, puts this new mood into perspective. “Up until very recently the medical profession was opposed to any hint of any move whatsoever away from fee-for-service,” he says. “What has been announced so far is not going to fix primary care itself but what it is doing is signalling the direction of change. It is like putting a little bit of sand in the oyster: eventually a pearl will emerge.”

In between his work as an obstetrician and gynaecologist and as AMA president, Robson has been studying for a master’s degree in health economics, which he says has fired his interest in and concern about the economic sustainability of the health system. Reminded of the AMA’s reputation as the Builders Labourers Federation of the medical profession, he laughingly responds, “I think that award has gone to the Pharmacy Guild” — a reference to that organisation’s over-the-top campaign against the government’s introduction of sixty-day prescriptions.

But the heavy artillery remains ready to be deployed. Or, as Robson puts it, “There is a time to hold a hand and a time to slap it. At the moment we want to make it very clear that we are very keen to work with the government on sustainability and at the same time to make sure we are respected for the care we provide.”

Given the increased emphasis Butler is placing on the primary care provided by GPs, that approach makes sense for the doctors’ groups. Robson’s interpretation of blended funding under MyMedicare is that extra money for enrolled patients will be provided on top of existing fee-for-service payments — in other words quite different from the Grattan model of patient-based payments substituting in part for fee-for-service. Duckett suspects the Grattan formula, which follows overseas practice, may be too big a political hurdle for the government. Peter Breadon, Grattan’s health program director, says restricting patient budgets to a small part of total funding would be a missed opportunity for meaningful reform.

Given the doctors’ sensitivity, the government is treading warily, not responding to my request for clarification about how blended funding will work. It doesn’t use the word “capitation” in the context of blended funding because it raises red flags. “What we want to get completely away from is the UK system of capitation,” says Robson, a view echoed by the RACGP’s Higgins. Importantly, capitation-based patient enrolment is compulsory in the British system but would not be here. But Breadon argues that the real problem with Britain’s National Health Service is the severe austerity under which it operates, with long waiting lists and chronic workforce shortages. It’s not the British funding model that’s the problem, he says, “it’s the funding quantum.”

Nor, despite the increases in Medicare rebates and the bulk-billing incentive, is Robson making any concessions on rebates. To cover costs, he argues, they need to double from an average $40 per GP visit. As to whether the government is amenable to further increases: “They are not going to have a lot of choice if they want to make the health system sustainable.” So expect some future slapping.

Plenty of problems remain to be tackled. While bulk-billing rates for GPs are falling, they remain higher than for other health professionals. In 2021–22 the rates for allied health services were an average of 51 per cent compared with 88 per cent for GPs.

And in that year nearly half a million Australians decided against seeing a specialist because they couldn’t afford it. On average, about 50 per cent of initial appointments with a dermatologist, urologist, obstetrician or ophthalmologist cost more than double the $90 Medicare schedule fee. As with allied health care, those most affected were the ones who needed the services most, namely the sickest and the poorest.

The Commonwealth Fund, a US-based health research body that conducts international surveys, found that 28 per cent of Australians reported out-of-pocket expenses equivalent to more than US$1000 a year in 2020, exceeded only by Switzerland and the United States among eleven higher-income countries. Thirty-two per cent skipped dental care, which is not covered by Medicare, because of cost, second only to the United States.

Fee-for-service’s continuing predominance encourages overservicing. According to a 2015 OECD study, knee-replacement surgery in Australia occurred at almost twice the rate of France and almost five times the rate of Israel. Antibiotics were prescribed at twice the rate of the Netherlands.

Despite large government subsidies, private health insurance remains a bad deal for many patients, with premiums rising faster than inflation and significant out-of-pocket costs for private hospital treatment. Nor does the evidence show that this form of insurance has done anything substantial to fulfil its claimed objective of taking pressure off public hospitals, mainly because private practice is much more lucrative for doctors, as well as much more expensive for patients.

Prevention remains the Cinderella of the health system, neglected and funded at lower rates than in most OECD countries. Isolated examples of success, including one of the lowest rates of smoking in the developed world, haven’t brought forth similar efforts in areas crying out for attention, such as Australia’s high rate of obesity. The Abbott government abolished the Preventive Health Agency and only now is an interim body planned while legislation is brought forward for an independent Centre for Disease Control, expected to be running by early 2025. Its focus will be on preparing for future pandemics, but it also will have a broader prevention brief.

Then there’s the overall financing of health, which remains a muddle of overlapping Commonwealth and state responsibilities. The states run hospitals but they are jointly funded by the Commonwealth; when problems arise, they blame the Commonwealth and demand more money. Many aged care residents spend excessive and very expensive periods in hospitals because the Commonwealth funds aged care and lacks the incentive to move people to more suitable and much cheaper facilities. Thirty or more years of reports, recommendations and attempts at reform — most recently under the Rudd government — have failed to bring meaningful change.

National cabinet agreed in August to devote a special meeting before the end of the year to this and other issues in health. But there is still no word on a date or an agenda for this meeting.

For Labor, the longer-term question is whether caution will overcome ambition. On this, the last word belongs to Ian Hickie, professor of psychiatry at Sydney University’s Brain and Mind Centre:

Back in 2008 I had a book contract to describe the obvious failings in Australian healthcare. It was planned to challenge the national myth that our system was “exceptional,” literally “best in the world.” I didn’t persist as prime minister Kevin Rudd was promising sweeping national reforms and there was genuine community enthusiasm for a major revamp of Medicare.

How I wish I had persisted! The glaring structural faults in the system have simply grown wider and deeper over the last fifteen years. Now the federal health minister Mark Butler is saying in public what his predecessors would only discuss in private. Our 1980s-style Medicare no longer delivers a fair, equitable or sustainable system… The challenge for the Albanese government is not to get stuck in the arguments about how best to re-design the Titanic. •

The post Medicare’s forty-year update appeared first on Inside Story.

The first Australian legation was a modest double-storey building on Goose Ridge Hill, in the heart of the city, not far from the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. The building is still there today, dwarfed by the forest of high-rise towers of what claims to be the world’s biggest city, its dazzling skyline a bold rival to Manhattan’s.

Australia’s initial diplomatic engagement with China came to an abrupt end with the communist victory in 1949. It wouldn’t resume for another quarter-century after a revolution of sorts in Australia swept away a generation of conservatism under Sir Robert Menzies and his successors.

Gough Whitlam had advocated diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China as early as 1954. It became Labor policy the following year. But it wasn’t until Whitlam’s election victory in 1972 that his vision became a reality.

Fifty years ago this week, Whitlam became the first Australian prime minister to visit the People’s Republic. A few days later, an RAAF Hercules landed in Beijing carrying a novel gift to mark the historic occasion — Saber Bogong, a 567-kilogram Murray Grey stud bull. Australia’s Beijing embassy had opened in January 1973 and the first resident Australian journalists soon followed. It would be another five years before the Americans turned up.

Whitlam’s maverick diplomacy — at the same time as the Nixon administration was taking its first halting steps towards normalising relations with China — set Australia apart.  We had been a firm and unequivocal ally of the United States since the second world war but we were prepared to make our own way in the region and the world — a fact that impressed the Chinese leadership and helped secure the foundations of a flourishing trade relationship that has underwritten Australia’s prosperity for half a century.

When he arrives in Beijing next weekend prime minister Anthony Albanese will find a city and a country largely unrecognisable from those Whitlam visited and receive a welcome that’s likely to be far less effusive if not overtly constrained.

Relations between China and Australia are slowly improving after reaching a nadir under the former government. The Chinese were infuriated in April 2020 when Scott Morrison demanded an independent international investigation with “weapons inspector powers” to reveal the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic. Soon after, they imposed a crippling raft of sanctions on Australian coal, barley, meat, cotton, lobster, timber and wine. The measures wiped out an estimated $20 billion in Australian exports.

The tensions worsened after ASIO agents staged early-morning raids in June 2020 on the Sydney homes of three Chinese journalists, including the bureau chief of the Xinhua news agency, alarming their families and seizing computers and documents — raids for which no official explanation has ever been given. A few weeks later, Cheng Lei, a Chinese-born Australian journalist working for Chinese television was detained and accused of illegally sending state secrets abroad. In early September, the ABC and Australian Financial Review correspondents sought diplomatic sanctuary, later fleeing the country after police warned they were to be interviewed regarding a “national security case.” A period of “wolf warrior diplomacy” during which Chinese critics were aggressively targeted and sometimes physically abused inflamed the hostility.

Since the Albanese government was elected early last year a gradual thaw in the relationship has seen the lifting or promised lifting of about three-quarters of the trade restrictions and a resumption of high-level government contacts. Cheng Lei was released and reunited with her family in Melbourne earlier this month, but no Australian journalists have yet returned to live in China. Australian writer and activist Yang Hengjun, who was arrested in August 2019 and accused of espionage, remains in prison with his health reported to be deteriorating.

While there are strong expectations of further improvement in the relationship as a consequence of Albanese’s visit to Beijing and Shanghai, it appears highly unlikely that it will return to anything resembling the détente of the 1970s and 1980s in the near future, if ever. And that is due mostly to a hardening of attitudes in Canberra.

The Australian government’s position, first enunciated by foreign minister Penny Wong, and still the script closely followed by senior Australian officials, is that while we seek to rebuild a cordial and constructive relationship with China it can’t be as close as it once was because of growing cybersecurity threats from Beijing, its more aggressive posture on Taiwan and the South China Sea and its efforts to expand its influence in the South Pacific.

During his state visit to the United States last week, Albanese went further in defining his government’s view of a growing divergence driven by China’s more assertive global posture. “China has been explicit: it does not see itself as a status quo power,” he told a gathering at the State Department attended by US vice-president Kamala Harris and secretary of state Antony Blinken. “It seeks a region and a world that is much more accommodating of its values and interests.”

A day earlier, an avuncular Joe Biden counselled his youngish guest that he needed to “trust but verify” the responses in his meeting next week with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Albanese responded to this somewhat patronising advice by insisting that he was “clear-eyed” about the challenge Australia faced: “We’re two nations with very different histories, values and political systems. Australia will always look to cooperate with China where we can, but we will disagree where we must, but continue to engage in our national interest. Our approach has been patient, calibrated and deliberate, and that will continue when I visit Beijing and Shanghai.”

It won’t be lost on the Chinese leadership that Albanese has chosen to visit them straight after a state visit to Washington. While the ANZUS alliance has been a fact of life in Australia–China relations since the beginning, it has never been as bluntly inserted into the bilateral equation as it has been since Australia ratified its new AUKUS partnership with the United States and Britain.

The timing of the Washington and Beijing visits will feed the Chinese view that Australia remains an unquestioning acolyte in America’s global reach, as it was in Vietnam and Iraq. “Australia’s political situation is not stable. They are influenced too much by the US and others,” Liu Zhiqin, a senior fellow at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute, told a group of visiting Australian journalists in Beijing last week. “It sometimes shows that they don’t have their own independent ideas. Sometimes, in my opinion, Australians behave like a fellow following the big brother.”

For years Western leaders recited the mantra that their defence and economic policies were never designed to “contain” China or thwart its inevitable emergence as a global economic and military superpower. Now that pretence has been abandoned. America is energetically pursuing efforts to “decouple” its economy from interdependence with China and to thwart China’s efforts to become self-sufficient in strategically critical industries. The AUKUS pact — along with the nascent Quad partnership between the US, India, Japan and Australia — is seen in China as part of an escalating effort to deny the nation its hard-earned place in the front row on the global stage.

Any Australian pretence that buying long-range nuclear-powered submarines from the United States under AUKUS is anything but a challenge to China was laid bare when deputy prime minister Richard Marles told a security forum in South Korea last week that if a war broke out over China’s determination to reunite Taiwan with the mainland, Australia would be in it. While mouthing the usual lines about the need for a peaceful solution, Marles added: “The consequences of a US–China conflict over Taiwan are so grave that we cannot be passive bystanders.” It sounded like an echo of Peter Dutton, his belligerent predecessor as defence minister, who declared in 2021 that in a war over Taiwan it “would be inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action.”

Chinese analysts scoff at the view that China’s military build-up poses any kind of threat to Australia. “China harbours no ambition at all in anything remotely close to Australia,” Renmin University’s Gong Jiong told the Australian journalists. “Why is it that politicians in Australia are even talking about China representing a security risk to Australia? That is something hard to accept and understand.” He says China’s increased engagement in the South Pacific was designed to counter Taiwanese influence in the region rather than challenge Australia.

Prominent Chinese also note the absurdity at the heart of Australia’s decision to spend an eye-watering $365 billion to buy a few hulking American nuclear-powered submarines on the grounds that they are essential to protect international trade routes vital to our economy. When a third of all Australian exports are sold to China and 90 per cent of Australian merchandise imports come from China, what exactly is the danger that requires us to give American and British industry a mortgage over the Australian defence budget from here to eternity?

While Marles was war-gaming in Seoul last week, ASIO chief Mike Burgess was joining his “Five Eyes” intelligence colleagues at a gathering in California to denounce the escalating cybersecurity threat posed by China. “The Chinese government are engaged in the most sustained, sophisticated and scaled theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history,” Burgess declared. Yet if the cyber-security threat from China is indeed far worse than ever before, is it perhaps simply that they are getting much better at strategic and commercial espionage and we are finding it harder to keep up with countermeasures? In the spying games that all nations play, are we struggling to keep up?

The more measured and less confrontational diplomacy pursued by the Albanese government has undoubtedly been crucial to stabilising the China–Australia relationship after years of upheaval, but China has good reasons of its own to seek a return to greater harmony.

The Chinese economy is facing a range of serious challenges that make continued friction with the West, and particularly with one of its most important trading partners, an unhelpful distraction. Chinese growth between July and September slowed to 4.9 per cent, compared with 6.3 per cent in the previous quarter. A crisis in its property sector has seen several major construction companies face collapse with hundreds of billions of dollars in debts. And China’s unemployment is rising, with the jobless rate for sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds climbing to more than 20 per cent.

Despite the recent economic turmoil, the Chinese economy is still expected to finish the year with growth of between 5 and 6 per cent — well below the boom years of the past but still a creditable performance. And despite the headwinds, China’s modernisation remains breathtaking. Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing are bustling and glamorous modern cities, linked to the rest of the country by the world’s biggest fast rail network. In this month’s glorious autumn weather, restaurants, shopping malls and parks are thronged with well-dressed, well-fed and obviously happy people. If the Communist Party’s contract with the people was to end the abject poverty that blighted most of the country before the revolution, it has delivered in spades.

Last week China celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping’s signature global engagement policy which has driven US$1500 billion in new development projects around the world. While the BRI has been widely criticised outside China for saddling many developing nations with crippling debts, building excessively extravagant infrastructure and causing widespread environmental degradation, many of the 150 participating nations have embraced China’s global leadership, opened lucrative new markets for Chinese exports, and provided access to new sources of oil, gas and minerals for Beijing.

Washington’s mostly unspoken distaste for the BRI stems from a perception that it is a crude device to extend China’s political influence at the expense of the United States and its allies, not least in the South Pacific. At a joint media conference with Albanese at the White House last week, President Biden derided the BRI as a “debt noose” for most countries that had signed on — then offered Xi Jinping the flattery of imitation by declaring that the G7 nations were working on their own version of the scheme: “His Belt and Road Initiative, well, we’re going to compete on that.”

Among the guests of honour at the BRI celebrations in Beijing were Russian president Vladimir Putin and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, whose warm embrace of Putin outraged his fellow European leaders. What escaped most media attention was the fact that among the other guests were president Joko Widodo of Indonesia and prime minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea. In a week when Australia was preoccupied with its American alliance, the leaders of the two countries that are our nearest neighbours were building stronger partnerships with China.

In recent days, Albanese has mused about the potential for Australia to build a role as an intermediary in the increasingly volatile relationship between Washington and Beijing. “I think both China and the United States probably see Australia as playing a role. We are a middle power,” he told journalists. “My concern with the relationship between the United States and China is that there has been good engagement at the diplomatic level… but military to military, there is still a lack of engagement. We need to build guardrails.”

That might also be an opportunity to rebuild some of the respect for Australia as an American ally with an independent worldview that prevailed through the years of the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke governments. “China wants to see a very independent, strategic and autonomous Australia,” says Zhou Rong, another senior fellow at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute. “You don’t need to depend on other countries. You are a European Asian country or you are a white Asian country, so you can function as a bridge between Asia and America — North America — and Europe.” •

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Coming just as candidate registrations opened for the 2024 presidential elections on 16 October, the five–four majority decision of the court created a loophole exempting elected officials from a rule that barred those aged under forty from joining the contest. It was all too convenient for the ambitions of thirty-six-year-old Gibran Rakabuming Raka, who had followed in the footsteps of his father, president Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi), by being elected mayor of their home city of Surakarta in 2020.

In recent months momentum had been gathering behind the idea of Gibran as running mate of defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the controversial former Soeharto henchman now widely seen as the frontrunner in the race to replace Jokowi. The court gave Jokowi, Prabowo and Gibran just the loophole they needed. Legal experts and the broader commentariat were scathing of its poorly reasoned decision, and of the crucial role played by the chief justice — who happens to be the president’s brother-in-law and Gibran’s uncle. Family Court, indeed.

But Jokowi didn’t become Indonesia’s most powerful president since Soeharto by caring much about the intelligentsia’s ideas of propriety. In brushing off criticism of the court’s decision and his son’s candidacy he struck a populist tone, declaring that “the people are the ones who mark a ballot, not we elites.” With approval ratings exceeding 80 per cent, he’s the most popular of any outgoing president in Indonesia; his endorsement provides a strategic advantage to any candidate looking to replace him.

Despite his disingenuous claims to neutrality, Jokowi is now well and truly off the fence in the contest between Prabowo and his main rival, Ganjar Pranowo, who — like Jokowi — is affiliated with the nationalist PDI-P party controlled by former president Megawati Soekarnoputri. The president’s disillusionment with the former Central Java governor — whom he sees as lacking independence from PDI-P and Megawati — has drawn him closer in recent months to Prabowo, who has carefully courted Jokowi’s favour by consulting him on key strategy decisions.

Prabowo and Gibran officially appeared together for the first time as running mates on 25 October, upstaging their rivals with a flashy stadium rally in Jakarta before leading a parade towards the electoral commission to submit their paperwork.

The unveiling of the Prabowo–Widodo alliance has changed the race to succeed Jokowi in important ways yet changed very little. Neither the constitutional court’s controversial ruling nor the nomination of Gibran appears to have had any immediate impact on any candidate’s popularity.

Polls still point to a two-round presidential election, with the likely elimination of former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan after an initial vote on 14 February giving way to a 26 June runoff between Prabowo and Ganjar. Prabowo’s success in the runoff will depend on the support of Anies’s voters, who mostly comprise the determinedly anti-Jokowi, and especially conservative Muslim, part of the electoral coalition Prabowo assembled at the last election in 2019. He’s counting on them voting for him, despite his accommodation with the Widodo family, out of antipathy to PDI-P and its secularist tendencies.

Jokowi’s support for Prabowo flies in the face not only of PDI-P’s preferences but also those of his own electoral base: about 55 per cent of those who voted for his re-election in 2019 tell pollsters they prefer Ganjar, while only 25 per cent have shifted to Prabowo. A key goal of pairing Gibran with Prabowo is to draw more Jokowi voters — largely concentrated in PDI-P’s Central and East Java heartland, where Ganjar has a sizeable lead — into Prabowo’s electoral coalition.

Nor is the vice-presidency the only front in the fight for a Widodo dynasty. In late September Gibran’s twenty-eight-year-old brother Kaesang Pengarep was appointed chairman of PSI, a minor party astroturfed into existence early in Jokowi’s presidency by sympathetic business and political figures, which recently endorsed Prabowo. The hope is that with the Widodo family halo above PSI, it will for the first time win the 4 per cent of the vote required to be awarded seats in the national legislature — and, now it has formally endorsed Prabowo, be rewarded with a share of cabinet seats if he wins. Speculation suggests that Gibran’s elevation to Prabowo’s ticket will be accompanied by his own defection from PDI-P to Golkar, the one-time regime party of Soeharto and another key member of the coalition supporting Prabowo’s campaign.

Take a moment to appreciate the sheer chutzpah Jokowi is showing in all this: putting one of his sons in control of a party whose principal strategy is to steal votes from PDI-P and putting another into a presidential campaign whose strategy involves poaching votes from PDI-P’s candidate — all while he himself is still a card-carrying member of the party.

PDI-P has little choice but to hold its fire. As one analyst puts it, Jokowi and the party are in a “mutual hostage situation” ahead of legislative elections to be held concurrently with the first round of the presidential vote on 14 February. For now, it’s not in PDI-P’s interest to have an acrimonious public split with a president who, even if his relationship with the party is becoming untenable, is still its most popular and influential cadre.

While Gibran’s candidacy has yet to change the state of the electoral horse race, it nonetheless has significant implications for Jokowi’s approach to the elections, and the political significance of their outcome for him.

Even as he became Indonesia’s most powerful post-reformasi head of state, Jokowi’s roots in the country’s political institutions remained quite shallow. His authority has rested not on direct control of a party, a social movement, a large personal fortune or even a particularly coherent band of cronies, but rather on the deterrent effect his huge popularity has on would-be opponents of his policies, and his willingness to use the legal system to coerce elites into cooperating with his political goals.

A key question that loomed over all this was his likely ability to wield influence after losing office. His efforts to engineer a constitutional amendment to delay the election, or allow himself to run for a third term, resulted in a rare defeat. Jokowi now seeks to anchor his post-presidential influence in a political dynasty the likes of which Indonesia has never seen at the national level, succeeding where former presidents Megawati and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono have failed in their efforts to secure presidential or vice-presidential candidacies for their children.

Has Jokowi accurately judged the risks and rewards of this strategy? If Ganjar can eke out a win, Jokowi will surely be exposed to withering revenge from PDI-P for his alliance with Prabowo. But even if Prabowo prevails, Jokowi might prove to have overestimated the payoffs. On paper, a Prabowo presidency would place members of the Widodo clan not only first in succession to a septuagenarian president but also potentially heading a debutante parliamentary party (PSI) and a new power base in an established one (Golkar), both of which are members of the nominating coalition that would have the pick of key cabinet posts.

But the real-world influence of all this is uncertain. Once he has settled in as president, Prabowo would have no compunction about sidelining Jokowi as part of any effort to assert his dominance over the political scene. A likely scenario is that the Widodo clan comes to resemble the Soekarnos or the Yudhoyonos: just one among many factions in a political oligarchy whose collective power, especially under Prabowo, would be checked by the overbearing presidency that Jokowi has given rise to.

It’s also important to set this within the record of Indonesian dynastic politics more generally. While a rising proportion of parliamentarians and local leaders have family ties to other elected officials, these dynasties have remained localised and small-scale, with little of the staying power of those in the Philippines, India or Thailand — or even consolidated liberal democracies like Japan and Taiwan.

The emergence of a Widodo dynasty as part of the national political furniture doesn’t on its own imperil Indonesian democracy. The worry is that Jokowi’s decision to take such a large stake in a Prabowo victory gives him a powerful incentive to use all the levers of incumbency to help bring it about. This could encompass his influence over the bureaucracy, local governments, big business, the police, the military — and if recent events are any guide, perhaps even the constitutional court, which adjudicates legal challenges to the results of elections.

In the end, the hazards for democracy that lie in Jokowi’s dynasty-building might have less to do with the ends than with the means. •

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It’s true that the country’s military-authored 2008 constitution gave the civilian government no effective oversight of the military and other security services. But while Suu Kyi’s lamentable defence of its actions before the International Court of Justice in 2019 did her no harm domestically, it brought her international celebrity to a shuddering halt, alienating democratic governments around the world. Foreign aid continued to flow, but Western investment dried up as corporations registered the reputational risk of operating under a regime tainted by horrific human rights abuses.

At the time, like other Myanmar analysts, we considered a military coup unlikely given the cosy, profitable arrangement the military had designed for itself under the 2008 constitution. But a more general principle should have given Suu Kyi pause for thought before she travelled to the Hague: authoritarian leaders, and bullies more generally — including Myanmar’s military leaders — see compromise or acquiescence as weakness.

We weren’t surprised when the National League for Democracy was re-elected with a thumping majority and seemed set to consolidate its power. In the light of the hardship and abuse of the long years of miliary government, Suu Kyi’s win offered at the least a glimmer of hope.

Yet her government’s second term was cut short even before it started. On 1 February 2021, the first day of the new parliament, the military commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing, ended a decade of reforms and semi-democratic rule and returned the country to the authoritarianism of the pre-2011 era. Suu Kyi was arrested and returned to her former role as political prisoner, as were the president and other National League for Democracy leaders.

As we wrote on the day of the coup, Myanmar’s people had enjoyed a decade of increased political and economic freedoms. The military was therefore likely to encounter “uncooperative subjects” as it sought to reimpose authoritarian rule.

That proved to be an understatement. The early opposition to the coup, nonviolent, almost festive, filled the streets of Yangon and other cities and towns around the country. The protesters were watched closely by the police, and sometimes the military, but little action was taken. A civil disobedience movement took hold, with striking or uncooperative workers paralysing major parts of the economy. Doctors, teachers, university lecturers: they all voiced their opposition to the military’s strangling of the government.

A month into these nonviolent protests the security services launched a more forceful response. Indiscriminate live fire into the crowds killed and injured protesters. National League for Democracy politicians and other protesters were arrested and tortured to death. A grim new chapter of reprisals and crackdowns had begun.

Under these conditions, opposition to the junta transformed from open, nonviolent action, with the risk of being abducted or shot, to an armed underground movement. The disparate militias of the newly formed People’s Defence Force are playing the key role, often supported by ethnic armed groups long opposed to the military.

The country descended into civil war — not only in the remote borderlands, where fighting led by ethnic armed groups has smouldered since independence in 1948, but also in the main cities and, perhaps most importantly, in the normally docile central dry zone populated by the numerically dominant Bamar (Burman) majority. This is the heartland from which the military usually draws much of its political strength and recruits.

A parallel National Unity Government was established, and the National League for Democracy’s UN ambassador managed to retain his position despite repeated attempts by the military junta to remove him.

The Myanmar people, their dreams having been so brutally dashed, are unlikely to accept a return to the uncomfortable compromises of the 2008 constitution. The army, having so carelessly discarded its comfortable and lucrative relationship with Suu Kyi’s League, now faces a popular and determined opposition implacably opposed to allowing it any role in government.

The catastrophic error of judgement by Min Aung Hlaing and the military leadership hasn’t only devastated much of the country. It has also destroyed any chance of peaceful coexistence between military and civilians for the foreseeable future.

This unravelling of constitutional rule made it necessary to revise our book. Our assumption had been that the National League for Democracy would govern for another five-year term, in coalition if necessary with some of the ethnic minority parties. The chance that another party would emerge to dominate Myanmar politics seemed remote, particularly while Suu Kyi remained at the League’s helm, and nor were the military-backed parties likely to cobble together a governing coalition.

We had a provisional agreement with our publishers to issue a second edition in the lead-up to the anticipated 2025 election, but these decisions are always conditional on first edition sales and other factors. Now the book required much earlier updating. Routledge accepted our proposal to accelerate the process, and the result is a fully revised second edition, just published, with extra chapters on education, health and the coup in historical context.

One difference in the new edition is that it draws on (and links to) articles published by the growing number of open-access policy outlets that provide fast — in some cases almost instant — research findings and analysis of regional issues. For Australian academics working on Myanmar politics these include the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Strategist, the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, the Australian Institute of International Affairs’s Australian Outlook and the Australian National University’s East Asia Forum. The Conversation also provides an invaluable space for academics to reach a more general audience with short research-based articles, and Inside Story publishes longer essays.

While these outlets don’t provide all the rigour of refereed journal articles, they overcome the delays in traditional academic publishing that can be frustrating for academics analysing contemporary events. Having this political analysis available much more quickly and free of charge is crucial, particularly when dealing with a region like Southeast Asia where local academics, analysts and members of the public are much less likely to have access to paywalled journal articles and books.

We are particularly pleased that help from our contributors’ institutions has enabled us to make the book available for download free of charge. We see it as a crucial social justice issue that the contributors’ analyses are freely available to readers in Myanmar, Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, with much of the world’s focus understandably on conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East, the Myanmar crisis has been relegated to footnote status. Although the United States’ BURMA Act earlier this year raised hopes of more international support for the opposition movement, little progress is evident.

Myanmar’s military continues its brutal campaign of attacks on civilians, including the burning of villages and indiscriminate air strikes on civilian targets. A single attack in central Myanmar in May killed more than 160 people, including children.

While the privations and suffering of the Rohingya that we described three years ago have spread across much of the rest of the population, we should not forget the terrible situation of that community. Over a million Rohingya refugees have spent more than six years in Bangladeshi border refugee camps at the mercy of criminal gangs, their already tiny food rations further reduced in recent times.

As investigations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity slowly wind their way through the International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, and courts in Germany and elsewhere, the Rohingya and Myanmar’s wider population experience no respite.

The top generals have been excluded from most diplomatic engagement, and are only welcomed by Russia, China, North Korea and a few other authoritarian regimes. Even ASEAN, which has tended to tolerate a fair bit of bad behaviour in Myanmar, recognises that the military regime in Naypyitaw presents a reputational risk for the entire region. An empty seat at ASEAN symbolises much wariness about legitimising the violence and devastation unleashed by the coup and sends a signal, albeit a weak one, to other autocratic regimes.

Like Ukraine, Myanmar is suffering the consequences of terrible decisions by ruthless, isolated leaders. As we look ahead it is crucial that we don’t ignore the crimes of these despots and the need to find just outcomes.

The answers will usually be found on the ground, in the hard slog of defying dictatorial rule. But let’s not ignore the contributions that can be made by democratic states prepared to resolutely oppose these dictatorial regimes. A concerted international effort to support the National Unity Government materially, diplomatically and militarily could easily alter the dynamics in Myanmar. •

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Often acerbic and sometimes irascible in public, Hayden had a fine sense of humour, a passion for political intrigue and a liking for journalists. As Geoff Kitney noted in a tribute in the Australian Financial Review, he loved to hear and trade gossip, preferably salacious.

After a tour of the private quarters of Ferdinand and Imelda that day in 1986, Hayden emerged to present us newshounds with a global scoop. Imelda might have been famous for her vast wardrobe of shoes, but she also had another collecting passion. Her rooms, he gleefully reported, contained a formidable stash of pornographic cassette tapes.

Hayden is mostly remembered as the Labor leader whose keys to The Lodge were snatched by Bob Hawke; as the fleeting but steadying treasurer in the last inglorious days of the Whitlam government; and as a principal architect of Medicare and the landmark economic reforms of the 1980s. He should also be celebrated as one of Australia’s most determined and effective foreign ministers.

When he fell on his sword, enabling Hawke’s unstoppable ascendancy to the Labor leadership to go unchallenged on the cusp of the 1983 federal election, Hayden had already anointed Paul Keating as the next treasurer and instead took foreign affairs as his consolation prize.

In his five years in the job, he would lay the groundwork for a peace settlement in Cambodia, strengthen the campaign against South Africa’s apartheid regime during Australia’s tenure on the UN Security Council and weather a period of bruising conflict with France over nuclear testing at Mururoa atoll, the Rainbow Warrior scandal and Paris’s intransigence on self-determination for its Polynesian subjects. He worked hard to build closer and deeper ties between Australia and its Asian and Pacific neighbours.

Hayden brought a stubborn determination and moral clarity to a job that saw him open talks over Cambodia with Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong in defiance of the United States, face down French bullying, and oversee a sensitive review of the ANZUS treaty. Through it all, he consistently spoke out in defence of what he saw to be Australia’s best interests.

In the same year as his visit to Manila, Hayden embarked on a grand tour of the nations of the South Pacific — if a two-week island-hopping expedition aboard an ageing Royal Australian Air Force Hawker Siddeley turboprop aircraft can be considered grand. At Funafuti, the tiny main island of Tuvalu, I vividly remember the plane almost getting bogged on the short grassy runway.

I missed another of the ports of call. The night before departure, a greatly amused Bill Hayden announced to his entourage over drinks, “We’re all off to Tonga tomorrow, but not Mr Baker, who has been declared persona non grata!” This is the first I knew of a ban imposed after I had detailed the extravagant lifestyle of the feudal court in Nuku‘alofa during an earlier visit to Tonga.

I rejoined the caravan in time for Western Samoa. On a free day, the travellers set off with togs and towels to a beautiful but treacherous beach on the north of the main island. To the consternation of his retinue, Hayden ignored the warnings, dived straight into the surf and swam far out to sea. Mercifully, Harold Holt’s fate was not replicated.

During the trip there was some engagement between the travelling journalists and the locals that went beyond the conventional scope of diplomatic intercourse. Hayden revelled in the gossip. At his first press conference at Old Parliament House after returning to Canberra he began by serenading one of the journalists with a variation on “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Hayden was also notorious for collecting outsized souvenirs on his global travels, many of them of dubious artistic merit. It was said that the garden of his Ipswich home was a Disneyland of kitsch, many of the pieces acquired on his travels around the world.

During a visit to Papua New Guinea Hayden alarmed his advisers by taking a particular shine to a large garamut, a slit drum fashioned from a tree trunk, that he spotted in the garden of the Mount Hagen hotel where his party was staying. Such was his enthusiasm that the hotel owner appeared to feel compelled to offer it as a gift to his distinguished guest.

The minders and the media — and perhaps the hotelier — concluded there was little risk of the gift being accepted given its great size and weight. Not so. By early the next morning it had been loaded aboard the VIP jet and found its way back to Ipswich via RAAF Amberley.

Throughout the tribulations and triumphs of his long political career, Hayden’s devotion to Dallas, his wife of sixty-two years, was a constant. In 1987 he was poised to travel to the frontline states of southern Africa at the height of the campaign against apartheid. It was a trip at the heart of Hayden’s determination to see an end to the racist regime in Pretoria — with the bonus of some exotic sightseeing and the chance to augment the Ipswich artefact collection. Days before departure, Dallas suffered a mental health episode and without hesitation Hayden cancelled the trip to stay with her while she recovered.

Among many fine tributes paid to Hayden in recent days was one by Laurie Oakes, former doyen of the Canberra press gallery. “They don’t come much better than Bill Hayden,” Oakes tweeted. “He would have made a great PM. Inheriting Bill’s policies and the people he’d put in key roles gave Hawke a head start. A politician in the finest Labor tradition. Humble, decent, clever, game as they come, Bill’s contribution was immense.”

Prime minister Anthony Albanese singled out Hayden’s achievements as foreign minister for particular praise: “Without Bill Hayden’s instinctive grasp of the relationship between facing our nation to the world and securing our prosperity for the future, the government in which he served might not have achieved the same degree of engagement in our region that still benefits Australia today.”

Had that vision been embraced and effectively driven by all of those who followed Hayden as foreign minister, Australia might not be struggling with some of the formidable challenges it now faces with its neighbours, not least in the South Pacific. •

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Walter, a British feminist writer and activist, has written an evocative book, Before the Light Fades, that begins as an exploration of the emotional aftermath and turns into an examination of the lives of Ruth and her refugee parents. At first her grief is raw, turning her into “a little scuttling mollusc without armour.” It is compounded by the lingering stigma of suicide, which somehow coexists with a new cultural openness to talking about it.

Walter struggles against the view that her mother had the worst kind of death and that her suicide could only be attributed to mental illness. She bristles at the modern tendency to see all dark emotions through a psychiatric lens, but also worries that towards the end Ruth was in a state of despair rather than Socratic composure.

Friends who use the well-meaning but “off the shelf” language of self-care to comfort her provoke the same irritation. She tries out a range of healing distractions — yoga, swimming, running, gardening — but the idea that we should soothe and coddle ourselves in times of loss seems to her self-absorbed and alien to the generation that is being lost.

