An opening montage blends images of an atomic fireball, tanks in the streets, burning villages, crowds tearing down statues and leaders being saluted by military parades. Historian Timothy Naftali speaks through it all: at its peak, he says, the cold war touched every continent, shaping the decolonisation of empires and transforming domestic politics in the great cities of Europe, North America and Asia.

As Knappenberger acknowledges, the series is “insanely audacious.” It features original footage of critical moments, interviews with people who lived through worst of them, and commentary from around a hundred historians and political insiders, many of whom were directly involved in the crises. Lessons have been learned from documentary-maker Ken Burns, with talking heads presented as dramatis personae. It’s all about managing tone and pacing so that reflections from the present create depths of field for visually evoked scenes from the past.

Knappenberger achieves something of the Burns effect in bringing out an at-times unbearable sense of how these events were experienced by those caught up in them. Rapid montages conveying the scale and density of the upheavals are counterposed with sustained evocations of the experiences of those caught up in them.

Hiroshima, considered a purely military target by the US government, had a civilian population of 350,000. Prewar photographs show carts and bicycles in narrow streets spanned by arching lamps, a place of small traders and modest resources. People who were living in the city as small children deliver their testimonies steadily, quietly — though, as one of them says, visibly working to sustain his composure, “I hate to remember those days.”

Howard Kakita, aged seven, was on his way to school with his five-year-old brother when the warnings started. The explosion came as they returned to their grandparents’ house, which was obliterated. They dug themselves out of the rubble and fled the city through the ruins and carnage. Keiko Ogura’s brother told her he had seen something drop from one of the planes flying over, a tiny thing, which did not fall directly, but was caught for a while in the slipstream of the aircraft before arching down. Then came the flash, the loss of consciousness and the awakening to a world in which “everything was broken.”

The effect of the blast on human bodies creates scars in the memory. Corpses turned to ash on contact. The river was full of them. It’s hard to watch, and to listen to these accounts, as it should be. They are a necessary corrective to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, with its brief, stylised evocation of the horrors, firmly subordinated to the main story of an American hero and his tribulations.

Is it even possible to see such a disastrous train of events from “both sides?” That, surely, is the question we were left with by the cold war that followed. For the first time in history, two global superpowers were frozen in a deadlock of mutually assured destruction. The rush to catastrophe was paralysed by symmetry.

That, at least, was one version of the narrative. But mutually assured paranoia, the more complex and confusing side of things, was anything but paralysing. The belief in an enemy working in secret on unimaginably evil weaponry provokes an overriding conviction that your own side must secretly work on something equivalent or preferably more lethal. This is the “hot” equation behind the cold war.

With technological escalation seemingly taking on a life of its own, no one could comprehend the scale of what was being created. The American government’s messaging was all about survivability — backyard fallout shelters, “duck and dive” drill for schoolchildren — as if a small wooden desk might be an effective shield.

The language used at the time betrays a pitiful divorce from reality. A military officer flippantly describes a planned thermonuclear test as something that will make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers. The monstrous Bikini Atoll explosion, with 7,000 times the power of the Hiroshima blast, give its name to a new provocative style of swimwear.

“Institutional Insanity” is the title of the episode that deals with all this. It is as if the human brain simply isn’t coping with the consequences of its own activities. No one really knew what they were doing, comments nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, and testing became a kind of game for hyperactive experimentalists.

In interviews recorded before his death last year, Daniel Ellsberg recalls joining “the smartest group of people I ever did associate with” at Rand Corporation, men seen in contemporary photographs relaxing with their feet up on their desks, sleeves rolled up, smoking. But it is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, grimacing in close-up as he advises on enemy psychology, who gets the last word in this particular sequence. “That was a documentary,” says Ellsberg.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev took a leaf out of the Strangelove manual. With an arsenal that couldn’t catch up with massive overreach of his opponents, he sought to weaponise American fears by making exaggerated claims, mounting the covert Active Measures program, which spread misinformation through news media and other forms of public communication.

Against this backdrop, the achievement of Khrushchev’s ultimate successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, in defusing the collective psychosis was extraordinary, whatever his political failings from the Russian perspective. Polarised views of Gorbachev’s legacy remain one of the deepest challenges to the West’s comprehension of post-Soviet Russia. Putin’s pronouncement that the break-up of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the modern era has driven the new wave of military aggression that now confronts us.

One of Turning Point’s great strengths is its engagement with the complexities of moral arbitration, which are explored in the extensive commentary offered those in a position to offer genuine insights. Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, now a professor of international affairs in New York, gives an account of the secret speech of 1956, in which Khrushchev made public the scale of the purges of the Stalin era and condemned the cult of personality that had poisoned Soviet politics.

Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq and other books on American cold war policy, delivers an excoriating analysis of the thinking behind interventions in Guatemala, Chile and Iran. Covert operations like these were one of the defining elements of the cold war; we get insider views of the activities of the CIA and its Soviet counterpart from dissidents now free to tell the tale and bring into focus some of the minor players who shaped events.

The cult of personality accounts for much of the evil in the modern political world, but an excessive focus on these figures is a problem in itself, as we are learning with the media response to Trump in America now. A personality-driven view of history glosses over the influence of those in the supporting cast — the secret service directors, spies, foreign policy advisers, diplomats, propagandists, journalists — and, it must be stressed, the voting public, who allow themselves to be swayed by flagrant manipulation.

Are we returning to the cold war? That question runs through Turning Point, culminating in the final episode on Ukraine. “History is not history,” says journalist Lesley Blume, “but we are in an ongoing tide.” •

The post Roaring back appeared first on Inside Story.

A modern addition to the pantheon is a university professor and writer who also worked in America’s National Intelligence Council, State Department and Defense Department.

Step forward Joseph Nye, the man who invented the concepts of “soft power” and “smart power” and set them beside “hard power.” Described by one of his Washington contemporaries as “the Grandmaster of the study of power,” Nye coined soft power to describe the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce. The United States could use culture and communications to influence the decisions and behaviour of others in ways that military force could not reach. Nye stands with Talleyrand, who advised Napoleon: “You can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them.”

Military power can bully, economic power can buy, but soft power is blarney magic.

Ideas set international standards in the same way that American software set the standards for the world’s computers. Thus, the lifestyle promoted by American media and the promise of plenty of American supermarkets helped undermine the Soviet Union, backed by the hard power of military forces and nuclear weapons. Mickey Mouse stood with the Marines.

Hard power rests on command, coercion or cash — “the ability to change what others do.” Soft co-optive power, Nye wrote in his 1990 book on the changing nature of American power, is “the ability to shape what others want” through attraction.

Millions of Google citations show the reach of soft power, Nye writes, but “the most surprising was in 2007 when the president of China declared soft power to be their national objective.” For Nye, the result was “countless requests for interviews, including a private dinner in Beijing when the foreign minister asked me how China could increase its soft power. A concept I outlined while working at my kitchen table in 1989 was now a significant part of the great power competition and discourse.”

Nye has seen his idea become an instrument with practical effects: soft power shifts the way leaders talk and generals act. Attending a state dinner at the White House in 2015 (“the hall was filled with cherry blossom and a Marine band in scarlet jackets was playing”), Nye shakes hands with president Barack Obama to be told “everybody knows about Nye’s soft power.”

Nye’s recently published memoir muses about his “life in the American century,” the title taken from a famous 1941 editorial by Henry Luce, creator of Time and Life magazines. Nye, born in 1937, dates the American century from the moment the United States entered the second world war: “Some have referred to an American empire, but our power always had limits. It is more accurate to think of the American century as the period since World War II during which time, for better or worse, America has been the pre-eminent power in global affairs.”

The United States could still be the strongest power in 2045, he thinks; in which case the American century would, indeed, mark a hundred years. The caveats on that prediction are that “we should not expect the future to resemble the past, and my optimism has been tempered by the recent polarisation of our society and politics.”

This leading member of the American foreign policy establishment offers his biography as illumination for fellow foreign policy wonks and tragics. Most memoirs look inward; the chapter headings of Nye’s book are organised around the administrations of US presidents and America’s international role.

Nye and his friend Robert Keohane are identified as cofounders of the school of analysis of international affairs known as “neoliberalism.” While not disavowing that role, Nye writes that he and Keohane regard neoliberalism as an “over-simplified label.”

Whether in government or university, Nye’s life is one of constant travel, constant conferences and constant writing. In the Defense Department in 1995, “alliance maintenance” sent him to fifty-three countries. The military parades became a blur but the banquets were the real ordeal: sent abroad to eat for his country, Nye jested he would go out “in a blaze of calories.”

Emerging from an “unofficial meeting” with Taiwan’s defence minister, Nye is told that his father has died: “On Friday, November 4, 1994, I had the odd experience of picking up the New York Times and finding myself quoted in a front-page story on Saudi Arabia, while my father’s obituary appeared on page thirty-three. I wept.”

The motto of the public intellectual is “I think, ergo I write” (my words, not his). Nye exemplifies the dictum. He is the author of thirty books and contributor to or editor of another forty-five; his textbook ran to ten editions and sold 100,000 copes. (Here’s the Inside Story review of his book on the foreign policy morality of US presidents from FDR to Trump.) He writes a column for Project Syndicate; topics so far this year: “Is Nuclear Proliferation Back?,” “American Greatness and Decline” and “What Killed US-China Engagement?”

Graduating from Princeton at the end of the Eisenhower years, Nye planned to become a Marine officer. (“All able-bodied young men faced the draft in those days, and I was a healthy specimen and looking forward to the challenge.”) Instead, one of his professors pushed him to apply for a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and he won:

One result was that, instead of joining the Marines after graduation and winding up as an officer in Vietnam, it took me thirty-five years before I saw service in the Department of Defense, and when I first went to Vietnam it was as dean of the Kennedy School to visit an educational program we had there. Any time I am tempted by hubris, I remember that much of where the roulette ball lands in the wheel of life is outside our hands.

Nye worked for two Democrat presidents. For Jimmy Carter, he was in charge of policy designed to slow the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Under Bill Clinton, he chaired the National Intelligence Council and then went to Defense to run the “Pentagon’s little State Department” as assistant secretary for international security affairs.

Professors who go to work in Washington can offer an anthropologist’s view of the tribes that serve the president and congress. Kissinger is good on this, but the best rules for working the swamp were penned by John Kenneth Galbraith: have the president behind you (or give that impression); adopt a modest aspect of menace — arrogance backed by substance can work; never threaten to resign because that tells your allies you might leave; but be ready to lose and leave town. Nye gets much outsider understanding into a paragraph:

In Washington, there was no shortage of bureaucrats and rival political appointees eager to take my job — or leave me with the title but empty it of substance. I had been issued a hunting licence, but there was no guarantee I would bag my game. My first instinct as an academic was to try to do things myself, but that was impossible… I realised I was drowning. I discovered that unlike academia, politics and bureaucracy comprise a team sport. The secret to success was to attract others to want to do the work for me. In that sense, I learned soft power the hard way.