The book’s account of the changing seasons of grief is intense and unsparing. Walter has tears, self-reproach and regret, as our current bereavement script leads us to expect, but also times of anger, bitterness and misanthropy. Mourning does not always deepen or ennoble. At times it leads her to resent the living and become hardened, cauterising her empathy to stem the flow of pain. “I am becoming less human, the more I grieve.”

Walter captures the experience of having an ageing parent beautifully. Her relationship with Ruth is about as solid and unambivalent as two strong personalities can have, but she confesses to having experienced a growing annoyance with her mother’s growing vulnerability. Ruth’s preoccupation with dementia, amplified by experiencing her own father’s illness and her work in aged care, seemed out of proportion. Walter is saddened by the loss of Ruth’s independence, fearlessness and rebellious spirit, but her sadness is mingled with an implied criticism of her slide into weakness, as if Ruth should have tried harder to embody the maternal ideal she represented as a younger woman.

Walter reclaims that younger self in a compelling retelling of Ruth’s past, from the horror of her parents’ early life as Jews in Nazi Germany, to their circuitous escape into an unwelcoming England that sent them to internment camps, their shrinking into postwar suburban anonymity, and their upset when the young Ruth resurrects her father’s abandoned radicalism in the fight for nuclear disarmament in the 1960s. Georg knew where dissent could lead.

Ruth’s involvement in Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100 is a mix of clerical tedium — so much typing, copying and mailing — and daring escapades, peaking when she helps uncover evidence that the British government had built bunkers to house the great and good in the event of nuclear apocalypse.

Ruth’s politics extended beyond the nuclear issue, leading her into a brand of feminism that would later conflict with her daughter’s. Walter recounts how the power feminism she embraced in the 1980s rejected Ruth’s critique of femininity. She believed she could remain glamorous while the last few glass ceilings were quickly shattered. That former self was naive, Walter writes, failing to anticipate that “objectification would be sold back to us as an empty mirage of empowerment.”

This realisation becomes part of a broader and more sympathetic re-evaluation of Ruth’s unorthodox and sometimes puzzling life choices. Even the suicide becomes intelligible, “like leaving a party when you’ve had enough.”

Before the Light Fades reveals not only the courage and creativity of Ruth’s generation of protesters, but also how the disarmament movement’s mission to avert global disaster is echoed in the climate emergency movement of today. Ruth herself comes across as a free spirit who retained her own parents’ sense of displacement and never became entirely settled. Marriage to a fellow activist burns brightly for a while but ends badly. She throws herself into study, social work with refugees, and being a mother and grandmother: “the myth maker of the family, the one who told us who we were.”

Walter’s writerly voice is distinctive without being showy: she is humane, curious and allergic to cliché, but also sceptical, half in the world and half on the sidelines looking askance. She is a deep thinker but not a wallower or a theorist. As her grief starts to lift, she recommits to political action as if carrying forward a family tradition. Her book is a moving meditation on ageing and loss, the persistence of the past, and the necessity of hope in spite of it all.

It’s a funny kind of hope, peeking through a cloud of pessimism, but it seems a fitting tribute to Walter’s lineage of brave and beleaguered radicals. •

Before the Light Fades: A Memoir of Grief and Resistance
By Natasha Walter | Hachette | $32.99 | 256 pages

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The centre-right National party — which won 46 per cent of the vote in 2017 but narrowly failed to form government, and managed just 26 per cent in 2020 — secured 39 per cent of the vote and fifty seats in the 121-seat parliament. Its habitual coalition partner, the ACT party, attracted 9 per cent and an additional electorate seat, for a likely total of eleven. Between them, these two parties of the right attracted 47 per cent of the vote, just two seats fewer than their combined result in 2017, giving National leader Christopher Luxon a clear mandate to form government.

This time it’s the turn of Labour, and its relatively new leader Chris Hipkins, to face devastation. The party won just 27 per cent of the vote and lost a number of previously safe seats in Auckland — results that echo its performance in the 2011 and 2014 elections. Polling had suggested a similar defeat in 2017 until Ardern took over the leadership and secured a solid 37 per cent, and government, through a coalition with New Zealand First and a support agreement from the Greens.

Some in the media are blaming the extent of the loss on Ardern’s unfulfilled promise of transformation and the extended lockdowns experienced by Aucklanders. But once the count is finalised (in three weeks or thereabouts) and the split voting patterns analysed, the causes may prove to be more complex.

First, it is important to remember that the 2020 election result was an anomaly. Since New Zealand introduced proportional representation in 1996, no party had won more than half the vote. Labour achieved this, but single-party government came at the expense of support from across the political spectrum.

According to calculations by the political scientist Jack Vowles, the net shift in votes in 2020 was the biggest in over a century. The question that followed from that electoral upheaval was whether New Zealand was witnessing the beginnings of an electoral realignment.

The weekend’s results so far suggest that New Zealand politics has returned to its pre-Covid, pre-Ardern political landscape. Fragmentation has returned on the left and right, with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori (the Māori Party) winning votes and seats from Labour, and the ACT party doing the same to National. NZ First, under the leadership of the veteran politician Winston Peters, is back in parliament after three years, with eight seats and the now-familiar role of kingmaker.

Second, this election featured a resurgence of anti-Māori sentiment built on extremist reactions to initiatives including co-governance of natural resources and infrastructure and the reorganisation of healthcare to better support the needs of Māori communities. Indeed, the politicisation of race relations during this year’s campaign reached a level not seen since former National leader Don Brash’s infamous 2004 “Orewa” speech, in which he attacked “special privileges” accorded to Māori New Zealanders.

The rekindled race debate fuelled opposition to the widely accepted recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi’s significance in fostering strong partnerships between Māori and the Crown to ensure greater equity in policy outcomes. (The constitutionally and culturally significant treaty was signed in 1840 between most Māori tribal leaders and representatives of the British Crown.)

By contrast, the two smaller parties on the left, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, campaigned on issues identified as the greatest voter concerns: the cost of living, inflation and health, as well as climate change and natural resource governance. They stayed positive in their messaging and quietly garnered an increase in support and ultimately an increase in both party and electorate votes at the expense of Labour.

Te Pāti Māori added three Māori electorates to the one it already held. The Greens also won three electorate seats, holding on to Auckland Central and picking up two central Wellington seats from Labour. High-profile Greens and Te Pāti Māori candidates also stood in several safe Labour seats, resulting in those seats being lost, or only marginally won, by Labour.

Third, turnout appears to have been well down this year, which was always going to be a concern for Labour. While the media coined the term “Jacindamania” even before her star power became evident, Ardern’s elevation in 2017 and her leadership through Covid-19 seem to have mobilised voters.

Part of the explanation for the turnout might also lie in the fact that no headline referendums were held on the weekend. End-of-life legislation and the legalisation of cannabis were both put to a vote in 2020, with the latter believed to have particularly motivated younger voters. As the 2020 New Zealand Election Study revealed, young people were more likely than their elders to favour that legalisation, to seek more information from the Electoral Commission’s referendum website and, as a consequence, to vote. Combined with polls predicting a resounding win for the right, the absence of highly charged referendums may have led some voters on the left to disengage.

The Electoral Commission has estimated that this year’s turnout will be 78.4 per cent of enrolled voters (down from 82.2 per cent in 2020). It would be lower still as a proportion of all those who were eligible to enrol. Research shows that Māori, Pacific islanders, young people and those on lower incomes — groups less likely to vote, historically at least — are more likely to vote Labour.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that only once since 1949 has Labour won three consecutive elections. It was Helen Clark’s Labour government (1999–2008) that achieved this feat, with its third term only possible with the support of NZ First among others.

By contrast, National has never had the experience of being a one-term government. Indeed, it won the most seats — and potentially a fourth term — in 2017 but was unable to win over NZ First. Similar negotiations will need to happen this time round, a process history tells us is likely to be painful and protracted and could yet slow the pace of National’s proposed cuts to taxes and services.

While the smaller parties may have scooped up more of the total vote share than in times past, the make-up of government, and the plight of Labour look like a return to pre-Covid times. •

The post NZ’s back-to-the-future election appeared first on Inside Story.

Recent censuses have documented a quite extraordinary growth in the Indigenous population, largely in southeastern Australia, driven by growing self-identification and rising numbers of mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships. As a result, the national profile of the Indigenous population is changing, accompanied by even greater levels of income inequality. Very high levels of income inequality exist within the Indigenous community, levels that are greater than those that exist within the non-Indigenous community.

Alongside these shifts has been a growth in the diversity of political perspectives among leading Indigenous figures. The contrasting views of Indigenous No campaigners Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine, on the one hand, and Lidia Thorpe and author/lawyer Michael Mansell, on the other, are just one example.

The geographical, social and linguistic heterogeneity of Indigenous Australians has long been recognised by policymakers yet only sometimes taken account of. The regionally organised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (1990–2005) was a rare example of a positive recognition of heterogeneity; in other cases — tighter conditions on social security in remote Australia, for instance — the recognition has come with a punitive veneer.

This diversity has increasingly been overlaid (though not replaced) by a pan-Indigenous focus on identity and identity politics that has begun to permeate the national imagination. The emphasis on a single identity — rather than on layered identities, as Noel Pearson advocates — has created a unity with its own fragility.

These strands have created social, economic and political complexities that undercut the possibility of building an enduring consensus among First Nations on virtually any issue. If substantial Indigenous consensus on policy aspirations is just as elusive as it is among the non-Indigenous population, then all-encompassing Indigenous representation is inherently elusive, particularly nationally.

The referendum result alone won’t drive this complexity; it has been emerging for at least two decades. But the vote will inevitably be perceived as a political and societal inflection point. The notion that governments should seek to discern an overarching and representative Indigenous perspective is likely to give way increasingly to multiple Indigenous interest groups, themselves engaged in the cut and thrust of interest-group politics both within the Indigenous domain and between the Indigenous domain and the wider political domain.

Virtually all recent public commentary has been on the politics of the Voice: the campaign, the tactics of the Yes and No camps, the effectiveness of the most prominent advocates, the implications for social cohesion and reconciliation, and the implications for Australia’s international reputation. The shape of the post-referendum policy framework has received almost no attention. Yet it will determine the opportunities available to First Nations citizens and inevitably shape the nation’s future in ways that are difficult to predict but nevertheless consequential and far-reaching.

In a hyper-rational world, the obvious response to the referendum loss would be to press ahead with legislation to create a Voice. After all, if it is important enough to be constitutionally entrenched, why wouldn’t the government seek to establish it legislatively?

We don’t live in an entirely rational world. Prime minister Anthony Albanese explicitly ruled out a legislated Voice before the vote, primarily on the basis that the process of legislating a Voice would become hyper-politicised. Opponents would argue that the referendum result made crystal clear that Australians don’t want a Voice, thus depriving any such proposal of an electoral mandate. Its design would become deeply contentious both in wider political circles and among Indigenous interests. Without constitutional enshrinement, a legislated Voice’s views and policy perspectives would arguably carry less weight and be more susceptible to being ignored by governments.

One alternative path would be to create an appointed Voice, though the prime minister appears to have implicitly ruled this out too. Governments often appoint specialist groups to provide advice; in fact, the previous government appointed a prime minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council in September 2013 with Warren Mundine as its first chair. It was silently abandoned in 2019 when its advice on how best to progress the Uluru Statement and the proposed Voice became politically inconvenient.

Since then, reflecting the triumph of political considerations over rationality, the Coalition government (and now Labor) operated without a formal Indigenous advisory mechanism while simultaneously funding elaborate bureaucratic and legal processes to design and implement a proposed Voice.

The government’s most likely move will be to embrace the role of the Coalition of Peaks, the alliance of eighty-plus Indigenous peak bodies that emerged in early 2019 from discussions between representatives of fourteen Aboriginal community-controlled organisations and prime minister Scott Morrison. Those discussions ultimately led to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. According to its latest annual report, the Coalition of Peaks directly and indirectly represents more than 800 organisations and at least 550,000 Indigenous people across numerous sectors.

Announcing a greater reliance on the Coalition of Peaks — or, more probably, gradually lifting engagement — has several political advantages. The coalition encompasses a wide swathe of Indigenous policy, it was established and funded by a Coalition government, and it is capably led by its convenor, the experienced former bureaucrat Pat Turner. Perhaps even more importantly, building on the coalition requires no legislation and can accurately be characterised as a continuation of the status quo.

If it pursues this option, Labor will presumably take the opportunity to signal its increased commitment by allocating new Indigenous funding in the coming 2024 budget. One obvious spending opportunity championed by Turner and the Coalition of Peaks is housing, a policy domain with implications for health, education, criminal justice and domestic violence. As the government develops its new National Housing and Homelessness Plan, which will encompass new intergovernmental funding arrangements, it could earmark increased funding to Indigenous communities.

The Coalition of Peaks is, of course, quite different from the proposed Voice. Unlike previous Indigenous representative bodies, it seeks to represent the interests of “community-controlled” organisations rather than the entire Indigenous constituency. Its members cover a broad range of Indigenous interests, but obvious gaps include the educational and economic development sectors. Implicit in any greater engagement would be a shift to engaging with coalition’s constituent peak bodies.

At the core of the Coalition of Peaks is NACCHO, the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, which represents 145 Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations across the country employing around 6000 staff. NACCHO’s members service more than 550 primary care sites delivering more than 3.1 million episodes of care to more than 400,000 people.

Apart from their sheer breadth of activity, NACCHO members have the advantage of receiving mainstream healthcare funding for their services, thus ensuring a substantial level of political independence. That advantage does not extend to most of the Coalition of Peaks’s other members, which rely to a greater or lesser extent on discretionary government funding. So too does the Coalition of Peaks’s policy secretariat, creating a major risk to its continued independence.

As a member of the council overseeing the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, the Coalition of Peaks has guaranteed cabinet-level access to every jurisdiction in the Australian federation. This is unprecedented in modern Australian history, though the reality is that it is outnumbered and outgunned by the sheer institutional heft of the states and the federal government, and particularly by the size and intellectual capital of their bureaucracies.

Of course, governments will continue to engage with Indigenous interest groups outside the Coalition of Peaks, and will draw on specialist advisory bodies where necessary, as already occurs in the mainstream policy domain. When both Indigenous and non-Indigenous interests are involved, governments will continue to appoint Indigenous members to relevant advisory committees.

The advantages of using the Coalition of Peaks to underpin the future framework of Indigenous policy are significant, but there are also significant challenges.

Foremost is the fact that the extraordinarily complex policy architecture of Closing the Gap is unfit for purpose and requires serious attention. Its bureaucratic complexity ties the Coalition of Peaks down in never-ending process, across eight jurisdictions, virtually guaranteeing it cannot focus consistently on strategic policy opportunities. Complicating its work is the fact that the Coalition government shifted political responsibility for most targets to the states and territories and stepped back from any overt leadership role, a move not reversed so far by Labor.

These problems should have been tackled head-on in the Productivity Commission’s recent draft report on the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. Although the report is critical of progress, its strategically underwhelming analysis is a lost opportunity to take stock and shift course to ensure governments take their commitments seriously. The machinery of Closing the Gap will not collapse in the short term, but neither will it survive into the medium term without focused attention.

Governments are inherently conflicted on this issue: reform of the policy architecture and a stronger Coalition of Peaks will inevitably make life harder for them. Visionary political leadership within government, always in scarce supply, will be required to crack this nut.

A second implication of the referendum defeat is that governments and First Nations will be forced to reconsider the preparedness of the Australian electorate (and the nation’s underlying political settlement) to accept treaties as a mechanism for advancing Indigenous aspirations. While many First Nations leaders and their supporters will intensify their calls for treaties, the risk of devoting decades of work to inchoate policy reforms, and the challenges of agreement-making with reluctant governments could fracture Indigenous views on the benefits of such a strategy. Pragmatic leaders could well see better and more immediate uses for scarce advocacy resources.

It is also worth mentioning that while a successful referendum would have paved the way for a vote on an Australian republic, the defeat is likely to dampen enthusiasm in the current decade. Perhaps paradoxically, it may also increase the likelihood of an Indigenous person being appointed as Australia’s head of state in the interim.

Progress on Indigenous constitutional recognition, meanwhile, appears more remote than ever. Short-sighted self-interest has triumphed over visionary reform. The 1967 referendum gave the Commonwealth an implicit mandate to lead on Indigenous policy, one it has progressively walked away from over the past decade. The Indigenous leadership, encouraged by progressive Liberals, decided to shift away from the recommendations of the 2012 report of the expert panel on constitutional recognition and replace it with the Voice proposal, a move that now seems a well-intentioned error of judgement.

Led by Pat Dodson and Mark Leibler, the expert panel recommended the repeal of section 51(xxvi) of the Constitution, which allows the federal government to enact adverse and discriminatory laws based on race, and called for a new provision prohibiting racial discrimination.

The nation’s Indigenous policy framework over the coming decades will inevitably focus on particular Indigenous interests rather than a notional general interest, tempered by more of the same: more rhetoric over substance, more evasion of responsibility, more blame shifting, less transparency and ministerial accountability, and continued policymaking aimed merely at giving the appearance of action.

If they are to force their way into the dominant bloc of interests that controls Australia’s institutions, Indigenous interests will need to look beyond governments for support and as the sole locus of political action. To be effective, they must build alliances, institutionalise the independence of their advocacy capabilities, and create their own policy institutions. They will need to span their diverse aspirations, and build and sustain the intellectual capital necessary to achieve inclusionary policy reforms in the face of opposition from mainstream interests concerned to protect the status quo. Inevitably, this will be a multigenerational struggle. •

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Early polling indicates overwhelming support. Liberal opposition leaders, regardless of their personal inclinations, lack the authority to support Labor’s proposals. If a Labor government is crazy enough to hold the referendum midterm, it suffers a particularly ghastly fate.

The Voice in 2023 was almost a carbon copy of Labor’s last referendums, in 1988, with overt racism added.

The table tells the story:

The content of the question matters a little, but only a little. It could’ve been purely symbolic recognition, or putting local government into the founding document, or taking out “race” or correcting a typo. If it’s a Labor proposal, and it isn’t held with an election, it gets walloped.

On current counting, the Voice is number 21 on this table, pretty much in the middle of Labor midterm results.

What else can we say?

Tasmania underperformed against general expectations; although, as electoral maestro Kevin Bonham points out, only Newspoll consistently had the smallest state’s support at a more modest relative position. On current counting it has slipped above New South Wales (all state numbers are at the AEC here) to reach second place after Victoria (third after the ACT if we’re including the two territories), which is itself worthy of a mini-headline. Tasmania hasn’t been in third place since, as it happens, that famous 1967 referendum that took out all references to “aboriginals” and “natives.” It hasn’t been in second place since an unsuccessful 1910 proposal.

South Australia’s relative support was always a bit of an unknown, and it came in very low.

In common with the 2017 marriage-equality survey and the 1999 republic referendum, and to varying degrees all referendums back to 1967, Yes was highest around the CBDs of the capital cities, and gradually got lower the further out you went. This routine fact is being turned over and over in the media, but they have to write and talk about something.

(This table on Twitter does show “outer metro” support for marriage equality lowest of all, which can probably be sheeted to its unpopularity in electorates with high numbers of people from non-English-speaking backgrounds. For the Voice, however, there is little evidence of this cohort deviating from the rest one way or the other.)

The figures strongly show big majority support for the Voice among Indigenous communities — if nothing like that 80 per cent January figure that the Yes case cited right up to and including polling day. Several late surveys had Yes support among First Nations people dropping by about the same proportion as the rest of the country, to about 60 per cent, and that looks about right from the polling booth numbers.

(Projecting remote community statistics onto First Nations people who live elsewhere, such as in the cities and towns, is fraught.)

During Saturday night’s ABC TV coverage, federal Liberal MP Keith Wolahan (a No supporter) warned against winners’ hubris, and so far the gloating anticipated on Friday has been restrained.

Late on Saturday evening Jacinta Nampijinpa Price did get defensive when asked about the strong support among Indigenous communities in her electorate of the Northern Territory. She implied an Australian Electoral Commission–Yes campaign conspiracy, and further questions made Warren Mundine so angry he shouted at journalists before they both walked out.

Another normal day for the No campaign. Despite its repeated disarray it wins bragging rights for an outcome that the proverbial drover’s dog could’ve presided over.

The Yes campaign by contrast has announced a week of silence, and who can blame them? The hot takes alone will be more than anyone can endure. While most of us get on with our lives, those who have been involved in this attempted change for a decade or more will obviously feel devastated, and not for a short time.

Anthony Albanese doesn’t seem to be taking it well either, at least twice in the past week describing himself at press conferences as a “conviction politician,” as if this will make voters see him as such.

(Note to Anthony: if you insist on these clunky phrases, it’s best to get someone else to utter them on your behalf. Also, you only get perceived that way by making unpopular decisions and then getting re-elected.)

The prime minister is getting a media pasting. It will be character-building.

On the other side, Peter Dutton is being feted as a winner. But as opinion polls fail to reveal any sustained improvement in his and his party’s standing, the backgrounding will begin in earnest.

How long until we read and hear the inevitable Liberal source’s lament that “we can’t win with Peter”? By June 2024 Dutton will probably be an ex–opposition leader. •

The post The unforgiving logic of Labor referendums appeared first on Inside Story.

I found myself among the forty-one academics suddenly “disestablished” from their continuing positions at the Australian Catholic University in the name of creating a “more agile and sustainable” education environment. I was then invited to compete in a Hunger Games for fourteen replacement positions. As one of the senior historians among the targeted, more privileged than several others, I have absolutely no intention of doing so.

It’s been an interesting, and unexpected, context for my reading of Mac Sweeney’s brilliant book on the history of the idea of Western civilisation. Back in August I thought I might consider it from the position of one of the few universities in Australia to have recently invested in those disciplines most strongly associated with the West — history, philosophy, religious studies, literary studies and political theory.

Where other universities have been trimming or at least following a course of “natural attrition” when it comes to these subjects, ACU pursued over the last few years a deliberate push to elevate its profile in what is also often called the humanities. The university systematically hired humanities researchers from around the nation and world at senior, middle and junior levels.

In 2020, ACU also became the third and final university in Australia to partner with the private Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, with which it now runs a Bachelor of Arts program in “the great books, art, thought and practices” that have shaped the West. This program remains largely segregated from both ACU’s regular BA offerings and its humanities research institutes.

In the face of a baffling and partial reversal, however — a reversal that slashes most of its recent research hires but leaves the Ramsay program intact — I now read Mac Sweeney’s book as one of the ousted, a living effect of the extreme tenuousness of the hold of the idea of “Western civilisation” in Australian society.

Tenuousness, in fact, is Mac Sweeney’s primary point. Her central argument is that our modern notion of Western civilisation is not only much newer than we thought but also unstable, compromised, frequently incoherent and indeed “factually wrong.” That notion, briefly, is that Western civilisation emerged from a shared Graeco-Roman antiquity that melded with the rise of European Christendom and led to the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, in the process giving birth to liberal capitalist modernity. All these developments occurred on an ever-westward sweep from southern Europe to North America.

Mac Sweeney’s secondary point, pursued more subtly throughout, is that grand narratives of the West have always been used ideologically to justify political ends, either for or against its central claims.

Such a twofold argument might suggest a book that covers only the span of time in which Mac Sweeney reckons our current notion of Western civilisation has been brandished — roughly from the late seventeenth century to the present day. But The West traverses all the ages currently understood to fall within the narrative, starting with the fifth-century BCE Anatolian thinker Herodotus. In fact, more than half the book is dedicated to the pre-seventeenth-century world. The subtitle should more accurately, though surely less cutely, have been “A New History of a Newish Idea, With a Good Chunk of Its Prehistory.”

Mac Sweeney was aware from the outset that her rather abstract subject matter could “easily get stuck in the realms of the theoretical.” To avoid this, she explores her ideas via fourteen lives, each with his or her own chapter. A couple are expected: Herodotus himself, as well as the English Tudor polymath Francis Bacon. The others are mostly surprises, including the Islamic philosopher Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq al-Kindī, the Ottoman Sultan-Mother Safiye and Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam.

All up, Mac Sweeney’s fourteen lives comprise two Anatolians, two Romans, two Britons, two Africans, a German, a Baghdadi, an Albanian, an American, a Palestinian and a Hong Konger. There are eight men to six women. Around two-thirds are scholars of some description; about half of them are significant political rulers.

The book’s biographical method and its vivacious and direct writing style are among its best features, turning Mac Sweeney’s compelling ideas into an enticing, delightful and sustaining read. But not all the figures do the same work. Some are discussed as presumed contributors to the Western tradition while others exemplify its contrary aspects.

The starting line-up shows these two modes neatly. Herodotus, in chapter one, has long been thought an original contributor to the Western tradition, inaugurating the binarism at its heart between “us” and “them” with his depiction of Greek heroes and barbarian enemies. Mac Sweeney insists, though, that Herodotus invoked this binarism solely to undermine it. He was repelled by the increasingly xenophobic triumphalism of his contemporary Athens, writing instead a history that showed equivalent heterogenous societies in all the regions of his known world. He eventually abandoned Athens in disgust at its invention of a singular, superior Greek culture.

Chapter two’s character, meanwhile, the Roman powerbroker Livilla, represents the people who are usually considered the inheritors of Greek culture, the Romans of the first century CE. Livilla’s turbulent life adds great colour but its pertinent part concerns how much Livilla — granddaughter of Augustus — nodded to “Asian Troy” as her most important heartland. Her Rome was an empire born of Trojan refugees and powered by absorbing every set of people within reach. It had no understanding of itself as being oriented towards Europe over Asia, and especially not to the conquered Hellenes.

Baghdadi al-Kindī demonstrates how much the Byzantine empire of the ninth century engaged with the Greek and Roman philosophers of the past. In fact, Mac Sweeney holds that the Byzantines took the thought of the varied ancients more seriously than did anyone in this era, proving that Greek and Roman influence did not “flow in a single channel” to western Europe but instead “sprayed rather chaotically in all directions.”

Godfrey of Viterbo and Laskaris of Albania both feature as warnings of how uncomfortable was the blending of medieval Christendom into Greek, Roman or Byzantine history. They similarly refute any sense of a single flowing channel: the retrofitting of Christian theology into pre-Christian traditions was awkward, painful and sometimes frankly denied.

Chapters six to eight traverse a long Renaissance, showing how this era “stitched together… the uneasy hybrid we now call ‘Greco-Roman antiquity.’” Even so, the Roman writer Tullia D’Aragona shows that there remained much respect in the sixteenth century for the traditions of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Ethiopia. So, too, Safiye Sultan shows that the attraction of the east for many Protestant Europeans was often greater than was an increasingly papalised West. And Francis Bacon exemplifies how emerging scientists, though they learned much from ancient texts, remained wary of any attempt to dictate how or what to think.

American revolutionary Joseph Warren brings the reader finally to the birth of the modern idea of Western civilisation, a truncated version that burgeoned through the prior two centuries but was, we now know, almost incomprehensible to thinkers of earlier ages. Mac Sweeney argues that the idea finally became “mainstream” as a helpmate to the success of the American Revolution. American-tinctured Western civilisation not only instantiated the idea that the West came from a fused and exclusive tradition of Greek and Roman practices, but also implied that those living on the latest western frontier — Americans — perfected the Christian, scientific and liberal threads that adhered seamlessly to the tradition along the way.

Chapters on the Angolan Queen Njinga and the West African poet Phillis Wheatley provide searing counterpoints, highlighting the ever-sharpening racial exclusions embedded in the modern idea of Western civilisation.

Perhaps the most contentious of Mac Sweeney’s biographical choices come in the final three chapters, where British prime minister William Gladstone, Palestinian critic Edward Said and Hong Kong premier Carrie Lam stand in for the last 200 years. Those who support the extreme tendency to favour the recent past in historical studies will protest that too much is missed, especially the cold war version of Western civilisation: the Plato-to-NATO narrative that focused so intensely on capitalism and founded so many “Western Civ” university courses around the Western world. As a former member of a “Not the Twentieth Century” reading group, however, I am happy to accept the author’s brevity here.

Gladstone represents the West’s zenith, when the idea bolstered a Western bloc that was also dominating the world. Said represents how the West started to come apart via its own critical methods during the twentieth century. And Lam, intriguingly, is a conduit to the challenges the West now faces from without — from a militant Islamic State, from post-Soviet Russia, and most of all from a soaring China.

Mac Sweeney spends less time on her second theme, the ideological weaponisation of the idea of the West, though it is implied throughout. She is clearest on how Warren and Gladstone wielded the idea to justify the rise to “domination” of Euro-American norms. She suggests that it’s less powerful today, when “most people in the modern West no longer want an origin myth that serves to support racial oppression or imperial hegemony.”

I’m not so sure. Advocates don’t have to carry placards of Donald Trump as a gladiator to reveal a desire to perpetuate certain conventions about Western primacy, exceptionalism and natural linearity.

The fact that Mac Sweeney wrote this book suggests she, too, may realise the idea still has dangerous legs. One of her implied points could well be that while the West wreaked plenty of havoc (dispossession, slavery, colonisation) between 1776 and 2001, it may inflict even more damage when brandished in a fractured, unmoored and uneven manner as it is today.

Most importantly, her book is not a call to cancel the study of what apparently constituted the West. Instead, she contends that by investigating the very tenuousness of its claims we can come to see more than just falsity. We get the chance to discover a richer and more diverse global past than we previously knew.

In endeavouring to trace the genealogy of the West back through liberalism, rationalism, Christianity, Rome and Greece, we will find a kaleidoscope of ingenuity, creativity, contradiction and interconnected collaboration in place of a neat arrow. Together, these complexities point to something far closer to universal humanity than was ever imagined in any Western narrative. They should inspire us to move beyond the binary of the West versus the Non-West that yet inflects much modern thinking.

I have no idea if the Ramsay programs currently being unrolled in Australia present the history of Western civilisation in Mac Sweeney’s critical and expansive way. What I do know is that the possibility of studying the politics, religion, literature and theories of the world in which the West arose is now significantly foreclosed at my university. Many regular students, and scholars, will have to turn elsewhere to continue to discover and to explain the ideas that have shaped all our lives. The West would make an excellent starting point. •

The West: A New History of an Old Idea
By Naoíse Mac Sweeney | WH Allen | $35 | 448 pages

Just noting that she uses this spelling but a quote later has Mac Sweeney using Greco.

The post Western civilisation and its discontents appeared first on Inside Story.

You never see anything near that kind of variance in ordinary voting-intention polls, though that’s at least partly because the pollsters are posing quite different questions from each other this time. Whose is the best? Referendum polls are a more imprecise science than election ones, so let’s talk about it after the results are in.

But no pollster has Yes ahead, alas, or even approaching it.

At last year’s federal election, people who followed the count from 6pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time experienced an early burst of déjà vu: was this 2019 all over again? The first numbers came predominantly from Tasmania, which happened to be the only state or territory to swing to the Morrison government. By around 7.30 the direction and approximate size of the national swing was clear, and it was an altogether different direction.

There’s a good chance the Apple Isle will again be the renegade on Saturday night, registering the biggest Yes of all states and perhaps generating some excitement for a while. But with only two piles for the ballot paper to be sorted into (plus one for informals) the Australian Electoral Commission’s counting should be faster than at a general election. Even under the Morgan scenario the overall result should be clear by 7pm.

Yet the telecast is scheduled to last until 10pm. What on earth will they talk about?

A referendum passes if it receives a majority of national votes and a majority of votes in a majority (at least four) of states. House of Representatives electorates have nothing to do with it, though they will be of academic interest; according to Antony Green the ABC website will publish all electorate results live online and discuss ones of interest on TV.

Tasmania, that wildest card, has a proud anti-Canberra — or maybe just anti-mainland — tradition of returning relatively high No votes in referendums, but this time the polls, albeit with small sub-samples, pretty consistently show it as the most supportive.

Not coincidentally, Tassie has the only state Liberal government in the country, and that government is supporting the Voice. And the high-profile federal Liberal member for Bass, Bridget Archer, a long-time irritant to her party, is energetically advocating Yes. Voters love major-party mavericks, and not just in their own electorates. But might the Tasmanian government’s meltdown over the past fortnight dampen the effect?

Of the states and territories up on the mainland, the city-territory of the ACT will record the highest Yes and Victoria can be expected to come second — unless South Australia or New South Wales does. It would be very surprising if Queensland and Western Australia don’t bring up the rear. But the rest is rather unpredictable.

Counting in South Australia and the Northern Territory won’t start until 6:30pm AEDT and Western Australia 9pm.

As a broad rule, the “big” states of New South Wales and Victoria, plus South Australia — second-least populous but displaying less of an outlier mentality than Queensland and Western Australia — have been relatively supportive of referendums. We saw it, for example, with both questions at the last set in 1999.

(In 1988, in a very rare break from tradition, Queensland recorded the biggest Yes votes for all four because one of them, for “free and fair elections,” was expected to apply particularly to the electoral malapportionment engineered by the Bjelke-Petersen government.)

Pollsters are broadly predicting these state trends to continue tomorrow. And yet… New South Wales came stone-cold last of all states and territories in the 2017 marriage equality survey. In crude terms, this was due largely to socially conservative religious white people outside the capital and many socially conservative religious people of colour in Sydney, particularly in the west. While the former can be expected to vote heavily No to the Voice, some pollsters have found people from non-English-speaking backgrounds/immigrants more likely to support Yes nationally than the rest.

That last expected dynamic seems counterintuitive. So it will be worth tracking seats in Sydney’s west, and consequently New South Wales as a whole, on the night.

The “inner-urban” professionals–heavy, high-income electorates, including the ones with teal MPs, can be expected to lean Yes. Not so the middle- to high-income, low-NESB ones such as (in Sydney) Lindsay, Hughes and Cook.

Does it go without saying that young people will be much more supportive of the Voice than old ones? That can’t be determined by the voting results, only by surveys. For gender, too, we must rely on opinion polls. For some other cohorts, where census data indicates they constitute a big majority in certain polling places, analysis can provide clues. (Ideally such analysis would adjust for aggregate state or territory votes.)

This time the topic of the referendum adds another geographic dimension. Attention will focus heavily on Indigenous booths, particularly in the Northern Territory, which has more First Nations voters than any other jurisdiction.

The electorate of Lingiari, although only 40 per cent Indigenous (with a lower proportion among voters, given a relatively low median age and a lower, if recently improved, enrolment rate), will come in for outsized attention, but the seat’s aggregate vote won’t tell us much. Turnout in Lingiari is another matter, however, and is (at the risk of tempting the ecological fallacy gods) an okay indicator of, if not the exact level, then the seriousness of low turnout among First Nations voters. In June last year the new prime minister made a big fuss about its low 65.8 per cent.

“That was part of the former government’s design. It wasn’t by accident,” thundered Anthony Albanese, “and they should be held to account for it!” He had a point — the Coalition wasn’t much interested in raising Indigenous participation — but only a small one, because the low Indigenous turnout there reflected a range of factors.

The Australian Electoral Commission has in the last year pulled out many stops to bring estimated Indigenous enrolment up to near the national figure, presumably at least partly by selectively relaxing the rules of its direct enrolment and update program. That’s excellent, but it will — all else being equal — make the turnout worse; after all, the figure will show voting as a percentage of the roll, not of estimated eligible people.

But all else won’t be equal for this referendum. We can expect a higher degree of interest from those voters, and the AEC is pulling out many stops to get their ballots. No doubt others on the ground are also encouraging people to register their vote.

When the counting is done, Lingiari’s turnout will attract attention. It might or might not be higher than at the 2022 election. But the more comprehensive Indigenous electoral roll will come back to bite Anthony Albanese at the next general election.

Probably a dozen or two of our 151 electorates will vote Yes, and maybe, perhaps, one state, Tasmania. The expected thrashing is consistent with your correspondent’s long-expressed deterministic mindset. Midterm Labor government referendums get slaughtered, partly because Liberal opposition is all but inevitable. The content of the proposal only affects the size of the defeat. And this would also apply to merely “symbolic” recognition: the Liberals in opposition would have opposed that too, regardless of what they say (or believe) now.

So expect Saturday night to degenerate into indulgent hot takes as self-identified campaign “old hands” compete to tell the tallest tales, and how they would have run Yes instead. The endless analyses, the gloating dressed up as advice will not be for the faint-hearted. And it won’t stop then but will last for weeks, no doubt joined by intra-Yes sniping.

What does it say about Australia? To this observer, the result will tell us nothing we didn’t already know.

So, no, the No campaign wasn’t brilliant, and the Yes one wasn’t that awful. The devastation about to engulf people on the affirmative side, particularly those for whom this has been a decade-long project, might not be leavened by this knowledge, but this result was a fait accompli once the decision was made to hold the vote apart from an election.

Amid the celebrations, Peter Dutton might even believe this will save his leadership. Perhaps he should have a word with his mentor John Howard, who likely reckoned the same in September 1988 but was out of a job eight months later. •

The post The weight of history appeared first on Inside Story.

Attorney-general Mark Dreyfus’s representative in the Senate, Murray Watt, made that pledge to Senator Thorpe on 7 November last year. Lawyer Megan Davis, an adviser to the government on the vote, was equally emphatic: “A referendum to establish a Voice to Parliament will not impede an unceded, unextinguished sovereignty asserted by First Nations people.” As 2023 began, Dreyfus repeated his view that putting the Voice in the Constitution would have no impact on sovereignty. Labor senator Malarndirri McCarthy gave a similar assurance on the ABC’s Q&A in late January.

But the government seemed reluctant to define what Indigenous sovereign rights entailed. During the July debate on the constitutional alteration bill, government speakers avoided mentioning that the Uluru Statement envisaged the Voice as a step towards a treaty. (The Greens were keen to make that point.) While the government remains nominally committed to implementing the Uluru Statement’s demand for Voice, Treaty and Truth, the fact that a Voice would enable a treaty has more often been highlighted by the No than the Yes campaign.

First Nations activists have good reason to explore the possible meanings of Indigenous sovereignty, but not all of them agree. Some Indigenous Australians, for example, reject “sovereignty” and “treaty” as counterproductive “separatism.” Some who want a treaty reject the Voice as an impediment (Warren Mundine) or as a diversion (Michael Mansell), while others who will vote Yes see the Voice as the body that could legitimately negotiate a treaty with the Australian government. Such diversity has been one of the revelations of the referendum debate.

Three clusters of First Nations thinking have become evident. Some, as mentioned, reject “separatism,” a term broad enough to include the Voice and any treaty. Others, supporters of “Blak sovereignty,” warn that constitutional recognition would pre-empt sovereignty recognised in a treaty. A third group takes a gradualist position, envisaging sovereignty as a steadily accumulating regional practice of land and native title rights.

Against “Indigenous separatism”

The anti-separatist position is exemplified by two First Nations participants in the referendum debate: academic psychologist Anthony Dillon and senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Writing in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph on 24 April 2019 under the heading “Close the Gap on Myths,” Dillon attacked a series of “myths”: that only Aboriginal people are expert on Aboriginal affairs, that only Aboriginal adults can raise an Aboriginal child, and that government is totally to blame for the problems facing Aboriginal people.

It is also a myth, Dillon wrote, that “we cannot move forward until this country acknowledges the atrocities of the past” and that Aboriginal people are victims of colonisation. And it is a myth that “Aboriginal people are an homogeneous group with all members equally disadvantaged,” given that many are thriving. “When we speak of closing the gap,” he wrote, “let’s focus on those who are most disadvantaged.”

Dillon believes these myths distract us from “the important issues facing Aboriginal people, like the need for employment, job readiness, good schools, ready access to modern services, and good housing.”

More recently, in 2022, in an essay titled “The Voice: Self-Determination or Separatism?” Dillon argued that “self-determination” policies mistakenly assume that Indigenous Australians are essentially different from other Australians and essentially similar to each other. Many individuals’ access to education and employment had, he said, been weakened as a result.

For Dillon, the leaders of the Yes campaign are those who successfully grasped education and employment opportunities despite self-determination policies. The Voice would, he argues, empower these successful Indigenous people to entrench a policy paradigm that is failing other Indigenous people. If anyone needs a voice, he says, it is the Indigenous Australians whose lives are much worse than the lives of Voice advocates. He has since confirmed that he will vote No.

As a National Party senator, Jacinta Price can seem like a typical rural conservative populist, repeatedly positioning herself as a critic of urban elites. She gives this stance a particular inflection: as the champion of abused women and children in First Nations communities who can’t gain the attention of the powerful (including leaders of Indigenous organisations). We should “amplify” the regions, she says, so we can hear the unheard.

Yet Price and the Nationals haven’t endorsed the Liberals’ proposal for a legislated regional Voice, so it isn’t clear how they would amplify the cries of the unheard — other than by persuading them to vote National. The constitutionally enshrined Voice, says Price, is likely to be a “bureaucracy” controlled by those whom she has called “the Qantas-sponsored leaders of the activist industry.” She blames Indigenous policy failure on these activist elites.

Price is ambivalent about whether we should characterise “the regions” in cultural terms. Social policy should assist people according to their needs rather than their distinct culture and historical experiences, she says. But she also sees the problems of Indigenous remote communities as cultural. When she recently denied that Aboriginal people are suffering intergenerational trauma as a result of colonisation, she suggested that their lives are instead blighted by “something much closer to home” — violent ways continuing from precolonial times.

Campaigning for a No vote, Price has highlighted her own family’s experiences. As a second-generation agent of what anthropologist Paul Burke calls the “Warlpiri diaspora,” she grew up in a household in Alice Springs rather than in the Warlpiri homelands. In this location and in her choice of a non-Indigenous husband she has followed her mother. Burke describes the “Warlpiri matriarchs” of this Australia-wide diaspora as “refashioning” Warlpiri tradition by adding non-kin to their stock of social capital. Price has presented her family as paradigmatic of a unified Australia threatened by Indigenous separatism.

Blak sovereignty as a rupture with the past

Having left the Greens earlier in the year and announcing herself as a leader of the Blak sovereignty movement, Lidia Thorpe moved the following amendment to the referendum bill during July’s parliamentary debate:

Nothing in this Act shall be taken to cede or disturb the Sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people means an unceded right held in collective possession by the members of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations which confers usage, access and custodianship to the lands, waters and natural resources of what is now known as Australia, and the right of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to exercise an unimpeded and collective self‑determinate governance over their political, economic and social affairs.

Two features of Thorpe’s thinking are worth highlighting. Although she has sometimes demanded that Australian law align with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, she hasn’t acknowledged the UNDRIP’s approach to sovereignty.

According to Article 46 of the UNDRIP, Indigenous peoples’ self-determination should do nothing to “dismember or impair totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.” In other words, the UNDRIP would require that First Nations sovereignty coexist with and pragmatically accept Australian sovereignty, working within Australia’s federal and state constitutions and laws. Yet Thorpe’s formulation of Indigenous sovereignty includes these words: “Sovereignty has never been ceded, our sovereignty does not coexist with the sovereignty of the crown.”

In their repudiation of Australia’s legal framework, the Blak sovereigns distinguish themselves from advocates of Indigenous sovereignty who see potential in Australia’s existing Constitution. One of them, Michael Mansell — a No advocate — believes parliament should create a seventh state of Australia, its territory combining all Aboriginal lands (as long as the owners consented).

Other champions of Indigenous Australia’s many emerging polities also see potential in federalism. As University of Technology Sydney legal academic Alison Vivian and her co-authors wrote in 2017, “divided sovereignty, shared jurisdiction and a capacity to evolve in response to changing community values are fundamental attributes of federations.”

Thorpe’s rejection of Australia’s legal traditions includes a dismissal of apparently progressive laws such as native title, which she has labelled “an insult.” Of the parliament in which she now sits, she has said, “Not one piece of legislation that has ever come out of this place has been good for us. You know why? Because it’s deliberate. It’s deliberate. This place is here because they need to get rid of the Black problem.”

Such words imagine Blak sovereignty as necessitating a revolutionary rupture from an entirely bad past. As I understand the Blak sovereign position, the rupture would be brought about by truth-telling — a process of enlightenment — that would leave Australians with such a sense of collective shame that they would sign a treaty establishing First Nations sovereignty in whatever terms First Nations wanted.

This scenario conceives human history in a way that owes much to a religious imagination. By picturing a moment of settler colonial awakening, confession and collective self-perfection, Thorpe turns her back on the opportunities created by recent Australian law and policy. Hers is a historical imagination alienated from messy, incremental politics.

This anti-politics can’t concede that settler colonial history is punctuated by moments of crisis, negotiation, compromise and concessions in law and institutional design. In the Keating and Howard governments’ responses to two High Court judgements that recognised “native title” (Mabo in 1992, Wik in 1996) we have recent history that discourages  this abject pessimism.

The Blak sovereigns seem unwilling to conceive Indigenous agency as experimental, and they too easily dismiss open-ended settler colonial ideologies and practices such as “recognition.” For example, University of South Australia legal academic Irene Watson writes that “there are no remedies in the recognition game; it is like the game of snakes and ladders, which goes up and down, but leads to only one ending, our assimilation into the white Australian nation. Genocide: there is currently no other alternative on offer.”

In recent Australian historical scholarship, the idea of a settler colonial society taking genuinely progressive steps has been under suspicion among historians and political scientists who take the “settler colonial studies” approach. This view aligns with Indigenous doubts that Australia could ever overcome its original sin. To quote Watson writing about the Voice in 2017:

The current discussion in Australia about possible constitutional recognition of First Nations is out there for public consumption, in an electorate noted for its conservatism. What it means beyond the terra nullius narrative is yet unknown, but there is little to suggest that it means much more than the continuation of that same narrative: the terra nullius body dressed in the costume of “recognition.”

Sovereignty as a steadily accumulating practice

In contrast with a rupture with the past, Indigenous sovereignty could also evolve from the imperfect structures of reformed settler colonial government, including the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act (1976) the Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Act (2006), the various state and territory land rights acts, and the Native Title Act (1993).

Consider the following contrast. The “Detailed Outline of the Blak Sovereigns’ Position on the Referendum” declares that “Land rights are central to our Sovereignty. Native Title is not land rights. Our struggle for real land rights is an assertion of our Sovereignty.” Others, though, see native title legislation as the context for nurturing First Nations’ capacities for sovereignty.

That way of thinking gained academic impetus more than twenty years ago when Marcia Langton and her colleagues at the University of Melbourne joined with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in an Australian Research Council–funded project, “Agreements, Treaties and Negotiated Settlements in Settler States: Their Role and Relevance for Indigenous and Other Australians.”

In a 2002 paper, “The Nations of Australia” Langton celebrated agreements signed under the Native Title Act that acknowledged the “ancient identities” of nations such as the Wik, Thaayorre and the Alngith. Referring to Indigenous signatories as “Aboriginal nations,” she wrote: “Corporations acknowledge that pre-existing Aboriginal polities exist as a profound reality in our political and economic landscape. The Constitution does not.” She hoped that constitutional amendment would eventually acknowledge “the pre-existing Aboriginal polities, or Aboriginal nations.”

Twenty years later, proposals for amending the Australian Constitution have taken a different form — not the constitutional acknowledgment of First Nations as sovereigns but the inscription of an Indigenous Voice to advise federal parliament and the executive. But these two calls for constitutional recognition share a commitment to Indigenous regionalism — a commitment also sustained by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in the years 1990 to 2004.

Langton’s Negotiated Settlements project argued that the practice of native title — especially after the Howard government’s 1998 amendments to the Native Title Act — was a stimulus to the reformation of Aboriginal polities:

In the minimal form of Aboriginal land-holding corporation, we find that governance and dominion, such as those rights of possession asserted among Aboriginal groups in disputes over territory, are achieved both within and between such groups. As a result, we find that there are transactions that may be construed as governance in a larger entity than the clan itself.

Langton was arguing that asserting customary law in matters of land title is one stimulus for the capacity and will to act regionally. The Negotiated Settlements project concluded that “the making of agreements [has] become the principal form of engagement between Indigenous nations and the modern nation-state.”

The project never lost sight of the fact that in these dealings Indigenous Australians have negotiated not only with governments but also with non-Indigenous corporations. Private enterprises have had a material interest in recognising Indigenous polities by contracting with them.

Indigenous polities have not always had the human and material resources they need to deal with corporations and government agencies. In a paper published in 2015, Langton described the Prescribed Bodies Corporate, the organisations that hold native title, as overburdened and under-resourced. She warned against assuming that PBCs’ roots in Aboriginal customary law meant they possess sufficient social capital to do all that is expected of them.

Langton also pointed to a danger of excessive localisation and thus of “balkanisation.” To work well as polities, old forms of social organisation would have to do new things, such as forge regional alliances. She applauded native title holders who were seeking “economies of scale” through “regional governance bodies” and saw hope in the regionalist visions of Native Title Representative Bodies.

Pointing to the “conflicting values at work: traditional values to stay local on the one hand, and the pressures of the organisational world on the other,” Langton exhorted “Aboriginal people themselves to change their mindset about the highly localised social world that they prefer, and make a decision to escalate their administrative organisational capacity to a much higher level than they are accustomed to.”

With this background, Langton was an excellent choice to lead the design of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament with Professor Tom Calma. When it was released in December 2021, their model emphasised the local/regional foundations of the Voice. The boundaries of the thirty-five Voices would be determined by discussions between governments and Indigenous organisations.

In each region, a Voice would either be designed from scratch or (more likely) built on existing Indigenous organisations and so “leverage existing approaches… with adaptation and evolution as needed.” This continuity would give the thirty-five Local and Regional Voices legitimacy in Indigenous eyes.

Calma and Langton declined to present a blueprint for the Voices, instead suggesting nine guiding design principles. The legitimacy of the National Voice, they said, would derive from “the strength, legitimacy and authority of Local & Regional Voices.” They recommended that the National Voice not come into operation “until the vast majority of Local & Regional Voices are fully established.” The Langton and Calma vision of regionalism is descended from the regionalism that ATSIC (which had thirty-six regions) practised and that the Negotiated Settlement project theorised as the emergent practice of land rights and native title.

The contest between the Yes and No campaigns has been an opportunity for the Australian public to learn about First Nations’ political diversity. What has become increasingly clear is that the Yes/No contest has been a misleading guide to that diversity.

For example, the Yes/No divide obscures the common ground between Jacinta Price and Noel Pearson. Both Pearson (in his 2022 Boyer Lectures) and Price have argued that social policy should pay attention to socioeconomic need and not assume that Indigenous problems are distinct in causation and solution. Both of them were also very critical of the Albanese government’s abolition of the cashless debit card in 2022.

Price wins the applause of some conservative Australians by urging a critical appraisal of Indigenous traditions, but she is not the only First Nations person to urge Indigenous Australians to allow space for critically assessing the claims of “custom.” Revision of custom is part of Langton’s project too.

The building of First Nations is a concern of people on both sides of the referendum debate. Warren Mundine is a No campaigner, but he also advocates that First Nations be recognised by treaties with Australian governments. As chief executive officer of NTSCORP Ltd, the native title service provider for Traditional Owners in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, Mundine’s approach to sovereignty emerges from the practice of native title. He believes that the path to First Nations treaties will be more direct without a National Voice in the Constitution.

The strength of the Indigenous opposition to the Voice amendment has surprised and puzzled Australians who pay attention to Indigenous affairs. But the 2022 Reconciliation Barometer, conducted between 21 July and 28 August last year (before and after the prime minister’s announcement of the draft amendment) provided clues to minority Indigenous disquiet about Yes campaign themes. While 57 per cent of Indigenous respondents judged it “very important” to protect a “First Nations Body” by putting it in the Constitution and a further 30 per cent chose “fairly important,” a substantial minority of respondents weren’t committed to some of the key ideas on which the Yes campaign has drawn.

About a quarter of respondents didn’t consider themselves to be well informed about the history of Australia, about the histories of First Nations people and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. The same proportion (but not necessarily the same respondents) disbelieve or feel “unsure” about the truth of some of the main themes issuing from the critical history of colonisation — the frontier wars and the stolen generations.

Asked how we should face up to the “wrongs of the past” (deeds not specified by the survey), about half the respondents chose “There should be forgiveness for the wrongs of the past and all Australians should now move on,” a higher proportion than those who chose “Must be rectified before all Australians can move on” (38 per cent).

On the causes of Indigenous Australians’ “disadvantage,” about a third of Indigenous respondents didn’t agree that “past race-based policies” were to blame, and they didn’t see disadvantage as “Australia’s colonial legacy.” Some flatly disagreed with this linking of cause and effect; others declined to express a view. When the survey listed nine kinds of “disadvantage,” the proportion denying that government policies had caused them ranged between 9 and 12 per cent.

In 2022, the Barometer didn’t ask respondents to agree or disagree with the statement “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are responsible for their own disadvantages today.” But in four previous Barometers (2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020) between a quarter and a third of Indigenous respondents agreed with that statement.

Some Indigenous support for voting No comes from those who prioritise a treaty as the guarantee of the sovereignty they believe constitutional recognition would deny. While the 2022 Reconciliation Barometer didn’t ask respondents to rank Treaty and Voice or to choose between them, it did show that Indigenous support for a treaty is on the same level (54 per cent very important, 32 per cent fairly important) as Indigenous support for a constitutionally entrenched “Indigenous Body.”

While the Reconciliation Barometer 2022 suggests that a very high proportion of Indigenous Australians support the Yes case, it also reveals Indigenous support for ideas about history, responsibility and treaty-making that resonate with the No campaign.

The Yes/No alignments of First Nations Australians may not be an accurate guide to their differing views about sovereignty, but the debate about how to vote has at least focused attention on larger questions that Indigenous representatives will probably need to debate if a Voice is established. I see four questions.

In what ways are First Nations people distinct from/the same as other Australians? This is a cross-cutting question, open to many contextual answers.

At what scale can Indigenous representation operate? Some would agree with Warren Mundine that there can be no effective representation of Indigenous interests above the level of a First Nation. Others argue that a national representative body is both possible and necessary.

What is the relationship between citizenship within a First Nation and Australian citizenship? This question arises when Indigenous Australians debate whether access to welfare should be contingent on the approval of local Indigenous authorities (as it has in the Cape York experiment).

The question arises also in debates about what role (if any) Indigenous community organisations should play in the authentication of the Indigenous identity of individuals.

As the Australian Indigenous project experiments with the political and legal devices that Australian history is making available, such questions will demand attention. In this sense, the recently revealed diversity of Indigenous opinion about the Voice is but a stage in the formation of First Nations’ political thought. •

The post A steady path to sovereignty? appeared first on Inside Story.

Who Sam Goldbloom was and why he came to be honoured thus is the focus of Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo’s My Father’s Shadow. While most of Goldbloom Zurbo’s published work has been fiction — stories in literary journals, the acclaimed novel The Book of Rachel — this new book is a work of remembrance, a memoir.

As most of us who have ever tried this form know, writing a memoir is far harder than it seems. What to put in, what to leave out — that’s the perennial question, and at bottom is the problem of memory itself, when so much of what’s remembered can’t be corroborated and our recollections, by their very nature, are riddled with fiction.

In a forthright introduction, Goldbloom Zurbo confronts the difficulties head-on. You learn (if, like me, you didn’t know already) that Sam Goldbloom was a prominent activist in the international anti-nuclear peace movement. A founder of at least two of its key Australian branches and secretary of the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign, he also belonged to the Labor Party.

Through thick and thin, though, he was a loyal supporter of the Soviet Union, his Communist Party membership largely a secret except within ASIO and Victoria’s Special Branch, the secretive intelligence-gathering section of the police. Handsome, tall and charismatic, reputedly an electrifying public speaker, he was a hero to Sandra, the eldest of his three daughters. Yet he was also her “nemesis all the days of his life.”

The story she tells of this filial relationship will resonate with many readers. Our parents are magically powerful beings, exerting a hold both positive and negative until with maturity we see them for what they were: flawed human beings who did their best at parenting according to their circumstances and the precepts of their day.

But Goldbloom Zurbo portrays a family drama unusually Shakespearean, not to say Freudian, in its intensity. Hers was a rebellious adolescence, which for all her father’s left sympathies puzzled and dismayed him. For minor misdemeanours and well into her teens, he administered humiliating physical punishments. Today we would look askance, if not in horror, at a father spanking his teenage daughter on the buttocks or the backs of her thighs, acts in our reckoning disturbingly sexual as well as psychologically charged.

Nor did the stories Goldbloom routinely told about himself hold up to his daughter’s scrutiny. As in Germaine Greer’s Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, though not to the same degree, Sam Goldbloom’s past proved a fertile ground for myth-making:

Mystery surrounds many of the stories he told about his life. True, he was a flight mechanic in the airforce during the war. But was he in New Guinea? Did he really learn Japanese to act for the Australian armed forces as an interpreter of Japanese prisoners of war — he who could speak very little Yiddish and barely a word of any other non-English language? What about the story he told of his father pretending to beat him at the behest of his cruel mother? Was that true — or did his father really beat him?

On the positive side, her father’s political involvements widened her horizons. His daughters came to know a dazzling cavalcade of guests — people like Jessie Street, Doc Evatt, Paul Robeson, Benjamin Spock and Danny Kaye. Accompanying him to Indonesia, sixteen-year-old Sandra was enchanted by the sights and smells of a wildly different culture and danced with President Sukarno not long before he was toppled by Suharto. In Moscow she met Wilfred Burchett, the exiled Australian communist known as the first Western journalist to write of the horrific civilian casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

At home it was obvious the family was under surveillance — the van parked outside the house, the telltale clicks during telephone calls — a circumstance they handled as other left-wing families did with nonchalance and humour, yet taking certain precautions. When Sandra was old enough she too joined the Communist Party, but her membership didn’t last long.

The quashed Hungarian uprising, Khrushchev’s speech to the twentieth Party Congress, the Soviet tanks rolling through Prague — each of these prompted people to abandon the party. But Sam Goldbloom held his ground. The New Left, civil rights and women’s liberation all marched past, sweeping along his daughters, but Soviet Russia remained for him the vanguard of world peace. Sandra argued with him at the same time as she worshipped him and dreaded his disapproval.

Before going further I have a couple of admissions to make. Readers should know that Goldbloom Zurbo and I met in the 1970s at a women’s liberation conference and she’s been a friend of mine since. I’ve also admired her writing, but all that she’s written in this book has been news to me. And as one who’s had a go at memoir-writing myself and so far failed with it, I’ve developed an interest in what makes memoirs work, and why the best of them are so absorbing.

It seems to me now that good memoirs have a focus, are organised around a theme, instead of strictly following chronology. They don’t seem to work so well as straightforward, linear narratives — indeed, it seems to be the writer’s task to play havoc with chronology.

A successful memoir, then, isn’t an exposition steadily plodding from one phase in life to the next. In any case, as the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson showed us, that isn’t the way we live our lives, or experience them. The past is the mulch of our present as well as a powerful determinant of our future. Still, Goldbloom Zurbo has structured a courageous, compelling narrative that in its way moves forward in time, much of which is concerned with the long, fraught, painful trajectory of Sam Goldbloom’s dying.

Throughout the looping accretion of memories we gradually learn more about him: that, British-born and Jewish, he migrated to Australia as a youngster with his parents and and his brother; that though he wasn’t observant, his Jewishness was important to him; that, uxorious, he was nonetheless a serial philanderer. We see him young, all six-foot-three of him, with large ears, freckles and reddish-brown hair; we see him ageing. We learn that he had beautiful hands, with long fingers that Sandra admired so much she couldn’t begin to contemplate pairing up with a stubby-handed man.

And still there’s a lot that’s missing. We glean in passing that Goldbloom Zurbo was married to a man named Jack, but what happened after that, and when and how, is unsaid. She’s the oldest of three sisters, but we know them only as Sister Two and Sister Three, as she is Number 1, as their father was given to call her. She is a mother, now a grandmother, but such momentous experiences in a woman’s life get little more than a glance.

On the other hand, Rosa, or Rosy, her mother and Sam’s wife, and two other women with whom he had affairs are vividly depicted. But although Rosa and Sam ran a wholesale business from the garage of one of their houses, we learn little about how he, or they, made a living.

That the narrative succeeds when so much is left out — or possibly because it is left out — is intriguing. I point to these lacunae not to criticise but to emphasise the skill with which the author tells her tale and how she deploys the emotional freight it carries in the strikingly visceral tenderness of her prose. Here she is, massaging her dying father’s feet.

“I take his foot and cradle it between my warm hands. ‘Cold,’ I remark, discomfited by the prickliness, repulsed by the thick, chilly flesh.” To this he replies, “They are always cold. No circulation, they tell me. Ever since the surgery.” Then, from her: “I do not enquire which surgery; it is unlikely we will agree. We would grow irritated with each other. Eventually, we would bicker.”

What is a man, his life? What remains of him in the hearts of those who were closest to him? Whatever we make of it turns out to be a great deal more than a street in a new Canberra suburb. Memoir, fiction, non-fiction… perhaps these categories are meaningless; marketing tools, little more.

The real truth is that My Father’s Shadow is a powerful, unputdownable book. •

My Father’s Shadow: A Memoir
By Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo | Monash University Publishing | $32.99 | 288 pages

The post The art of a memoir appeared first on Inside Story.

Never mind, it’ll win the vote hands down. That’s right, I refer to the official No case, which any visitor to this country with a mind unpolluted by survey results and media analysis would award very low marks indeed for its frequent drifts from covert to overt racism, its individual meltdowns, and its contradictions.

This, of course, is not how the political class sees it. They who adjudicate campaigns’ “performances” through the opinion polls — currently around 60 per cent for No — are in furious agreement that the Yes campaign has been atrocious.

This recent Nine article is a classic of the genre, with the inevitable Labor “senior figures with years of experience” proclaiming Yes “the worst [campaign] they have seen” while delivering glowing reviews to the No side, and particularly its — try not to laugh — “discipline.” (Meanwhile, in this week’s news, No leader Warren Mundine tweets of his desire to see one of the Yes identities bashed up.)

Now it’s true that the Yes side has made its share of mistakes and has its own inherent inconsistencies. We can all identify things that could have been done differently. But the No side wins the “undisciplined” crown hands down.

But the quality and professionalism of the campaigns isn’t the key issue, and it certainly isn’t responsible for the upcoming result. The scripts write themselves and the individuals are bit players, swept up by larger currents.

Why, in September 1988, some thirty-five years ago, did 62.4 per cent of Australian voters write “No” next to a constitutional referendum to “provide for fair and democratic parliamentary elections throughout Australia”? It surely wasn’t because they don’t believe elections should be fair and democratic. They would have had their purported reasons: it’s unnecessary, the government’s motives are suspect, the whole exercise is a waste of money.

And they would have had reasons for rejecting the other three questions posed at the same time, which all also got Yes support in the 30s.

The real reason was that it was a Labor referendum and it was being held midterm. That’s what always happens in these cases, and it’s happening now.

What did the huge 90.8 per cent Yes vote in 1967 tell us? It certainly wasn’t that racism was dead in Australia. That referendum’s most important consequence lay in activating the “race power” to enable the federal government to make special laws for First Nations people, but that detail was largely kept from the electors.

“Vote Yes for Aborigines” was the slogan, and the Yes campaign enjoyed the support of every member of federal parliament and every state government. Gough Whitlam’s Labor opposition campaigned energetically for it, as did Harold Holt’s government.

Today the 1967 result is steeped in mythology. The Uluru Statement was read out on its fiftieth anniversary. It was a motivator for next month’s vote.

And when the No case wins the only thing it tells us is that Labor governments shouldn’t hold midterm constitutional referendums. They go down, and badly, regardless of the topic.

Advocating for serious policy change in this country is never a fair contest. The proponents attempt to keep it simple and explain the modest benefits, trying to slide through journalists’ pesky questions without misspeaking into the evening news. They never promise nirvana, just modest improvement.

Opponents are not so constrained. Free to exaggerate and scream disaster, they fly a variety of kites, and if one crashes they simply send up another. All they have to do is sow doubt and confusion. They might cover themselves in mud in the process, but it doesn’t matter.

“If you don’t understand it, vote No.” It worked for Paul Keating against John Hewson and the GST in 1993 and it works today.

In reality, most change is never actually voted on. Instead, governments announce and implement changes (the Senate willing) within a term, and by the next election voters are largely used to them and the caravan moves on. When a party is unwise enough to take something substantial to an election, it influences some votes, sometimes enough to make a difference. Two stand-out cases are 1993 and 2019.

Constitutional referendums occupy a sub-category of their own. It’s not about who will form government. Australians, barely aware of the Constitution’s existence, are reminded that it is dangerous to tamper with the founding document of a country that, as we all know, is the “envy of the world.” The term “lawyers’ picnic” always gets trotted out.

We can all recite — let’s put it to music — that bipartisanship is a necessary but not sufficient condition for referendum success. The counterargument that bad proposals are unlikely to receive bipartisan support has some merit, but is let down by the fact that the non-Labor parties (the Liberals and Nationals and their earlier iterations) have sometimes opposed a change in opposition and then attempted to get the same thing passed in government.

The clearer pattern is that Labor government referendums are particularly prone to failure, and that’s largely because Liberal opposition leaders simply lack the authority to support them. Peter Dutton’s decision earlier this year was based solely on his desire to survive as leader; to grasp this we only have to try to imagine the opposite: Dutton ordering the party room to campaign for Yes. He’d probably be an ex-leader by now.

In the end, driven by the shocking Aston by-election result to seek comfort from the party base, Dutton opted for a particularly harsh No stance. Until then, total freedom for the rest of the party room — like the republic vote in 1999 — seemed an option.

Liberal prime ministers, on the other hand, usually possess the ability to ride roughshod over the party room — certainly that was true for Malcolm Fraser when he held referendums in 1977 and for Harold Holt ten years earlier. Both had massive election wins under their belts. Labor oppositions led (both times) by Gough Whitlam gave their full support, because Labor in its DNA believes in constitutional “reform” whereas the Coalition parties are innately suspicious of it. Out of the Coalition’s six proposed amendments in those two years, four passed, one received a majority of votes but not states, and one was badly beaten.

So if you want to know why the Liberals opposed a simultaneous elections referendum in 1974, proposed exactly that in government in 1977 and then ran against it again in 1984 (when it was more accurately referred to as “terms of senators”), that’s the reason.

And (I know I’m repeating myself) Labor mid-term referendums suffer a particularly harsh fate. This chart, colour-coded with mid-term elections in white and ones with concurrent elections in yellow, tells the story.

The dynamic holds true largely regardless of the actual proposed amendments. If a proposal is inherently ambitious (as the Voice could be characterised) it presents a juicy target; if it’s trivial, the apparent gratuitousness of the exercise becomes an issue. And there’s always some former judge or lawyer on hand, or at least someone with a law degree, to supply quotable words.

Recall also Tony Abbott in 2013, having agreed with the Gillard government to support recognition of local government, jumping ship at the last minute after a party-room revolt.

So any purported analysis that assumes agency on Dutton’s part — that he thought it would be good politics or was acting with sincerity — is just theatre. He did what he thought maximised his chances of being Liberal leader at the next election; his personal inclinations, whatever they were, barely mattered.

Like this year, 1988’s set of four questions started with very high support that whittled down (and eventually halved) by voting day. Yet two referendums run just four years earlier, with the 1984 election, did much better. Barely remembered today, and little thought about at the time because they were swamped by the election proper, they received Yes votes of 50.6 and 47.1 per cent.

A loss is a loss is a loss, but some losses come closer to succeeding than others. Labor government referendums held with elections have historically received much higher support, four of them managing national majorities and one actually passing (in 1946). The average Labor government midterm referendum Yes vote is 37.9 per cent; with elections it’s 49.3.

(Incidentally, with tiny Tasmania set to break with referendum tradition and deliver a higher Yes vote than the national average, the likely space for a sixth “double majority” loss shrinks substantially. Electoral maestro Kevin Bonham uses survey data to put it at 50 to 51 per cent. That is, anything more than 51 per cent nationally would probably pass. This is of less relevance to the 14 October vote, which will struggle to even get into the 40s, than to the road not travelled of a referendum held with the next election.)

The Voice proposal came not from the Albanese government but from the Uluru Dialogues. But it was the government’s decision to hold the vote midterm. It presumably believed bipartisanship would be difficult to achieve with a general election — that a midterm vote would facilitate an uncluttered national conversation — and it was encouraged by the early surveys into believing that this time bipartisanship mattered less.

Tick, tick and tick, all just like 1988. Labor, the party that obsesses over its own history, seems determined not to learn this particular lesson. •

The post Timing, and other referendum obstacles appeared first on Inside Story.

To be sure, it is a familiar enough sight in Australian politics more broadly — ours is a political class obsessed with infrastructure boondoggles — but for the Andrews government major projects were more than a recurring theme; they were the state religion. The premier performed the rites of sod turning and site inspecting as regularly as Mass and recited figures on level crossings removed or hospitals built like counting rosary beads.

And he backed up these prayers and incantations with billions of dollars. As of the last budget, Victoria had approximately $200 billion in projects under way, and was planning to spend an average of almost $20 billion a year over the coming four years on its infrastructure program.

So big was the Big Build — fiscally, politically, physically — that it competes with the state’s traumatic lockdown experience as the dominant element of Daniel Andrews’s legacy. The psychological scars of that time will stay with many of us for a lifetime, but Andrews’s projects are the very fabric of our daily lives. Millions of Victorians use the infrastructure built over the past nine years several times a day. They envelope Melbourne and wind out into the regions, many of them dominating our skylines or otherwise rearranging our neighbourhoods. It is a legacy inscribed in the physical, in concrete and steel; Danist monuments in nearly every quarter of the state.

But what does this tangle of level crossings and tram upgrades, flyovers and tunnels, hospital wards and transmission cables add up to? What, beyond a personal message from Dan to “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” does all this stuff actually mean? What is the Andrews infrastructure legacy?

The first thing to say is that the Big Build’s message isn’t coherent. The Andrews government has never adopted a formal, public, long-term infrastructure strategy. It has published documents that claim to put the state’s many and various projects together, but these are retrofilled scrapbooks based around projects chosen with little consideration of how they all work together. As I have argued previously, the Big Build is ad hocery writ large. That makes the program especially vulnerable to the seductions of the boondoggle — projects that look impressive on paper but don’t work out to be all that helpful in practice.

These problematic projects are easier to catch out in the framework of a long-term plan — new schemes only get in if they actually fit into the bigger picture, meet the overarching goals, work well with the other elements. Andrews’s Big Build fails to do this. At best, it speaks of expedience and pragmatism — build now; don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. At worst, it is cynically opportunist — build something, anything, and we will get the political dividend. Who cares if it works in the long run? They might as well be pyramids.

And, in many cases, unfinished pyramids at that. The Melbourne Metro, the megaproject Andrews spruiked on his way out the door, is one of vanishingly few projects running ahead of schedule — and even that project has run billions over budget. Others have been bigger fiascos: the West Gate Tunnel, meant to be a simple project to better connect the Melbourne’s port with road freight, has become a quagmire — ensnared in complicated disputes over contaminated soil, three full years behind schedule and in the neighbourhood of $4.5 billion over budget, or almost double the initial price tag.

The Melbourne Airport Rail, meanwhile, due to connect Tullamarine Airport to the metro rail system in 2029, has been put on pause, alongside the Geelong Fast Rail, pending the federal government’s infrastructure review findings. The Suburban Rail Loop’s total cost has been estimated by the Parliamentary Budget Office at double the original forecast — more than $100 billion for the full project, which isn’t due to be fully complete until the 2080s. These half-built, might-never-be-complete projects stand as monuments to the government’s naivety, its impatience, its imprudence.