Nye records two of the “major regrets” Bill Clinton offered about his presidency: “having an inexperienced White House staff and underestimating the bitterness of Washington politics.”

Because of his diaries, Nye’s memoir offers tone and temperature on how different the world felt as the cold war ended. Washington was optimistic about Russia and fearful of Japan: “economic friction was high, and many in both Tokyo and Washington regarded the military alliance as a historical relic now that the cold war was over.”

Japan debated the idea of relying on the United Nations rather than the United States for security. Nye argued against both the economic hawks in Washington and the security doves in Tokyo, pointing to the rise of China and problem of North Korea. “The logic was simple,” he writes. “In a three-country balance of power, it is better to be part of the two than the isolated one.”

During defence negotiations in Tokyo, Japanese officials took him out for evening drinks and cut to the fundamentals: “How much could they trust us? As the Chinese market grew larger, wouldn’t we abandon Japan for China? I answered no, because Japan was a democracy and was not a threat. It seemed to work.”

In 1995, with “moderates still in control in Moscow, there was a sense of optimism about the future of US–Russia relations.” That mood helped drive the expansion of NATO. At talks in Geneva, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev discussed the idea of a “new NATO” with a “collective security pact” and “partial membership in NATO” for Russia. Nye wrote in his diary that Russia would accept a bigger NATO “if it is done right — and if Russia doesn’t change.”

By 1999, the optimism was gone. The US now believed that “Russia would not collapse but would develop a form of corrupt state capitalism.” Talking to former colleagues in Washington, Nye is “struck that nobody seemed to know much about Putin or to have realised how important he would become.”

As the US century enters this century, China takes centre stage as the peer competitor. Asked by Xinhua News Agency whether he’s a China hawk or dove, Nye replies that he is an owl. At a dinner in Beijing in 2012 a member of the Communist Party central committee tells Nye: “We are Confucians in Marxist clothing.”

The following year, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi invites Nye to a private meal “to quiz me about how China could increase its soft power.” Nye replies that raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and celebrating a gorgeous traditional culture are “important sources of attraction for China. At the same time, as long as it had territorial disputes with its neighbours, and as long as its insistence on tight party control over civil society and human rights continued, China would face serious limits on its soft power in Asia and in the West.”

The US power equation has shifted significantly in two decades. In the early years of this century, as the United States invaded Iraq, Nye’s concern was about “unipolar hubris.” Today, he frets about a polarized America turning inward. He thinks the greatest danger the United States faces “is not that China will surpass us, but that the diffusion of power will produce entropy, or the inability to get anything done.”

In the final pages of his memoir, Nye assesses the balance of power between China and the US, and says America has five long-term advantages:

• Geography: the United States is surrounded by two oceans and two friendly neighbours, while China “shares a border with fourteen other countries and is engaged in territorial disputes with several.”

• Energy: China depends on energy imports far more than the United States.

• Finance: the United States gets power from the international role of the dollar and its large financial institutions. “A credible reserve currency depends on it being freely convertible, as well as on deep capital markets and the rule of law, which China lacks.”

• Demography: the United States is the only major developed country projected to hold its place (third) in the global population ranking. “The US workforce is expected to increase, while China’s peaked in 2014.”

• Technology: America is “at the forefront in key technologies (bio, nano, and information). China, of course, is investing heavily in research and development and scores well in the number of patents, but by its own measures its research universities still rank behind American ones.”

Nye’s fear is that domestic change within the United States could endanger the American century. Even if its external power remains dominant, he writes, a country can lose its internal virtue:

All told, the US holds a strong hand in the great power competition, but if we succumb to hysteria about China’s rise or complacency about its “peak,” we could play our cards poorly. Discarding high-value cards — including strong alliances and influence in international institutions — would be a serious mistake. China is not an existential threat to the US unless we make it one by blundering into a major war. This historical analogy that worries me is 1914, not 1941.

Nye ends his memoir with the humility that befits an old man: “I cannot be fully sure how much of my optimism rests on my analysis or my genes.” In his final paragraph, he ruefully notes that “the more I learn, the less I know… Though I have spent a lifetime following my curiosity and trying to understand us, I do not leave many answers for my grandchildren. The best I can do is leave them my love and a faint ray of guarded optimism.” •

A Life in the American Century
By Joseph S. Nye | Polity Press | 254 pages | $51.95

The post The father of “soft power” appeared first on Inside Story.

Offering another perspective, Ann-Marie Priest’s recent biography of Gwen Harwood presented the case of a woman writer fighting to be published and recognised despite her husband’s obstruction and the daily grind of domestic life. Charmian Clift is a third example of wifedom: a writer married to a writer who was acclaimed for a novel, My Brother Jack, that he admitted could not have been written without her help.

The lives of Clift and George Johnston retain a certain glamour because they were spent partly on the Greek island of Hydra, mixing with Leonard Cohen, Sidney Nolan and other artists, during the 1950s. Interest has been renewed in recent years with the release of Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s study of their role in the Hydra artistic community, Half the Perfect World (2018), Sue Smith’s play Hydra (produced in Brisbane and Adelaide in 2019) and a film rumoured to be in production. Nadia Wheatley, who has long been the leading expert on Clift, published an excellent biography, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, in 2001 and edited a selection of her essays published in a new edition as Sneaky Little Revolutions in 2022.

Now comes The End of the Morning, the first section of an autobiographical novel Clift never completed but Wheatley believes can be read independently as a novella. Readers of Wheatley’s biography will recognise it as a significant source for her account of Clift’s childhood and adolescence in the quarry community near Bombo Beach, north of the NSW coastal town of Kiama.

The novella presents a vivid and charming picture of a childhood spent amid the freedom of the beach and bushland, Clift’s parents managing their poverty with creative resourcefulness and a commitment to literature as a reliable means of access to a wider imaginative world. Some recognisable tropes of autobiographical fiction appear — the rebellious tomboy narrator in rivalry with a more conventionally feminine sister for her parents’ attention; the narrator’s delight in learning — but this is not the conventional story of workers beaten down by the Depression. The father has chosen to live beyond the grind of English city life, among workers in Australia, so that he can enjoy a life with plenty of fishing.

Wheatley explains Clift’s struggle to meet the deadlines of the Commonwealth Literary Fund grant she’d been given for the novel, and gently outlines the anxieties that led to her suicide (which she refers to indirectly as “a cry for help that went unheard”). She speculates about the direction the novel might have taken without suggesting that Clift would have dealt with the sexual experiences that worried her so much at the time of her death.

Many readers will know that as a teenager Clift had a child who was adopted at birth. (She could not know that the child would become the artist and writer Suzanne Chick, herself the mother of Gina Chick who has gained fame in the reality television series, Alone.) But Clift’s concern at the time of her death was the imminent publication of George Johnston’s novel Clean Straw For Nothing, which depicted some of their sexual liaisons on Hydra.

As a kind of scaffolding for the unfinished novel, the rest of The End of the Morning is made up of a selection of thirty essays from the 225 columns that Clift wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald between 1964 and her death in 1969, chosen for their references to family life and childhood. Where the unfinished novel may frustrate the reader looking for a completed story, these short essays show Clift in total command of her form.

These 1000- to 1500-word pieces are full of thoughtful observations about her life and the social world around her. Sometimes she mentions the artistic community on Hydra, sometimes aspects of Sydney life, including renovations to her home in Mosman and the building of the Opera House. Often, she makes literary allusions to John Donne or Laurence Sterne or the most popular Romantic poets, but she never puts on airs — she has met many contemporary English poets and was struck by “over-reverence” before realising “that poets can be just as vain ordinary, peevish, arrogant, timid or plain dull as other people.” The essays assume that her readers also admit literature into their lives.

Clift understood that her column needed to be upbeat and inoffensive, so she makes no mention of her husband’s debilitating illness or the difficulties of her private life. The closest she comes to a political statement is when she contrasts the goals of younger and older women — helping women return to work in one case, engaging them in handicrafts and theatre parties in the other — at the inaugural meeting of a new women’s organisation. There is a lightness of touch and a clear sense of an audience that is made up, by implication, of other intelligent suburban women.

The same close observation enlivens the essays and the novel. Clift delivers wonderful lists of things: “On a Cluttered Mantelpiece” is made up mainly of descriptions of various objects found on her mantelpieces and their histories. “An Old Address Book” does a similar thing with places and people. Here are the county English:

men wearing either tweeds and caps and driving farm utilities or dinner jackets and driving Bentleys, mucking in with the pigs or serving champagne by candlelight and ladies who alternated between maintaining an Amazonian posture on perfectly frightening horses (and that horn so plangent over the Cotswold hills) and rising with that twitch of the trailing skirt that summoned all females at the table to retire and leave the gentlemen to their port.

Reading this you feel there is a novel waiting to happen.

Clift’s writing conveys a nostalgia for a lost Australia, not only for present-day readers but within the essays themselves, as she often remembers Sydney’s past and her own youth on the south coast. The End of the Morning also looks back fondly at the lost world of childhood, giving some clue to Clift’s role in the success of My Brother Jack. The novel is alive with a sense of what it was like to live in suburban Melbourne in the 1930s that Johnston couldn’t match in the Hydra of Clean Straw for Nothing or the Sydney of A Cartload of Clay. Clearly this detailed observation was Clift’s particular talent, just as her adaptation of My Brother Jack (1967) for television showed her gift for dramatic concision.

Clift’s newspaper columns remind me of Helen Garner’s articles for the Age, collected in True Stories and later books, and her comment that feature writing saved her from the loneliness of fiction and the need to “make things up.” Clift also admits to being gregarious, and it may be that she too found personal journalism suited her personality. But the literary world always rates the novel more highly than this kind of ephemeral writing and she struggled to finish her most ambitious work.

As well as her fears about the revelations in her husband’s next novel, perhaps the attitudes of the 1960s made it impossible for her to write about her teenage pregnancy, let alone sex outside marriage. We can speculate and regret the loss of what might have been an important addition to Australian fiction. At least we have these entertaining essays to enjoy. •

The End of the Morning
By Charmian Clift | Edited by Nadia Wheatley | NewSouth | $34.99 | 240 pages

The post A fragment of a life appeared first on Inside Story.

In England, although he had been exhibited at the Royal Academy, it had again rejected his application for membership. His English and European landscapes, they seem to have felt, were not distinctive enough: his watercolours — and he was active in marketing the genre generally — were seen as potboilers. Glover hoped for some sort of rejuvenation. “The expectation of finding a new Beautiful World,” he wrote to a patron, “new landscapes new trees new flowers new Animals Birds &c &c is delightful to me.”