Finally, the Big Build tells us interesting things about the role of the state under Andrews. Labor brought with it a renewed commitment to an active and interventionist state — a profound step away from the neoliberal model that had dominated state politics since the coming of Liberal premier Jeff Kennett in 1992. This more active posture has held across a broad range of policy domains, including housing, energy, domestic violence, industrial relations, TAFE, early childhood education, and health product subsidies. The Big Build is the big outlier.

True, the government’s infrastructure program constitutes public investment on a scale unseen for a generation. But the Big Build has also been big business. If Daniel Andrews’s rail bridges and road tunnels, hospital wings and prison expansions had credits chiselled into them, top billing would not belong to the State of Victoria but to private contracting companies, private consultancies, private financiers and toll road operators.

They have been the ones actually doing the building, often at considerable profit. Billions upon billions of public dollars have helped engineering firms, design consultancies, contract lawyers and construction companies not only keep afloat but expand massively. At times, private companies have also been the ones to own the assets at the end — or else new public infrastructure has been financed by the sale of old public assets, as with the Port of Melbourne sale that funded many level crossing removals.

More than this, the private sector is also deeply involved in planning, assessing and even suggesting major projects. These are all roles that were once the domain of the public service. Yes, they have been increasingly outsourced since the Kennett era — it is not a wholly new phenomenon. But under Andrews the trend towards contracting policymaking out has accelerated rather than abated. The private sector now intrudes further into the process than ever before.

Some of the Big Build’s biggest projects have been devised from their earliest stages by the likes of PwC and Transurban. It is companies like this that are setting the priorities, developing ideas, planning routes, proposing programs — policymaking on a vast scale, with an eye-watering budget and long-term consequences for millions of people, devised by private, profit-driven, non-transparent and unaccountable businesses.

The Big Build, then, illustrates the profound alliance Daniel Andrews has forged with big business. While he may have brought back a more interventionist state in many realms of Victorian life, he has also given over swathes of the state’s treasure and territory to the private sector. RMIT politics scholar David Haywood calls it the rise of the Rentier State.

Did it all come to an end this week? Does the exit of Dan, alongside the recent departure of his longstanding infrastructure tsar Corey Hannett, and the end of the cheap finance that fuelled the infrastructure boom, spell the end of the Big Build? We should doubt it. In her first press conference as Labor leader yesterday, Jacinta Allan pointed to her experience as the minister for infrastructure as one of the things that prepared her for the premiership. The projects have been as much hers as Dan’s. When Andrews has been on site, in hi-vis, Allan has been at his side, hardhat fastened. The Big Build will plough on.

But can Allan use the chance of a leadership reset, and a faltering budget situation, to rein in the Big Build’s excesses — to transform it from boondoggle city to a coherent plan that prioritises the needs of the public over the profits of the private sector? Or will she simply continue digging the hole deeper? •

The post Pharaoh’s curse appeared first on Inside Story.

We learned his answer last week. You abandon and attack climate change policy, invent unpopular measures you claim your opponents support, and pledge you will never force such monstrous burdens on hard-working voters.

To the dismay of many in his own Conservative Party but the joy of the right-wing press, Sunak has come out fighting on the territory his predecessors had been careful to avoid. Climate change policy has been the subject of consensus among all of Britain’s major political parties for nearly two decades, giving the United Kingdom an enviable reputation as a global leader not just in emissions reduction but also in making climate policy with public consent.

Sunak has decided to rip all that up. The government is still committed to achieving its statutory target of net zero emissions by 2050, he said in his much-anticipated speech last week, but it isn’t willing to impose “unacceptable costs” on ordinary households to achieve it. It would therefore reverse three key policies introduced by previous Conservative administrations. The ban on new petrol and diesel cars would be pushed back from 2030 to 2035. The ban on new gas boilers (to be replaced by heat pumps and biofuels) would be pushed back to the same date and would no longer apply to poorer households. And landlords would not be required to insulate tenants’ homes. Sunak also took the opportunity to rule out four other policies: taxes on meat, higher taxes on flying, the compulsory separation of household waste into seven different recycling bins, and compulsory car sharing.

As intended, Sunak’s speech caused an immediate uproar. Environmentally minded MPs in his own party condemned the decisions. Green groups proclaimed themselves appalled. Business groups decried the ad hoc changes to regulatory frameworks and warned that investment would fall in sectors generating rising numbers of green jobs.

At the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express, meanwhile, there were celebrations. Their collective view was expressed in a triumphant Mail editorial congratulating Sunak for finally “shatter[ing] the cosy consensus, which has let an out-of-touch Westminster elite think it can bully a compliant public into footing a mind-blowing climate bill… This motley assortment of eco-zealots, the liberal Left and posh Tory rebels — egged on, of course, by the BBC — are invariably comfortably enough off to be able to swallow such costs. But for hard-working and practical-minded voters… Mr Sunak’s rethink will make life less tough, less cold and less poor.”

Sunak’s election strategists didn’t write the Mail’s leader, but they might as well have done. The prime minister’s purpose is transparent. He wants to create a clear dividing line between his government and the Labour Party, which has made strong climate policy a central plank of its platform, and in doing so to present the opposition as an out-of-touch elite and his own party as the defenders of ordinary people. He has, in short, decided to drag climate change into a culture-war battle and make that war the foundation of his election strategy.

If this sounds somewhat Australian, it is. Sunak’s chief election strategist is Isaac Levido, protégé of famed Liberal Party election guru Lynton Crosby and architect of Scott Morrison’s 2019 election victory. His strategy for Sunak comes straight from the Crosby playbook: use culture-war framing to drive a wedge between your opponents and their own supporters, forcing them to defend unpopular policies on your favoured territory. And don’t worry too much if this requires a measure of blatant dishonesty.

As many commentators observed — and as a BBC interview with Sunak expertly highlighted — it was the dishonesty that most marked out the prime minister’s speech. Every single policy Sunak claimed to have overturned was falsely described.

Neither the ban on new petrol and diesel cars nor the prohibition on gas boilers would have required consumers to fork out “£5000, £10,000, £15,000” more on their alternatives, as Sunak claimed. Innovation in battery technology has so rapidly reduced their cost that electric cars are expected to be cheaper than their fossil fuel competitors as soon as 2027. In practice, postponing the petrol and diesel ban will have very little effect on consumers’ decisions. In any case, 80 per cent of cars bought each year are second hand, to which the ban would not apply.

Heat pump costs are also falling rapidly — driven by the government’s phase-out plans. Consumers also get generous subsidies to install them, making their actual costs to households far less than Sunak claimed. And the requirement to insulate their homes was not on all property owners, as Sunak implied. It was only on private landlords. So, far from saving money for ordinary households, its abolition will actually leave tenants facing higher energy bills.

As for the four other measures Sunak claimed to have scrapped — from taxes on meat to compulsory car sharing — not one of them was government policy, or had even been considered. Nor are any of them Labour policy. They are all mythic inventions of the tabloid press designed to whip up public anger at the general notion of stronger climate policy. The claim to have got rid of them was pure Crosby/Levido: imply that these “extremist” absurdities are supported by your opponents and only you can save voters from them. Within minutes of Sunak finishing his speech Tory central office had put out social media messages highlighting these apparently abolished policies and linking them to Labour’s green spending plans.

(Within another few minutes a whole series of memes had appeared ridiculing Sunak’s remarks and listing a variety of other policies Sunak had saved a grateful public from, including compulsory badger-racing and limits on the number of invisible friends children would be allowed.)

Rishi Sunak’s new strategy has finally revealed his political character, and it is not what his supporters claimed it would be when Conservative MPs made him — without a contest or a vote — Britain’s fifth prime minister in five years last November. He was intended to represent a return to normality, a sensible hand on the tiller who could steady the country’s rocking ship of state.

After David Cameron (who called an unnecessary referendum on Brexit and lost it), Theresa May (who called an unnecessary general election, lost her majority in the House of Commons and failed to get Brexit through parliament), Boris Johnson (who illegally suspended parliament, oversaw 180,000 Covid deaths, associated with Russian spies, failed to disclose personal loans from party donors, promoted corrupt government procurement, lied to parliament about lockdown parties, tried to overturn rules on MPs’ standards of behaviour, and promoted supporters accused of bullying and sexual harassment) and Liz Truss (who introduced a budget that crashed the pound and sent interest rates soaring, and was forced to resign by her own MPs after only forty-nine days in the job), it was generally agreed that British politics needed something a little more stable. Though he had only been an MP since 2015, the smooth, very rich and apparently sensible former hedge-fund manager Sunak seemed to fit the bill.

But he has struggled to keep the Tories’ heads above water. On the five modest priorities he spelt out at the beginning of the year, he has so far failed to make any progress. Economic growth has been anaemic, with the economy teetering all year on the edge of recession. Inflation has fallen from 11 per cent to just under 7 per cent, but only after fourteen straight rises in interest rates (from 0.1 to 5.25 per cent) which have led to huge increases in monthly mortgage costs for householders. Sunak pledged to bring down National Health Service waiting lists, but instead they have reached a record high, with more than seven and a half million people now waiting for treatment in England, over three million of them for more than eighteen weeks.

Sunak’s most high-profile pledge, to reduce the number of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats, has also been his most conspicuous failure. Not only have the numbers continued to increase, but each of the measures aimed at tackling the problem (or, to be more precise, aimed at appearing to tackle the problem) has hit the rocks. The courts have prevented anyone at all from being deported to Rwanda, as the government wanted, to seek asylum there. And the hired-in barge moored off a south-coast port, intended to house 500 asylum seekers, had to be closed after a week when Legionella was found in its water supply.

Meanwhile Britain’s privatised water companies have been discharging raw sewage into the country’s rivers and seas, schools have been forced to shut because they contain dangerously unsafe concrete, and the country’s air-traffic control system was closed down by an error in a single flight plan. Callers to radio phone-in programs and newspaper columnists alike lament that nothing in Britain works anymore and the country has gone to the dogs.

All of which has duly been reflected in Sunak’s polling numbers. Labour has been fifteen to twenty points ahead of the Conservatives in national polling for a year now, sufficient to return it to government with a comfortable majority. Sunak’s approval ratings have fallen to minus 30 per cent, with Labour leader Keir Starmer ahead on almost every leadership quality listed by pollsters. Voters now say they trust Labour over the Conservatives on every major issue.

A general election doesn’t have to be called until January 2025, but May or October next year are seen as the likeliest dates. That gives Sunak a year or less to turn his dire fortunes around. After this week’s relaunch and with Levido in charge, we know how he will seek to do it. Reinforced by relentless tabloid attacks on Labour in general and Starmer in particular, the culture-war framing will be used to try to separate the opposition from its traditional working-class base.

This was how the Brexit referendum was won, and it was how Boris Johnson increased the Conservatives’ majority in the general election of 2019. Labour’s heartland voters in towns and cities across the Midlands and North of England were told that the party they and their families had always supported had become detached from their concerns: pro-EU, insufficiently patriotic, too supportive of immigration, soft on crime, uninterested in the armed services, and too London-centric (read, culturally liberal).

With Labour having governed while the post-2000 globalisation was creating an economic boom in London and the affluent southeast, but largely leaving old industrial areas behind, and having then presided over the great financial crash, many of these voters proved ripe to change their allegiance. Johnson’s stunning election victory in 2019 included a whole swathe of former Labour seats thought to be unwinnable by the Tories. That was why, despite everything, Johnson was tolerated for so long by Tory MPs and members: he had won in areas of the country that had not for years, if ever, returned a Tory MP.

It is these “red wall” seats that Sunak must retain in order to have any chance of winning the next election — and equally that Labour must win back if it is to do so. Both parties are focused laser-like on this task. From now until he calls the election we can confidently expect Sunak to attack Labour for its profligate tax and spending plans and economic recklessness, for wanting to rejoin the EU single market, for trying to reduce prison numbers while the Tories want to lock more criminals up, for wanting higher immigration and less defence spending, and — because the party has been taken over by the woke trans-rights brigade — for being unable to define a woman. This week’s climate row-back was just the start.

Will Labour take the bait? On all but one of those issues, it won’t. Over the past year Keir Starmer — also explicitly influenced by the Australian example — has adopted a classic small-target strategy. If you’re this far ahead in the polls, his reasoning goes, and the Tories keep spectacularly demonstrating their own incompetence, don’t blow it by giving your opponents easy wins.

Like a Roman phalanx curling itself into a tight circle with its shields on the outside, Labour has been busy closing off any available lines of attack from the Tories and their media spear-bearers.

On fiscal policy, Labour’s shadow chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves has insisted that Labour will cut government borrowing and only increase spending if it can identify a way of paying for it. And she has since ruled out almost any tax rise, including higher-rate income taxes, the capital gains tax and a wealth tax, that Labour supporters had hoped might allow some spending commitments to be made.

On defence policy, on crime, on immigration and asylum seekers, Labour has attacked the Tory record but has not committed to any significant changes to government policy. On trans rights, Labour has ruled out gender self-identification without a medical diagnosis.

All eyes were therefore on Starmer for his reaction to Sunak’s anti-climate policy speech. Would he take the same approach he had on all the other wedges the Tories had been trying to hammer between him and his voter base? Would he again cleave close to Tory policy and refuse to allow a gap to open up through which he could be attacked?

Signs suggested he might. Reeves had already watered down Labour’s “climate investment plan” to spend £28 billion a year on green infrastructure and innovation: facing rising borrowing costs, she announced that a Labour government would now only get spending to £28 billion by the end of the parliament.

When the party then lost a by-election in London it had been expected to win, amid widespread voter opposition to the (Labour) mayor’s plans to extend a charge on polluting cars, Starmer had a very public wobble, openly questioning the policy. The Tories took their by-election victory as evidence that green policies imposing costs on voters are unpopular and ripe for attack, and Starmer seemed to be drawing the same conclusion. The environmental movement — inside and beyond the party — was alarmed.

They need not have worried. Starmer’s response to Sunak’s anti-green speech was subtle. Refusing to fall into the trap of a debate about the costs of climate policy to ordinary households, he made no public comment at all on the speech apart from a couple of tweets emphasising that Labour’s renewable energy strategy would create jobs, reduce bills and improve energy security. He left it to his shadow climate minister, former party leader Ed Miliband, to castigate Sunak for “not giving a damn” about climate change, describing the PM as “rattled, chaotic and out of his depth.”

Labour would retain the petrol and diesel ban by 2030 and the responsibility of landlords to insulate their tenants’ homes, Miliband said, both of which would cut ordinary households’ costs. (He notably didn’t promise to restore the ban on gas boilers.) As for the four fictional policies Sunak said he was scrapping, Miliband was scathing. Not only had the Labour Party never proposed a tax on meat, he said, but it was not even the policy of the Vegan Society.

Miliband is well known as strongly committed to climate action. Yet it was not he but shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves who was the decisive figure in Labour’s choice to pick up the climate gauntlet Sunak had thrown down. Reeves, who has been assiduously wooing business leaders over the past year, has been struck not merely by how fed up with Tory incompetence they have become, but also by how green they are.

With US president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act driving record investment into environmental technologies and sectors in the United States, and the European Union’s Green Deal following suit, Labour has made “green prosperity” the centrepiece of its economic and industrial strategies. It will have been delighted at the furious reaction of business leaders to Sunak’s speech. Why get Starmer to attack Sunak when the UK head of Ford will do it for you?

For party members and activists, Labour’s response will have come as a relief. The leadership’s small-target positioning has been deeply frustrating for those who believe the party needs radical policies to tackle the legacy of thirteen years of Tory rule. Starmer’s bland persona and extreme policy caution have left both members and many political commentators despairing that Labour was not offering the public a positive reason to vote for it but rather merely relying on the Tories to mess up. With the NHS, social care, schools, policing and local government all in crisis, but Labour not promising to spend significant money on any of them, they fear the party will succeed in the general election but fail in government.

In this context Miliband’s climate policy platform has offered a ray of hope. He has managed to persuade Starmer and Reeves to support a bold plan to achieve 100 per cent renewable power by 2030, create a new publicly owned energy company, and insulate nineteen million homes over ten years, generating a claimed 200,000 new jobs across the country. Most radically of all, Labour has pledged to end new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea fields, which would make Britain the first major economy to do so.

Labour hasn’t committed to these policies in the hope that the public supports them. It knows the public does: it is one of the consequences of the eighteen-year cross-party consensus on climate policy. Climate change is now ranked third when voters are asked about the biggest issues facing Britain, behind only the economy and inflation. Over half of voters want to see the government take stronger action, with a quarter happy with current policies and fewer than 20 per cent believing the government is moving too fast. These numbers vary little across Labour and Tory supporters and different parts of the country. Red wall voters are as green as people in the rest of Britain.

Tory strategists think these numbers are soft. They point out that the majorities in favour of tougher climate policy fall when voters are reminded that this might involve them, not just other people, paying more. Levido is convinced that continuous campaigning on the cost of achieving net zero for ordinary households will reduce public support even further. If this means making fictitious claims about those costs, or about Labour policy, so be it. He believes the Tories can peel enough voters away from Labour to make the election competitive.

He may be right. And this is what dismays moderate Tories the most about Sunak’s new stance. They know that their own voters care about climate change, and that strong policies will attract business investment and jobs in the new global green economy. But they also know, from Australia, the United States and elsewhere, that mendacious culture wars can be remarkably effective means of undermining voter confidence in political parties and policies of all kinds.

Britain has been spared this kind of social and political division up to now. But it is about to find out what happens when concerns about the future of the planet are sacrificed on the altar of election strategy. •

The post From net zero to rock bottom appeared first on Inside Story.

Ministerial staff, on the other hand, have provoked much greater curiosity. In the 1970s, principal private secretaries Ainsley Gotto and Junie Morosi carved swathes during the Gorton and Whitlam governments, though few have since matched their flair. Much less colourful as an adviser was the current prime minister, who cut his political teeth on the staff of Tom Uren, local government minister in the Hawke government, and Bob Carr, premier of New South Wales.

Whether in the Gotto–Morosi or the Albanese mould, ministerial staff still grab a headline or two, if sometimes for the wrong reasons. They inhabit an area of the public service where accountability is minimal but proximity to power gives a sense of dash, even of gravitas — whispering in ministers’ ears, digging their leaders out of strife, telling senior public servants what to do, flitting around sometimes in VIP planes and perhaps glugging on a beaker or two of pinot grigio in a Qantas Chairman’s Lounge.

So when things go wrong with ministerial staff, people prick up their ears. And things have gone wrong with them, and with their ministers and other members of the federal parliament — wrong enough for the Human Rights Commission to be asked to review the scene. Its 2021 report, Set the Standard, made many recommendations about how Parliament House could be smartened up as a workplace.

One consequence of that report is legislation to create a new statutory body, Parliamentary Workplace Support Services, which will deal with staffing, complaints, education and training, and related matters affecting Parliament House’s denizens.

Set the Standard also recommended a review of the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act, now fondly known as the MOPS Act, which provides a legal base for the employment of MPs’ staff. The review, recently completed by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, is important because ministerial staff have become a linchpin between ministers’ offices and the public service. Where that connection has not worked as it should, things have often turned sour.

Before I say any more about the bill, though, a little history.

In 1983, Labor offered voters a pre-election policy on, of all things, the public service. That policy proposed reserving a proportion of senior executive service positions for political appointments, a move — however well intentioned — that would have disastrously compromised merit staffing.

The MOPS Act was designed as an alternative to Labor policy. (I confess I played a role in advising on and implementing it.) It allowed ministers, under certain conditions, to engage ministerial consultants who could be employed within departments. But it avoided a further politicisation of the public service by limiting the tenure of consultants to the period for which the appointing minister was in charge of the relevant department. Almost as an afterthought, the MOPS also gave ministers and other MPs legal power they’d not previously had to employ their office staff.

The MOPS legislation came into effect in 1984 and it has not been materially changed since then.

Now, based on the review by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, comes a bill that would materially change the MOPS Act. Some of the proposed changes are for the good, some are not, and some that should have been made have been left on the shelf. The MOPS Amendment Bill might not be as bad as the ridiculously inadequate Public Service Act Amendment Bill, also now in parliament, but it could have been a lot better.

On the positives, the MOPS Amendment Bill would do three important things. It would introduce employment principles designed to improve the behaviour of MPs and their staff. It would better define the employment responsibilities of ministers and other MPs, and elucidate different categories of staff. And it would clarify and improve termination arrangements in association with provisions in the Parliamentary Workplace Support Services Bill dealing with dismissal, grievance procedures and so on.

Given that the optimistic assumptions about the behaviour of MPs and their staff that underpinned the MOPS Act have been invalidated over the years, these changes are welcome. Unfortunately, though, the MOPS Amendment Bill heads south from that point on.

The bill would cut the heart out of the MOPS Act by removing the ministerial consultant provisions. It is as if the bill’s designers have taken fright at the word “consultants” (now an eleven-letter swear word) and simply reacted by removing it from the bill. Their explanation is that the provisions have not been used and are therefore “obsolete.”

But the consultant provisions were never intended to be greatly used. Their purpose was to protect against any return of Labor’s notion of reserving a proportion of senior executive service positions for political appointment, and to block insidious, backdoor pressures from ministers to insinuate their nominees into the public service. Any ministers trying such tricks could be deflected by the consultant provisions.

The fact that they’ve not been much used is not a sign of obsolescence; it’s a sign of success. Their planned demolition ignores the deterrent value of many little-used laws. Indeed, getting rid of laws because they’re not much used would probably wipe out half of what are now on the books.

As the MOPS Amendment Bill errs in what removes, so too is it deficient in what it fails to include.

The administrative code of conduct for ministerial staff has been around for many years. Because it doesn’t seem to have done much good, the 2019 Thodey review of the public service and the robodebt royal commission recommended it be replaced with a legislated code. The government has squibbed on those recommendations; the MOPS Amendment Bill doesn’t propose a code for ministerial staff or one for other MOPS staff.

That’s a shame because a legal code of conduct would provide a clear and unavoidable statement of expectations about proper behaviour and a solid base for keeping staff up to the mark, including with disciplinary measures.

For these reasons parliament has put a legal code of conduct for departmental and agency staff into the Public Service Act. For the government to refuse to do likewise for ministerial staff is hypocritical. If it is not to join the government in this two-faced mire, parliament should insist on legislated codes of conduct for ministerial and all other staff employed by MPs.

For all their value, legal codes of conduct are at risk if recruitment procedures allow ratbags to be employed. The MOPS Amendment Bill includes a provision requiring ministers and MPs to assess whether staff they wish to employ have the appropriate capability. That too-small step is typical of this bill.

True, it provides for the prime minister to regulate what kinds of staff can be employed and to establish related arrangements and conditions, but the powers are unspecific. For ministerial staff, the government (or the prime minister) should be required to establish by delegated legislation suitably tight procedures for selecting ministerial staff, for receiving independent advice on appointments, for security and other vetting, and for induction and training.

Unlike recruitment to public service departments, current procedures for ministerial staff are opaque and vulnerable to shady dealing. While ministers (and other MPs) need scope to employ staff with whom they can get on, more open recruitment procedures would promote public confidence and minimise the ratbag risk.

During the Hawke government, many senior positions in ministers’ offices were occupied by public servants on secondment, a factor contributing to a high point in productive relations between ministers and the public service. While those days are long gone, ministers would do themselves a favour by seeing that their offices include a reasonable seasoning of competent public servants.

There is, however, a disincentive for public servants to sign up with ministers’ offices. In doing so they effectively rule themselves out of promotion within the public service, often for years. With the Hawke government this disincentive was reduced by arrangements whereby public servants returning from ministers’ offices could be reintegrated into their department at a level appropriate to the length of time they’d been on secondment and the kind of work they’d done during it. These provisions should be brought back.

Finally, the Parliamentary Workplace Support Services Bill’s provisions for reporting on employment under the MOPS Act are insufficient. It should be up to the government itself (or the prime minister) to report on the employment of ministerial staff; after all, those given statutory powers by parliament should account directly for their exercise rather than rely on others to do so. Points of authority and accountability should match up.

It’s a pity the MOPS Amendment Bill is so modest and weak, errs significantly in removing the ministerial consultant provision, and omits more important provisions than it contains. Timidity, public service incapacity, an unwillingness or inability to see what’s important in the historical background and a sheer lack of imagination continue to dog attempts to improve the Commonwealth public service. •

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Evatt’s move from court to federal parliament was considered “a most regrettable precedent” by Menzies, who was by then prime minister. (While it may have been regrettable, it wasn’t much of a precedent, never being repeated over the ensuing eighty-three years.) Evatt responded in kind, suggesting that Menzies would lose the next election. (That, too, proved a less than accurate prediction.) As Anne Henderson sees it in her new book, Menzies vs Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics, battle was joined from that time.

Reading Henderson’s opening chapters it’s hard not to be staggered by Evatt’s workload as external affairs minister and attorney-general. No minister today would take on these dual roles, and Henderson highlights the difficulties the combination caused for Labor in government, especially at a time of war.

It would have been a punishing load for the best-organised minister (which Evatt clearly was not), and was exacerbated by his frequent absences overseas in the pre-jet age, including a year as president of the UN General Assembly. As an often-absentee attorney-general, he was unable to contribute fully to vital tasks, including defending the government’s bank nationalisation plan before the High Court.

Evatt became Labor leader after Ben Chifley’s death in June 1951. His role later that year in defeating Menzies’s referendum to ban the Communist Party is seen by many as his finest moment, but Henderson downplays the victory. Support for the ban was recorded by polls at 73 per cent in early August but by polling day, six weeks later, it had dropped to just under 50 per cent. (The referendum was carried in only three states.) Henderson cites the history of defeated referendum proposals and asks why the Yes even got close — as if falling support for the ban followed a law of nature regardless of effective political campaigning.

It’s true that early support for many referendum proposals has evaporated by polling day. But it is difficult to think of a question for which Yes campaigners enjoyed more favourable circumstances than this one. The cold war was in full swing, Australian troops were fighting the communists on the Korean peninsula (under a UN flag), and communism was seen as an existential threat, broadly detested within the electorate. Menzies had warned of the possibility of a third world war within three years; strong anti-communist elements within Evatt’s own party supported the ban.

Indeed, one might equally ask why Menzies couldn’t pull it off. I suspect that he would have appreciated the irony that it was the internationalist Evatt, not the Anglophile Menzies, who campaigned by citing British justice’s onus on the state to prove guilt rather than (as the anti-communists proposed) on the accused to prove innocence.

As with most failed referendums, the loss did the prime minister no harm. In fact, Henderson makes the interesting suggestion that it saved him from having to enact legislation that may “have been as divisive and unsettling to civic order” as the McCarthy hearings were in the United States. It’s impossible to prove of course, but Australia definitely didn’t need that kangaroo court–type assault on individuals’ reputations and lives.

Henderson’s account of the Petrov affair and the subsequent royal commission — a disastrous time for Evatt — traverses territory that is probably less contentious than it was a generation ago. On the Labor Party’s 1955 split, she quotes with approval the claim by former Liberal prime minister John Howard that Labor’s rules afforded too much power to its national executive: a more genuinely federal structure (like that of the Liberals) would have rendered Evatt’s intervention more difficult and a split in the party less likely.

Whether a Victorian Labor branch left mostly to its own devices would have sorted out its problems is unclear, but the opportunity was unlikely given the hostility of Evatt and his supporters to the group of Victorians they saw as treacherous anti-communists. Ironically, it was this capacity to intervene that would facilitate a federal takeover of the moribund (and still split-crippled) Victorian ALP fifteen years later. That intervention eventually reinvigorated the state branch, establishing a Labor dominance in Victorian state elections and in the state’s federal seats that persists to the present day.

Henderson also poses the question of whether a different Labor leader could have avoided the split. What if deputy leader Arthur Calwell had been installed after the 1954 election loss? She speculates that Calwell might have been able to offer concessions to the anti-communist Victorians and stresses an absence of intense ideological fervour among many of those who would soon be expelled from the party.

While it is hard to envisage a leader handling the crisis less effectively than Evatt did, Henderson quotes Labor MP Fred Daly’s view that Calwell at the time was “hesitant, uncertain and waiting for Evatt’s job” — hardly the stuff of firm leadership. Arthur was always prepared to wait.

It may be true that most of the anti-communist Labor MPs, even in Victoria, were not fervent ideologues, but possibly more relevant was the ideological predisposition of the powerful Catholic activist B.A. Santamaria, who was able to influence state Labor’s decision-making bodies and preselections from outside the party. Santamaria boasted in 1952 to his mentor, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, that his Catholic Social Studies Movement (the infamous “Movement”) would be able to transform the leadership of the Labor movement within a few years and install federal and state MPs able to implement “a Christian social program.”

This may have been overly ambitious nationally, but Santamaria’s undue influence over Victorian Labor was already a concern for some. Moreover, the party Santamaria envisaged might be viewed as essentially a church or “confessional” party, at odds with traditional Australian “Laborism,” not to mention with the main elements of a pluralist, secular democracy.

Henderson’s most interesting observation, for this reviewer, is her contention that Evatt’s lack of anti-communist conviction owed much to his being “an intense secularist.” It is certainly the case that critics of communism in this era often preceded the noun with the adjectives “godless” or “atheistic.” In a predominantly Christian society like Australia, communism’s atheistic nature was a damning feature, especially among Catholics, including Catholic Labor MPs. Presbyterian Menzies also held strongly to this view.

If this review has focused more on Evatt than on Menzies, this reflects the enduring questions Evatt’s leadership raises — including the state of his mental health, which is seen by some as helping to explain his erratic and self-destructive behaviour. (Henderson doesn’t consider this question, but it was well covered by biographer John Murphy.)

Menzies, having survived the referendum result, was also undaunted by his narrow election victory in 1954, secured with a minority of the vote, a lucky escape to be repeated in 1961. He went for the Evatt jugular whenever it was exposed — which was often, as Henderson shows vividly. John Howard would later claim, on his own behalf, that the times suited him. Menzies had that advantage in spades, and he exploited it artfully.

If there is a central theme to Menzies’s approach to his battle with Evatt, it is his characterisation of the Labor leader as a naive internationalist, oblivious to the emerging threat of monolithic communism, especially to the north of Australia. This is a criticism endorsed by Henderson. A cynic might suggest that the communist threat was not only electoral gold for Menzies but also provided a convenient pretext for him to maintain his unwavering support for European colonialism. Better the colonialists than the communists.

Neither character was a team player by instinct, but Menzies adapted better and learned from mistakes. Among other flaws, Evatt’s lack of self-awareness was both crucial and crippling. There is no doubt that the winner of the “great rivalry” was Menzies.

As a known partisan, Henderson runs the risk that her book will be seen in that light, and that her put-downs of Evatt’s admirers — “a collective of scribblers,” “the Evatt fan club” — will be viewed accordingly. Her failure to acknowledge any merit in Evatt’s referendum victory will seem churlish to some. But Henderson can’t be faulted on the book’s readability: it’s a one-sitting job for those fascinated by the politics of that era.

I was left wondering about the depth of the personal animus between the two men. Henderson quotes Menzies accusing Evatt of being too interested in power — as “a menace to Australia” to be kept out of office “by hook or by crook.” Prime ministers and opposition leaders routinely find themselves in settings where some form of civil, non-political conversation is virtually unavoidable. What on earth might these two have talked about? Well, both of them loved their cricket. •

Menzies vs Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics
By Anne Henderson | Connor Court | $34.95 | 236 pages

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Crucially, these new approaches envisage Australia working with neighbouring governments on a range of challenges including climate change, global economic uncertainty, and the need to build “effective, accountable states that drive their own development.” These strategies aren’t straightforward: they will involve not only grappling with challenging political realities in Asia and the Pacific but also navigating the contending ideas and interests jostling to shape Australia’s foreign policy.

The late Alan Gyngell, one of Australia’s foremost foreign policy analysts, argued that Australia lacks the power or resources to shape politics in the region and must therefore focus on building partnerships with existing governments through statecraft and diplomacy.

Like the paper released last month, Australia’s 2017 foreign policy white paper argued that such partnerships can tackle a wide range of challenges, including the spread of “terrorism and extremist ideas” and “growing transnational challenges such as crime and people smuggling.” They can even enable “effective programmes to promote economic reform and inclusive growth, reduce poverty and address inequality.”

Partnerships with regional governments would focus on “shared values” and “enduring ties” — assumptions also found in the terms of reference for the current parliamentary inquiry. But it isn’t always easy to identify those common values. Experience in Southeast Asia shows how electoral democracy and pro-market governance can mask the reality of rule by highly illiberal and anti-democratic forces.

Does this matter? Not so much, it seems, when Australia’s foreign policy increasingly places a priority on security by supporting political leaders and governments seen to provide social order and political stability — governments that can act as a bulwark against China and contain insurgency and unrest within the region.

But can the two strategies — fostering security and fostering democracy — work together? Writing for the Lowy Institute, Kevin Casas-Zamora argues that democracy “is not separate from security — the first begets the second.” The United States Studies Centre’s Lavina Lee contends that policies promoting democracy, good governance and a more open Southeast Asia are important tools in protecting the region from the influence of autocratic regimes, notably China.

Australian foreign policy has taken a different route in recent years, drawing a sharp divide between its security goals and programs aimed at democratic and social reform. As former prime minister Tony Abbott famously declared in 2016, “moral posturing” was never allowed to threaten Australia’s security interests under his government. His comment reflects the cold war fear that democracy and social reform in developing societies open the door to social disorder and political instability.

Perhaps the central question, though, is whether strategies promoting democracy and civil society are possible while certain governments and allied elites remain entrenched? Governments themselves, and their apparatus of officials, politicians and security forces, are often the primary causes of repression and consequent unrest. Reformers can face pervasive systems of money politics and assaults on independent judiciaries and media or find their efforts blocked by purportedly democratic constitutions that use restrictive electoral laws to limit political competition. In some cases, they confront extra-legal and state-sponsored violence and, in the extreme, military coups.

Rather than being orthodox defence forces, these militaries were always vehicles for protecting powerful ruling interests against opponents and critics.

It should have come as no surprise when the militaries in Thailand and Myanmar overthrew democratically elected governments or when the military and security forces in Cambodia played the central role in consolidating a repressive one-party state in that country. Australian efforts to help bail out an inept Philippines military struggling to control a ragtag Islamist insurgency may also have simply helped prop up the creaking system of oligarchic politics that underlies a long history of exploitation and repression in that country.

Outside the mainstream, civil society organisations including farmers’ associations, workers’ unions and environmental movements face land grabbing by politically backed elites or illegal logging and deforestation by large mining and palm oil conglomerates. Like human rights groups, professional and business associations aligned with anti-corruption movements struggle to hold police or militaries to account for abuses of power.

Expectations that Australia can partner with countries to promote a “rules-based order” and good governance also collide with governments and elites in the region whose power and wealth is rooted in rent-seeking. This has been illustrated especially by sustained but often futile attempts to control endemic corruption. Indonesia’s anti-corruption commission, the KPK, is a striking example of how an effective and popular reformist institution can be undermined — in this case by vested interests in parliament and the police service.

Efforts to introduce reform through pro-market policies, including privatisation and deregulation, have similarly been co-opted by entrenched rent-seeking coalitions, turning public authority and resources into private monopolies and translating property rights into land grabbing. As in the dramatic case of Russia, market reform has enabled the rise of powerful political and business oligarchies in Southeast Asia.

Clearly, as Gyngell argued, there are limits to Australia’s capacity to reshape these factors within the region. Nevertheless, important opportunities exist to bolster reformist strategies by tackling deep problems of policymaking within Australia itself.

What would such a foreign policy entail?

To begin with, it would mean reinvesting in the authority and resources of a public sector overly reliant on consultants and outsourcing. This reliance has fatally compromised Australia’s understanding of how democracy or good governance are built, reducing officials to roles of accounting, processing and tendering work to private consultants and contractors.

It would mean replacing process-driven approaches that diminish the importance of analysing the environments in which development and other assistance programs operate. An important example is how “statecraft” — now conceived as a set of context-free tools — operates without recognition of the structures of power and wealth in the region.

It would also mean taking “soft power” seriously and harnessing it to support reformist forces in Southeast Asia. This involves leveraging the very liberal nature of what Australia can offer, including the appeal of our universities for regional students as distinctive sites of new ideas and ways of thinking about societies and their governance.

Identifying reforms is one thing, but implementing them is quite another, when foreign policy has become a proxy for deeper political and ideological conflicts in Australia. Rolling back the vast and pervasive influence of security-focused foreign policy–makers will be difficult given the breadth and power of their interests inside and outside the state, and their formidable lobbying networks.

With their emphasis on continuing threats and uncertainty, these policymakers and networks provide the basis for electoral appeals to nationalism and xenophobia by right-wing politicians and parties. This creates a powerful conservative political coalition. They also support a vast apparatus of defence and security institutions extending into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and universities. A large and well-funded think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, projects their ideological claims.

Above all, it is difficult to find any cohesive force or set of ideas driving Australia’s promotion of democracy. It may indeed be simply another case of Australia mimicking the United States by following the Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy announced by US secretary of state Antony Blinken in late 2021.

A successful program for promoting democracy and good governance must provide a case for how this will be in Australia’s national interest. Will the Labor government provide this reformist agenda? Can it arrive at a coherent engagement strategy that transcends the rhetoric of AUKUS and the American alliance, or will it revert to the position taken in the 2017 defence white paper and confirm that the old cold war thinking is again ascendant? Sadly, Labor in government seems to be embedding itself in a deepening subordinate relationship with the United States focused firmly on issues of security. •

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In recent months, China’s exports, along with its currency, its consumer confidence and the price of pork, have begun to tumble. The real estate sector, broadly responsible for 30 per cent of the country’s GDP, is looking more and more like an empty tower block teetering on a foundation of debt. Banks have shaved another 2 per cent off an already modest economic growth forecast in 2023 of 5 per cent. One economic indicator that is rising is youth unemployment, though after it surpassed 21 per cent last month the government stopped publishing statistics.

Until recently, the Communist Party under Xi Jinping has been able to muddle through crises, including those of its own making. Yet fears are mounting that the People’s Republic could be entering the kind of deflationary spiral that took a rising Japan back to ground in the 1990s.

While trying to stamp out spot fires, the Communist Party has predictably grabbed the oldest fire extinguisher in its cupboard, labelled Blame the West. It has sprayed abuse at outside observers who have been so rude as to raise the alarm. “At the end of the day, they are fated to be slapped by reality,” asserted a foreign ministry spokesperson in August, doing his best to block the view of the front door burning.

What props up that door is the subject of economist Keyu Jin’s new book, The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism. It lands in bookshops just as it has become urgently necessary to understand how China’s economy really functions, and the less obvious ways it fits into global economic and financial systems.

Beijing-born and Harvard-educated, Jin splits her time between Beijing and London, where she teaches at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is well connected in Beijing — her father, Jin Liqun, is a former vice-minister of finance and current president of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. Her intimate understanding of the system, ability to explicate complicated economic issues in plain English, and emotional investment in a thriving China all inform this most timely book.

China’s economic success, she writes, has defied all the usual assumptions about the necessary ingredients for long-term growth: a strong rule of law, for example, along with robust corporate governance and solid intellectual property protection. What’s more, neither its consumers, nor its entrepreneurs, nor the state itself have behaved like “conventional economic agents.” Rather, she contends, their actions are shaped by culture and history as well as ideology. These particular conditions cast doubt on whether China’s growth model could be replicated elsewhere in the developing world. But if it’s unique, she argues, it’s far from a “miracle,” as some have called it: China has simply caught up to its own potential.

How it has done this is the interesting part. The old playbook, Jin writes, referring to the first decades of reform, was all about “short and fast” development, a “febrile rush to boost GDP.” She chronicles how Deng Xiaoping and his successors progressively introduced market mechanisms into what had been a central planned economy, putting it on the road to becoming the manufacturing powerhouse and global economic power it is today.

One of the central and widely misunderstood aspects of the “new China playbook,” which she says aims for “a slower but saner pursuit of growth,” is how closely interconnected are the country’s state and private economies. There are numerous partnerships between state-owned enterprises and private businesses. These partnerships, in turn, are typically situated in what is nicknamed the “mayor economy”: a synergy between local government, state enterprise and private business. Other central aspects of the new playbook include the country’s idiosyncratic stock markets and the widespread “shadow banking” practices that introduce both risks and benefits into China’s finance sector.

Jin counters some common misapprehensions. In her chapter on China’s role in global trade, she shows that burgeoning US–China trade and investment did not in fact cause a net loss of American jobs. Less-skilled workers certainly suffered badly from trade-related job losses. Yet, she notes, that’s partly because the American economy privileges employers over employees: the impact of trade on workers was less in the European Union because of the strength of unions there and its fairer labour practices and laws more generally.

As for innovation, it’s often said that industry in China is better at copying than creating. But she points out that economists distinguish between “from zero to one” innovation — the production of a first-of-its-kind device, method or process — and “from one to N” innovation, which seeks to improve on existing technologies. She describes “from one to N” as China’s innovation “sweet spot.”

In March this year, incidentally, an Australian Strategic Policy Institute report concluded that China already leads the United States in thirty-seven out of forty-four critical technologies, including drone technology and critical minerals processing.

In discussing the agility of Chinese companies, Jin relates how the ridesharing company Didi has used its flexibility in adapting to local conditions to make inroads into places where Uber has failed to establish a presence. In Brazil, for example, where many drivers live hand-to-mouth, Didi pays them on a daily basis, and for those without a bank account, it helps them apply for one through its app.

Jin’s accomplishment is to illuminate the workings of this ever-evolving system, using a mix of statistics, narrative and anecdotes. Less impressive are some of her breezy references to Chinese culture and history, those “underlying fundamentals” (as only an economist could call them). She makes numerous minor mistakes. For instance, she places the invention of paper, the compass and printing in the Song dynasty (960–1269) when they arrived more than seven centuries earlier, in the Han.

Her insistence that China has had meritocratic government since the third century BCE stretches the definition of meritocratic: it wasn’t until the late seventh century that Empress Wu Zetian, incidentally the only woman to rule in her own name in all Chinese history, reformed the procedures for entry into the civil service so that exams would be held on a regular schedule and be open to men of humble background for the first time. (Women, no matter how meritorious, were never eligible). There would still be debates, which heated up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, about whether the exams produced an actual “meritocracy” or simply elevated to power men who were able to memorise and regurgitate classical texts.

Jin similarly credits Confucius with providing the Chinese with an ingrained work ethic married to respect for authority, nodding to the popular view that Confucianism has been a foundation for economic success not just in China but in South Korea, Japan and other societies influenced by Confucian thought. She speaks of “996” (Chinese slang for working 9am to 9pm six days a week) as a “work ethic,” when in most Chinese discourse it’s more of a complaint. If it is a work ethic, it’s one many young people have rejected, choosing instead to “lie flat,” to engage in extremely non-Confucian “quiet quitting” or even actual quitting. It’s also a reason that the public service, with its regular hours and less hectic demands, has re-emerged as a desirable employer for many of China’s youth.

Simplistic and uninflected views of history chime with contemporary Communist Party narratives aimed at promoting cultural pride, but they can’t carry the full freight assigned to them here of providing a meaningful explanation of Chinese economic and other behaviours.

Jin confronts problems such as ballooning debt and an ageing population head-on. Yet she doesn’t adequately address the underlying ideological and political issues that have in many cases an outsize impact on China’s economic policies, performance and behaviour. The party, by its own proclamation, wants to control everything; there is no sphere of life exempt from political “leadership.” The recent draft patriotic education law made that clear by mandating that its demands extend to how parents speak to their children.

If the party controls everything, Xi Jinping controls the party. It seems odd for an economist not to question whether this will lead to better or worse economic decision-making. Jin notes that Xi Jinping has “himself taken over the job of overseeing China’s technology advancement, previously under the supervision of a government minister.” She likens this to wartime mobilisation, explaining that “China sees being at the forefront of developing key technologies as a matter of survival.”

But she doesn’t ask whether having Xi — a non-technologist — in charge is the best bet for guaranteeing that survival. After all, Xi, dubbed by Geremie Barmé the “chairman of everything,” is not just leader of party and state but chair of the Central Military Commission and numerous other central bodies, including those with responsibilities for Taiwan affairs, Hong Kong and Macau affairs, foreign affairs, national security, financial and economic affairs, defence and military reform, and cyberspace. What’s wrong with having a dedicated minister in charge of each of these important portfolios? Xi’s assumption of leadership in the technological sphere hardly seems the acme of rational decision-making, economic or otherwise.

It would certainly not be comfortable for someone who lives part of the time in China and has family there to focus on such things, but the avoidance of politically sensitive topics and analysis compromises the value of The New China Playbook. It also draws attention to the odd narrative lacunae.

For example, Jin speaks in positive terms of the rising demands of the people for civil society, and backs this up with statistical evidence. The problem is that the data refer to the period right before Xi took power in 2012–13. She doesn’t add that, almost from that moment, Xi has ruthlessly set about crushing that civil society, silencing legal academics, detaining feminists planning to protest sexual harassment on public transport, clamping down on LGBTQI activism, and imprisoning lawyers who argue for rights given to the Chinese people by the Chinese constitution itself.

She also writes admiringly of China’s data protection laws — and yet doesn’t tackle the problem of the clauses regarding “national security” (which is defined very loosely in China) that allow the state itself to access pretty much whatever data it wants. Her claim that Chinese people “feel very differently” from those in the West about issues like privacy and surveillance, thanks to a cultural preference for stability and safety, might be broadly true. There are plenty of people, including in Xinjiang, on the other hand, who feel rather similarly to people in the rest of the world.

On the subject of Xinjiang, the vulnerability of the Chinese economy to political boycotts of its products would seem a useful subject for examination in a book like this, but no.

The problem is that China’s political and economic goals are frequently in conflict: the need for foreign investment, for example, is frustrated by increasingly strident anti-foreign rhetoric and rising party interference in the business sector that make China a more difficult, or at least less enjoyable, place for non-Chinese to do business in. She does acknowledge that China’s relative lack of soft power acts as a barrier to global economic leadership (including greater use of its currency in international trade). She also observes the paradox that the pursuit of economic stability through control can actually trigger instability.

We’re seeing plenty of evidence of that now, and it’s unclear whether Xi Jinping and the party he leads can control their way out of the mess. There’s no pleasure in contemplating the possibility that Xi might steer the Chinese economy off a cliff and drag the rest of the world down with it. Jin professes to feeling optimistic “that pragmatism and rationality will eventually prevail.” I’m not persuaded. But I hope she’s right. •

The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism
By Keyu Jin | Swift Press | $36.99 | 368 pages

The post Slapped by reality appeared first on Inside Story.

It was “completely outrageous,” the opposition leader thundered to Fordham. “Australians want a fair election, not a dodgy one.” That turned a storm in a teacup into mainstream news.

Soon enough, the Australian Electoral Commission felt obliged to point out that “the formal voting instructions for the referendum are to clearly write either ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ in full, in English.” In the 1999 republic referendum, said the AEC, a tiny 0.86 per cent of votes were informal (the accompanying constitutional preamble question got a slightly higher 0.95). Given that there are obviously many ways of voting informal, these numbers represent the very maximum number of ballot papers discarded because they were marked with a cross.

The current interpretation of ticks and crosses was adopted in the late 1980s. The Coalition has never expressed any concerns about it, and certainly didn’t this year when many of its MPs voted to pass the Voice referendum legislation in March. The interpretation isn’t in any legislation, but it’s in legal advice obtained by the AEC.

This sudden kerfuffle is of course part of the No side’s grievance campaign: the government and other elites, it says, are pulling a swifty on ordinary voters. One likely outcome of the beat-up will be more ticks and crosses on ballot papers than would otherwise have been the case.

An irony of all this is that when jurisdictions across the country count ticks and/or crosses as formal, they are deemed to mean the same thing: a vote for whatever party or candidate they are written next to. In the Senate, for example, a tick or cross is taken to mean a “1.” It’s the same in NSW elections: a cross or tick next to a candidate or party is interpreted as a “1.”

The last twenty constitutional referendums (there have been forty-four since Federation) have used the current ballot paper design. It might be reasonable to wonder, soberly, whether the legal advice should be overridden by legislation. It could be done: parliament sits this month. But sowing confusion — “If you don’t know vote No” — was the real purpose of the exercise.

The evolution of the referendum voting paper illustrates two features of Australian elections: that instructions for one ballot paper can have a negative impact on how voters mark another paper they must fill in on the same day; and how the AEC uses “savings provisions” to deal with some incorrectly filled-in papers.

A well-known case of the unintended crossover arose when the Senate ballot paper was redesigned in 1984. This was the first outing for two new features: group voting tickets and the above-the-line option of simply putting a tick (a cross was also accepted) next to a group. The chief purpose was to reverse the explosion in informal Senate votes, which had reached 9.9 per cent in 1983. The above-the-line option worked a treat, cutting Senate informality by more than half to 4.7 per cent.

Unfortunately, some voters applied the Senate instructions to the House of Representatives ballot paper as well, and informal votes for the lower house more than tripled, from 2.1 in 1983 to 6.8 per cent. Oops.

(Thanks partly to a voter-education campaign, lower house informality subsequently decreased, but it has never again been as low as 1983’s 2.1 per cent. The lowest in the past four decades was 3.0 per cent in 1993. These days the main causes of informal votes — not necessarily in this order — are increasing candidate numbers, more voters from non-English-speaking backgrounds, the confusion created by optional preferential voting at state or territory level, and a rise in the number of people deliberately voting informal. Group voting tickets were abolished in 2016.)

The savings provisions, meanwhile, allow the AEC to count a ballot paper filled in incorrectly — with ticks or crosses against candidates’ names, for example — so long as the voter’s intention is clear.

People of a certain age might recall what became known as the Langer vote, a savings provision introduced in the 1980s for House of Representatives elections. Despite the stated requirement that voters number all candidates, the AEC accepted ballot papers where a voter appeared to have inadvertently failed to fully comply with preferencing (by numbering 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, for example).

Like most savings provisions, the difference this made to the count was tiny, but it wasn’t long before interested parties cottoned on to the fact that a voter could use it, in effect, to make a full allocation of preferences optional. Most importantly — at least from the major parties’ point of view — you could cast a valid vote without your preferences ending up with either Labor or the Coalition. Parliament’s first response was to make it illegal to urge anyone to vote in this manner; after a series of court cases, and after an activist called Albert Langer did time in the slammer, parliament got rid of the Langer vote altogether.

Several Australian jurisdictions have laws against advising voters to avail themselves of savings provisions. During a NSW campaign, for example, it is illegal to “print, publish, distribute or publicly display any electoral material that encourages any elector to place a tick or a cross in a square on a ballot paper” even though, as described above, it would still in many cases be counted as formal.

The current referendum ballot paper, which has just one square and instructions to write Yes or No inside it, was first used for the 1967 referendums. Since the 1980s the AEC has acted on legal advice to accept ticks as “Yes” but throw crosses onto the informal pile. I haven’t been able to find out how the commission and its predecessor treated ticks and crosses at referendums from 1967 to 1984.

A sketch of the journey of referendum ballot papers goes like this. The first ones, created and used in 1906, contained two boxes, next to the words Yes and No, and voters were instructed to put a cross inside the box next to the option they wanted. Referendums in that first decade of federation were held with general elections; voting for both houses of parliament also required putting crosses in boxes (one cross for the lower house, three for the upper) and that left little potential for confusion.

(Those three referendums, in 1906 and 1910, still had rather high informal votes, much higher than the accompanying elections.)

In 1918 the federal government replaced first-past-the-post with full preferential voting, requiring the ranking of all House candidates with numbers, like today. (At the next election, in 1919, informality for the House increased only slightly, but this was masked by the fact that voters who persisted in writing a cross next to their desired candidate benefited from savings provisions that counted their vote as formal if only two candidates ran in their electorate, which was the case for 64 per cent of those votes.)

The two referendums held with the 1919 election used the 1906 ballot paper, and average informality was a very big 13.6 per cent. Two midterm referendums in 1926 averaged a low 4.5 per cent informality. So it seemed reasonable to surmise that running referendums with elections caused some confusion.

In 1928, two months before an election at which a referendum would also be held, the ballot paper was radically redesigned. Referendum voters were still presented with Yes and No with a square after each, but now they had to put a “1” next to their choice and “2” next to the other. No more mentions of crosses on any ballot instructions (although — hullo savings provision! — a ballot with a single cross was still counted as if it was a “1”). Relative to the pair of referendums held with the 1919 election, informality dropped dramatically to 6.6 per cent.

This referendum ballot design remained through to 1965, when the Menzies government changed it to what we have today: just one square, with instructions to write either Yes or No. Country Party MP (and future party leader) Doug Anthony told parliament it would be “a more positive and, I believe, a more correct form of voting at a referendum.”

Anthony also noted that the “present provisions which provide that a ballot paper marked only with a cross or marked only with the figure 1 constitutes a formal vote will no longer be appropriate.” Back then, of course, a cross was accepted as indicating support for either Yes or No. Did this influence the later legal advice to the AEC regarding crosses? I’m no lawyer.

In 2023, it’s not even clear that most people who put a cross inside the referendum box are expressing opposition. Many times — in banks, at hospitals — they will have been asked to mark their preference with a cross. A more responsible party leader would have politely declined the invitation to buy into this ridiculous circus, but we are where we are, with ticks and crosses in the news and the commission having to devote resources to answering questions about them, sincere and otherwise. •

Update: Kevin Bonham covers similar territory, in parts in greater detail.

The post No diversion unticked appeared first on Inside Story.

In government just a year later and in power for almost a decade, the Coalition made frequent promises to lift the uptake of private health insurance even as doubts intensified about its value and cost. Along the way, private hospitals labelled private insurance as the health system’s “weakest link” and the private health funds themselves worried about an exodus of customers.

With analysts increasingly predicting a health insurance industry “death spiral,” the Morrison government made moves over several years to — as officials described it — “improve the value proposition of private health insurance for all Australians.” In reality, that was code for the government’s efforts to rescue the funds from what industry insiders have called “the jaws of death.” (Together these concerns raise the question, to which we’ll return, of whether the funds have any useful role to play.)

The changes enacted by the Coalition were mostly ineffective. Efforts to make health insurance policies easier to understand were undermined by industry lobbying, leaving the system as confusing as it ever was. Discounts for younger members appear not to have lifted the participation rate for hospital cover.

A deal to keep premiums lower was undermined by the failure to achieve savings on the prostheses list, a government-maintained register of medical devices for which insurers are required to pay a benefit. A costs-finder website designed to reveal out-of-pocket costs for specialist medical services has done nothing to increase the affordability and uptake of private insurance.

Through those years the means-tested rebate remained untouched. Never a government to take on difficult issues, the Coalition was confronted with the reality that meaningful options were risky, controversial or both.

Labor’s current consultations on private health insurance had their genesis in Coalition health minister Greg Hunt’s review of the sector, which he launched in July 2019. “I’ve already been meeting with private hospitals, insurers and medical leaders on the next stage in terms of private health insurance reforms,” he said at the time. A few months later he reported that he was working on ways to enable health funds to cover hospital-in-the-home and specialist treatment delivered outside hospitals at a lower cost, starting with mental health and orthopaedics.

This work appears to have stalled. The 2020–21 budget papers announced that the Morrison government would begin consulting the private funds about expanding community-based mental health and rehabilitative care in October 2020, with the changes to take effect on 1 April the following year. I can find no evidence that progress was made towards this goal.

The following year’s budget papers proposed a review of the Medicare levy surcharge (a penalty payable by higher earners who don’t have hospital health cover) and the private health insurance rebate (the means-tested government subsidy to help offset the cost of private insurance). They said that the prostheses list needed modernising and its administration improved, and foreshadowed scrutiny of private hospital default benefit arrangements (the benefits insurers pay to private hospitals if they have no standing financial agreement).

The need for reform has only intensified since Labor took office. Housing and cost-of-living pressures mean that many people, especially if they’re young, can’t afford an expensive discretionary purchase like private insurance. Out-of-pocket costs for private healthcare services continue to rise. The ageing of private fund members is threatening the funds’ sustainability. The cost to government of the private insurance rebate is expected to be around $28 billion over the four years from 2021–22.

But private insurance reform is not a topic health minister Mark Butler is talking about, at least in public. In his media releases and statements this year I can find only one passing reference to the government’s reform program: a mention of reducing private health prostheses prices and enhancing the Medical Costs Finder. The work on major reforms appears to be happening under the radar.

Given the impact any changes could have on all Australians, it’s surprising the health minister isn’t keeping the public informed. We can be sure the other stakeholders — the health insurance industry, the private hospitals and the doctors’ groups — are being kept in the loop.

Labor’s work draws on commitments made by the Coalition in recent years, and reports commissioned by its last health minister, Greg Hunt. But tracking the efforts of both governments is hindered by a lack of transparency and a dearth of publicly accessible documents. Complicating the task is the fact that many of the proposals currently up for analysis and discussion are highly technical, demanding expertise in insurance, taxation and risk management that most health policy experts — let alone the general public — lack.

An online search for official information on private insurance reform reveals a single page on the health department’s website — and despite being dated July 2023 it is clearly a relic of the Morrison era. An invitation to find out more about the reforms it mentions takes the visitor to a budget 2021–2022 fact sheet.

The government’s consultation hub is more forthcoming. It includes a report from consultancy firm EY on hospital default benefits and reports from Finity Consulting on lifetime health cover (May 2022), risk equalisation (September 2022) and a mix of other insurance issues (2023).

This is where the story gets complicated. The latest Finity report recommends retaining the Medicare levy surcharge, the insurance rebate and lifetime health cover (no surprises there), and offers options for optimising both the surcharge and the rebate by targeting incentives more effectively. It offers no options for reforming lifetime cover, with the implication that this is inextricably linked to changes in the surcharge and the rebate.

In its earlier lifetime cover report, Finity found evidence that the penalties for delaying the purchase of private insurance, or for purchasing it only when it was felt to be needed, were having a weaker effect and/or becoming less relevant for younger Australians faced with financial constraints.

A single-page departmental consultation paper requests feedback on these studies’ recommendations and how they might be implemented. It also seeks views on a number of policy and regulatory issues not canvassed in the consultants’ reports and wants to hear back about “the readiness of participants in the private health sector to work constructively together to the benefit of policyholders and the performance of Australia’s private healthcare system, and whole of sector mechanisms that can facilitate this outcome.”

The consultation period was open from 6 June to 15 August. The consultation paper had mysteriously disappeared from the consultation hub when I looked for it on 20 August but was reposted after my email enquiry. No submissions have yet been posted on the website. While we can assume that Private Healthcare Australia (the industry’s peak representative body), the Australian Private Hospitals Association, medical organisations and, it’s to be hoped, consumer and patient groups are keenly interested in the outcomes, to date only the Australian Medical Association and the Australian Private Hospitals Association have made their submissions public.

A separate consultation process on EY’s recommended changes to hospital default benefits arrangements took place in August–September 2022, but despite the release of a consultation strategy the recommendations appear to have gone no further. Without changes to the current default policy, patients using smaller hospitals and hospitals in under-serviced areas will be increasingly out-of-pocket, or those hospitals will receive increasingly inadequate compensation.

Thankfully, a paper by several academics who worked with Finity Consulting helps navigate through this welter of studies. According to its authors, the studies have produced three key findings: that financial incentives for consumers to purchase private health insurance are effective overall but inefficient in achieving their desired objectives, including reducing pressure on public spending; that options for reforming those incentives have been designed only as short-term solutions; and that price changes have little effect on insurance uptake.

Reduced to these three key points, the consultants’ work can justly be regarded as unnecessary. A succession of recent analyses and reports from universities and elsewhere have shown how incentives to take out private insurance do and don’t work and what might be done to improve its value for those who purchase it.

A 2021 paper from ANU’s Tax and Transfer Policy Institute looked at the effectiveness of various sticks and carrots used to encourage private insurance, in particular the changes made by the Gillard government in 2012. It found that the Medicare levy surcharge had a greater bearing than the premium rebate on decisions to purchase insurance.

Research by economists Yuting Zhang and Nathan Kettlewell, on the other hand, showed that increasing the levy surcharge wouldn’t meaningfully increase take-up of private insurance because higher-income people who aren’t already buying insurance appear to be highly resistant to financial incentives and disincentives.

A four-step plan to fix the private health insurance system released by the Grattan Institute called for restraints on price-gouging specialists, measures to stop insurers increasing premiums if they can’t demonstrate value for money, and market competition to control the costs of prostheses.

Amid these reports, what messages have the insurers and providers of private healthcare been pushing in their communications with government, the media and the public?

Private Healthcare Australia, the funds’ lobby group, is strongly focused on two issues: restoring the full private insurance rebate — removing the means test, in other words — and cutting back the costs of medical devices, which are much more expensive in private hospitals than in public hospitals. It recently called for a review of the Morrison government’s prostheses changes, which it described as an “inflationary medical device deal.” Tackling both these issues, says the group, will lower premium costs and increase the uptake of private insurance. (Mark Butler announced a series of changes to the prostheses list in January 2023, but they won’t be fully implemented until July next year.)

The Australian Private Hospitals Association argues that the appeal of private insurance will decline if private hospitals aren’t viable. It accuses the funds of profit-taking at the expense of the long-term viability of private hospitals. The association objects in particular to the default funding arrangements for the treatment of private patients in public hospitals.

The Australian Medical Association deserves some credit for recognising the impact of high-priced health insurance premiums on patients. Its submission to the consultation pushes reforms the AMA first put forward in 2020, including the creation of a Private Health System Authority charged with protecting patients, instilling confidence in this highly complex system and driving reform. The AMA has also called for the private health sector to adopt (and fund) more innovative and efficient models of care, including home- and community-based care.

The loud voices of these well-resourced organisations are not easily ignored by governments. The needs, concerns and growing dissatisfaction of the general public, meanwhile, aren’t readily marshalled, presented and heard. While the biggest concern in the community is that insurance should deliver value for money and be accessible when needed, the evidence shows that many Australians value public hospitals more, especially in a crisis. One in four patients who hold private insurance choose to use public hospitals.

What’s glaringly absent from the current consultations are several basic questions that deserve to be taken seriously. Chief among these is whether the government should withdraw its financial support for private insurance altogether and invest the billions of dollars it would save in Medicare and public hospitals (or cut out the funds and directly support private healthcare).

Which of course raises the question of whether private insurance actually does reduce the burden on public hospitals — a belief challenged by recent research from the Melbourne Institute (summarised in the Conversation) that found it doesn’t make much difference to hospital admissions and waiting-list times.

In debating the public–private divide, it’s important to separate the delivery of private healthcare from private insurers, which are simply financial intermediaries — and surprisingly small ones at that. Australia’s total health budget in 2020–21 was $220.9 billion, of which governments contributed $156 billion, individuals $33.2 billion and private insurance $18 billion. Moreover, to quote insurance industry expert Ian McAuley, there isn’t any aspect of private insurance that isn’t done more efficiently and more equitably by Medicare.

The debate on these issues has always been hindered by the fact that Medicare was introduced without planning for how two health insurance systems, Medicare and private insurance, would coexist. Now might be the time to face the problem squarely.

I have yet to see any response from health stakeholders to the government’s plea for signs of a willingness to cooperate constructively for the benefit of health consumers — but that is surely what is needed if the necessary reforms are to be made. A new openness with the public about the existing consultations would be a good place for both the health minister and his department to start. •

The post The weakest link appeared first on Inside Story.

Its population was ethnically mixed but with a strong dominance of Ukrainians, who made up 73 per cent of the people. Russians constituted a significant minority of 22 per cent, followed by people identifying as Jews, Belarusians and Moldavians, all making up just under one in a hundred. Other nationalities of the Soviet empire, from Bulgarians and Poles to Azeri, Koreans, Germans, Kyrgyz and Lithuanians, made up the remaining 3 per cent.

Regional differences in political outlook were strong. Although all regions voted in favour of separating from the Soviet Union in the December 1991 referendum, some were more enthusiastic than others. In Lviv, in the west of the country, 95 per cent of the people voted and 97 per cent of them approved the declaration of independence, which had been made in late August in response to the coup attempt in Moscow. In Crimea, an ethnically strongly Russian region at the other extreme, only 68 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls, with 54 per cent of them voting in favour.

Donetsk, an industrial region in the east of the country with strong economic ties to Russia, stood somewhat between these extremes. There, 77 per cent registered their vote and 84 per cent of those people voted for independence.

With the partial exception of the three Baltic republics, all post-Soviet nations have struggled with three interrelated crises: a crisis of democracy, an economic crisis and corruption. Outside the three Baltic outliers (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), the relatively well-performing Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are all resource-exporting economies. Everybody else is struggling.

In terms of wealth per person (measured by GDP per capita), Russia is about at the level of China (US$10,500), while even the rich Baltic countries are nowhere near the United States (US$63,500) or Australia (US$51,800).

The comparative poverty of the region is partly a legacy of the Soviet economy’s poor performance, and partly a hangover from the economic catastrophe of the 1990s. In Ukraine, agriculture continued to be run by the disastrously unproductive collective and state farms until 2000. Other economic reforms were also slow in coming.

Meanwhile, the unravelling of the integrated Soviet imperial economy, the economic burden of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, ageing and inefficient equipment, and dependence on Russian oil and gas were problematic legacies.

Moreover, Ukraine’s state apparatus had controlled no more than 5 per cent of Ukraine’s GDP before 1990 (the rest was under the direct control of Moscow). Officials thus “lacked the experience necessary to take quick and effective control” of the economy, as the writer Marco Bojcun puts it. The quick expansion of the share of the economy controlled by Ukraine’s officials — reaching 40 per cent on the eve of independence — only added to the problems.

Together, these issues combined to create a disaster: between 1991 and 1996, Ukraine’s economy contracted every year by at least 10 per cent and as much as 23 per cent. Overall, it had contracted to 43 per cent of its 1990 level by 1996 — a decline worse than the United States experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The main reason nobody starved after 1991 was similar to Russia’s: the existence of private gardening, a legacy of the Soviet period. “The overwhelming majority of workers have out of town kitchen gardens,” wrote a worker from the Dnipro region in 1996. These were “little patches of land given them by the factory management under an agreement with the agricultural authorities… People work five days in the factories and two days on their plots.” According to official statistics, by 1996 some 80–95 per cent of fruit, vegetables and potatoes came from such plots. Even a quarter of all livestock were raised in private gardens.

Ukraine’s economy has not recovered nearly as much as that of resource-rich Russia, and its economic growth has stagnated since 2009. Russia’s war by proxy in Donbas since 2014 again stunted economic growth: between 2013 and 2015, Ukraine’s GDP halved.

The current war will have catastrophic consequences for this overall picture. In early 2022, the World Bank predicted a contraction of the economy by 45 per cent. In the same year, 47 per cent of surveyed Ukrainians reported that they did not have “enough money even for food” or had money sufficient “only for the most basic items.”

Post-Soviet countries are not only poor, they are also among the world’s most corrupt. Among European countries, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are all known as deeply corrupt societies. Of the 336 politicians whose secret offshore financial accounts were leaked in the “Pandora Papers” of 2021, thirty-eight came from Ukraine, among them president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This was the largest number of any country in the world. Russia’s figure was nineteen.

Over time, however, Ukraine has improved its record. In Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a higher score means less corruption. Ukraine initially improved significantly after 2004. While this progress was undone after a few years, improvement has been steady since 2009. Meanwhile, Russia has stagnated since 2012 and is classified today as more corrupt than its neighbour.

Corruption and economic crisis do little to embed democracy. Maybe unsurprisingly, then, the majority of the societies that succeeded the Soviet Union are ruled by authoritarian regimes. (Nine out of fifteen of them, or 60 per cent, according to the 2021 classification by Freedom House, an organisation that measures democratic performance.) Only the three Baltic states, which are members of both NATO and the European Union, are classified as consolidated democracies. Three others, Ukraine among them, are hybrid regimes, where authoritarian elements compete with democratic ones.

Within this general context, Ukraine is doing relatively well. Between 2017 and 2022 it was classified as “partly free” by Freedom House, its score oscillating between 60 and 62 on a scale out of 100, where the higher number indicates a higher level of civic and political liberty. Such numbers do not indicate that Ukraine is a beacon of democracy, however, either in the region (where Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia stand out as the freest countries, with scores of between 89 and 90) or around the world (the troubled United States scored 83 in 2021, while Australia stood at 97).

But Ukraine contrasts positively with Russia, which has been categorised as “not free” with a score of 20, falling to 19 in 2022. And Vladimir Putin’s state, in turn, still compares favourably with other dictatorships in the region, which are even more repressive: Belarus with 11 and Tajikistan with 8. For comparison, China scored 9 in 2021 and North Korea 3.

To a significant extent, the predominance of authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space is a Soviet legacy. “In all parts of the former Soviet empire,” write two legal scholars who studied this problem in detail, “the socialist party-state structure left a shared legacy of an executive-dominated state.” Change depended on whether a postcolonial or neocolonial mindset won the day.

In other words: did people want to stay in the Russian orbit or not? If not, the obvious choice was an orientation towards Europe, which came with mixed constitutions stressing checks and balances, weakening the executive; if yes, the constitution would be modelled much more closely on Russia’s “crown presidentialism,” further entrenching the centrality of the executive. In Ukraine, the former tendency won out, but not without political struggles.

One rather basic aspect of democracy is that governments are changed peacefully by elections. Ukraine is doing quite well in this regard, particularly if compared with its two autocratic neighbours. In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko has been in power since 1994; in Russia, Putin since 1999. Ukraine, meanwhile, has seen seven presidencies since 1991: of Leonid Kravchuk (1991–94), Leonid Kuchma (1994–2005), Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10), Viktor Yanukovych (2010–14), Oleksandr Turchynov (2014), Petro Poroshenko (2014–19) and now Volodymyr Zelenskyy (since 2019).

The majority of these presidents were elected to office and left when they lost elections or decided not to contest them. Two were removed through revolutions, one peaceful (the Orange Revolution of 2004–05), one violent (the Revolution of Dignity, or Euromaidan, of 2013–14). But both revolutions resulted in elected governments again, not the imposition of revolutionary dictatorships.

Ukraine’s presidents ruled in competition with parliament, at first the one elected under Soviet conditions in 1990, then, since 1994, a post-Soviet one. This competition was formalised in the 1996 constitution, which put the directly elected president next to a one-chamber parliament that limited presidential powers to a much larger extent than in Russia.

Its unusually strong parliament became an issue because of the fragmented party system, however. First, there were too many parties; second, the existing parties were not based around major ideological positions or clearly elaborated political philosophies; third, there were many socially influential groups competing for power. As one observer puts it, this system was based “not on ideological factors, but on the competition of financial and industrial groups and regional elites” interested “in dispersing power in order to control at least a small segment of it.” The result was “political instability.”

Ukraine’s political system, then, constituted something of a unique case, both within the post-Soviet space and in the world at large. Its huge number of parties — more than 120 were officially registered in 2002 — were often internally divided as well. In the words of one observer, this fragmentation was “unprecedented for a modern democratic republic.” For another, it “hindered democratisation” by making it “difficult for the population to orient itself politically.” But the diversity also made it more difficult for would-be autocrats and their networks of clients to consolidate power.

The same can be said for the much-quoted regional fragmentation of Ukraine. On the one hand, regionalism has defined voting behaviour and hence fragmented the political system. In both parliamentary and presidential elections until 2019, voters in the more Russian and Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea voted for one set of parties, while those in the more Ukrainian-speaking western Ukraine preferred a different set. “No party managed to elect candidates across Ukraine,” writes political scientist Paul D’Anieri. Presidential elections show a similar regional pattern.