“I mean to take possession of 2,000 Acres,” Glover continued, and “to have a vineyard &c &c upon it.” Born the son of a tenant farmer, a gentleman-proprietor is what he wanted to be, and became. A responsible but strict father, he ran a tight ship: one (unmarried) son functioned as his personal assistant. Altogether, with the sons and their families, free labourers and convict servants, Glover was patriarch to some thirty or forty people. (We tend to forget that big colonial properties were in effect small villages.) Eventually he ran some 3000 sheep on the property, named Patterdale after a favourite spot in the Lake District. And there he died.

Ron Radford’s book, building on the scholarship of Ian McPhee, David Hansen and others, is particularly focused — as the subtitle indicates — on Glover’s Tasmanian period. But due attention is given to the English and Continental paintings, since Glover kept producing them even at Patterdale. The thing was, they sold — in England. In Tasmania, inferior paintings by English artists were preferred by homesick settlers. And they had no interest in local scenes. Apart from a few commissions, it was only at the end of his life that Glover sold one or two major Tasmanian paintings locally. He was, as Radford puts it, “the key, though isolated, figure in what can be called Tasmania’s ‘golden age’ of colonial prosperity, culture and art.”

Radford, as a sometime gallery director, is fully aware of the importance of the market, together with patronage and questions of framing. This practicality carries across to the placement of the sumptuous illustrations: they are always adjacent to the discussion of the paintings, even repeated if necessary.

Glover was a practical, prudent man — except when it came to his house. Perhaps in his enthusiasm he was led to over-estimate his own abilities, for Patterdale was built hurriedly and mistakenly on damp clay, near a soak, and of rubble sandstone. Floors and walls were inadequately joined: the façade fell away in the 1940s, to be replaced by one in concrete and weatherboard. Later there was risk of further collapse. An interesting chapter relates the post-Glover history of the house, culminating in its purchase, rebuilding and elegant restoration by Rodney and Carol Westmore.

Glover had already turned to oils in England, but at Patterdale he painted in them almost exclusively, responding to the new environment with his greatest burst of creativity. The result, writes Radford, is a succession of “realistic and light-filled celebrations of his recently adopted country.” He explains that Glover adapted a technique from his watercolouring, using a white ground which would glow through translucent glazes, helping to capture the intensity of Australian light. Indeed, the painter rose immediately to the challenge of a new country: in an early painting of a gully on Mt Wellington there is no idealisation, but characteristically Australian forest regrowth after fire, and dead stumps.

Even so, while alive to the “thrilling and graceful play in the landscape,” Glover found it more difficult to render than European ones. “There is a remarkable peculiarity in the trees,” he noted, “however numerous, they rarely prevent your tracing, through them, the whole distant Country.”

As was customary at the time, Glover did not perceive such vistas as the direct result of Aboriginal land management — burning the undergrowth to create pastures for kangaroos and wallabies, thereby making hunting easier. The assumption of white settlers was that all this was a God-given natural pasture, just waiting for the sheep and cattle to arrive. (A rare romantic strategy by Glover was to supplant sheep in his paintings with cattle, more picturesque.)

Radford is at pains to show that Glover was keenly sympathetic to the Palawa (Tasmanian Aborigines). The last tribals were being rounded up by George Augustus Robinson when Glover arrived in the colony. Robinson turned up at Patterdale with a small group of them, was well-received, and was shown massacre sites. Tellingly, Glover’s very first — and possibly last — paintings there would be of moonlight corroborees. At every opportunity he inserted the departed Aborigines into his landscapes. For Robinson he produced a painting of Aborigines Dancing at Brighton, Tasmania, explaining that “the figures are too small to give much likeness — my object was to give an idea of the gay happy life the Natives had before the White people came,” and also, he added, “an idea of the Scenery of the Country.” Interestingly, there are almost no whites and no cultivation in his landscapes. They are Edenic, essentially a record of what they were like before the invasion.

At one level Glover was, as the historian W.K. Hancock put it, “shedding an economical tear” about the displacement. For it was so recent, and in stark contrast to Glover’s sense of his own achievement on the same land, caught forever in the famous paintings of his house and garden and in the “My” of My Harvest Home. A contradiction: you might say that — surrealistically — his characteristic spaghetti gum trees had buckled under the strain. For there are few like that around Patterdale, yet Glover fixated on them; they became a trope. Significantly, Radford points to a yearning for synthesis: late works include an ambiguous Ben Lomond (Scotland — or Tasmania?) and the fanciful A Dream At 82.

Glover is still underestimated. Working in Tasmania alone and now perceived as a white man, he was described only a few weeks ago in the press as the “so-called father of Australian landscapes.” Yet, as Ron Radford tells us, he is still the Australian artist most widely represented in galleries abroad — extending to a good half dozen American ones, and the Louvre. Equally tellingly, Tom Roberts — having married into a northern Tasmanian family — painted the landscape Glover’s Country in homage around 1929. When he died a couple of years later, Roberts chose not to be buried where he lived, at Kallista in Victoria, but in a Tasmanian churchyard within view of Glover’s Ben Lomond. And twenty years ago, the locals of Evandale instituted the annual Glover Prize for Tasmanian landscapes, a prestigious and generous award.

In all, it is an impressive node of continuing influence, buttressed by the preservation order recently placed on the Patterdale landscape and the scrupulous restoration of the house. Ron Radford’s book will go a long way to making Glover even better known. •

John Glover: Patterdale Farm and the Australian Landscape
By Ron Radford | Ovata Press | $49.95 | 216 pages

The post John Glover, born-again artist in Tasmania appeared first on Inside Story.

In the latter case, probably not. Yet it is in so many ways both the most intriguing first choice — who, after all, would expect the creator of James Bond to allude to the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Charles Secretan? — and the most portentous revision. The decision to eschew the clumsy homage and instead appropriate the dull name of an American ornithologist underscores Fleming’s ruthless pruning of anything that might unnecessarily adorn the instrument he created in 1952.

That creation, and the long story of its making, is at the heart of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an immense biography by Nicholas Shakespeare. Building on earlier efforts by John Pearson (1966) and Andrew Lycett (1995), the book was prompted by the Fleming estate’s willingness to give Shakespeare access to unreleased archival material that illuminates the real-life source material embedded in the Bond novels. That openness may also have been the estate attempt to adjust the dominant view of Fleming as a man who, where he is not defined by Bond, is derided as a misogynistic, alcoholic wastrel with a penchant for whipping who showboated during the second world war and spent postwar summers in Jamaica fantasising about British grit, foreign villains and sexual conquest in exotic locales.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man has plenty of whipping and wantonness, but it adds nuance to a life whose early years seem to have been spent in guileless and unknowing preparation for important wartime work — work for which he turns out to have been unusually gifted. In fact, it is the observation of one journalist — that Fleming, in this moment, with all his gifts and talents finally in use, was a “complete man” — that gave Shakespeare his title.

But what freight it brings to the book: an intimation of comprehensiveness underscored by its bulk and the vivid cultural history woven through it; an implied claim to being definitive bedevilled by the persistent haze of uncertainty around Fleming’s war record. Then there is the dramatic portent — that Fleming, even as he created the character that secured his fame, was somehow lesser or incomplete in those postwar years.

But perhaps that was merely a reversion to form. Fleming’s early life was monied but grim. His miserly Scottish grandfather was a banker who had survived considerable bereavement (three siblings had been buried before he was born, and three more, plus his mother, would follow by the time he turned fifteen) to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Robert Fleming’s greatest stroke of luck, however, was to be a constituent of a young Winston Churchill, who called on him for donations and provided in his friendship a glow of respectability for Robert’s sons, Val and Philip, whom Churchill nicknamed the “Fleming-oes.”

Val, elected a Conservative MP in 1910, fathered four sons — Peter (1907), Ian (1908), Richard (1911) and Michael (1913) — with socialite Evelyn Sainte Croix Rose, whom he had married in 1906. But his influence as a father was defined by his absence. After war broke out, he joined Churchill’s regiment, trained alongside the future prime minister, and was killed while serving on the Somme in 1917.

Robert Fleming is said to have bellowed in grief at the news, Evelyn painted every room in the house black, and Churchill wrote an obituary for the Times, a copy of which, framed and hung above Ian’s bed, gave the eight-year-old a nightly reminder of the greatness that he could never hope to match.

Val’s estate, meanwhile, gave Evelyn enormous wealth, but in terms that invited her to endure a lifetime of dutiful widowhood: should she ever remarry, the money would be immediately transferred to her children. She responded by elevating her dead husband “from an absent, pipe-smoking, deer-stalker to an iconic figure in the clouds with whom she alone enjoyed privileged communication,” writes Shakespeare, in one of many deft summations.

Controlling, insecure and extravagant, she played her boys off against one another, guilt-tripping them and blackmailing them with threats of disinheritance, pulling out all the stops to ensure they might never suffer the consequences of taking responsibility for their actions.

For Ian, this manifested most acutely in endless reprieves from failure and ignominy, and repeated diversions from paths that might well have led him away from Evelyn. He was pulled out of Eton ahead of trouble over a relationship with a girl and sent to Sandhurst with hopes of joining the Black Watch infantry battalion. Out less than a year later after contracting gonorrhoea in a London brothel, he was dispatched to the Tennerhof, a private school in the Austrian town of Kitzbühel, with freshly adjusted plans that he would pursue a diplomatic career.

Distance from Evelyn allowed promise to flower: linguistic versatility, some artistic ambitions, an engagement to a Swiss woman. But on his return his mother stomped on all these green shoots. After his failure to find a position in the Foreign Office she intervened to get him a job at Reuters, where he made a decent fist of covering a famous Soviet show trial of six engineers employed by a British machinery manufacturer. Then he was off again, moving at Evelyn’s insistence to join a firm of merchant bankers in the City.

Fleming had little to no interest in commerce and even less in maths: “I could never work out what a sixty-fourth of a point was,” he wrote. Yet he flourished to the point of becoming a partner at another firm only eighteen months later. The succession of environments into which he had been dropped had given him a charming veneer that allowed him to adapt and conform while keeping people at a safe distance. Even the jaded journalists he tried to scoop in Moscow had been disarmed to the point that they were willing to help him with his boss: one vouched that Fleming was “a pukha chap.”

The elite education and time spent among the privileged had also knitted Fleming into every club and network that was worth knowing about, giving him vast contacts and points of reference that he wielded readily. The “stockbroker” Fleming would talk to clients about investment strategy, wine and dine them at an appropriate club or hotel, and then turn them over to the pointy heads and bean counters in the office who could make the money flow. On the surface (and, to some, that was all there was), all this made Fleming a Wodehouse character: paid too much to do too little, all charm and glamour and self-obsession.

And yet, Shakespeare suggests, Fleming had by this time planted “miscellaneous seeds.” He could speak several languages, had solid journalistic experience, and was friendly with several notably crotchety press barons. He had contacts and networks across the financial, commercial and intelligence worlds. He even had literary credentials, via the reflected glow of elder brother Peter, who had become a successful travel writer, and his own efforts as a collector of first editions of books that had “signalised a right-angle in the thought on that particular subject.”

The book collecting might not have seemed helpful when war broke out in 1939, but the miscellaneous seeds sprouted once Fleming was recruited to the Department of Naval Intelligence as a personal assistant to its director, rear-admiral John Godfrey. His ability to deal with the press and with people — not least his irascible boss — made him indispensable. His myriad contacts became invaluable. His knowledge of distant worlds and their connections made him insightful. But perhaps most surprising of all was his creativity.

In this vein he was much like Churchill, whom Fleming grew to resemble with his polka-dot bowties and “daily prayer” memos (“Pray, could you find out…”). Under Godfrey, Fleming brainstormed all sorts of schemes, many impractical and far-fetched, to gain an advantage over the enemy. For every hare-brained idea — to have a fake U-boat captain send messages in glass bottles railing against the Third Reich, to create a fake treasure ship packed with crack commandoes (which sounds suspiciously like the Trojan horse) — there was something promising. Perhaps most notable was what Fleming took from a little-known novel, The Milliner Hat Mystery: the germ of what became Operation Mincemeat, a successful tactical deception of the Axis powers.

Placed at the near-centre of British intelligence efforts, Fleming had a wide ambit of activity that Shakespeare believes to have extended to a role in the creation of America’s foreign intelligence service. He was hardly the “chocolate sailor” some contemporaries called him. Godfrey certainly thought highly of his assistant. He called Fleming a war “winner” who was owed a debt that could never be repaid, and Shakespeare adds to this the findings of other historians: “It has taken time to realise how central Ian Fleming is,” says one. “What he was doing touched on so much of the war,” says another.

But ascertaining exactly what Fleming touched, and how lightly or heavily, is difficult. Even the claim to Operation Mincemeat is made via inference, analysis of stylistic tics and coincident timetabling. Secrecy is the issue. With friends and colleagues, Fleming was generally reticent about his wartime service; bar the blurred fantasies of the Bond books, he left few hints of his activities. Shakespeare adds to this the need for confidentiality during the war and, later, during the cold war, when archives were both weeded and closed to access. Then there is the material simply lost to time — damaged, forgotten, burned — and the records that are exaggerated or simply mistaken.

None of this is unusual, yet at other times Shakespeare strains to explain Fleming’s absences from records, or even to gainsay what exists and inveigle Fleming’s way in. “Simply because Ian is not listed in the minutes of a high-level meeting,” he writes at one point, “does not mean he was not there in the room.”

Enough well-documented rooms exist to make arguments like this unnecessary. The array of material Shakespeare proffers is enough to convince this reader, at any rate, that Fleming was an active, engaged, important and unconventional wartime player. While Shakespeare labours the point, it also serves to establish a key fact about Fleming’s literary efforts: while James Bond was depicted in a cold war world, with its dubious moralities and shifting principles, he was fundamentally a creature of the second world war and its starker divides between allies and enemies, good and bad.

The oft-made comparison with John le Carré has never been to Fleming’s advantage, but Shakespeare draws out so many connections, echoes and resemblances between Bond and the second world war that any comparison between Bond and George Smiley or between Fleming and le Carré seems like a category error. In fact, given Shakespeare’s attention to literary antecedents, the better comparison is between Bond and characters such as Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond, Richard Hannay and perhaps even Sherlock Holmes — Britons who, with vigour, smarts and a willingness to do violence, save the world.

Shakespeare is a restless writer. As though to jolt the reader awake, lengthy passages of third-person past-tense narration suddenly crystallise into the first-person present as he tracks down a long-lost colleague of Fleming’s or a vague acquaintance or — in more self-indulgent moments — the descendent of some vague acquaintance. These moments fold into the story of Fleming’s life the story of the stories — of the Pearson and Lycett biographies of Fleming, and of Shakespeare’s biography.

Shakespeare quotes people crowing about their efforts to mislead his predecessors or their determination to shut up shop: “Poor Pearson,” Godfrey writes, of Fleming’s first biographer, “is like a famished man gazing, his mouth watering, into the butcher’s and confectionary shop windows and having to be content with a stale turnip (or swede) from the greengrocer.”

Shakespeare doesn’t conceal his similarities with Pearson, noting his own eager anticipation of new discoveries. But he adds in the dynamics of his interviews, poignant notes about the contingency of historical research, and observations about the dark material at the heart of the Bond novels.

In one scene he arrives in the rain outside a bungalow at Milton Keynes to interview the last surviving member of 30AU, a wartime intelligence gathering unit set up under Fleming’s influence and operating, effectively, under his command. Bill Marshall is ninety-four years old and feels a decade older. He tells Shakespeare he is a week early but beckons him inside anyway. “Later, I am glad I got the date wrong,” Shakespeare adds. “Bill Marshall will be hospitalised five days after our conversation. Had I come at the right time, I would never have heard what he tells me.”

Inside, Shakespeare listens as Marshall — who only days before has received the Légion d’Honneur and a letter from Emanual Macron praising him as a hero — confesses to murder:

On 26 June, Bill watched as German snipers fired through the windows of a hotel, killing one medical orderly and shooting another through the knee as they attended wounded American soldiers in the street. It was raining when the German riflemen surrendered. Another witness told Nicholas Rankin how not long afterwards he had seen their blood flowing in the rainwater.

Bill grows quiet, withdrawn. “I shot four Germans in cold blood.”

“What did you feel?’

“Nothing. How do you feel seeing two men trying to attend being shot?”

What happened next, whether he was reprimanded or Returned to Unit, he does not say. He has said enough. I think of another character who inherited Bill’s licence to kill. This was the compost out of which James Bond emerged.

Much as he had come into his own, Fleming was in an invidious position by the end of the war. Bound by secrecy, he could not dispel or rebut jibes about him being the “Sailor of the Strand.” He was carrying considerable emotional turmoil: his brother Michael had died in 1940 as a prisoner of the Germans; a serious romantic relationship with Muriel Wright, begun in 1935 in Austria, had come to an end with her death in a German bombing raid in 1944. He could too easily see a future in which the skills and talents he had wielded so well went to waste. He was hardly alone in this plight: in the United States, Allen Dulles described his return to the legal profession as an “appalling thing” after heading a spy network. “Most of my time,” he wrote, “is spent reliving those exciting days.”

Where Dulles went to the CIA, Fleming returned to journalism. In 1945, he took a position in the Kemsley newspaper group, handling a network of foreign correspondents. A journalist Shakespeare interviews recounts how Fleming sat in front of a canary yellow map of the world equipped with tiny flashing light bulbs — one for each man.

Shakespeare cautiously ventures that this might have been cover for continuing intelligence work, but the whole portrait has the tragic comedy of a Graham Greene novel: Fleming’s use of naval intelligence lingo with his journalists, his retention of a code and cipher book in his office, the derisive whispers of younger colleagues that his vaunted contacts were nothing but old duffers. Then, of course, there are the corporate machinations: Fleming took the position with Kemsley, which also owned the Sunday Times, on the intimation that he might become the paper’s editor and the hope that he might even get a seat on the company’s board. He also fantasised that the foreign news service he was managing might one day become a rival to Reuters — at which point Fleming would be a press proprietor in his own right.

If true, it was only ever to be a sideline, for alongside a salary of £225,000 in today’s pounds Fleming negotiated an iron-clad policy of two months of paid holiday each year. He would spend those months in Jamaica, at the rather uncomfortable bungalow he had built and initially named “Shamelady Hall” before choosing a name that harked back to a wartime operation — Goldeneye. Here, in daily bursts of 2000 words, he wrote Bond.

In Shakespeare’s telling, the novels came shortly after a burst of disappointments and disillusionments. Fleming’s hopes of advancement at Kemsley had vanished; his long-term paramour, Anne Charteris, had been divorced from her husband and fallen pregnant (again) to Fleming, necessitating a hasty marriage that neither of them much wanted. With fatherhood imminent, wedlock complete, he was looking back to a life he once had and could still have had — in intelligence, on one hand, but also in literature.

Signs of Fleming’s desire for this life recur in the book, especially during Fleming’s time attending the Tennerhof. There, according to Shakespeare, the youthful Fleming was steeped in European history and literature and imbued with ambitions to write a serious novel in the vein of James Joyce or Thomas Mann. He made attempts to act on those ambitions, planning but then aborting a co-authored translation of Paracelsus and, in 1928, self-publishing a volume of poetry titled The Black Daffodil only to become deeply embarrassed by it. “He took every copy that had been printed and consigned the whole edition pitilessly to the flames,” wrote one of Fleming’s friends.

A factor in Fleming’s constant withdrawals, Shakespeare argues, was his elder brother’s success at writing. “Of course, my brother Peter’s rather brilliant as a writer,” Fleming would say, “but I wouldn’t know how you set about writing a book myself.” In the postwar years, however, his attitude changed. One prompt was his belief that he could better his brother’s effort at an adventure novel; another was his sense that he would not be trespassing on his brother’s turf if he did so. Then there was a sense of resentment, aggravated by his failed hopes at Kemsley, as friends, acquaintances and other writers churned out thrillers and spy novels that, in many cases, claimed experiences and actions Fleming saw as his own to write about — the gag of secrecy notwithstanding.

Perhaps too there was a sense of how he might slip that gag: Shakespeare posits that Graham Greene’s difficulties with the intelligence services — it was felt he drew too closely on his first-hand knowledge — may have influenced Fleming to increase the fantastical elements of the Bond stories even as he drew on the real-life material of his wartime experiences and insights. “I think he wrote the books primarily because he had a great deal of knowledge of things like this within him, and he had to get it out,” says one acquaintance.

It is a conflux of influences that Shakespeare presents with considerable verve. He plays with the book’s internal clock, changes style and tone, moves into scenes and back out of them, and in doing so creates vivid juxtapositions and drama. The chapter on Bond’s first appearance on the page follows immediately on Fleming’s decision to marry to create the convincing argument that Bond was an escape for Fleming as much as for an exhausted postwar Britain:

Suddenly, as he floated over the reef [at Goldeneye], above barracuda he had named after battleships, Ian saw an exhilarating path back to bachelorhood — by creating a contemporary naval hero in the tradition of Drake, Morgan and Nelson, loyal to the Crown, who would reaffirm England as a world power, wipe out the shame of the Burgess–Maclean defection, and re-establish SIS as “the most dangerous” Secret Service in Russian eyes. And he would be a bachelor. “If he were to marry and settle down he would be of little value to the Secret Service.”

A chapter later, Shakespeare is looking ahead again, foreshadowing how Bond would consume Fleming. It was not only that Bond’s fame quickly came to define his author’s public persona; it was also that Fleming became reliant on Bond. Advised that it was no good to write just one book, that he had to “hit the nail again and again with the same hammer until it’s driven into the head of your potential public,” Fleming became a factory working on a one-year schedule, the brunt of the work to be done during a spell at Goldeneye.