At their extreme, regional divisions can define conflict lines within Ukraine, including the threat of secessionism and ethno-political conflict. On the other hand, regional identities and political networks also help balance power within the broader political system and prevent any one group of elites from monopolising power. Ukraine’s regional, cultural, religious and economic diversity can be seen as an asset as much as a liability. For historian Serhii Plokhy, it is “one of the main reasons for Ukraine’s success as a democracy.”

Of the three main regional power groups, one is based in Kharkiv in the northeast; the second in the industrial heartland around Donetsk in the east; and the third in Dnipro in central Ukraine, the heart of the Soviet Union’s defence and space industries. These were already part of the political structure of late Soviet times, and they led to a specific form of “patronal democracy” in which clans competed for political power within a republican set-up.

At the same time, winners often tried to replace this competitive structure with a single hierarchy of power. The first attempt came under Leonid Kuchma, who built a “patronal autocracy,” but the Orange Revolution of 2004 destroyed this system and reverted to dual competition between president and parliament on the one hand and multiple power networks on the other.

Yanukovych then tried again, and successfully neutralised competing clans — until ordinary citizens intervened to stop this usurpation of power. The 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity not only undid Yanukovych’s dictatorial slide but also led to an election labelled by two experts as “probably the fairest one in the country’s history.” This transformation of the political system was one-sided, however: while it did constitute a redemocratisation, it didn’t eliminate regional and patronal politics.

It was only with Zelenskyy’s election in 2019 that things began to change in this regard. Zelenskyy was “no chief patron and [had] no patronal pyramid” but instead gathered strong support from the new middle and creative classes, campaigning on an anti-corruption platform. He mostly spoke Russian during his campaign, which helped overcome regional differences between Russian speakers in the east and Ukrainian speakers in the west. He achieved what many thought impossible: his election was the first in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history where voting did not follow regional patterns. •

This is an edited extract from Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story, published this month by Melbourne University Press.

The post Ukraine’s struggle for democracy appeared first on Inside Story.

The Red Riding Hood persona is surely tongue in cheek, but Crabb is taking a real risk by evoking a fairytale figure who proved terminally naive: quite literally, since she was swallowed alive. Whether or not there’s a wolf in the house, Crabb can expect savage attacks in the surrounding media environment.

In another reversal of traditional symbolism, rather than discovering a wolf in the guise of a trusted human, she is about to use a cheerful domestic setting to reveal the human who, in political guise, may have inspired fear and loathing. “Every single politician we elect has a backstory that dictates the way they behave in politics, and whether you love or loathe them, it’s always worth knowing that story,” she says.

Given the temperature of responses to the program, that has proved a too-easy assumption. This week’s episode with opposition leader Peter Dutton showed, not for the first time, that Crabb’s enterprise serves only to inflame the ferocity. For Charlie Lewis, writing in Crikey, the “cosy and humanising profiles of people responsible for variously sized portions of national shame” come across as “a prank on everyone involved.”

Amy McQuire’s excoriating review in New Matilda, prompted by the season five episode featuring Scott Morrison, was circulating again on social media in the lead-up to the Dutton appearance. McQuire calls the program “ridiculous, sickening,” “junk food journalism.”

The chorus on Twitter, where #KitchenCabinet has been trending since the start of the new season, has been virulent. A photoshopped image shows Crabb lunching with Adolf Hitler, whom she describes as “good company” and “funnier than I was expecting.” Other posts focus on those who have suffered the consequences of Dutton’s political decisions: the Biloela children, Reza Barati and others held in long-term detention, communities in Melbourne vilified in response to his “African gangs” claims.

These and other highly charged issues, including Dutton’s current campaign for the No vote on the Voice, are raised over a lunch of chowder cooked by the opposition leader in the kitchen of his beautiful old Queenslander house. He seems to take Crabb’s insistence that some of his public remarks are straight-out racism in his stride, without seeming riled, excessively defensive or especially embarrassed.

Crabb encourages him to talk about his life before politics, including the experience of attending violent crime scenes as a police officer. In answer to Crabb’s suggestion that he might suffer from PTSD, he says that probably most police officers do. That exchange triggered his antagonists, who saw it as a bid for sympathy put forward by Dutton himself.

Distortions like that are par for the course on social media, where criticisms of programs and presenters often take the form of personal abuse. The problem has been serious enough for Leigh Sales, Stan Grant and Hamish Macdonald to leave political roles at the ABC, and has led to the broadcaster’s recent decision to withdraw its program accounts from Twitter.

While the personal abuse is intolerable, the reactive high dudgeon is often too sweeping. Professional journalists, especially if they have a television profile, are prone to characterising social media users as a rabid species, demented by a diet of disinformation and immune to reason or civility. But something of vital importance gets missed: behind the apparent savagery lies an essentially human response that warrants serious attention. Seen collectively, the attacks on Kitchen Cabinet are not in the vein of criticism or argument but are manifestations of a visceral moral outrage.

This is what Crabb in her smiling Red Riding Hood persona has failed to take account of. “Sometimes people who disagree with each other, and even people who agree with each other on some things, do not have conversations with each other,” she says. “And I think that’s madness.” Is it? Suggesting that the reaction reflects a pathological refusal to have conversations across lines of disagreement is missing the point by a country mile.

“The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”: the poet William Blake might not have written that line if he’d been around in the age of social media, but it remains a succinct and unforgettable evocation of wrath as a moral force, and one that may be collectively generated. Blake himself wrote under its influence in response to the social cruelties and political degeneracies of the industrial revolution.

We in Australia may no longer send children down mines or up chimneys, but we do put them into solitary confinement, isolate them in island compounds, and subject their parents to prolonged and abject misery. As we’ve learned from the robodebt debacle, we drive people to suicide through government-initiated programs of extortion. We create pariah communities through the racial stereotyping that is sometimes explicitly promoted by elected politicians.

Is it really so incomprehensible that many people take offence at being vicariously invited by the national broadcaster to have a chatty meal with those seen as instrumental in perpetuating these kinds of torments? Or if we do decide to spend half an hour in this way, and we find the company genial and good-humoured, and the host quite a decent bloke, where does this leave us?

Kitchen Cabinet started out as an experiment in genre-crossing: equal parts reality TV, chat show, cooking program (the dessert recipes are posted on the ABC site) and political inquisition. Crabb’s deliberately ingenuous persona was presumably intended to push the dial to the lighter end of the spectrum, but she was an experienced enough journalist to know how to introduce more serious registers as the conversation rolled along.

Guests have been chosen from across the political spectrum, with a predominance of women, and they do tend to open up in unexpected ways, offering new perspectives on the personalities and motivations of those in power. But personal trust in politics is a high-risk investment.

In season one, lunch with National Party senator Nigel Scullion, Indigenous affairs minister at the time, involved a trip up river in the Northern Territory to catch crab and giant prawns that he cooked on a makeshift barbecue. “How do you fit into the Senate?” Crabb asked. The Australian people shouldn’t be represented in parliament just by lawyers, he responded; there should be tradies and fishermen too.

He sounded like a good bloke. Referring to the Warramirri people as “my mob,” he talked of his responsibility for finding better ways to address disadvantage in Indigenous communities. Barnaby Joyce, too, sounded like a good bloke when he weighed in against “back-pocket politics” and “the clever club” of lobbyists, mining companies and foreign investors in season two.

Five years later Scullion was in hot water with allegations he’d given Indigenous funding to his own former fishing-industry lobby group, and Barnaby Joyce had resigned as leader of the Nationals over an affair with a former staffer, with attendant allegations of nepotism over the appointment of his new partner to an unadvertised position. In retrospect, the good bloke talk does seem rather… disingenuous.

Many of the other guests on the program no doubt really are good people who maintain ethical standards and principled positions in situations of evolving complexity. But it would be impossible to draw a line between those who should and should not be featured in this pseudo-innocent format. Might the best thing therefore be to draw a line under it? There was, after all, a seven-year gap between this season and the last.

True, we’d have missed out on engagements with some of our most interesting and dynamic female politicians: Dai Le, Linda Burney, Anika Wells, Lidia Thorpe. The diversity of the current parliament, according to Crabb, was the compelling case for another season. Perhaps, though, it’s a sign of a lack of new ideas at the ABC, and a compelling case for a different kind of program. •

The post Last supper? appeared first on Inside Story.

A cluster of six state elections in Malaysia last Saturday supported neither view. Instead, it showed that two equally competitive coalitions remain engaged in a sharp political contest, and neither can fully meet all its supporters’ diverse and often contradictory expectations.

One side is projecting images of a postcolonial national cleansing that will subjugate Malaysia’s minorities and deliver an Islamic state, sealing Malay Muslim majority dominance forever. The other is slowly working up an argument that only it can deliver a modern economy, social harmony and national repair after years of political upheaval. Locked in battle with each other, neither has been able to stake out the nation’s direction decisively.

Saturday’s elections were all held on the Malay Peninsula: in Selangor, Penang and Negeri Sembilan on the industrialised, multiracial west coast, and in Kedah, Terengganu and Kelantan, purported “Malay heartland” states, in the north and east. All of them returned incumbent governments.

In the west, the states in question are aligned with prime minister Anwar Ibrahim’s federal Pakatan Harapan, or Alliance of Hope. Those in the north and east align with the main rival coalition, former prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s Perikatan Nasional, or National Alliance. While the results produced no major surprises, they provide plenty of insights into the narratives used by the contending forces to frame and conduct their struggle for the national state and its institutions.

That struggle was at its most naked in November last year, when Anwar Ibrahim finally became the nation’s prime minister after twenty-five years’ worth of attempts. In the final days of the campaign, Muhyiddin and his Islamist running mates in the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, or PAS, drew on every racial and religious trope they could find to turn voters away from Anwar’s Pakatan.

They argued that Christians and Jews would use victory as a Trojan Horse to colonise Malaysia. Malaysian TV actor Zul Huzaimy expressed a wish to “slaughter kafir harbi,” or enemy infidels, at a pro-PAS rally in the eastern peninsular state of Terengganu. (The term is borrowed from classical Islamic jurisprudence to anachronistically demonise Malaysian racial and religious minorities for participating in the political life of the modern nation-state.)

Then, when it became clear that Anwar would form a government, PAS supporters used TikTok to call for a “new May 13” — the date in 1969 when a post-election massacre of Chinese Malaysians took place across Kuala Lumpur.

The Perikatan Nasional coalition had hoped to use similar messages and tactics to topple Anwar-aligned state governments on Saturday and trigger the federal government’s self-destruction. The Malaysian and international media pitched in, framing the elections as a “referendum” on the federal government.

PAS, which has the greatest grassroots reach of all the Perikatan parties, had been keeping its supporters in a state of constant mobilisation for exactly this purpose. It has worked hard to frame its aim as a kind of Malay Muslim decolonisation.

In February this year, for instance, a group of PAS youth caused widespread concern when it organised a rally in Terengganu in which a column of Malay Muslim men marched down a main street in white robes, brandishing swords, scimitars and shields that appeared loosely (and badly) modelled on those carried by troops of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman sultan was the caliph of Islam until the caliphate was abolished in 1924 after the Ottoman Empire’s postwar dismemberment and Kemal Ataturk’s rise to power.

PAS’s message is that Anwar’s federal government — which includes members of Malaysia’s Chinese and Indian minorities — is a legacy of colonialism and must be toppled. PAS appears to be drawing on tales of Malay rebels who built an Islamist coalition against colonial rule in 1920s Terengganu, some of whom also wore white robes and raised the Ottoman flag over their uprising against the British. (The similarity makes me wonder if Malaysia’s Islamists have been reading my own historical work on the subject.)

The Ottoman references didn’t stop with Terengganu. Later, in May, the acting PAS chief minister of Kedah, Muhammad Sanusi, compared Penang, a Pakatan stronghold, with Constantinople, and Perikatan with the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (“the Conqueror”), who wrested it from the Byzantine Empire in 1453. The Byzantines collapsed from the impact, allowing the Ottomans to expand their empire into Christian Eastern Europe.

These messages no doubt helped Perikatan shore up its strongholds. Terengganu’s state assembly, for example, is now entirely made up of PAS members; in fact, PAS won 109 of the 127 seats it contested across the six states, slashing the total held by the once-dominant Malay party, UMNO, from forty-one to nineteen.

UMNO’s poor result has further weakened the party that led the winning coalition in every federal election from Malaya’s first, in 1955, until 2018. UMNO ruined its own fortunes so badly with the infamous 1MDB scandal, which began in 2015, that it is hard to imagine it playing a prominent role in any future election. Nationally, it is in the ironic position of being a junior partner in Anwar’s government.

PAS and the other Perikatan parties also made gains in the Pakatan Harapan states, ensuring PAS in particular even more national prominence. Gone are the days when UMNO prime minister Mahathir Muhammad could isolate PAS by associating it with “the Taliban” and promising that only his coalition could deliver development. Mahathir didn’t deliver for the PAS states, though, and people remember that well. Perikatan parties also benefit from Malaysia’s notorious electoral malapportionment, which favours Malay-dominated rural seats.

Anxious not to appear anti-Muslim, Anwar’s Pakatan government has had to pick its battles carefully. It may well have been waiting for these elections to pass before its members risked mounting an overt defence of its policies. But the alliance has nevertheless been using two sets of messages to build momentum for a victory at the next federal election, which is still more than four years away.

First, there is Pakatan’s longstanding message of racial and religious tolerance. During the 2022 election campaign that finally delivered him his victory, Anwar’s team circulated footage showing him defending the rights of minorities at a mosque in Adelaide’s Gilles Plains, where he gave a Friday sermon as a side event to his lecture at the 2013 Adelaide Festival of Ideas. Kuala Lumpur’s Malay-language radio stations reinforced the video’s message in the week after the election, playing a steady stream of commentary on how Muslims have always treated non-Muslims with respect.

One after another, religious experts and authorities discussed Islamic teachings on minority rights, dating back to Islam’s early expansion in Arabia. US-based Turkish scholar Mustafa Akyol issued a statement suggesting that Malaysians should study the Ottoman constitution of 1876, which argued that “all subjects of the empire are called Ottomans without distinction, whatever faith they profess.” Further, “they have the same rights, and owe the same duties towards their country, without prejudice to religion.”

Whatever the details, the moral was the same: there is no excuse for demonising minority groups in contemporary Malaysia, or for using the Ottomans as a means of doing so. This argument has clearly not delivered Pakatan enough protection, however, and in the lead-up to the state elections, Anwar’s federal government made a spectacle of seizing “gay” rainbow Swatch watches from the shops. It also shut down a music festival in Kuala Lumpur after a British rock band, The 1975, performed a same-sex kiss as an onstage statement. (Malaysian LGBTI activists decried the band’s “white saviourism” and ignorance of local political dynamics.)

Pakatan’s leadership must now be calculating that PAS, having done everything it can at this point, will begin to lose momentum. After all, nobody wins elections on TikTok alone, and Ottoman dreams and claims of racial supremacy won’t create new, well-paid jobs in an economy battered by the pandemic and runaway food price inflation.

This is the second of Pakatan’s themes: its focus on jobs and economic development. Deputy investment, trade and industry minister Liew Chin Tong has been urging colleagues to support nation-building measures, including policies to promote new industries that Anwar set out in SCRIPT, or MADANI, a manifesto he recently published. Anwar and his colleagues have also led work on Malaysia’s climate response, and efforts are under way to upgrade the nation’s care economy, a huge employer of underpaid women.

Anwar must also be hoping that some of the lads who love PAS will also be fans of Elon Musk, whom he recently convinced to establish Tesla’s regional headquarters in Selangor. Bringing in Tesla will force a rethink of some of Malaysia’s restrictive business regulations, which tend to protect rent-seekers and prevent economic reforms that could deliver much-needed high-wage jobs.

A fair share of new economic opportunities will also need to be directed into PAS states, one of which, Kelantan, has brown, undrinkable water running out of its taps, a travesty when contrasted with Kuala Lumpur’s fancy spas (some of which, perhaps coincidentally, are modelled on hammams similar to those used by Ottoman courtesans).

As well as pursuing economic reforms, Anwar has positioned himself as someone who can bridge the divide between Islamic State hopefuls and a multiracial Malaysia. He promises that debates about Malaysia’s future will be performed as “polylogues,” reflecting the nation’s diversity and his own ability to code switch between competing political registers.

Liew is also arguing that Perikatan, having pushed so hard on religious race-war rhetoric, won’t be able to win multiracial federal seats at the next election, and that PAS’s strength inside the coalition increasingly marginalises Perikatan’s other parties and denies them a nationalist disguise for its true aims. Perikatan also risks a tussle with Malaysia’s royal families, none of which appreciates Islamist critiques of its members’ lifestyles or their historical accommodations with the colonial state.

Amid the fierce contest over which coalition can best repair Malaysia after years of instability, it’s important to remember that the nation is not, after all, a liberal democracy but an electorally competitive authoritarian regime. Power is centralised in the federal government and the institutions of the national state, which place limits on how far challengers can push. These limits worked for UMNO for decades.

While Anwar and Pakatan are in power now, the underlying structure hasn’t changed, and there is no telling whether or how it will. For the time being, it supports the current federal government.

For PAS, meanwhile, Constantinople still stands. •

The post Malaysia’s history wars at the ballot box appeared first on Inside Story.

But Albanese was also that very modern species: the student politician who came to parliament via a career as a political staffer and party official. His only experience of paid work outside of professional politics occurred while he was a student. After university, he was employed as a staffer by that doyen of the Sydney left, Tom Uren. He married Carmel Tebbutt, who would also become a politician and rose to the position of deputy premier of New South Wales. He spent more than a quarter of a century in parliament before becoming prime minister. His was a long game, and there was nothing inevitable about where it led.

These were the outward expressions of Albanese’s rise: prominent in campus politics at the University of Sydney; NSW Young Labor president; rising political staffer; NSW Labor assistant general secretary at twenty-six, and therefore de facto leader of the left in the party machine; member for Grayndler at thirty-three. He would go on to hold senior positions in the shadow ministry during the Howard era and cabinet office under Rudd and Gillard, as well as being leader of the House. But Albanese’s more private world disclosed a complexity barely hinted at in these impressive career landmarks.

Albo — the nickname that attached to him from boyhood — was born in Sydney on 2 March 1963 and raised by his mother, a disability pensioner and Labor Party member, in public housing in Camperdown. The official story was that Anthony’s father, an Italian ship’s steward named Carlo, had died in a car accident soon after marrying his mother. They had met while Maryanne was travelling on an ocean liner to Britain.

Early in his teenage years, Anthony learnt from Maryanne that she had never married Carlo, and that he had not died. Nonetheless, Anthony made no attempt to find his father for many years. He was close to his mother, who held lofty ambitions for her son: she told friends Anthony would one day become prime minister. In the meantime, she had a short-lived and unhappy marriage to another man, whose surname Anthony briefly adopted before reverting to that of a father he had never met.

Albanese attended Catholic schools and then the University of Sydney, where he studied economics. The university had a broad left that took in a wide range of ideologies and affiliations, and Albo, a charismatic figure, got on well with people across the spectrum of radical politics. His affiliation, however, was with the ALP Club, and he was best known on campus for organising a successful campaign to defend the teaching of political economy, a program that offered a left-wing, Marxist-inflected alternative to neoclassical economics.

But Albo regarded grown-up Labor politics as the real game. He had joined the party in 1979, still at school, and would later rise through the ranks of the Young Labor organisation, which, unlike the NSW Labor Party, had a left majority.

Albo was determined that NSW Young Labor would remain left, and he displayed an early ability to round up the necessary numbers. The origins of the NSW Labor left, also known as the Steering Committee (and from 1989 as the Socialist Left), stretched back to the Labor split of the 1950s. Of its sub-factions, the “soft left” was closely associated with the Ferguson family: Jack, who was Neville Wran’s deputy premier, and his sons. The alternative and rival “hard left” was the group to which Albanese gravitated. While the right was their mutual foe, there was no love lost between the two left sections.

Anthony took over many responsibilities connected with his mother’s precarious health and finances. While mother and son were devoted to each other, the absence of his father shadowed Albanese’s life. Even the pronunciation of his name was unsettled, then as now.

Tom Uren, a former boxer, prisoner of war and leading minister in the Whitlam government, took him on to his staff and became a mentor and even something of a father figure. Uren was by this time an elder statesman of the NSW left but on the outer in the Hawke government, which had little interest in taking up the kind of ambitious policy associated with Uren’s time as urban and regional development minister (1972–75). A deep affection developed between the older and the younger man. Before the decade was through, Uren was publicly describing young Albo as a future Labor leader.

In 1989, Albanese won the position of assistant general secretary of the NSW Labor Party. This was no bit part. Having emerged in the early 1970s out of a power-sharing arrangement between the majority right and minority left factions, it was one of the toughest gigs in backroom politics. As the left’s man in the Sussex Street party office, the assistant general secretary could expect relentless obstruction, and not a little hostility; there was no pretence of comradeship across factional lines. On one occasion, while Albanese was overseas, his rivals from the right faction turned his office into a library and changed the locks.

But Albanese was already a tough political operator. For many ordinary Australians, their first encounter with him would have been in a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the 1994 election for mayor of Leichhardt, Rats in the Ranks, even though he remained off-screen. Albanese was alone among the main players in refusing to cooperate with the filmmakers and appear on-screen. In this, he showed an astuteness about the damage that might have been done to his political career if he had been seen as centrally involved in the plotting of what proved to be an unseemly struggle for a minor local office.

The future prime minister won preselection for the safe Labor seat of Grayndler ahead of the 1996 federal election that saw the defeat of the Keating Labor government by a resurgent Coalition under John Howard’s leadership. Normally, preselection would have been a near-guarantee of election. On this occasion, there were predictions that it might be more difficult because of the controversy aroused by the building of a third runway at Sydney Airport. Albanese faced a candidate from the No Aircraft Noise Party, who won enough of the vote to reduce the Labor candidate to a bare majority of the primary vote.

In his first speech to parliament, Albanese began by thanking his mother, who had raised him “under very difficult economic circumstances” and instilled in him “a strong sense of social justice and fairness.” His “politics as a democratic socialist,” he said, had “been developed from my experience in life.” He defended the public sector and criticised “strict adherence to dry economic philosophies.”

These were noble words, but he soon showed on the floor of the House his fighting instincts, honed in Sussex Street and party conferences at the Sydney Town Hall. In April 1998, he made a memorable attack on Howard: “You can trim the eyebrows; you can cap the teeth; you can cut the hair; you can put on different glasses; you can give him a ewe’s milk facial, for all I care; but, to paraphrase a gritty Australian saying, ‘same stuff, different bucket.’” The usual phrase would have been “same shit…” but Albanese was sufficiently familiar with parliamentary rules to know that he would not have got away with that.

He continued: “Here is a man who lived at home until he was thirty-two. You can imagine what he was like. Here were young Australians demonstrating against the Vietnam war, listening to the Doors, driving their tie-dyed kombi vans, and what was John Howard doing? He was at home with mum, wearing his shorts and long white socks, listening to Pat Boone albums and waiting for the Saturday night church dance.” It was very impolite but contributed to Albanese’s image as a bomb-thrower.

There was more to Albanese than such fun and games. He opposed a bill that Liberal parliamentarian Kevin Andrews introduced to overturn voluntary euthanasia legislation in the Northern Territory. He pursued reforms to allow same-sex couples to gain access to each other’s superannuation on the same basis as heterosexual couples. These years also provided Albanese with an opportunity to demonstrate his devotion to another part of that Sydney working-class trinity: he was centrally involved in the successful campaign to save South Sydney from the National Rugby League’s effort to get rid of it.

As Albanese’s standing in the party grew, his views on matters such as the leadership came to count for a great deal. He supported Kim Beazley in both of his periods of leadership (1996–2001 and 2005–06) and Simon Crean (2001–03), until the latter decided, without consulting him (or, indeed, the caucus), that Labor would oppose a new airport for western Sydney. He opposed Mark Latham’s ill-fated ascension to the leadership in December 2003 and three years later supported Beazley against Kevin Rudd while maintaining a strong relationship with the man who would take Labor to victory a year later.

He also gained increasingly important shadow ministries. After Labor lost the 1998 election, he was shadow parliamentary secretary for family and community services. Later, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs and the arts were added. He arrived on the frontbench as shadow ageing and seniors minister after the 2001 election loss, followed by education and training, and then the environment. When Rudd became leader, he got the infrastructure and water portfolios. Having come to be seen as a skilled tactician, he rose to become manager of opposition business in the House.

Here was the story of a man playing to his own strengths and interests, rising steadily rather than as a shooting star (in contrast with Latham), building trust with straight-talking, discretion and competence, and wielding power and organising numbers in the party as an old-school factional leader.

Albanese’s marriage to Tebbutt, the birth of a son, Nathan, and the devastating death of his beloved mother in rapid succession in the early years of the new century mellowed him. He enjoyed warm friendships with some members of the opposition. And he commenced a search for the father he had never known. In a highly emotional encounter, he met an elderly Carlo on a visit to Italy in 2009. A missing part of his life fell into place.

Albanese was a heavy hitter in the Rudd government that came to power in 2007. With ministerial responsibilities covering infrastructure, transport, regional development and local government, he had an important role in a government that said it wanted to renew nation-building after years of neglect under Howard-era market fundamentalism.

The establishment of Infrastructure Australia was integral to this effort: there were major investments in road and rail, but the global financial crisis distracted the government from its larger ambitions towards everyday survival through quick, smaller-scale spending projects. Albanese, as a member of the left long sceptical of inflated claims for the value of markets, supported the thrust towards a more ambitious role for government.

Albanese was leader of the House — and therefore responsible for the smooth running of parliament — as well as a loyal Rudd supporter, despite his misgivings about some of the prime minister’s bad calls, notably the abandonment of legislation for an emissions trading scheme. He was dismayed as Rudd’s critics moved against the prime minister in mid 2010 in favour of the deputy, Julia Gillard. Albanese and Gillard had an association going back to student politics but had never been close. Albanese believed the switch ill-judged, but he took on the task of talking with Rudd to persuade him that he should not run in a leadership contest that he was destined to lose badly.

While known to be a loyal Rudd supporter, Albanese continued as a senior minister in Gillard’s government both before and after the 2010 election that sent Labor into a minority government facing a resurgent opposition led by Tony Abbott.

Unlike many of his colleagues, Albanese managed to avoid the impression that he was a plotter. Trusted on both sides of the bitter Rudd–Gillard rivalry, his reputation as a party man, his astute leadership of the House and his capabilities as a minister made him valuable to whoever was in office.

His factional leadership was another reason why he was to be taken seriously. Albanese’s value only increased when Labor, lacking a majority in the House, depended on the support of Greens and independents. He formed excellent relations with the independent parliamentarians on whom Labor depended for continuation in office. Some 561 pieces of legislation were passed during Gillard’s prime ministership, and each required someone to reach beyond the Labor Party to gather the numbers needed. That someone was often Albanese.

He also had the melancholy duty of engineering the replacement of Harry Jenkins as speaker with the Queensland Liberal National Party member Peter Slipper, a manoeuvre Albanese had devised to get Labor an extra vote in parliament. While many regretted the idea when Slipper became mired in scandal, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and Albanese conceived and executed the plan well.

Rudd’s destabilisation of Gillard’s leadership couldn’t but draw a figure of Albanese’s standing into the fray. Just how involved in the decline and fall of Gillard he became remains contentious. But when Rudd challenged Gillard’s leadership in February 2012, Albanese held a media conference in Sydney at which he shed tears for what the government had become. There were references to his mother and her three great faiths and to the values on which he had been raised. What the party had done in June 2010 in replacing Rudd with Gillard was wrong, he said, and he would now be voting for Rudd. “I like fighting Tories — that’s what I do,” he added.

It was a supreme performance of the party man, an old-fashioned demonstration of tribal loyalty in an era of fluid identities and shifting allegiances. Gillard had refused his offer to resign, she won the leadership vote, and Albanese continued as a minister in a tired, staggering government.

Rudd defeated Gillard in a second bid to return to the leadership on 26 June 2013. Nobody accuses Albanese of doing the numbers for Rudd, yet few doubt that his involvement behind the scenes must have been significant. Those who recalled Rats in the Ranks might have been reminded of Albanese’s presence during that drama, always off-screen but a player nonetheless. Albanese’s reward came with the office of deputy prime minister. He was conscious of the honour. As so often at significant moments in his career, he would return to where he had come from: “It says a great thing about our nation that the son of a parent who grew up in a council house in Sydney could be deputy prime minister.”

That was true, but he would have only a few weeks in the job. On 7 September, the government was swept from office and Abbott became prime minister. There were small consolation prizes for Albanese: an inner-city pub had named a beer after him, and he had been given the chance to host the ABC’s music video program Rage.

Rudd had left a parting gift. The parliamentary leadership was now to be decided, in part, by a vote of the ALP’s rank and file. Party members’ votes would count for half the weighting; those of a diminished caucus would make up the other half. Bill Shorten, a figure from the Victorian right, contested the leadership; so did Albanese, representing the left. There were weeks of speeches and debates. Most agree that the ritual was a positive one, generating friendliness and goodwill, and engaging ordinary members in a novel outbreak of party democracy. Indeed, the experiment was seemingly so successful that it has never been repeated.

Albanese won the rank­and-file vote easily, but Shorten gained sufficient support in caucus to win the contest. Several members of the left voted for Shorten; Albanese was left to lick his wounds just ahead of a final, emotional visit to his dying father in Italy.

In running for the leadership, Albanese had formally announced that he regarded himself as a potential future prime minister. Inevitably, and even allowing for the protections that Rudd’s reforms offered an incumbent leader between parliamentary elections, that also made him the most obvious alternative to Shorten. Whenever Shorten was faring poorly in public esteem, there would be chatter about the possibility of an Albanese leadership.

Meanwhile, Albanese worked hard to raise his public profile, to show that he was neither just a Sydney brawler nor a man destined to rise no higher than second-rank portfolios. His profile was raised by a regular slot on Nine’s Today with his Liberal Party friend Christopher Pyne. He cooperated with a biography written by leading journalist Karen Middleton, which was published in 2016. (I have relied on it, among other sources, for information.) A photograph of a young and handsome Albanese from 1985 — dubbed “Hot Albo” — circulated widely on social media from the time of the leadership election of 2013, quite obviously with his cooperation.

Albo also cultivated an image of retro hipness as “DJ Albo,” performing the role of disc jockey at pubs and clubs — sometimes for charity, sometimes as a party fundraiser — with an emphasis on 1980s and 1990s numbers. He assured journalists that it was “part of who I am” and not a publicity stunt aimed at winning over younger voters. In truth, it was likely something of both.

Labor’s strong performance at the 2016 double dissolution election largely put paid to chatter of a change of leaders. Shorten had almost edged out Malcolm Turnbull, who seemed a beaten and bitter man on election night. In the circumstances, Albanese quickly ruled out any challenge to Shorten, who therefore retained the leadership unopposed.

In the years ahead, prominent members of the political class found it increasingly hard to visualise a future Albanese prime ministership. Some considered him worthy of it but thought that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others believed that he had kept too many of his old left-wing sympathies. Inevitably, new prospective leaders gained attention, notably Tanya Plibersek, a fellow member of the NSW left. But Albanese had the virtue of patience. His views might have become milder over the years, but he had the lodestar of his upbringing. It was hard to accuse him of believing in nothing, of being a mere careerist. He could also sound the right note at the right time. His 2018 Whitlam Oration was widely perceived as a call for the party to “engage constructively with businesses” at a time when Shorten’s rhetoric seemed likely to alienate “the big end of town.”

He was entering an era, too, in which the political insider was on the nose. Albanese celebrated twenty years in parliament in 2016, managing in that year to hold off a challenge in his electorate from the Greens after a redistribution in their favour. The Greens challenger professed radical ideas of a kind that might once have been close to those of a younger Albanese. Albanese’s marriage to Tebbutt ended in early 2019 — they had been together for three decades and married for nineteen years.

Both personally and professionally, Albanese seemed to have reached a crossroads. As the Coalition government lurched from one crisis to the next, and from one leader to the next — Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison in 2018 — a Shorten Labor government seemed more likely than not. A Labor victory at the 2019 election would have ended any prospect of an Albanese prime ministership.

Since September 2013 Albanese had been shadow infrastructure and transport minister, also covering tourism — responsibility for cities was added in 2014. But the best he could look forward to in a Shorten government was a role of secondary importance, doing the kinds of things he had done before. He was not close to Shorten and was never part of his inner circle; Albanese was only brought onto the tactics committee in 2016, ahead of that year’s election.

Shorten and Labor’s shock loss at the 2019 election changed things entirely; Morrison retained the prime ministership and Albanese assumed the Labor leadership without a contest. The Victorian right’s Richard Marles was his deputy. Albanese had secured the prize he coveted in vain in 2013, but the pathway to the prime ministership, even in the third term of a deeply mediocre government, looked treacherous. Morrison’s majority was, like Turnbull’s had been, a small one, but the margins needed to win many seats had blown out, especially in Queensland.

Labor jettisoned the policies that were seen to have created trouble at the recent election, working hard to counter a perception that its environmental policies were a danger to job opportunities without alienating too many voters committed to countering global heating. And it waved through income tax cuts that would, when they reached their third stage in 2024, involve large gains for high-income earners.

Morrison’s ill-judged response to the devastating bushfires during the summer of 2019–20 gave Albanese and Labor their first chance to gain ground. Morrison was taking a family holiday in Hawaii while the fires raged. The poor impression created by his absence was compounded by his office’s decision to obfuscate about his whereabouts.

Albanese, meanwhile, was on duty and conspicuous in the media, giving interviews, visiting bushfire sites and serving meals to firefighters. He avoided an aggressive partisanship, allowing Morrison to make, and then suffer for, his own errors. Albanese also called for volunteer firefighters to receive financial compensation for their efforts. It was a masterly performance.

After the bushfires came the Covid-19 pandemic. These were dark days, but an unexpected opportunity for Morrison to rebuild his credibility. The government instituted measures that helped avert both mass death and economic disaster. The formation of a national cabinet that included leaders of all state and territory governments excluded Albanese as opposition leader.

Inevitably, the decision-makers hogged the limelight, Morrison’s own approval rating recovered, and Albanese disappeared from public consciousness. Disruption of the normal schedule of parliamentary sittings also reduced visibility. But in retrospect, Albanese’s low profile was advantageous. It allowed him to maintain a decent distance from the government, which was beneficial when things eventually went wrong.

In the meantime, Albanese was able to offer bipartisanship on most major matters and to appear constructive while his party quietly went about developing new policies. Labor’s victory in a by-election in Eden-Monaro in July 2020 might have helped his leadership survive in dark times. He had formed a new romantic relationship, too, with Jodie Haydon, which boosted his personal happiness.

But a month after that by-election, several leading colleagues had a meeting with him that was also a warning: the party would be defeated if an election were to be held then, and he needed to improve his performance. In the wider commentariat, too, were several who thought Albanese not up to it. Even in May 2021, when Labor’s prospects looked rather better, political historian and journalist Chris Wallace thought Albanese “a bloke past his prime.”

At the end of 2020, Morrison appeared to be coasting towards another victory, and some suspected he might call an election sooner rather than later. In January 2021, Albanese was badly injured but fortunate to survive a car accident when a young driver hit his car in Sydney. The year that followed, however, saw Albanese recover both his personal health and his political fortunes. Morrison muddled pandemic management; Albanese stepped up his criticism, arguing that the prime minister had “two jobs,” quarantine and vaccination, and that he had failed at both. A new round of restrictions became “Morrison’s lockdowns.” Meanwhile, Albanese and Labor benefited from the perception that the government was hostile to measures to counter global warming, to women’s rights, and to clean and accountable government.

Labor entered the campaign for the 21 May 2022 election ahead in the polls and modest favourites to win. Albanese seemed to many to lack star quality, but he looked good, having lost weight and acquired stylish glasses. While no one could discern any great wave of enthusiasm, Labor seemed to have a fair prospect of at least minority government. Albanese has a reputation for an excellent memory, especially for figures, so it was remarkable that early in the campaign he found himself unable to recall the Reserve Bank’s cash rate during a media conference. The unemployment rate also eluded him. The media were ruthless, and Morrison pounced, presenting this lapse as evidence of Albanese’s unfitness for the prime ministership.