Fleming went into this routine clear-eyed, seeing it as wholly compatible with his working life as well as a path out of financial difficulties caused by a spendthrift Anne. As he wrote to his publisher Jonathan Cape during negotiations over Casino Royale, “I am only actuated by the motives of a) making as much money for myself and my publishers as possible out of the book, and b) getting as much fun as I personally can out of the project.”

But the fun, in Shakespeare’s telling, dwindled as the money poured in. Lawsuits over film and television rights, accusations of plagiarism, negative reviews and laughter from friends all corroded this late-life literary success. Then there was Fleming’s knowledge that, at some point, he would run out of material. Philip Larkin famously detected in the posthumously published Octopussy (1966) an allegory for how Fleming had used his war experiences as treasure off which to secure his heart’s desires — Bentleys, caviar, Henry Cotton golf clubs. It was acute insight that Shakespeare agrees with. “This was the draining exchange,” he writes. “Once Ian gave birth to Bond, he relied heavily on the hard-earned secret capital of the war. Each book was a different slice of stolen gold until the material ran out.”

The poor quality of Octopussy and The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), also published after Fleming’s death, suggests Shakespeare’s assessment is right. But at play in the preceding Bond books too is a sense of Fleming butting up against the limits imposed on a writer tilling in a single genre. For Your Eyes Only (1960) abandons the novel form in favour of the short story, one of which — the horribly titled “Quantum of Solace” — eschews gunfights and villains in favour of a parable about marital compassion delivered after a disappointing dinner party in a manner reminiscent of Somerset Maugham. The response to this deviation was lukewarm at best.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), meanwhile, is unique among the Bond novels for being framed by a meta-fictive introduction from Fleming, for adopting the first-person perspective of a woman, and for its brutally sleazy and violent story. The book contains the most rounded and complex of Fleming’s female characters, but its reception was so virulently hostile that Fleming, taken aback, suppressed a paperback edition, refused to allow anything but the title to be used in the film adaptations, and went back to his safe patch with the Bond that followed, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963).

One might wonder whether Fleming still yearned to write something that his younger, more highbrow self would have been proud of, and whether he had come to believe that, thanks to Bond, he could not. If so, it is all the more tragic for being a knowing compromise signalled by the early change he had made to the draft of Casino Royale.

A homage to a nineteenth-century philosopher was never going to fit into that work, into that world, and Fleming saw it quickly. He slashed a blue line through Secretan and above it wrote a new name. His protagonist would introduce himself bluntly, almost monosyllabically: “Bond. James Bond.” •

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
By Nicholas Shakespeare | Harvill Secker | $42.99 | 830 pages

The post Grand days appeared first on Inside Story.

That is not what I had in mind; the initial idea was to pull together some threads of thinking developed over a decade or so. Certainly I began with a set against what governments of all persuasions had been saying and doing about schools since the Howard years, an approach driven with utter conviction by the Rudd/Gillard governments in their “education revolution” (with the sole but compelling exception of Gonski). But as I dug out and for the first time really focused on a mass of evidence about how things had been going, I got more than I’d bargained for.

I was not shocked, exactly, but taken aback by the consistency of the picture over a wide field and across many years: Australian schooling has been on the slide for two decades, is still on the slide and is showing no signs of turning around.

That conclusion was reinforced and expanded in scope late in the piece when I realised at last that much-publicised difficulties of a behavioural and emotional kind (“classroom disruption,” “school refusal,” early leaving, bullying, lack of “engagement,” problems of “wellbeing”) are even more marked, fundamental and significant than the cognitive shortcomings on which much of the evidence dwells. They suggest that schooling isn’t working, and that it isn’t working because what children and young people experience there is badly out of kilter with what they experience elsewhere.

There was more to come as I turned to the obvious question: why? Why didn’t an agenda prosecuted with exceptional vigour by exceptionally capable political leaders deliver what it promised, let alone do what really needed doing? There is nothing inherently wrong in the big arguments used to make schools sit up straight and do as they were told — choice, equality, “effective” teaching, and the duty owed by publicly funded schools to the wider society, including its economy. All can be constructive, inspiring even. But not the versions that came to dominate official minds.

Then came the third and final occasion for a sinking feeling: how and by whom could the slide be arrested and reversed? As the straightening agenda expanded and grew in confidence, the system of governance — already limited to doing what could be done in bits and pieces within three-year election cycles — became more complex and less capable. When the Productivity Commission looked at the problem it found that key elements of the national reform agenda had been “stalled” for thirteen years, and that the things talked about at national HQ could seem “remote” from the “lived experience” of teachers and school leaders. There is now no entity, national or other, no government, state/territory or federal, and no stakeholder or combination of stakeholders with a span of responsibility and authority and a relationship between brain and body close enough to conceive and drive change of the kind and scale required.

There is another side to this ledger, however. I was not the only or first to be dismayed at how things were playing out. Prominent veterans Brian Caldwell and Alan Reid (both former deans of education) conclude that “Australian schools have hit the wall” (Caldwell) and need “a major overhaul” (Reid). A former NSW education minister, Verity Firth, argues that the time has come for structural reform rather than more of the same. Her Western Australian counterpart (and former premier and Gonski panel member) Carmen Lawrence rages against the long tail, rising segregation, pathetically narrow performance measures, the failure of new school planning, “deeply disturbing” inequities, and “huge” differences in resourcing and opportunity. Barry McGaw, former chief executive of ACER, the Australian Council for Educational Research, and former head of education at the OECD, famously careful in his pronouncements, says bluntly that quality is declining, inequity is high, and the system is “resistant to reform”; his successor at the ACER, Geoff Masters, says “deep reforms” are “urgently required.”

All this comes amid a flurry of books about the “tyranny of merit” or “threats to egalitarian schooling,” books assaulting policy “that is taking us backwards” or calling for “reimagining” or “revolution” or “transformation” or a “ground-up rethink” of what “learning systems” are needed to equip students for “societal challenges we can’t yet imagine.”

And it’s not just policy wonks and the kinds of people who write books. Others trying to find a way through the maze include some actually giving life to the idea often given lip service by the powers-that-be: that all young people will become “confident and creative individuals, successful lifelong learners and active and informed members of community.” Now, for the first time, breakthroughs in the rigorous assessment of learning and growth are making it possible for schools to keep doing some of the important things they have long done and to do important new things as well, and, what’s more, to do it for everyone: to provide twelve safe, happy and worthwhile years across the board.

So the nub of the answer to the question posed in the book’s subtitle — can schooling be reformed? — is yes, but it’s a very big ask, and schools can’t do it by themselves. It requires a reorganisation or “restructuring” of the system of governance; of the sector system, government, independent and Catholic; and above all of the daily work of students and teachers.

That in turn requires a very different way of thinking about schools and reform: more incremental reform, yes, but within a big, long-term strategy for structural change; equality in schooling rather than through it; more fraternity as well as more equality and liberty; more choice, but made more equally available; sectors, yes, but not organised so that two feed off the third; realising that schools, like students and teachers, need space and support to find their own way within a negotiated framework; accepting that schools can contribute to prosperity, but not by aiming at it; and the really big one, focusing not on teaching, effective or otherwise, but on the organisation of the production of learning and growth by its core workforce, the students.

Thinking needs to be more politically capable and inspiring as well as enlarging in spirit, able to stimulate and guide the kind of top-down-bottom-up popular movement briefly seen in the “I Give a Gonski” campaign (and on a very much larger scale in the distant but formative tumults of the 1960s and early 1970s).

The case for such a big and risky rests on necessity (current and piecemeal reforms can’t do what needs to be done) and the fact that it really matters, not in a life-and-death way but in a hard-to-pin-down, universal, lasting way. •

Unbeaching the Whale is published by Inside Story in association with the Centre for Strategic Education and the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

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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

The post Emergency thinking appeared first on Inside Story.

On balance, British journalist David Stubbs thinks not. His new book, Different Times: A History of British Comedy, opens with a bravura critique of the weakness in the British character that forgave Boris Johnson almost everything because he’s fond of a joke, often apparently at his own expense: “Humour, our craven inability to resist humour, is what created Boris Johnson.” This is a salutary reminder that laughter matters, but it can anaesthetise as well as enlighten. As Peter Cook said about the satirists of the Weimar Republic: “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the second world war.”

Comedy may seldom transform the world but it provides a revealing window on continuity and change in a society. Different Times traces British laughter during the United Kingdom’s decades-long retreat from imperial primacy, and perhaps it is no coincidence that America is getting funnier as it becomes more intractable while China is one of the most dangerous places on earth to crack a joke.

Stubbs has watched a lot of TV and been to a lot of gigs. If you enjoy anything British, funny and filmed, from Chaplin and Stan Laurel to The Office, chances are they’ll be here. It’s a compendious survey that moves decade by decade from the 1920s to the noughties, with a sketchy coda towards the present. Comedy and satire emerge as lagging indicators of cultural change.

As an Australian with an Anglophile education I kept flashing in and out of recognition. A lot of it I know, because a lot of it we see. The British roots of Australian humour remain strong and possibly predominant against the onslaught of American stuff that comes down the wires and through the ether. The bits I didn’t know are well described, but I’m seldom persuaded I was missing much. English comedy, in particular, can appear rather insular at a distance.

So some of the jokes seem inbred, overwritten by class obsessions. But I do sometimes wish our own writers had the time and the patience to write so well. The sophistication of script and characterisation, the attention to human quirkiness — nobody does it better.

The good news for readers is that Stubbs writes as a proper fan but not uncritically. This is a mostly good-natured, sometimes school-masterish book, its critical arc summed up early: “With magnificent but too few exceptions, British comedy in the twentieth century was not so much about the human condition as about the white, male condition.”

So if you are after a “war on woke” lamentation that no one can take a joke anymore, go to another shop. Things are getting better: “Political correctness liberated comedy,” says Stubbs, “forced it to resort to its creative imagination, helped create a new self-consciousness about what it meant to create comedy, to be more inclusive and open to new forms, new avenues of social exploration, rather than falling back on lazy, reactionary stereotypes and tropes.”

What’s important about this is the demand that comedy must do without the lazy and the reactionary, not that it try to do without tropes and stereotypes entirely. Stereotype is a particularly dirty word these days, and the reflex for a lot of people is to assume it is always a terrible thing. But comedy uses various forms of shorthand and thus always trades in tropes, stereotypes and metaphors. The real debates need to be about who the jokes are targeting and whether they conform to the poetic justice of comedy. That’s what makes the lettuce such a perfect joke. It didn’t implicate anything extraneous like Truss’s class or gender — it focused purely and searingly on the public matter of her government’s doomed program.

We can and should move from a narrow set of stereotypes towards a wider and more representative set. This would be progress, yes, but not a revolution. Comedy can’t do entirely without caricature, stereotype, ridicule. If the world doesn’t see another mother-in-law joke, if an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman never walk into a bar again, it will be no loss. But other tropes and stereotypes are filling the vacuum.

The better angels of our nature would prefer to believe that we mostly laugh with rather than at, but that isn’t true. The same overworked angels then try to insist that only punching up can be funny, and that works a little better. Most people I know think it’s fine to laugh at a president or prime minister and not okay to laugh at someone for being gay. But still people laugh at babies suffering mishaps on YouTube — maybe we shouldn’t, but often enough we do. It seems unlikely that many of the babies really deserve it.

Another good thing about this book is that Stubbs tries hard to see things in social and historical context. He doesn’t judge, as people sometimes do, from the perfect moral clarity of the present. The Carry On movies are a necessary and popular part of his story; Dad’s Army is lovingly analysed as 1970s nostalgia for a plucky, unified and rather ridiculous wartime Britain. The radical satire boom of the Thatcher years is lauded, even while we are reminded that it was mostly posh boys who did the shouting in The Young Ones and elsewhere. Working-class comedians from the Northern club circuit get respectful attention despite their reactionary jokes and views.

Or, rather, Stubbs doesn’t judge prematurely. Monty Python’s creators get lavish admiration but lose a few marks on women and race for being the postwar Oxbridge boys they were. In the end, he lets “progressive” and “morally palatable” merge a bit. Occasionally Different Times drifts into marking the exams of comedians of the past by standards they were unaware of.

Here, Stubbs is in good company. The slippage between what is and what should be funny is near universal in humour studies. Laughter feels good, so we want to feel good about why and when we laugh. Often we are kidding ourselves.

Stubbs tries hard to hold a catholic view of British comedy as a sort of fun-park mirror held up to the decline of national significance. Nevertheless, the most abiding impression I got from this book is how pervasive the hegemony of Oxbridge has been and remains. Stubbs admits he arrived at Oxford two years ahead of BoJo and they both expect to be attended to, as of right. Did the British tolerate BoJo’s lying simply because he made them laugh? No, there is also the fact that he came from the class that was born to rule.

We Australians fool ourselves that we don’t have class distinctions. Lined up beside the British, though, we at least don’t have as concentrated a stream of cultural privilege as Oxbridge. With all the self-congratulation, there is still something in the idea of a larrikin sense of humour, a persistent disrespect for authority in a tie. It used to belong entirely to white blokes like me, and we are still wildly over-represented, but more voices are claiming the right to call bullshit than used to be the case. We don’t defer as much as the British to the bright, loud boys who went to Sydney or Melbourne universities. Things could be worse.

But Stubbs’s BoJo thread shines a light on something less pleasing. What a humourless bunch we tend to elect in Australia! Keating had a killer vein in invective that sometimes looked like satire, but only Whitlam and Menzies were genuinely funny, and that mostly counted against them with the general public as aloofness. People say George Reid could be funny on the hustings, but that’s going back a long way. We obviously expect earnestness in our leaders, certainly in the half dozen since Howard set the pattern. Our public figures should be able to bear a joke, but heaven preserve any politician who gives the impression they are laughing at us, for Newspoll certainly won’t.

Are we really much good at laughing at ourselves, I wonder? Some future historian of Australian comedy may have a tale to tell. •

Different Times: A History of British Comedy
By David Stubbs | Faber | $39.99 | 416 pages

The post Born to laugh appeared first on Inside Story.

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. •

The post The fragility of American democracy appeared first on Inside Story.

Penny Wong is well-suited for all these roles, alternating between the higher-intensity Peking opera, the low-intensity Kabuki form, and the diplomatic shirtfront. Thus, she said she was disturbed by China’s confronting behaviour in the South China Sea, concerned about China’s human rights abuses and “shocked” by the suspended death sentence meted out to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun for allegedly spying.

Having got that off her chest, she was also pleased that relations between Australia and China had “stabilised” under the Albanese government, enabling the resumption of what diplomats call a high-level foreign and strategic dialogue. That process had fallen into disuse under the more combative and, as it turned out, less constructive approach taken by the previous Australian government.

As for Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister provided a relatively enigmatic foil in his public encounters with Australian leaders, including Wong and prime minister Anthony Albanese. In private, he will no doubt have given as good as he got: as a long-serving foreign minister he is no stranger to difficult encounters triggered by China’s  assertiveness.

Wong and Wang won’t have neglected the implications of an extremely unstable global security environment for regional peace and stability. While they may not have dealt directly with a possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, it will have been part of their calculations about what lies ahead.

Offstage we had a staple of Peking opera, with a villain in the shape of Paul Keating, whose meeting with the Chinese foreign minister was portrayed in some excitable media quarters as treason. In a world of high-stakes diplomacy in which one of Beijing’s stocks-in-trade is divide and prevail, the meeting with a former prime minister who is a critic of Australia’s China policy will have served a symbolic purpose.

What was achieved by all this activity?

The answer is straightforward. The Wong–Wang meeting served both countries’ interests. For Australia, it demonstrated that relations with its cornerstone trading partner are in mutually beneficial shape. For China, it suggested Canberra had not moved irredeemably into Washington’s orbit.

The encounter was realpolitik writ large in preparation for a visit to Canberra later this year of Chinese premier Li Qiang. To use a phrase borrowed from Chinese leader Xi Jinping, it had a win–win outcome for the two countries, though not for Australia’s China hawks.

Much of this movement, including an easing of restrictions on Australian exports to China, would have been off limits under Scott Morrison’s government — a time when Australia’s trade minister could not get his counterpart on the telephone.

In the eighteen months since Labor took office, bilateral encounters have occurred monthly at least, and with increasing frequency more recently. Contrast this with the paucity of meetings, invariably restricted to encounters on the sidelines of international gatherings, under Morrison.

Absent from Wong’s remarks about the relationship on this occasion was the bromide that Australia would disagree with China where it must, and agree where it can, or words to that effect. Increasingly, we now have Wong saying that Australian wants a “stable and constructive” relationship with China “in the interests of both countries.”

This might be bad news for those critics of China who have put us on a “red alert,” as a febrile newspaper series in Age and the Sydney Morning Herald described it last year. A “constructive” relationship would seem to be in Australia’s own interests, though it shouldn’t be at the expense of Australia’s treaty arrangements, its national interest or its values — a fact that shouldn’t need to be repeated ad nauseum.

In their quite lengthy talks Wong and Wang will have dwelled no doubt on a trading and people-to-people relationship that has rebounded since the Covid crisis subsided. Goods and services exports to China gained 13 per cent to A$203.5 billion in the 2022–23 financial year, with China accounting for a shade over a quarter of total exports. Service exports to China were up 27 per cent as a result of the return of students and tourists. The country is far and away Australia’s biggest export market.

If there is an impediment from China’s point of view, it is the obstacles facing Chinese enterprises attempting to gain a foothold in Australia’s investment market by the Foreign Investment Review Board. China’s investment stock in Australia stands at just A$44 billion, or 4 per cent of total foreign direct investment. It ranks sixth among foreign investors, far behind the United States, the European Union and Britain.

Among jarring aspects of Wang Yi’s visit, and one that raised questions about China’s willingness to engage more broadly, was the foreign minister’s unwillingness to avail himself of the opportunity to answer questions from the Australian media. Wang and his advisers won’t have overlooked the hostile tenor of some of the reporting ahead of his visit, and the near certainty that this hostility would have permeated an encounter with an Australian media loaded for game.

In all of this, participants in the diplomatic jousting will continue to play their roles for both a domestic and a wider audience. Senator Wong is proving quite good at it. The question, as always, is how much substance is there behind the shadow play. •

The post Shadow play appeared first on Inside Story.

It took a while for diplomats to realise they had a window into the mind of this reticent figure courtesy of a Westerner — an Australian, in fact —who had become part of Soeharto’s household a decade before these events and was to remain a key intermediary between the general and the West until Soeharto stepped down in 1998. In the words of an American diplomat in Jakarta at that time, Clive Williams was Soeharto’s “Australian whisperer.”

But as former Australian diplomat Shannon Smith writes in his intriguing biography, Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher, Williams’s role was kept largely secret from the public for more than fifty years. “Those who knew him in an official capacity are confined to several dozen international diplomats, journalists and politicians, and they had national interest, and sometimes self-interest, in keeping his name, his position and his role out of the public spotlight,” says Smith. The man himself would divulge only that he came from Geelong. “Beyond that, to every single person who ever came across Clive Williams, he was a puzzle, a riddle, a mystery, an enigma.”

So who was Clive Williams? How did this cashiered Jehovah’s Witness missionary and self-trained chiropodist become attached to Soeharto? How important was he in the power transition and Soeharto’s long presidency? And what did he know about the manoeuvrings around the night of 30 September 1965? Thanks to exhaustive research, Smith has answers to the first three of these questions, but only a hint about the fourth.

Williams was born in Geelong in 1921 to a family on the edge of survival, his father shattered by two years as a German prisoner of war. His mother died when he was sixteen, robbing him of close emotional support just as he was coming to the realisation that he was homosexual.

Feeling “hunted” in Geelong, Smith conjectures, Williams needed somewhere to “hide in plain sight.” He found it as a Jehovah’s Witness. Though the sect had only about 2000 followers in Australia, it was well known thanks to its early adoption of new technologies. Sound vans cruising the streets, radio broadcasts, pamphlets and foot-in-the-door house calls — all these were used pushed its millenarian belief that Christ would soon return to Earth and replace all worldly governments with a paradise populated only by Witnesses.

The group was unpopular, of course, and as Australia entered the second world war it was also suspect for its pacifism. Its eventual banning in 1941 added to the attraction for Williams. “An ardent, proselytising Jehovah’s Witness must have felt a real adrenalin rush pitting themself against community standards, breaking laws, and actively seeking pushback or confrontation,” Smith thinks. “Living in a society where one felt pressure for being ‘other’ or ‘less,’ such as a homosexual, it would have been an ideal outlet for barely twenty-year-old Williams to fight back, especially where the attention was on one’s religious beliefs not sexuality.”

Having started out as a self-supporting “pioneer” roaming the towns in a sound-van, Williams graduated to a central role in the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in Sydney, got exempted from call-up as a religious minister even as the sect continued to operate semi-underground, and then, in 1950, gaining induction into the sect’s global training centre, Gilead, in upstate New York. The following year, when his class was dispatched as missionaries, he landed in Manado, the province in the north of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island.

Williams lasted not quite three years in that role. Smith found a cryptic reference in the sect’s records for 1954 — “During the course of the year it became necessary to disfellowship a person from the congregation for unchristian conduct” — but Williams was otherwise expunged from the sect’s history books. He might have been expelled for attending more to charity than conversions, Smith generously observes, but his sexuality seems a more likely cause.