When, later in the campaign, Albanese responded to another question from a journalist that he believed the minimum wage should be increased at the same rate as the present level of inflation, 5.1 per cent, there was initially adverse media reaction, with Morrison now calling him a “loose unit.” In reality, Albanese’s response helped to provide Labor’s campaign with some much-needed ballast amid the activities of a media pack that seemed more interested in testing his memory than his policies.

Albanese performed effectively in the three formal debates. Labor ran a professional and disciplined campaign under national secretary Paul Erickson and, notwithstanding the occasional setback, by election day Albanese had every reason to be hopeful.

Election night began at Albanese’s Marrickville home with Penny Wong, a factional colleague, close confidant and shadow foreign minister. She would later introduce Albanese when he made his victory speech. As he had done on several occasions in the campaign, Albanese spoke feelingly of his mother, and he committed his government to the full implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for a First Nations Voice to Parliament, a treaty and truth-telling.

Labor had won a narrow majority, with a primary vote in the low thirties. Independents and Greens had taken seats, mainly from the Liberals, but the size of the crossbench was widely interpreted as a symptom of disillusionment with the old parties and an old politics. Albanese, a factional warrior from way back, in some ways seemed an unlikely herald of a new order. But he had come a long way since his 1998 excoriation of John Howard as the latest in the Liberals’ “pantheon of chinless blue bloods and suburban accountants.” Albanese could now have passed for a suburban accountant himself.

Still, he hit the ground running. He and four colleagues were sworn in the Monday following the election, just ahead of an overseas visit to Tokyo for the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (“the Quad”) with Japan, India and the United States. High in the government’s early priorities was repairing Australia’s international relationships, including with France — which resented what it saw as Morrison’s dishonesty over the purchase of submarines — and with China, which had placed relations with Australia in the deep freeze.

Albanese — as well as foreign minister Wong and defence minister Marles — spent a good deal of time overseas in the early weeks of the new government, during what was a period of considerable international turbulence following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Wong visited several Pacific nations in an effort to counter Chinese influence in the region. Albanese undertook a tightly controlled visit to Ukraine himself.

Rising inflation, accompanied by climbing interest rates, contributed to the most serious cost-of-living crisis in three decades. Energy prices were particularly troublesome, especially in light of Labor’s pre-election commitment to get prices down. In December 2022, after a tussle between the minister, Chris Bowen, and energy companies extending over several months, the government used its powers to intervene directly in the energy market to cap coal and gas prices.

An October 2022 budget delivered by treasurer Jim Chalmers advanced the implementation of election commitments in areas such as the extension of paid parental leave, higher subsidies for childcare, and more social and affordable housing. A May 2023 budget would offer further cost-of-living relief for the most vulnerable and a boost to Medicare bulkbilling. The parliament also agreed to industrial relations reforms intended to strengthen enterprise bargaining and boost wages, especially for women. A bill for the long-anticipated and long-delayed federal anti-corruption commission passed before Christmas 2022.

In the first year of the government, there were consultations and inquiries across a wide range of areas, including a royal commission into robodebt, the Coalition government’s illegal effort to extract money from welfare recipients by raising fictional debts against their names, created by averaging their income over a year. The Reserve Bank, criticised for its recent interest rate hikes when its governor had previously given the impression an increase was unlikely before 2024, was also the subject of an inquiry, as was Australia’s immigration system and the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

A consultation was launched on a proposal for an Australian Universities Accord, and another led to the launch of a new cultural policy, Revive, followed by a major financial boost to the national collecting institutions. And amid all this, the parliament found time for a two-week period of mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Albanese attended the coronation of Charles III in May 2023.

The emphasis was on order, regularity and trust — a rebuke to the Morrison government but also, arguably, to the Rudd and Gillard era. Albanese had some of the instincts of the “lone wolf,” as journalist Katharine Murphy put it, but his approach in both opposition and government had become increasingly collaborative. He relied on the competence of a strong frontbench, and he made it clear that he wanted to re-establish Labor as the natural party of government.

Like Hawke, even in his first year Albanese was criticised for being too moderate, too cautious in pushing back on Coalition-era initiatives, too attached to old ways. Several of the new independent parliamentarians expressed outrage when the government reduced their staffing entitlements. There were also criticisms, from the outset, that Labor’s middle path on the shift from fossil fuels to renewables lacked sufficient ambition.

In its defence policy, the government added crucial detail to the bare bones of the Morrison government’s AUKUS agreement, with expensive plans for nuclear-powered submarines. Critics argued that the government was surrendering Australia’s sovereignty to the United States, an accusation that Albanese and Marles denied.

The government introduced only modest increases to JobSeeker — the unemployment benefit — in its May 2023 budget, which delivered a small surplus that the treasurer said was likely to be a one-off. Yet it was committed to fulfilling its pre-election promise not to dismantle the Morrison government’s stage three tax cuts, despite the windfall they would offer the wealthy. Albanese wanted to avoid accusations of breaking a core election promise, or of profligacy.

In one area in particular, however, his approach seemed to owe more to Whitlam-era idealism than to the more cautious and pragmatic Hawke tradition. The Albanese government’s commitment to holding a referendum on the First Nations Voice to Parliament before the end of 2023 remained steadfast, even as an otherwise demoralised opposition, led by Peter Dutton, did its best to use obstructionism as a means of reviving the Coalition’s political fortunes.

These had declined to alarming levels for the Liberal Party especially, and voters were unimpressed by its attempts to lay blame for the nation’s difficulties, such as the rising cost of living, at Albanese’s feet. At a by-election on 1 April 2023 for the outer-suburban Melbourne seat of Aston, long held by the Liberals and recently vacated by scandal-plagued ex-minister Alan Tudge, Labor won a two-party-preferred swing of more than six percentage points. It was the first time since 1920 that a federal government had managed to win a seat in such circumstances.

It was hard not to read into that result a wider verdict on the performance of the government. Commentators wrote of a sense that the country was being run by “adults,” and Albanese’s own image as a likeable, trustworthy and competent leader contributed something to that impression. We do not yet know if Anthony Albanese will be a short- or long-term leader — the last in the procession of two-to-four-year prime ministers that we have had since Howard, or a more lasting proposition. His age works against Howard-like longevity, but he could well emulate Hawke’s eight years. •

This is an edited extract from the new edition of The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia’s Prime Ministers from Barton to Albanese, by Mungo MacCallum and and Frank Bongiorno, published this month by Black Inc. Inside Story readers can order a copy at a 30 per cent discount by using the code InsideStory at checkout here. 

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What did catch their attention was the government’s cagey response when it was questioned about the decision. The 2020 stripsearch of Australian passengers in Doha cracked a mention, and there was vague talk about decarbonisation targets.

When transport minister Catherine King did finally admit that the decision had all been about defending national markets, the next question was obvious: why the initial obfuscation?

One explanation is that the government was alert to political sensitivities. The obvious beneficiary of its decision to block Qatar is Qantas, an airline that no longer attracts the national affection it once did. Revealing the real reason for the decision would have raised the question of how Qantas manages to get its way so often, despite growing resentment in the electorate. And pretty soon the talk would have turned to lobbying.

Coincidentally, Qantas’s Chairman’s Lounge — the airline’s network of free luxury lounges for handpicked chief executives, judges, politicians and senior bureaucrats — has been the subject of critical comment in the Australian Financial Review this month. The paper reported that Nathan Albanese, the prime minister’s twenty-three-year-old son, was among those entitled to enjoy the Lounge’s benefits, which include food, drink and business facilities in pleasant, secluded locations at most Australian capital city airports.

Singling out one Lounge member might have been unfair, but it did raise an important question: should politicians be accepting a gift of such value from a government-regulated company? Blocking Qatar’s expansion into Australia harms both consumers and Qantas’s domestic rival Virgin Australia, which has been denied the additional passengers Qatar Airways would have fed into its routes. All of the cabinet members who made that decision have been offered — and we know have accepted — membership of an exclusive club.

The fact that key politicians list their Chairman’s Lounge membership in parliament’s register of members’ interests — usually alongside their free Foxtel subscription — doesn’t make it right. Lawmakers (and their spouses and other family members) are receiving the equivalent of thousands of dollars from an Australian company that benefits directly from their decisions. The register’s limited transparency doesn’t change that.

And it’s not just about Qantas. Among the gifts declared by federal parliamentarians are memberships of their local RSL or racing clubs and tickets to concerts and high-profile sports events. The quid pro quo may not be clear, but it’s there — if not, who would bother? It may be that businesses are out to buy access, or simply to promote an event by luring well-known faces into the audience. Either way, they want something.

Whatever the motivation, the quo being bought by the sponsor’s quid isn’t the politicians’ to give. Their reputations, their influence and any executive power they wield is res publica — a public thing. It belongs to the Australian state and, by implication, to the Australian people.

But there’s a second reason why membership of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge is a concern: it comes against a backdrop of a transparency regime that is miles behind those of other Western democracies.

While the European Union’s transparency arrangements aren’t perfect, at least journalists and other outsiders can broadly sketch out what lobbyists are up to. For example, we know that EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager met with Amazon on 21 June to discuss artificial intelligence, and that Meta had discussed digital-platform regulation with her a couple of days earlier. It’s all logged and readily accessible; and only registered lobbyists are allowed to book a meeting.

Ireland’s mandatory lobbying register goes even further. Any contact between politicians or public servants and company lobbyists has to be reported — by the company. Even a chance meeting in the aisles of a supermarket needs to be logged. A few clicks of your mouse will reveal the dates meetings occurred, who was there, and what was discussed.

Here in Australia we only know that Qatar Airways enlisted Australian lobbying firm GRACosway on 27 July because the airline, owned by the Qatari state, has to report its movements to Australia’s foreign influence register. Yet Qatar Airways doesn’t appear among GRACosway’s clients on the separate lobbyist register.

There’s simply no way to find out what contact there has been between lobbyists and government officials; meetings aren’t made public and it’s impossible to know what was discussed. The names of the lobbyists engaging on specific issues aren’t disclosed.

The lobbyist register does tell us that Qantas uses SEC Newgate, a firm with registered lobbyists that include an adviser who worked in Albanese’s office between May 2022 and March 2023. But we don’t know what meetings were held between the firm and government decision-makers in the lead-up to the Qatar Airways decision, or who attended those meetings.

This Wild West of lobbying means that an invitation-only club that counts most federal politicians as member becomes an opportunity for access — access that’s ultimately controlled by the chairman of Qantas, who issues the invitations. Any lobbyist or company executive lucky enough to have a membership in his or her pocket can easily find a way to bump into decision-makers while the warm face washers are being handed out or have a chat while queuing up for the hors d’oeuvres.

Managing this kind of access to our elected representatives is a remarkable amount of power for the Australian state to hand over to a business — a business that stands to gain from policy settings put in place by the lawmakers who accept its hospitality. The government’s decision to stymie Qatar Airways’ Australian expansion may well have been justified, but it has been tarnished by an institutional lack of transparency and the conflicts of interest underpinning Australia’s political classes. •

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Many saw the election result as a tipping point, signalling that Australia’s longstanding and very stable two-party system was finally on its way out. Its dominance had been gradually eroding and, this time, more than 30 per cent of voters looked elsewhere to cast their primary vote. As it transpired, Labor won government with a majority of seventy-seven seats in the House of Representatives but a lower primary vote than it had achieved in 2019. It optimistically attributed this to “strategic voting” by supporters temporarily shifting their primary votes to non-Labor candidates deemed capable of beating Liberal incumbents. Labor polled exceptionally strongly in Western Australia, winning four seats from the Liberal Party.

While the Coalition parties made much of their primary vote being slightly higher than Labor’s, the Liberal Party also had a historically low primary vote. In other democracies, the Covid-19 pandemic shored up some faith in the “wartime” governments dealing with it, at least initially. By 2022, though, the same incumbency benefit was not enjoyed by the federal government in Australia. Nor did the lowest unemployment rate in almost fifty years save the government from defeat (or the treasurer from losing his own seat in Kooyong). Prime minister Scott Morrison, who had become the most unpopular Liberal leader for more than thirty years, was targeted relentlessly during the campaign. The “miracle” of his 2019 electoral victory, in the face of opinion polling predicting a Labor win, did not occur twice.

The longer-term trend in Western democracies — reinforced by the Australian election result  — is that the major (or traditional) parties can no longer rely on lifelong voters. The success of Australia’s teal independents reflected widespread reaction against major parties perceived to be operating in the interests of the political class and donors, and ignoring substantive policy issues — such as climate change — that mattered to Australians. Political scandals over sexual misconduct contributed to this disenchantment and to the increased salience of gender issues.

If the 2022 election could be seen as a watershed moment for Australian voters, the extraordinary events that transpired between the 2019 and 2022 elections certainly increased the importance of certain policy issues and voters’ critical stance on the government. The Morrison government, like its counterparts across the globe, faced the daunting task of dealing with a global pandemic. Significantly, the 2022 Australian election campaign coincided with a period in which the country had the highest daily infection rates in the world.

Climate change also loomed large in the wake of record-breaking bushfires and floods since the 2019 election. Between September 2019 and March 2020 the Black Summer bushfires burned an unprecedented 18.6 million hectares of bushland. “Once in a century” floods in March 2021 severely affected communities in greater Sydney, the Hunter region and the mid-north coast of New South Wales, and around Queensland’s Gold Coast. These events were repeated a year later, with severe flooding affecting Brisbane, the NSW Northern Rivers and Sydney. The Insurance Council of Australia reported almost 200,000 claims from the 2022 floods, or more than $3.3 billion in insured losses.

Despite the severity of these events, the theme of climate change was not prominent in the campaigns of the major parties, although the prime minister’s apparent lack of empathy with flood and fire victims became part of the negative campaigning against him. The Coalition government was particularly vulnerable on climate change, and its attempts to reframe the issue were singularly unsuccessful. One discursive tactic tried well before the campaign proper was that climate change would “ultimately be solved by ‘can-do’ capitalism, not ‘don’t-do’ government.” This attempt at free-market framing was no more successful than the ubiquitous “freedom” ads of the United Australia Party funded by billionaire Clive Palmer.

Voters were looking for alternatives to the two-party system and they were also engaging in politics in new ways, both online and offline, in the community organising of the “Voices for…” movements. The election campaign moved further online, and citizens creating and sharing memes were as visible as more traditional party efforts. Within this landscape the visual elements of campaigning were more important than ever. Digital disruption and disinformation — so prominent in 2019 — were also a feature, but so were more concerted efforts to deal with them.

Not only did the election bring a change in government; it also saw the lowest primary votes for both major parties and the election of the greatest number of independents to the lower house since the formation of the Australian party system. The success of the teal independents and the Greens, and the appetite voters showed for “doing politics differently” suggested the dominant model of electoral competition might no longer be the two-party system. At the very least, the continued usefulness of the two-party-preferred vote as a way of conceptualising and predicting Australians’ voting behaviour has been cast into serious doubt.

A key outcome of the election was a widening split between the salience for voters and the salience for the major parties of long-term issues such as climate change and transparency in government. “Localised” politics, community campaigning and candidate quality were more prominent than in recent elections, in combination with the changing nature of campaigning in an evolving digital media landscape.

Another issue that unexpectedly took off was the Coalition’s broken promise to introduce a federal integrity commission. Integrity issues were highlighted by the teal independents and the Greens and, along with gender issues, became part of the negative depiction of Morrison that dominated social media. The Coalition unsuccessfully attempted to deflect attention from integrity issues by suggesting they were of no interest to ordinary voters and that the focus should instead be on cost-of-living issues and economic management — their usual electoral strengths.

Along with climate change and integrity issues must be mentioned gender issues, which were more prominent than in any election since 1972. The Morrison government’s seeming incapacity to deal with issues of sexual misconduct in the parliamentary precinct served as a touchstone for women’s disenchantment with the government on a range of issues. Veteran political journalist Paul Kelly was taken by surprise (and won a Gold Ernie Award) for his 2021 prediction that “the women’s movement won’t decide the next election.”

With so many high-profile ministers (and purported future party leaders) falling victim to independents’ campaigns on these issues, the Liberal Party faces the daunting task of rebuilding and — along with the Nationals — re-establishing its relevance with Australian voters, particularly women, socially progressive economic liberals and younger Australians.

The 2022 federal election also marked a profound shift in how the country runs its elections. A record proportion of voters cast their ballot before election day through either early or postal voting. While this trend was no doubt accelerated in 2022 by Covid-19, it builds on an underlying preference for convenience and arguably on disengagement from politics — with voters casting an early ballot to switch off from the long campaign.

With fewer than half of all voters casting their vote on election day, it appears that we have moved from an election day to an election period. This is a trend that is highly unlikely to be reversed, with potentially significant implications for the nature of elections as democratic rituals. It also has implications for small parties and independents because non-incumbent candidates can struggle to staff polling booths for extended periods.

The traditional media were criticised during the campaign for a seeming preoccupation with the performance of leaders and the possibility of missteps, with the hashtag #ThisIsNotJournalism trending on Twitter. In the very first week, Labor leader Anthony Albanese was unable to recall either the unemployment or the cash rates during a press conference. The government and the conservative media seized on the misstep to discredit Albanese’s economic expertise and cast doubt on his leadership abilities. But it also became illustrative of a style of politics that characterised the election: a focus on “gotcha” moments and detail from which bigger policy issues and debates were notably absent.

Having learned from the mistake of campaigning in 2019 on complex reforms (such as overhauling tax policy in areas like imputation credit refunds), the Labor Party focused on a slimmed agenda of manufacturing, wage growth, gender pay parity and housing. The Coalition responded by repeatedly emphasising its record of economic management, leading to what it described as “jobs and growth.” This dynamic left major policy issues prominent in the minds of voters — such as climate change — out of the contest between the major parties and in the hands of the Greens and the teals.

Despite the major parties’ best efforts to keep the campaign focused on preset announcements and policy agendas, significant events occurred during the official campaign period that challenged both leaders to respond in ways that were not scripted. These included the announcement of Solomon Islands’ security pact with China early in the campaign, which made regional security a significant issue, though not in a way favourable to the government.

On 3 May, the Reserve Bank of Australia lifted the official cash rate by 0.25 per cent — the first of eight increases during 2022. This was the first time since the 2007 federal election (when Liberal prime minister John Howard was ousted by Labor’s Kevin Rudd) that such an increase had occurred during a campaign, and it cemented economic management, the cost of living and housing affordability as key campaign issues.

Compared with other recent federal election campaigns, the 2022 election saw a heightened focus on individual candidates and constituencies. While all elections feature scandals involving candidates, the attention given not just to individual seats but also to the competencies of individual candidates was highly unusual. In part this focus can be explained by the momentum behind the localised campaigns of the teal and “Voices for…” independents, but it could have also been a broader consequence of the renewed importance of place and community that was felt so acutely during the Covid lockdowns.

The national media were captivated by the controversial candidate Katherine Deves, who was selected by Morrison to contest the northern Sydney seat of Warringah against independent Zali Steggall. Deves’s vocal stance against the rights of trans Australians was interpreted as a dog whistle to the Liberals’ conservative voter base. In other electorates, meanwhile, the suitability of candidates was being questioned based on geographic representation and appropriate reflection of ethnic diversity.

Labor’s Andrew Charlton and Kristina Keneally — both contesting seats in western Sydney — were caught up in these debates. Charlton — despite his political credentials as a former adviser to prime minister Kevin Rudd — was criticised for not living in the electorate. Former NSW premier and senator Kristina Keneally, also attempting to win a House of Representatives seat, was criticised in a similar way — but the party also faced strong opposition to the fact that it had not fielded a candidate who reflected the diversity of the electorate’s population. Independent and Vietnam-born candidate Dai Le ultimately won the seat of Fowler from Labor.

The victorious Albanese government got to work quickly, embarking at high speed on its election commitments, including preparation for a referendum on a Voice to parliament, legislation to introduce a federal integrity commission, and a jobs and skills summit. Both Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong embarked on international diplomatic visits to the Pacific region, to security summits in Japan and Spain, and to Paris to “reset” Australia’s relationship with France, which deteriorated after the cancellation of a multibillion-dollar defence submarine contract in 2018.

The government itself was more diverse than ever before, with a record number of women — including an Indigenous woman, Linda Burney, holding the Indigenous Australians portfolio.

Doubt continued about the legacy of the Morrison government. In August 2022, it was revealed that Morrison had been secretly sworn into multiple ministerial portfolios, including health, finance, home affairs and industry. He defended these actions as necessary in a time of unprecedented crisis and uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, but his actions were widely criticised as contrary to fundamental principles of collective ministerial responsibility and open and transparent government.

While the implementation of Albanese’s policy agenda began with considerable speed, the economic context created — and will continue to create — significant challenges for the new government. Saddled with its election commitment to proceed with the Stage 3 tax cuts for the wealthy, the government faces an incredibly difficult mix of rising inflation, rising interest rates and falling wages. This will significantly constrain its fiscal policy options and presents a scenario for industrial unrest that could become difficult for Labor to resolve given its voter base and election commitments. •

This is an edited extract from Watershed: The 2022 Australian Federal Election, edited by Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer and Jill Sheppard and published by ANU Press, the latest in a series of detailed post-election analyses dating back to 1975. Contributors to the book — which can be downloaded free of charge — include Carol Johnson, Murray Goot, Marija Taflaga, Glenn Kefford and Stephen Mills, and Anthony Green.

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are calling for similar recognition in Australia. Despite very different constitutional and political settings, Canadian political scientist Graham White’s new book, “We Are in Charge Here”: Inuit Self-Government and the Nunatsiavut Assembly, offers much for Australian readers watching the development of innovative native title settlements in Western Australia and modern treaty-making in Victoria and elsewhere.

While those experiments in Indigenous self-governance remain aspirational, White provides a comprehensive profile of functioning self-government in Canada. If Australian treaty processes continue apace, we may soon see a diverse range of culturally resurgent self-government structures empowering Indigenous communities to respond to contemporary challenges.

Until relatively recently, Indigenous self-governance in Canada was also largely aspirational (if we put to one side extensive precolonial histories). Scholars developed arguments for self-government without being able to assess how it works in practice. Given that self-government’s success, in White’s words, is “highly dependent on the design, operation, and effectiveness” of the legal and policy architecture within which it sits, White’s analysis of the Nunatsiavut in action is especially welcome.

The Nunatsiavut government’s origins lie in what’s formally known as a comprehensive land claim — a modern-day treaty. Canada’s long history of treaty-making began in 1701, and although the seventy signed between then and 1923 were not always fair bargains — and were sometimes honoured only in the breach — they recognised that Indigenous communities owned their land and possessed rights to their country.

Even so, vast areas of Canada were never subject to treaty; like Australia, the Canadian Crown simply asserted ownership and control. But the Supreme Court of Canada complicated this approach in 1973 when it held that Aboriginal title existed prior to the colonisation of North America. Anxious to resolve difficult questions over ownership of land, the Canadian government quickly established a process to negotiate outstanding claims with Indigenous communities. After another two decades of Indigenous political activity, the Canadian government agreed in 1995 that self-government arrangements could form part of comprehensive land claims.

Modern Indigenous self-governance in Canada comes in a variety of forms. In some cases, federal legislation delegates significant authority in a particular sector to specific Indigenous communities; in others, such as the Sechelt Indian Band Self-Government Act, legislation recognises more general powers of autonomy.

In certain regions, demographics have also created the conditions for de facto Indigenous governments. In places like Nunavut and Nunavik in northern Quebec, benefits and services are open to all residents (unlike Indigenous self-government regimes, which are characterised by exclusionary provisions), but with Inuit comprising most of the population the local legislatures essentially operate as Indigenous governments.

These self-government regimes are largely creatures of federal (and in some cases, provincial) legislation. Although they may devolve substantial autonomy, federal and provincial governments retain the authority to revise and even drastically curtail its exercise. This is not the case for self-government arrangements that emerge from comprehensive land claims agreements: section 35 of the Canadian constitution, which recognises and affirms “aboriginal and treaty rights,” provides significant legal protection for this model.

Twenty-three such agreements have been struck, of which Nunatsiavut is the largest in terms of population. Its governance model thus ranks “among the strongest, most autonomous self-government regimes in Canada,” according to White. This is good news for the roughly 7000 Labrador Inuit beneficiaries, around 2400 of whom live in Nunatsiavut’s 72,520 square kilometre territory.

The negotiations that led to the formation of Nunatsiavut, like all comprehensive land claims agreements, proved challenging. Although the claim was filed in 1977, talks didn’t commence until 1988 and only in 2001 was in-principle agreement reached between the Labrador Inuit Association and the governments of Newfoundland and Canada.

Because the federal government “determines the rules of the process,” Labrador Inuit negotiators were forced to offer what White calls “substantial concessions.” Nevertheless, and despite some unease, the agreement was ratified by the beneficiaries in 2004, and the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement entered into force the following year. The first assembly elections were held in 2006.

We Are in Charge Here focuses on the Nunatsiavut assembly, the key democratic body in the territory. In clear, patient prose, White surveys the assembly’s first fifteen years, assessing its structure, operation and effectiveness. He examines the assembly’s success in carrying out its core parliamentary functions, its relationship with the Nunatsiavut executive council (or cabinet), and — critically — whether and how Labrador Inuit culture has influenced the design and practice of this distinctive parliamentary institution.

White also skilfully weaves his technical study of the Nunatsiavut assembly into a deeper examination of the opportunities and tensions involved in blending Indigenous and Western constitutional orders within the state.

The Nunatsiavut assembly is “a site of intersection” between Inuit and Euro-Canadian cultural traditions, he writes. Within a Westminster-style institution, power is concentrated in cabinet — the president and four ordinary members of the assembly — which is responsible to the assembly. Members of the assembly exercise accountability functions through committees and question time.

Nevertheless, the assembly has “some decidedly non-Westminster features.” “Explicitly designed and mandated to reflect and enhance Inuit culture,” its eighteen members must be Inuit. The president is directly elected by all beneficiaries (who must be fluent in Inuktitut) and ten members are elected by geographic electorates, with the membership rounded out with the angajukKât (mayors) of the five Nunatsiavut Inuit community governments and the chairs of the two Inuit community corporations. The speaker is nonpartisan but unusually active and influential.

It is not just the structure of the assembly that differs from the traditional Westminster system. In White’s words, the practice of the parliament demonstrates the “pragmatic adaptability of the Labrador Inuit,” who have modified key elements to “render serviceable for Inuit purposes a decidedly colonial governance model.”

Adversarial politics is shunned as incompatible with Inuit political culture. Political parties are absent, and consensus decision-making is common — though divided and secret votes do occur. Perhaps most alien to Australian readers, a strict and enforceable code of conduct (including no drinking on the job) has led to several dismissals from the ministry and expulsions from the assembly.

But the institution that emerges from White’s research faces real challenges, though their precise cause is difficult to pinpoint. The legislature is largely quiescent, happy to be led by the cabinet. The assembly is not especially active in its key roles of policymaking, legislating, educating the public, and maintaining accountability.

Is this a function of a non-confrontational Inuit political culture or does it reflect conditions in the community the assembly serves? Nunatsiavut is geographically remote, its major population centres small and difficult to access by transport that can’t be used during winter. The assembly, which receives almost 2 per cent of the Nunatsiavut budget, operates on a shoestring, without parliamentary or research staff. Media attention is sparse.

And yet the assembly can exert influence when it chooses to do so. The locally contentious issue of uranium mining, for instance, stretches back to the 1950s. In one of its early decisions, the Nunatsiavut government determined to prohibit uranium mining on Labrador Inuit lands. Extended consultations across the territory, held at the assembly’s insistence, led to a modified proposal for a three-year moratorium on mining and development rather than an outright ban. Following more debate, the bill passed eight–seven, with two members of the cabinet in opposition. While consensus is prioritised, it is not always possible; even so, debate on the mining proposal was forthright but civil.

The uranium moratorium bill reveals the strength of the assembly. More important, though, is the fact that the people of Nunatsiavut had the authority to decide the issue.

The first minister drew on this point when he explained that the larger purpose of the bill was to send a message to exploration companies, mining companies and other governments that the assembly is “in charge here in Nunatsiavut… We are the decision body, we will make the rules that apply to our land. It is our land and we will continue to protect it and we have newfound powers that we will use to ensure that development that takes place will be done so on our terms.”

Against the wishes of largely non-Inuit environmental groups, the moratorium was lifted in 2011. The assembly and community were not anti-development or anti-uranium; rather, they demanded the recognition of their autonomy and decision-making authority.

During that 2011 debate Nunatsiavut’s president noted that his people had spent many years being governed by non-Inuit. “That day has passed.” Now “we make our decisions on what we do. We’ll make our own mistakes. We learn from our own mistakes.”

For the people of Nunatsiavut, self-government means controlling their own affairs. It may be challenging at times, but it is through the assembly that this is achieved. And that is worth celebrating. •

“We Are in Charge Here”: Inuit Self-Government and the Nunatsiavut Assembly
By Graham White | University of Toronto Press | C$75 | 304 pages

The post Northeastern Canada’s self-governing Inuit appeared first on Inside Story.

But can the tide of disgust, disbelief and frustration really be turned back? It’s a question that calls to mind the British political scientist Bernard Crick’s insistence that democratic politics must be defended even from itself. It is only by strengthening forums in which conflicts between interests can be resolved with civil discourse — argument, persuasion and negotiation of common goals — that democracy can be sustained.

That may be the ideal, but adversarial politics has a dark shadow. “The individual is tied into politics by its capacity to draw deeply on his feelings,” the Australian political scientist Alan Davies once argued. “[P]olitical leaders are like sculptors, whose medium is public emotion. It is only because people momentarily feel in common that they can for a while think alike.” But he went on to caution that politics often seems to channel the negative emotions.

Other political scientists have been blunter. “Politics has always been the systematic organisation of hatreds,” Henry Adams, scion of the famous political family, remarked in 1905; later, his fellow American Harold Lasswell nominated hatred as the leading political emotion.

In 1974, Davies set out to explore these suppositions using diaries recording how successive cohorts of his students felt about politics. Reading through their diaries he couldn’t identify a single day on which the positive emotions they recorded outweighed the negative ones. “In politics,” he concluded, “we are evidently hard to please, disposed to blame… [and] adept at finding ourselves angered, disillusioned and pained.”

Davies and his Melbourne University colleague Graham Little warned that we are primed, when times are tough, to accentuate the negative — especially when we have leaders adept at identifying the cause of disquiet and giving it a target. That skill has long been a gift to media outlets that drive sales by “exposing” the sources of our rage and resentment, but it has lately been turbocharged by the anger algorithms of social media.

These emotions — and especially resentment — have become the go-to explanation for the rise of Donald Trump in the turbulent politics of the past decade. But do they really explain what has been going on?

The American historian Robert Schneider sets out to test the evidence in his new book, The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of Political Emotion. His subtitle immediately raises the question: did resentment ever go away? Given the emphasis that Davies, Little and their predecessors give to the ongoing role of emotions (including resentment) in mobilising political responses, it seems curious to argue that resentment might at some stage have dissipated.

Yet the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, published in 2003 and sponsored by the International Society of Political Psychology, contains no reference to resentment, and articles on the topic only began to accrue in the society’s journal, Political Psychology, when hyperpartisan politics and party fragmentation became more pressing concerns in the early 2000s. Theorists and historians of political thought, of which Schneider is one, might have more to tell us than do the current generation of political psychologists.

Schneider’s purpose is twofold. He wants to explore the gestation of the contemporary understanding of resentment in Western political thought; and he intends to demonstrate that resentment is complex and politically potent in ways that do not pertain to other emotions — which means that its re-emergence signifies something particular to our historical moment.

Much of The Return of Resentment is a compelling discussion of the identification of resentment, and debates about its meaning, from the sixteenth century until 2022. Schneider produces a tapestry in which certain threads are continuously interwoven. One thread concerns resentment’s contradictory elements: on the one hand, as a signal that something is wrong, that an injury demands a moral response and justice; on the other, as a destructive impulse with adverse effects both on its carriers and, at its extreme, on society.

He also traces resentment’s transition from the individual and interpersonal — as a product of proximity (think of witch hunts) to be ameliorated through civil discourse (one of the themes in eighteenth-century debate) — to the collective, after inter-class envy was sharpened by the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The rise of the bourgeoisie provoked a backlash from political and intellectual elites embodied most significantly in the “Nietzschean moment.” Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality (1887), with its supposedly historical depiction of the inevitable division between masters and slaves, sought to account for but also denounce the ressentiment of the latter. These “slaves” couldn’t aspire to the higher values of their betters so they wanted to drag everybody down to their level. Nietzsche’s book was complemented by works including Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd (1895), which analysed the impulsiveness and irrationality of individuals seduced by crowd behaviour.

These nineteenth-century thinkers shifted the source of psychological disorder from the individual to the group. As contemporary institutions of governance emerged, their ideas fostered an implicit anti-democratic impulse among some intellectuals, political professionals and bureaucrats. Worried that people, lacking their expert knowledge, would too easily succumb to populist nonsense, they were all too ready to ascribe resistance to “rational plans” to the “pathology” of the crowd — a response that persists, as exemplified by Hillary Clinton’s unfortunate reference to the “basket of deplorables” supporting Trump.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–40) took the argument a step further by pinpointing equality as the key value of the age. Although a levelling impulse might be expected to foster unity, in Tocqueville’s portrayal it instead generated heightened self-interest, individualism and an ever-vigilant jealousy lest any group gain an advantage over another.

Those threads persisted. But Schneider argues that a recognisable “resentment paradigm” was formulated after the twentieth century’s world wars and depression. Stimulated by the influential analysis of The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by the German sociologist Theodor Adorno and his co-authors, it was part of an attempt to make sense of Nazism and right-wing extremism and to guard against their return. Other sociologists and historians, including Talcott Parsons, Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Bell, attempted to distil the psychological disposition generated by economic and communal breakdown in interwar Germany that facilitated the anguish on which Hitler could draw.

This work was a warning that fairness and justice must be achieved lest conditions conducive to the heightened jealousy of some group over others should re-emerge. Normative codes of human rights and the Keynesian management of economic prosperity in the rebuilt Western economies were designed to facilitate relatively equal life chances and keep resentment at bay. The relative success of this postwar settlement saw the decline of resentment between the 1950s and the 1980s.

The 1960s generation mounted another form of resistance, hopeful rather than resentful, argues Schneider. This was a politics of authenticity and personal freedom against the stifling conformity that seemed endemic to the managed prosperity of the postwar order. To some extent it also opened the way for recognising the rights of the dispossessed and marginalised.

The justified resentment of the excluded — Black Americans, Indigenous people in settler societies, decolonising nations now free of imperial powers — persisted. Speaking for the oppressed, Frantz Fanon, an Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist and philosopher from the French colony of Martinique, called for a transformative break from colonial “negritude” through an assertion of Black humanity and pride. The instrument of change would be action to challenge the colonial state’s monopoly of violence rather than a plea for recognition on the colonisers’ own terms.

In the United States, human rights activist Malcolm Little discarded the “White slavemaster” name he was given at birth and became Malcolm X, advocating radical action to secure justice and Black dignity. Martin Luther King dreamed instead of a redemptive future where all enjoyed equal rights; but he also urged, “[Don’t] get rid of your discontent, channel it into non-violent direct action.” Both approaches informed civil rights movements of the sixties and thereafter. And both men, despite their differences, were assassinated.

Those deaths, says Schneider, are a reminder that there were “two sixties,” and the other was partly a reaction to freedom movements, which seemed inimical to the established order, and partly a calculated mobilisation of elements of society in support of a conservative agenda. It was here — rather than in the radical student movements, the demands for self-determination and authenticity, the protests against postcolonial wars, or the civil rights organisations asserting Black rights — that the politics of resentment was reinvented.