Aged thirty-six, Williams then moved to Semarang in Central Java, taking with him a younger Manadonese man. “It was also a good place to lose oneself or, indeed, hide from view. A place to shake off a religion and find some spirituality, to conceal sexuality, and to reset,” Smith writes. “Over the next few years, Williams delved into Javanese culture, became fluent in the local languages and established a series of lifelong friendships. Like many who enter witness protection, he emerged with a new identity.”

Despite his humble schooling, Williams had always been well spoken, had become a confident speaker from years as a missionary, and no longer had a mission to convert the local Muslims. He quickly tapped into the immense demand for English-language tuition in the new nation, particularly among upper-echelon Indonesians who could pay for classes and textbooks.

Word of Williams’s activities reached Tien Soeharto, wife of the rising army officer. The two struck up a rapport: “he delighted her with his demonstrations of Western etiquette and customs, he became the couples’ English tutor, and like most Australians, he was practical and handy at fixing things (including cutting her in-grown toenails).” Clive also followed international affairs: “he had travelled to London and New York! And his knowledge about the human condition, gained from travelling around the cities and isolated communities of Australia and his missionary work, was extremely broad. To the inward-looking Javanese couple, Williams was a revelation.”

It was during these years, the 1950s, that Soeharto rose to command the army’s crucial Central Java region, building a patronage style of leadership bolstered by commodity smuggling, protection rackets and other business activity. In the process he attracted life-long loyalty from army colleagues like Sudjono Humardhani, Ali Murtopo and Yoga Sugama and among Chinese-Indonesian compradore businessmen like The Kian Seng (known as Mohammed “Bob” Hassan) and Liem Sioe Liong (Sudono Salim).

Eventually the business deals got too much for the puritanical army head, Abdul Haris Nasution, who transferred Soeharto to the new staff college in Bandung in 1959. But that didn’t stop Soeharto’s rise. He took command of a new Jakarta-based ready-reaction force called Kostrad that also had the job of regaining Western New Guinea from the Dutch. Tien stayed in Semarang through this period, with Williams becoming a trusted male presence while frequently flying to Jakarta to see Soeharto.

Smith takes us through much of the still-emerging history and analysis of the events of 1965, though he misses some parts of the story, notably the role of the double agent Sjam Kamaruzaman, an army intelligence asset inside a “special bureau” attached to the top leadership of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party.

What Smith’s research reinforces, though, is that neither the CIA nor other foreign intelligence agencies were masterminding events. Although Western powers quickly piled in with propaganda blaming the killing of six army generals on the PKI, they were taken completely by surprise by the nature of the military putsch and knew virtually nothing about Soeharto. A provincial figure, he had not been among the more cosmopolitan Indonesian officers given US army training.

As Soeharto moved to undercut Sukarno, first by facing down his attempt to appoint someone else army commander, then by forcing the handover of executive powers in the famous 11 March 1966 letter Sukarno was intimidated into signing, then by becoming acting president in 1967, foreign embassies were baffled by the opaque responses they were getting from the emerging leader. When he said “yes” it could mean yes, or maybe, or just “I have heard you,” or even a no.

Then, in mid 1966, Williams was discovered by American ambassador Marshall Green and soon became an indispensable intermediary for the embassy, and vice-versa. He would often turn up on the doorstep of an American diplomat’s house at the behest of the acting president, and the embassy also chose Williams for reciprocal approaches.

Williams was very different from other potential intermediaries including members of the ring of ex-Semarang army officers serving as “special advisors” to Soeharto, or foreign minister Adam Malik and other civilian politicians who sometimes had different political agendas. He was non-political, incorruptible and simply not interested in money. He understood “Soeharto’s nuances and communication style; he could read Soeharto’s mood and could tell whether he was angry or prevaricating or anxious, and he could anticipate Soeharto’s thinking and reaction to an issue.” He also spoke both English and Indonesian fluently, “ensuring there were no linguistic or cultural misunderstandings.”

By 1967, Soeharto was ensconced in the large house at Jalan Cendana in Menteng, the old inner suburb of Dutch officialdom. Williams took a small house, connected by gate, at the back. He would come in for meals, take Soeharto through what the foreign media were saying, coach the six children in English, and guide Tien through the Australian Women’s Weekly.

The Australian embassy was two years behind Marshall Green in discovering Williams as the best conduit to Soeharto. Or at least its mainstream diplomatic staff were. An army attaché, Colonel Robert Hughes, met Williams in Central Java in 1966 and got a meeting with Soeharto, with Williams interpreting. Murray Clapham, a suave young officer of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, became friendly with Williams, as did his chief of station Kenneth Wells.

The ABC’s correspondent, Tim Bowden, also discovered Williams and persuaded him to give a radio interview in October 1966. While current politics were barred, the hour-long encounter went deeply into the kind of divination that Soeharto — like many Javanese — practised as they reached major decisions.

But these insights were disregarded by Australia’s ambassador from 1966 to 1969, Max Loveday, a rigid and self-important character who insisted on using conventional channels, notably the Indonesian foreign ministry and Malik, its minister, whom Soeharto distrusted. The Australian government consequently made a number of diplomat blunders by pushing proposals that Williams would have advised were bound to be refused. A visit by prime minister John Gorton in 1968 to cement reopened political contact was a near failure, redeemed mostly by the Indonesian-language fluency of Gorton’s wife Bettina.

It was not until Gordon Jockel — who knew about Williams from a memorandum the exasperated Ken Wells circulated in Canberra behind Loveday’s back — became ambassador in March 1969 that the embassy tapped into the Whisperer.

Smith’s biography ends about there, with the relationship from 1969 to Williams’s death in 2001 to be covered in a second volume. Those who met Williams over these decades know he remained fervently loyal, especially to Tien Soeharto (and her memory after she died in 1996). During the tension over East Timor he remained a vital channel for Canberra.

His house in Menteng remained a modest one, as did the former home and hobby farm of Soeharto himself by the standards of Marcos, Mobutu or Putin (or even Sydney’s harbourside mansions these days). Whether he exercised any restraint over Soeharto’s children in their business dealings would be interesting to discover. From the available evidence it would seem not. Any role he took in the nuptials of Soeharto’s daughter Titiek to the dashing special forces officer Prabowo Subianto would be of added interest now that Prabowo is president-elect.

On the last question — what did Williams know about 1965–66? — Smith has found only tantalising clues. When a German-born Jesuit, Franz Magnis-Suseno, met him just prior to the 30 September coup, he was surprised by Williams’s conviction that Soeharto was ready to act against the communists. “What was clear from Magnis-Suseno’s account of his conversation with Williams — and it wasn’t a [later] recollection, he recorded it in his diary — was that Soeharto was either planning his own initiative or preparing to respond to another scheme,” Smith writes.

But then Smith backs away. “The 30 September Movement  seems to have been no more than an old-fashioned army putsch by disgruntled middle-level officers using whatever support they could get,” he writes. “But it was a clumsy, poorly planned operation and probably didn’t expect Soeharto’s quick counter-reaction. It might also have been subverted by Soeharto; he certainly didn’t orchestrate the movement but it is very reasonable to assume he knew the plans in advance, and that he both infiltrated the putsch and then took action against it.”

So Smith, despite have read and cited much of the still-expanding literature about 1965, hangs back from the logical leap that other scholars are making, and that the Jesuit’s diary points towards. This is that Soeharto’s own spooks fired up impressionable middle-ranking officers to mount the 30 September putsch against pro-American generals allegedly about to overthrow Sukarno, in the hope of drawing the PKI into a power grab, thereby justifying an army counter-coup.

We live in hope that the second and third volumes of David Jenkins’s account of Soeharto’s rise to power will clarify further, and that Williams grew less discreet in his later years. So far, though, Soeharto’s Australian whisperer remains largely enigmatic. •

Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher: The Enigmatic Clive Williams, Volume 1, 1921–1968
By Shannon Smith | Big Hill Publishing | 254 pages | $34.99

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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.

On the night of the opening ceremony, 24 January, Cyclone Wanda crossed the coast at Double Island Point north of Noosa. It didn’t have the devastating winds of cyclones like Ada and Althea that smashed the Whitsundays in 1970 and Townsville in 1971, and it weakened rapidly, but the monsoonal trough it forced south to Brisbane stayed there for days. Small oscillations in its movement and intensity generated many stretches of drenching rain.

Across Brisbane, 600 millimetres fell on the first three days of competition in Christchurch — twenty-four inches, or two feet, in the language of the time. This was three times the city’s average rainfall for January, its wettest month. On 28 January the trough weakened and retreated north. A drier, cooler air mass from the south finally brought some blue sky to the capital of the Sunshine State.

The river peaked in the early hours of 29 January at a height not seen since 1893. Residents woke to find about 13,000 buildings damaged. Children due back at school that morning got an extra week added to their Christmas holidays.

Across the Tasman in Christchurch, Australia had won a bag of gold medals while the river rose. Raelene Boyle retained the 100 metres sprint title she won in Edinburgh, fourteen-year-old Newcastle schoolgirl Sonya Gray won the women’s 100 metres freestyle and Mexico Olympic champion Mike Wenden the men’s. As the waters receded, Boyle and Gray added the 200 metres to their 100-metre golds and Don Wagstaff completed a double in the diving pool.

The deputy lord mayor reported Brisbane’s promotional T-shirts “were without doubt the most sought-after item at the Games.” Its souvenir match boxes and coasters “were widely distributed and caused much interest.” Sandwiched amid coverage of the floods, the full-page advertisement for Brisbane’s bid in the Christchurch’s main paper, the Press, caused “some concern,” but it was not fatal because “most people realised that occurrences such as these were not the normal thing.”

Whether or not the 1974 flood was abnormal depended on the time scale. The “River City” had not seen a flood as high in the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century it had seen four as high, including three much higher, and a total of eight floods classed as “major” according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s current classification system (3.5 metres at the City Gauge). Only two other “major” floods occurred in the twentieth century, the last in February 1931. This century is different again. The February 2022 flood was Brisbane’s second major flood after the even higher one in January 2011, and a further “minor” one occurred in January 2013.

The inaugural meeting of Brisbane’s Commonwealth Games Committee was held two months before the Christchurch Games. Chaired by lord mayor and sports fan Clem Jones, the meeting was told an application had already been lodged for Brisbane to host the 1982 Games. Business representatives thought the city council’s report on possible venues was technically excellent but lacked ambition. By 1982, they thought, the city “would deserve a sporting complex of world-wide standard.”

Council representatives baulked at the zeal. They “could not commit the City to structures which could become ‘white elephants,’ or to a financial burden which it might be virtually impossible to meet.” After the floods, the committee’s next meeting was deferred, but not for long. Lord Mayor Jones and his deputy flew over the city in the 4KQ helicopter and were “amazed at the number of places which could be regarded as possible sites for the Games.” A sites sub-committee was whisked around nine possible venues in a council bus just three months after the flood’s peak.