Richard Nixon led the charge, evoking a “silent majority” of put-upon Americans who feared that all the benefits they had accrued since the war were threatened by liberals, “privileged” student protesters, “so-called intellectuals” and Black activists. Others took up the theme in ways that reached out to the “working man” and to Middle Americans alike.

On the one hand was philosopher Eric Hoffer’s “wistfully reactionary” appeal to “salt of the earth” Americans oppressed by intellectuals whose rule “went hand in hand with subjection or enslavement of those who do the world’s work.” On the other was John Updike’s representative of Middle America, the resentful everyman Rabbit Angstrom, striving fruitlessly to recover lost glory and a sense of purpose, beneath whose animus for Blacks, counterculture proponents and rich people lies “an amalgam of sadness, confusion and… loss which would increasingly characterise the psychological disposition of white men for generations to come.”

And so was born the Republicans’ “southern strategy” to mobilise the disgruntled white working class while appealing to suburbanites and small towns to vote in defence of their entitled lifestyles.

Resentment would not flourish immediately: Ronald Reagan’s approach was upbeat. Heralding “Morning in America,” he eschewed resentment politics, and his “compassionate conservatism” persisted right through to George W. Bush. But the seed planted by “the other sixties” ensured that resentment was always in the offing, and with the next phase of economic and social change — precipitated by Clinton- and Bush-era neoliberalism’s failure to deliver prosperity and choice fairly and by rapidly accelerating inequality — it would flower.

These were the circumstances that facilitated “the return of resentment”: a sense of people “cutting in” on ordinary Americans waiting for their enterprise to be rewarded; of cultural resentment against “others” who don’t comply with the American way; of unfair competition and powerlessness as industries closed or moved offshore; of being left behind and disempowered while riches were grasped by the very “elites” who had trumpeted the benefits of neoliberal policies — all of it amplified by the balkanisation of the public by identity politics and social media.

Donald Trump’s populist appeal was anchored in the recognition of just those elements, and his adept mobilisation of the feelings of anger, humiliation, victimisation and marginalisation they provoked. He promised to be the voice of the aggrieved and proffered his own victimisation by “the deep state” as evidence that “they” were coming for him, as ordinary people’s tribune.

It has been common to tie the rise of Trumpian resentment to angry white men, especially those without a university education whose livelihood and status have eroded. But this is true only to a point. Schneider points to his other significant sources of support, with professionals, white-collar workers and solidly middle-class people among those who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Others have shown the differences in life experiences, income, education, ethnicity and religious affiliation between Democratic-voting districts, with their preponderance of knowledge workers benefiting from the modern service and digital economy, and Republican-voting districts, whose industrial and agricultural workers are most prey to the depredations of local production by free trade and globalisation. Hence, household incomes have declined in Republican districts relative to Democratic ones, with the gap between upper-income households and their middle- and lower-income counterparts rising, and the share of income held by middle-income households falling.

In seeking to understand the history and the sources of resentment, Schneider makes four thought-provoking points. First, he returns to Tocqueville’s theory that resentment is always a risk in democracies that claim to value equality, which means that a balance in political settlements must ensure that some are not left behind and most feel that fair competition applies. The implication is that this was achieved for decades following postwar reconstruction, but that the neoliberal era ushered in the Trumpian moment.

Second, resentment is always anti-pluralist: a call for fellow patriots (defending core values of “the people”) to unite against all others. Hence it is disruptive of social cohesion in the relatively multicultural societies that are now common.

Third, when resentment is triggered by social conditions or certain leaders it can prevail against rational discourse more potently than can other emotions — anger, disappointment, frustration or envy — because it consolidates all of them.

Fourth, significant dangers face those policymakers and intellectuals whom the aggrieved are resisting. They may ignore or underestimate the factors provoking resentment and dismiss the resentful as a minority of “deplorables” incapable of understanding what is needed. It is on this failure that a resentment entrepreneur like Trump can prosper.

But those feelings of injustice and moral injury — and grievance — can also be indicative of wrongs that should and can be rectified. The rights of marginalised Blacks and minorities, and of dispossessed and brutalised Indigenous peoples in settler societies, and reparations due to them cry out for such a response. Empathy, recognition and an acceptance of their memories are needed.

Schneider concludes by conceptualising dual modes of contemporary political resentment: a “threatened/left behind” model (applying to the embittered and envious, who are reactionary and prone to extreme political expression) and a “comparison/discrepancy” model (that might also prove fractious and polarising but can alert us to injustices or inequities that should be addressed).

Despite the conceptual distinctiveness of these models, Schneider argues that we should conceive of a continuum of resentment, and in all cases try to empathise with the aggrieved to the extent needed to understand their disquiet. It is a warning against seeing resentment as an emotional trait of others, and against pathologising and delegitimising people’s claims and grievances.

What does all this mean for Australia? Bruce Wolpe’s recently released book, Trump’s Australia: How Trumpism Changed Australia and the Shocking Consequences for Us of a Second Term, translates the American experience — and resentment politics — into a message about how its ally must prepare for the possibility of a second Trump presidency.

This is a more contained and polemical exercise than Schneider’s. Wolpe starts with personal history: of growing up in Washington, working as a staffer in Congress, and seeing up close the transitions from Kennedy and his Democrat successors, through Reagan, Nixon and the Bushes, to the Republicans’ deal with the Devil, manifest in the election of Trump.

Like Schneider, Wolpe acknowledges Reagan’s upbeat optimism. He sees the source of the rot in Nixon and Watergate, and its coming to fruition in Sarah Palin’s failed candidacy for vice-president in John McCain’s campaign, which “scratched an itch among white voters who felt let down and driven out by establishment politics.”

His analysis, then, presents a version of the “threatened/left behind” model amped up by a leader who capitalised on fear and division. He doesn’t underestimate the likelihood that fear and threat will win again in 2024, but nor does he give much attention to the extent of disquiet that motivates Trump’s base. Arguably, he tells us nothing new about the extent of the chaos, disregard of norms and mendacious destructiveness of Trump’s term in office, but his deft touch and capacity to interpret political developments through personal history makes for a persuasive narrative.

Wolpe deals in detail with Trump and Australia’s foreign policy, Trump and Australia’s domestic policy, and the future of democracy in America and Australia. All of it is thought-provoking, though it boils down to an existential crisis for democracy captured in a series of “what-ifs.”

What if Trump cripples, even destroys NATO and the United Nations, smashes climate agreements, forms an alliance with Putin, surrenders Taiwan to China and withdraws troops and naval forces from the Asia-Pacific? What if he declares martial law, uses troops to contain protests, ignores court orders and legislation, jails political enemies, shuts down certain media, directs regulatory agencies to target individuals and companies deemed unfriendly, completes the process of ensuring compliant officials and Republican legislatures can overturn the popular vote in the electoral college? What if he even cancels elections?

Despite Wolpe’s useful attention to the danger of Australia’s adopting Trump-like policies — and our susceptibility to covert racism, inadequate campaign finance regulation, insufficient control of misinformation and disinformation in social media, and Trumpian appeals to division in mainstream media and campaigning — he points out that the most extreme domestic threat, to the electoral process, cannot succeed in Australia. Here, the electoral guardrails — mandatory voting, preferential voting, an independent electoral commission, and anti-corruption agencies at state and federal levels — will prevent executive excess and caprice. America would indeed benefit if such institutional guardrails could be introduced there.

We need to be attuned, meanwhile, to how we can resist the potential collapse of the rules-based international order: by strengthening alliances in the Asia-Pacific and with other middle-order powers, pursuing our own relations with China, not entrusting too much to great, powerful and electorally volatile friends (as we’ve done with AUKUS), and contributing to the strengthening of the United Nations.

Perhaps the missing ingredient in Wolpe’s book is a recognition of those times when political settlements served to abate inequality, enabling fair life chances, fending off resentment and promoting trust — in institutions and in each other — to prevent the erosion of democratic processes. Schneider is conscious of such cycles and the necessity of their restoration if democratic guardrails are to be reinforced. Wolpe see hope in the Albanese government and Biden’s efforts, but it is hope hedged by global challenges that foreshadow potential recession and disillusion.

All of which leads to the final great what-if: what if an America in accelerated decline in 2024 feels more like Germany in the 1930s than America in the 1990s? We know what the German people decided ninety years ago. Will the malign sculptors of public emotion be empowered once more? •

The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion
By Robert A. Schneider | University of Chicago Press | $47.95 | 312 pages

Trump’s Australia: How Trumpism Changed Australia and the Shocking Consequences for Us of a Second Term
By Bruce Wolpe | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 320 pages

The post Democracy’s dark shadow appeared first on Inside Story.

Labor’s Dorothy Tangney made history in 1943 when she became the first woman elected to the Australian Senate. But though she sat in that chamber for twenty-five years, no Labor woman ever joined her. Instead, she watched as the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh women were elected to the Senate — all of them Liberals. And while Tangney spent her entire career on the backbench, two of those six Liberals managed to become ministers.

They hardly shattered the glass ceiling. But that first wave of elected Liberal women — six senators, along with Enid Lyons elected to the House in 1943 — were real pioneers, prising open the men’s world of parliament.

Who were these pioneering women? And how did they get there? Recent biographies of two of them, Dame Annabelle Rankin and Dame Margaret Guilfoyle, describe two very different women who took strikingly different paths to power and who, against the odds and in different eras, became ministers.

Rankin, a Queenslander who became the first Liberal woman in the Senate, served from 1946 and eventually became Australia’s first female minister; her biography is written by long-time Canberra journalist and lobbyist Peter Sekuless. Three months after Rankin left the Senate, in 1971, Margaret Guilfoyle, a Victorian, entered; she served until 1987, becoming a senior and powerful cabinet minister. Her life is told by the prolific Anne Henderson of the Sydney Institute.

For both, the path to power, and the exercise of it required innovation, political smarts and sheer tireless persistence. But both operated within heavy constraints imposed on them by the masculine character of their chosen career. These biographies tell us important stories about the past that prompt good questions about the present: in particular, they stand as an implicit challenge to the present-day Liberal Party which, by its own admission, struggles to find and promote female members of parliament.

Annabelle Rankin came from a prosperous middle-class family in Queensland’s coastal Wide Bay region. Her father, a Boer war veteran, was elected to state parliament as a conservative; he then ran a colliery. The elder of two daughters, Annabelle later claimed in a well-worn anecdote that a childhood game had involved imitating her father “being a member of parliament. I would play that I was opening fetes and all that sort of thing and making speeches.”

Rankin attended the all-girls Glennie (Anglican) School in Toowoomba, and her path forward continued via women’s and girls’ associations as state secretary of the Girl Guides and assistant commissioner with the YWCA. But it was the second world war that made her, opening up leadership roles in two women’s paramilitary forces, the Voluntary Aid Detachment and the Australian Women’s Army Service.

Sekuless suggests Rankin’s constant travel and networking within local communities in these roles provided invaluable training for the future senator. Before long, her political potential was recognised and she was encouraged — by a man — to seek Senate preselection with the conservative-leaning Queensland People’s Party, or QPP (which soon merged into the Liberal Party).

In July 1946 Rankin, a thirty-eight-year-old single woman, found herself as one of two women and four men seeking endorsement for two QPP Senate spots. The gender make-up of the interviewing panel is not recorded, but one can assume a predominant male gaze. One of those present, state director Charles Porter, resorted to the language of love to describe the “splendid” impression Rankin made:

She was a strikingly handsome young woman, with a fine lot of auburn hair and she had this ringing clear voice, and she enunciated the principles that she believed in with such a fervour and dedication that was almost a passion…

She also wore her service uniform, which no doubt helped.

After making her speech to the panel, Rankin went home convinced she had lost, walked the dog and went to bed. But she’d won, and within days — a novice and a novelty — she was campaigning around the state. Her first rally, near her hometown at Maryborough, attracted 150, two-thirds of them women, and it was the women who led the cheering as Rankin outlined her political philosophy/strategy.

“I honestly believe,” she told the meeting, “that the need of a woman’s voice in the Senate is vitally necessary.” The audience applauded, and she went on: “For a number of years I have worked with women’s and children’s organisations all over Queensland. I have been honoured and privileged to meet and know so many women and men of our fighting services during my service years during the war years. I worked for those women and men during the war, and I want to go on working to help the woman and the wife during the years of peace.”

Rankin and her handlers carefully fostered her image: within a month, she was being widely described in the press as “our Annabelle,” creating what Sekuless describes as “a cosy familiarity” about her. She also carefully deflected questions about her decision to remain single. (Sekuless suggests there may have been a fiancé, who may have died, but he leaves it unclear.) In any event, Rankin routinely generated a high personal vote; in 1946, at third spot, she recorded twice the vote of the man at number two.

Rankin became the first female opposition whip, but was dumped when Menzies won government in 1949. Reinstated as whip in 1951 and despite tireless service, she was never promoted to the ministry by Menzies. It was Harold Holt who appointed her as the first female minister in 1966 (in the housing portfolio; Enid Lyons had been made a minister in 1949, but without portfolio — a deliberately toothless honorific).

Rankin then suffered the distinction of becoming the first woman dumped from the ministry (in 1971, by Billy McMahon). She quit the Senate in March 1971, reportedly in tears, and accepted as consolation prize another first — as first female head of a diplomatic mission (high commissioner to New Zealand).

The Belfast-born, state school–educated Presbyterian Margaret McCartney had few of Rankin’s social advantages. Night school at Taylor’s College led to accountancy qualifications, a corporate job, and a friendship with young RAAF veteran Stan Guilfoyle. They married in 1952.

Margaret and Stan quickly got involved in local Liberal Party work. Stan’s mother was a member of the Australian Women’s National League — one of the women’s organisations that later merged into the Liberal Party — and she had enrolled Stan as a Liberal while he was still in uniform; he was destined to be elected to the state executive.

Margaret became branch secretary in South Camberwell, set up her own accountancy business and produced three children. With the state’s Liberal Party division requiring fifty–fifty organisational power-sharing between men and women, Margaret steadily acquired influence and leadership in the Victorian Liberal Women’s section, the state executive and the Federal Council.

But these positions didn’t translate easily into parliamentary preselection. When senator Ivy Wedgwood, elected to the Senate for the Liberals in 1950, prepared to step down in 1971, it was Stan she first approached about replacing her; only when he demurred did Margaret come into the frame.

Even so, of the twenty candidates for Wedgwood’s spot, seventeen were men. Guilfoyle was opposed by the premier, Henry Bolte, and by a (male) member of the interview panel who asked her who would look after the children if she were in the Senate. An unimpressed Beryl Beaurepaire, another member of the panel, put the same question to the next (male) candidate. Guilfoyle won.

Guilfoyle became the third female Liberal senator elected from Victoria (after Wedgwood and Marie Breen) and the seventh overall. In opposition during 1975 she was one of the key Liberal senators, along with Reg Withers and Ivor Greenwood, who hung tough in refusing to pass Gough Whitlam’s budget, paving the way for his dismissal. Her reward was a senior position in the incoming Fraser government, becoming the first female member of cabinet as minister for social security (1975–80) and finance (1980–83).

As a young journalist in the press gallery I had the distinct joy of covering both the Senate and the social security portfolio. To visit Guilfoyle’s office was to undertake quite a trek: she occupied room M152, the most remote point on the southwest corner of the old Parliament House, accessed at the end of a long, gloomy, empty, creaking corridor.

The office was diametrically opposite the prime minister’s office in the northeast corner, and this seemed a metaphor for the way the Senate exercised power in those days — with aloof disregard for the hustle and bustle of executive government. There was no mistaking the silent sense of power in the air. Once admitted, I would sit with her private secretary Rod Kemp, who imparted as background a few carefully selected crumbs of news.

Henderson provides the broad context of Guilfoyle’s portfolio battles and crises, informed by interviews with former staffers and departmental officers, and analyses the complex way in which, even as a Fraser loyalist, Guilfoyle’s defence of her social security budget and turf managed to thwart the prime minister’s overall drive for reforms.

These interviews yield the gem that Guilfoyle’s always-assured and measured parliamentary performance was enabled by her “handbag statistics” — a notebook of key portfolio facts maintained by her department. But unfortunately we don’t hear Guilfoyle’s own voice; perhaps because of that same understated style, her Hansard is dull rather than daring.

These easily readable biographies form part of a series of short biographical monographs edited by political scientist Scott Prasser and published by Connor Court. Prasser describes the series as “scholarly rather than academic” — a very fine distinction that seems to mean narrative in form with clear referencing of sources. Fair enough, though a few of the “academic” virtues would not be out of place, such as a critical approach to sources and a more considered acknowledgement of previously published research (for example, Marian Sawer and Marian Simms’s A Woman’s Place: Women and Politics in Australia).

Neither author really probes the institutional obstacles and advantages facing these women. As becomes clear, though, both careers were at least partly subject to the will and whim of the (male) prime ministers of the day. Menzies fully recognised the importance of women for the Liberal Party, as a matter of organisational structure, political philosophy and electoral strategy. But talented women were routinely overlooked in preselections. And as PM he ruthlessly pruned the ministerial careers of colleagues male and female.

Rankin had to wait for her promotion until Menzies had finally gone. Fraser, by contrast, had to repay Guilfoyle’s loyalty in 1975 with portfolio heft in government; it probably helped that she was Victorian in a time when all but one Liberal prime minister had been from the jewel-like state.

Equally, it’s clear — though again, not analysed in either biography — that the political careers of these women depended heavily on the dynamics of the Senate. Fewer elections, longer terms and a less volatile statewide electorate helped to protect incumbents, including women. Once Rankin was in, she stayed in. A similar dynamic was at work in Victoria.

In fact, Guilfoyle’s replacement of Wedgwood was a watershed moment, effectively reserving one Senate spot in Victoria for women. (When Guilfoyle retired in 1987, she was replaced by Kay Patterson; when Patterson retired in 2008, Helen Kroger was elected; but the sixty-three-year line came to an end in 2013 when Kroger, from third spot, lost to Ricky Muir the Motoring Enthusiast — a perfect symbol of the decline of Liberals, and Liberal women, in Victoria.)

But these institutional explanations deny the agency exercised by each of these women in negotiating a narrow path into and through their male-dominated workplace.

After one setback in 1949 — when she was dropped as opposition whip — Rankin sought the comfort of Enid Lyons. Lyons told her that she would be accepted, “so long as you manage to do the work that men do and do it as well, and at the same time don’t antagonise them.” In remarkably similar terms, the newly elected Guilfoyle was advised by husband Stan “not to take on any responsibilities or portfolios that were women’s issues. If she was to make it, she would make it as a person like any man.”

Both women did indeed do “the work that men do”: long hours, late nights and mute persistence in hard slog. Both had a prodigious work ethic. It might have been harder for Rankin, a curio item in the 1940s and 1950s, than for Guilfoyle, who in the 1970s and 1980s was able to become a serious player. Rankin remained unmarried and lacked the personal support of a family; Guilfoyle had to negotiate a more complicated work–family balance.

But who would offer such advice to today’s female MPs? With unprecedented numbers of women in parliament, ten cabinet ministers, and teal and Green crossbenchers galore, the numbers have changed, thanks in part to Labor quotas. The nature of representative political work has changed as well. In today’s politics, does anyone (even a man) need to work “like” a man or “as well as” a man?

As for “antagonising” male politicians, Julia Gillard and others have shown that outing misogynists is a legitimate and valuable part of a female political career. But in an earlier era, it is notable that so many of these Liberal pioneers were rewarded — partly in tacit exchange for not antagonising the men — with the highest imperial honours. Rankin, Guilfoyle, Wedgwood, Lyons were all titled “Dame.” Even Tangney accepted one, though it was against Labor policy. •

Annabelle Rankin
By Peter Sekuless | Connor Court | $19.95 | 134 pages

Margaret Guilfoyle
By Anne Henderson | Connor Court | $19.95 | 84 pages

The post Doing “the work that men do” appeared first on Inside Story.

He had lost two general elections in his nine years as party leader, but he had also saved Labour from annihilation and laid the ground for Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997. He continued to command respect across the party.

I worked with him on those programs. For some weeks we struggled to find a new, succinct definition of socialist ideology that would be fit for purpose. It was Neil who solved the problem, and with the utmost simplicity. Modern socialism should not be an ideology at all, but an ethic. The party’s long-term aims should leave out any reference to the ownership of businesses. The relationship between labour, capital and the state should be determined by the circumstances of the day. The party should abandon the goal, set out in 1918 and inscribed on each membership card, of “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” Instead, it should define itself in terms of liberty, social justice and opportunity for all.

This excursion down memory lane is prompted by a new book, more relevant to today’s centre-left throughout the democratic world than is suggested by its clunky title. In Futures of Socialism: “Modernisation,” the Labour Party, and the British Left, 1973–1997, Colm Murphy tells an important story more completely than anyone has done before: how Labour, step by painful step, shed its constitutional commitment to the abolition of capitalism and redefined its basic doctrine.

Everyone who played a part in or followed the drama at the time will have their own take on his analysis. Mine is that Murphy exaggerates the impact of some of the party’s fringe groups and understates the personal roles played by successive party leaders. But his book is likely to remain for some time the fullest account of what happened during those years.

Murphy’s story brings to mind Humpty Dumpty’s famous remark to Alice in Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” The etymology of “socialism” has ensured that disputes about its definition have been weaponised in a bitter struggle to wield power on the left. The word dates not from the time of Karl Marx, as many assume, or even from Welsh philanthropist Robert Owen’s cooperative model. Henri de Saint-Simon, a French politician and economist, invented the term in the 1820s. He wanted to replace autocracy with a more meritocratic society, one in which the arbitrary, self-serving power of the church, aristocracy, landowners and the military was replaced by that of merchants, manufacturers, scholars and workers coming together for the common good.

For pre-democratic times, Saint-Simon’s “socialism” was a radical vision of dispersed power. He fiercely opposed an over-mighty state. What Marx did was appropriate the term as part of his dream to replace capitalism with communism. At their heart, and for more than a century, the battles over the meaning of “socialism” have been over whose ideas to update for a more democratic age: Saint-Simon’s or Marx’s?

Labour’s adoption in 1918 of “common ownership” in Clause 4 of its constitution put the party closer to Marx (though, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, its authors tried to make it not too close). For the next forty years, Labour leaders espoused the language and adopted “Clause 4” policies: up to a point, that is. Clement Attlee’s post-1945 government nationalised the energy, transport, and iron and steel industries, but left most of the private sector alone. Although hailed by subsequent left-wingers as the radical model for future Labour governments, Attlee stopped well short of implementing the strategy demanded by the party’s grassroots. In December 1944, the party conference backed the nationalisation of land and all heavy industry. Attlee simply ignored it.

Attlee’s government lasted for six years. It was Britain’s first majority government with the freedom to secure parliamentary backing for its full manifesto program. By supporting a mixed economy rather than pursuing the eventual abolition of capitalism, it provoked the question: what kind of socialism did the party really believe in?

Hugh Gaitskell attempted to answer it. He succeeded Attlee as party leader in 1955, four years into thirteen years of Conservative rule. In 1960, following Labour’s third general election defeat, he told the party’s annual conference that he wanted to amend the party’s aims. The delegates thwarted him. A messy procedural deal prevented a vote in which Gaitskell would have suffered an acutely embarrassing defeat. Instead the issue was dropped. It would be more than thirty years before it would be picked up again.

How then, could Labour square the circle of being nominally in favour of “collective ownership” but not really in practice? Harold Wilson, who became party leader following Gaitskell’s death in 1963 and led Labour to victory the following year, offered an ingenious solution. He drew on the work of the party’s “revisionist” thinkers to argue that socialism was not purely an ideology; it was also an ethic. He said that the Labour Party owed “more to Methodism than to Marx.” He didn’t disown Marx; he argued for the state to have a major role in planning a modern economy rather than just leave the private sector alone.

In government, Wilson didn’t oversee much planning; but in terms of keeping on board the rival wings of the party, he was successful.

The ethic-plus-ideology compromise held for the next three decades — though only just. In the early 1980s, following the defeat of the Labour government in 1979, the party’s left made a determined effort to restore the primacy of ideological socialism. Its most prominent MP, Tony Benn, challenged Denis Healey, the incumbent, for the party’s deputy leadership and came within one percentage point of victory. Though the left was defeated, the vote was so close, and the danger from Benn’s faction seemed so great, that almost thirty Labour MPs ended up defecting to the newly formed Social Democratic Party, which explicitly repudiated the ideology embedded in Clause 4.

These divisions contributed to Labour’s worst postwar defeat in 1983. In October that year, Kinnock was elected leader. His Welsh roots were on the left of the party, but he opposed the stance of Benn and his followers. A charismatic speaker, Kinnock was Labour’s best hope for holding the party together and hauling it back to electability.

During his nine years as Labour’s leader, Kinnock took his party on a journey of ideological reform. His starting point was an updated version of the conventional critique of capitalism. In his party conference speech in 1984 he warned of “the irrational response to technological and economic change which the market economy and the social market economy makes, and has always made — huge numbers of unemployed, millions more who live in constant fear of unemployment and the insecurity which it brings.”

In 1987, Kinnock shifted towards a more nuanced critique: “whilst the market is an adequate system for deciding the price and availability of many goods and services… the market alone will never ensure that flow of investment in machines, people, skills and ideas which is necessary to gain and sustain long-term economic strength and the employment that comes with it.” Instead of rejecting markets as such, he now rejected markets “alone.”

The following year he went further: “There are those, like the government, who simply say ‘private good, public bad.’ There are those who say, in a mirror image, ‘public good, private bad.’ Neither of them are dealing with the realities… Neither are asking the real question ‘does it work?’”

Kinnock went on to attack Labour’s left wing even more directly: “Comrades, the day may come when this conference, this movement, is faced with a choice of socialist economies. The debate will be fascinating as the Labour Party conference chooses between the two. But until that day comes… the fact is that the kind of economy we will be faced with when we win the election will be a market economy. That is what we have to deal with and we will have to make it work better than the Tories do.”

In his final conference speech before the 1992 election, Kinnock took his evolving argument to its logical conclusion: “An innovation-driven economy needs a tax system and economic policies which promote sustained investment. It needs monopolies and mergers regulations that promote competition and safeguard company programmes of research and development. We shall make those changes.” Common ownership? Forget it.

Despite gaining almost fifty seats, Labour lost the 1992 election and Kinnock resigned as party leader. But one piece of unfinished business remained. Labour’s membership cards still set out the goal of common ownership. As long as it did, left-wing party members could point to Clause 4 of the party’s constitution to insist on sticking to their ambition of one day killing off capitalism. This was what made Kinnock’s TV documentaries so significant. For the first time, someone who had led the party explicitly renounced ideological socialism altogether.

At first Kinnock’s plan found few takers. Even Blair was sceptical. In June 1994, a few months after the programs were broadcast, Blair stood for party leader. Asked in a TV interview if he would change Labour’s stated aims, Blair dismissed the suggestion. “No one,” he said, wanted it to be “a priority for the party.”

He soon changed his mind. Three months later he told the party that he wanted it to do just that. The following April a special party conference voted to abandon the aims it had espoused for almost eight decades, and committed the party instead to the ethic of serving “the many not the few.” In July 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of Attlee’s 1945 election victory, Blair set out his concept of socialism in a lecture to the Fabian Society.

“Since the collapse of communism,” he said, “the ethical basis of socialism is the only one that has stood the test of time. This socialism is based on a moral assertion that individuals are interdependent… This concept of socialism requires a form of politics in which we share responsibility both to fight poverty, prejudice and unemployment, and to create the conditions in which we can truly build one nation — tolerant, fair, enterprising, inclusive… Once socialism is defined in this way — as social-ism — we can be liberated from our history and not chained by it.”

By inserting the hyphen — “social-ism” — Blair was putting himself firmly on the side of Saint-Simon and against Marx. He underlined the point by rebranding his party as “New Labour.” In going on to win three general elections and remaining prime minister for ten years, he could ensure that his philosophy took root.

Murphy’s book ends in 1997, but it’s worth bringing his story up to date. Ideological socialism returned for a spell after Jeremy Corbyn was elected party leader in 2015. Asked in a TV interview in 2018 whether capitalism got anything right, Corbyn floundered. He knew that it would be electorally disastrous to say he wanted to kill off the private sector, but his life-long opposition to it was clear from his answer: “Well, it does invest, mainly for its own benefit. But it does of course get challenged. Isn’t that what social movements are about, isn’t that what trade unions are about? Isn’t that what our democracy is about?”

In 2019 Corbyn led Labour to an even worse defeat than in 1983. Enough party members got the message of that trauma to elect the more moderate Keir Starmer as leader — one who has become more moderate still by ditching some of the more left-wing policies he had espoused in the contest to become leader. He picked up the “ethical socialism” baton that Kinnock had passed to Blair and Brown, and which Corbyn had not so much dropped as thrown aside.

In May this year he went even further. “I believe in the power of dynamic government,” he told the British Chambers of Commerce. “But I also believe in the brilliance of British business and I’ve changed my Labour Party to reflect that. We’re not just a pro-business party, we’re a party that is proud of being pro-business, that respects the contribution profit makes to jobs, growth and our tax base, gets that working people want success as well as support. Understands that robust private sector growth is the only way we pay our way in the world.”

Not even Blair’s embrace of ethical socialism in his early days as leader was as effusive in its praise of capitalism.

Within the next eighteen months, Britain’s voters will elect a new government. All recent evidence — from by-elections, local elections and opinion polls — points to Starmer becoming prime minister, though whether he will enjoy the luxury of a clear overall majority remains to be seen.

What also remains to be seen is how what Starmer calls “the moral case for socialism” will look in practice once he is running the country rather than devising plans from the frustrating comfort of opposition. He will face huge challenges: climate change, the uncertain future of globalisation, making sure AI does more good than harm, the fallout from Brexit, and a weak British economy where living standards have stalled and poverty spread. Can ethical socialism rise to these challenges, or will it be vulnerable to another Corbyn-style assault from the left?

Even if ideological socialism has been laid to rest, the doctrine of ethical socialism is certain to evolve. Murphy rightly links the modernisation story to a broader range of issues, such as gender and race. At its core, is “socialism” becoming more a cultural than economic project? Its purpose looks set to be a continuing source of debate and dispute.

Murphy’s conclusion from Labour’s painful transition from ideology to ethic is that the party’s “irresistible restlessness and creativity” is its “enduring virtue,” even if this makes for a bumpy ride. The story of how bumpy, and how successful, that ride turns out to be over the next decade or so will deserve a sequel. •

Futures of Socialism: “Modernisation,” the Labour Party, and the British Left, 1973–1997
By Colm Murphy | Cambridge University Press | $160.95 | 320 pages

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Former National Party leader Barnaby Joyce recently made some comments about the makeup of the Voice to Parliament:

What you’ll see is people on $300,000 a year, twenty-four of them, and they won’t be elected, they’ll be selected. Which one are you going to select? Which tribe are you selecting from? I’ll give you a little tip, they don’t get along. You pick one, watch out, the other one’s coming. Right down to families, families don’t get along. A group of people, highly paid, they’ll be like a quasi House of Lords.

As the late, great Tommy Cooper used to say, “Deja Moo: the feeling that you’ve heard this bullshit before.”

We all recognise bullshit when we see it, but do we recognise it as a genuine philosophical concept? Could we one day find ourselves attending an erudite lecture on the topic by Oxford University’s Rupert Keith Murdoch Professor of Philosophy?

If you were in the habit of visiting bookshops around 2005 you may recall encountering a little hardback called On Bullshit. Written by someone with the unlikely name of Harry G. Frankfurt, it became an unlikely bestseller.

On Bullshit looked like one of those “joke” books they stack next to the cashier’s desk. I’d happily bet that many of its buyers were jaded Christmas shoppers on the lookout for a last-minute stocking stuffer. But it was, in fact, a serious work of scholarship, with a serious message.

Frankfurt, who died this month at the age of ninety-four, was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University who made substantial contributions to moral philosophy. He is also the father of Bullshit Studies and On Bullshit is the nascent discipline’s seminal work.

I’m sure he hoped to be remembered for his writings about free will and moral responsibility in a deterministic universe, but it was his pathbreaking theorising on bullshit that got him invited onto 60 Minutes and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, and assured him a place in the popular culture.

By all accounts Frankfurt was a committed intellectual: it was philosophy, not fame or money, that got him out of bed each morning. Predictably, he was also committed to the truth — as a concept and as a practice. Asked why he chose Descartes as the subject of his first book, for example, Frankfurt happily admitted that he was attracted to the brevity of the Frenchman’s books.

First published in 1986 as an essay in Raritan and then as that very short book, On Bullshit grabbed the imagination of so many because it identified something that was obvious as soon as Frankfurt pointed it out: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”

Using his training as an analytical philosopher, Frankfurt then went further and defined this phenomenon: bullshit is not just lying, it is indifference to the facts: “the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.”

Truth-tellers and liars, Frankfurt argues, are playing in the same game on the same playing field. Liars may seek advantage by lying to hide the truth but, just like an adherent of the truth, they know what it is. In essence, they agree about the rules of the game and have their own kind of respect for the facts. A liar understands that if he’s caught out in a lie, there will be consequences.

The bullshitter, on the other hand, is sitting in the grandstand, tweeting on a smartphone, and pretty much ignoring the game of truth and lies. The bullshitter’s intentions are very different. As the old saying goes: “Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through.”

As Frankfurt writes:

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all bets are off… He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.

The great bullshitters of our age — you know who I mean — are certainly highly skilled purveyors in counterfeit thought; they don’t care if what they say is true or is not true.

What they really care about is conveying a politically useful impression of themselves to their audience; they care about their image and the power that flows from it. They bluff to deceive and deceive to bluff; they cherrypick ideas and facts and present them as an advertisement for themselves.

This is why Frankfurt believed that bullshit is a greater dishonesty than lying: if you don’t have to believe that something is true, you’re free to believe that anything might be. In a democratic system where accountability is supposed to depend on facts, this is highly corrosive. The public square becomes a kickboxing ring without an umpire.

Unfortunately for Bullshit Studies, Frankfurt’s argument is weakest when he attempts to explain just why there is so much bullshit around nowadays. “Bullshit is unavoidable,” he argues, “whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” Now this is true — to a certain extent.

Writing near the beginning of the digital age, Frankfurt never anticipated that the rivers of bullshit would soon become tsunamis, supercharged by the internet, social media and a 24/7 media cycle.

But none of this really explains where the original impetus comes from and why it’s so rewarding for its proponents. Unfortunately, I think it comes from us: the audience.

Barnaby Joyce says things, and because they’re colourful and he’s a member of parliament, the media reports them. Then, as he intends, someone else responds in outrage and the media reports on that. By creating a clickfest, Joyce has manoeuvred debate about the Voice referendum to just where he wants it: circling the drain.

Frankfurt’s short essay — great as it is — would have benefited from being just a bit less short: bullshit has a long history.

In his classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964, the historian Richard Hofstadter explains that American politics has always been “an arena for angry minds.” A nation’s political rhetoric, he says, reveals its political psychology — and it’s not a pretty picture.

“I call it the paranoid style,” writes Hofstadter, “simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy.” Take one bullshitter, add a dash of social media, stir into a bowl of paranoid style and you get a recipe for disaster.

Hofstadter’s essay is full of examples from American history, such as the red scare of senator Joe McCarthy, but he argues that the paranoid style can be found anywhere.

It’s a view supported by recent science, As one survey of the field suggests, “paranoia should not solely be viewed as a pathological symptom of a mental disorder but also as a part of a normally functioning human psychology.” Being a bit paranoid was an evolutionary advantage. Our ancestors who were too scared to go into the dark forest may have been more likely to pass on their genes because oftentimes the dark woods were dangerous. And then the tribe’s big man — possibly the original bullshit artist — came along and exploited it.

Harry Frankfurt learnt the hard way about the dark side of our fascination with bullshit. Impressed by the popularity of his little book, Knopf paid him a six-figure advance for whatever he came up with next. The sales of the book he produced, On Truth, were disappointing. •

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