The choice narrowed to the Northside versus the Southside. Deputy Mayor Walsh, representing the Chermside ward on the Northside, wanted Marchant Park redeveloped. Mayor Jones, representing the Southside’s Camp Hill ward, liked a site in the new suburb of Nathan, adjacent to the Mt Gravatt Cemetery and Griffith University, which would accept its first students the following year.

In late July, six months after the flood, a decision was reached: the Southside. It would be closer for visitors staying at the Gold Coast and more convenient for residents of the rapidly expanding southern suburbs.

The campaign for Brisbane to host the 1982 Games succeeded, although the likely “phenomenal” cost was much criticised. At the Montreal Olympics in 1976, where the Commonwealth Games Federation met to decide the venue for the ’82 Games, Brisbane found itself the only bidder. Montreal’s diabolical financial outcome scared others away.

New lord mayor Frank Sleeman assured Brisbane ratepayers they would pay only for the “bare essentials.” A new stadium would be built in the new suburb, but it would have a permanent grandstand seating just 10,000. “Temporary” seating would accommodate another 48,000. Work began immediately and the venue was first used in late 1975. Two years later, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, it was named the “Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Sports Centre,” or “QEII.”

There was one big problem with siting the main stadium on the top of a hill. One of the signature events at major games, the marathon, traditionally starts and finishes in the stadium. After the local distance-running community rejected a plan for the runners to complete three laps along the nearby South East Freeway, ending with a sharp climb back up to the stadium, organisers agreed to start and finish the race away from the stadium. (It was men’s only; the first women’s marathon was run at the 1986 Games in Edinburgh.)

A flatter, “city” course was mapped, like those becoming popular in places like New York, Chicago and London. For Brisbane, this meant using the river. The new route started and finished on the south bank, opposite the CBD. It headed out through the city and “The Valley,” across Breakfast Creek to the river at Kingsford Smith Drive, then doubled back to the river bank around the University of Queensland. TV cameras would capture the city at its most picturesque, spectators would get accessible viewing spots, runners would appreciate the cool breeze and flat ground in a city that doesn’t have much of it.

Held the day before the closing ceremony, the marathon did not disappoint. Big crowds lined the route. Australian favourite Robert De Castella found himself well behind two Tanzanians who were close to world record pace at the halfway mark. He set off to chase alone, catching Gidamis Shahanga just before they passed a heaving Regatta Hotel, then ran side-by-side with Juma Ikaanga for a kilometre along Coronation Drive (named in 1937 when George VI was crowned). Morning peak hour traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge slowed as commuters tuned car radios to the struggle. Finally, “Deek” made a decisive break and won by twelve seconds.

Building the main stadium for the Commonwealth Games on a hill in the southern suburbs had helped, paradoxically, and indirectly, to re-energise an old conceit. Decades earlier, tourism promotions dubbed Brisbane the “River City.” Soon, the first of several major arts and cultural organisations began setting up on the South Bank. Expo 88 would draw millions of people from the suburbs, the state, the nation and the world to the banks of the big river.

Despite the best intentions, QEII struggled to avoid the fate those Brisbane City Councillors feared: becoming a white elephant. Track and field events take centre stage in Olympic and Commonwealth Games but local athletics events, even the biggest interschool carnivals, attract much smaller crowds at other times.

For a while, in the 1990s and early 2000s, QEII was back in business. On joining the national rugby league competition in the late 1980s, the Brisbane Broncos played at the sport’s traditional home in the city, Lang Park. A few years later, after the temporary seating at QEII was made a little more permanent, they moved there and started drawing Commonwealth Games–like crowds to the renamed “ANZ Stadium.”

Annual State of Origin matches against New South Wales, though, stayed at Lang Park. The regular monster crowds at ANZ declined. Eventually the state government and others decided to revive the old cauldron. The two “Origin” matches played at ANZ in 2001 and 2002 while Lang Park was rebuilt were the last.

In 2003, the Maroons and Broncos returned to the new “Suncorp Stadium.” They have been there ever since, sharing the venue with the Queensland Reds (rugby union) and Brisbane Roar (soccer). Last year, it was at Suncorp that the Matildas played their World Cup quarter-final against France, which ended in that epic, victorious penalty shoot-out.

QEII went back to being a track and field venue, the Queensland Sports and Athletics Centre, “QSAC.” It was used as an evacuation centre during the 2011 floods. After Brisbane won the right to hold the 2032 Olympics, there was a chance it might be revived again as a temporary venue for cricket and AFL while the traditional home of those sports in Queensland, the Gabba, was being remade as the main Olympic stadium at a cost of $2.7 billion.

That was until Monday, when QSAC got an even bigger future. Queensland’s government considered the recommendations of a committee set up to propose further options after the earlier rejection of the Gabba rebuild. The committee recommended that a wholly new stadium be built at Victoria Park, at a cost of over $3 billion, and eventually replace the Gabba as the home of cricket and AFL in Brisbane. Both recommendations were rejected. (Victoria Park was one of the sites rejected by Clem Jones’s 1974 committee.)

The Gabba is going to stay the Gabba, with a modest upgrade. Victoria Park is going to stay Victoria Park.

The winner is… QSAC! The stadium on the hill will rise again to host the track and field events at an Olympic Games fifty years after it staged them for the Commonwealth Games. At a cost of $1.6 billion, permanent seating will be increased to 14,000, and total capacity will touch 40,000 for the period of the Olympics, some way below the 1982 full houses.

The other winner is Suncorp Stadium, with its larger capacity of more than 50,000, which will get the opening and closing ceremonies.

The marathoners? They will surely follow the river again, winding out, back, out and back, sticking to the old, deceptively gentle watercourse that has always drawn people to this place. •

Information about Commonwealth Games planning is taken from Brisbane City Council committee minutes and files, and about the 1974 floods from the Department of Science/Bureau of Meteorology’s “Brisbane Floods January 1974” (AGPS, 1974). Other information drawn from Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (2023), Margaret Cook’s A River with a City Problem (2019) and Jackie Ryan’s We’ll Show the World: Expo 88 (2018), all published by UQP.

The post Olympic origins appeared first on Inside Story.

Labor had long endorsed AUKUS, but now a Labor PM was standing beside US president Joe Biden and British prime minister Rishi Sunak to announce how it would be implemented. The political symbolism was sharp; what had previously been endorsed by Labor was now being wholeheartedly embraced.

Soon after, former prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club to drop a rhetorical depth charge. He called the Albanese government’s embrace of AUKUS Labor’s “worst international decision” since Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription. Suddenly the debate opened up, and since then doubts and criticisms of AUKUS — among them my book The Echidna Strategy — have barely let up. As former Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese put it during Adelaide Writer’s Week in February, the anti-AUKUS argument is now reasonably complex and sophisticated while the pro-AUKUS position rarely rises above platitudes.

In the two-and-a-half years since the deal was announced, we have not once heard — either from the Morrison government or its successor — what the order for eight nuclear-powered submarines is actually designed to achieve. With neither a prime minister nor a senior minister providing any kind of strategic rationale for the deal, the case for AUKUS has not advanced beyond clichés and truisms about “deterrence.” Apart from pacifists, everyone is in favour of deterrence; the debate is solely about how we deter, and on this point the pro-AUKUS side has barely engaged.

Still, for all the strength of AUKUS scepticism, it seems unlikely to have any perceptible impact on government policy. Foremost among the reasons is the fact that major-party support for AUKUS remains steadfast: neither Labor nor the Coalition is likely to move away from AUKUS because they have nothing to gain by doing so.

AUKUS was conceived by a Liberal-led government, and the Liberal Party typically feels that national security is its electoral strong suit. So, barring a major reversal in the practical implementation of AUKUS (more on that in a moment), it is difficult to see what they could gain by revising what they regard as a signature policy initiative. Former prime minister Scott Morrison recently said that history would record AUKUS as the best decision his government made.

Of course, it’s not unprecedented for subsequent leaders to walk away from policy stances championed by their predecessor. But Peter Dutton was defence minister when AUKUS was conceived so he is closely associated with the policy and will stand by it.

Is Labor support for AUKUS more fragile? A heated debate took place at the party’s national conference in September last year, but ultimately a resolution backing the initiative passed with a comfortable majority. Former Labor leader Kim Beazley was moved to describe AUKUS as a “core Labor value,” evoking a sense of grassroots support and deep historical resonance. Beazley called the conference vote “the most significant move in the party since the 1963 Labor Federal Conference,” which dealt with the establishment of the North West Cape naval communications station.

But there is reason to doubt the sincerity of Labor’s conversion. Before AUKUS, no senior Labor figure had ever campaigned for nuclear-powered submarines. Indeed, support for such subs was a fringe position even in the Australian strategic debate. Then, in September 2021, the Morrison government gave the Labor opposition less than a day’s notice before announcing AUKUS. Labor, fearing a khaki election, instantly threw its support behind the initiative.

By any measure, it was a lightning-fast conversion on a huge policy question. And it seemed to be based largely on political calculation rather than deep principle or historical affiliation. Beazley’s “core Labor value” declaration looked like an attempt at what American political strategists call “astroturfing” — political elites creating an artificial semblance of grassroot activity.

But even assuming support for AUKUS inside the Labor caucus is a mile wide and an inch deep, does that matter for the future of the project? Perhaps less than we might think. Major political questions are never decided purely on principle or on the careful weighing of policy alternatives divorced from party-political considerations. Politicians can change their minds, but they change them faster if arguments align with incentives. At present, that’s simply not the case.

Prime Minister Albanese has spoken openly about his plans to entrench Labor in office for several terms to guarantee its reforms can’t be undone (as was the carbon price) by the Liberals. To win successive elections, he and his senior ministers appear to believe that Labor should never give Australian voters reason to doubt its national security credentials. And the cost of providing that reassurance is, for the moment, manageable.

AUKUS spending is not expected to peak for some years. Of a total project cost of between A$268 billion and A$368 billion, the government expects to spend A$58 billion over the next decade, but with less than a quarter of that sum due in the first five years. In budgetary terms, therefore, the decision is easy. Why offer the opposition a stick with which to beat the government at the next election when avoiding that fate costs the government so little?

Labor doesn’t even have an incentive to encourage debate about the deal by having the prime minister or defence minister give a major address. Policy wonks want such a debate, but who gains? What powerful political force would be quieted by a prime ministerial statement? Critics of AUKUS are unlikely to be satisfied; supporters just want to see the project go ahead.

This reflects two things about the structure of Australian politics: first, the number of people who care about defence policy is tiny, and so government doesn’t feel an urgent need to be accountable; second, the number of key decision-makers in defence and foreign policy can be counted on one hand. Unlike in the United States, no alternative base of power exists in the legislature to encourage accountability.

But political incentives change, and this project will rise or fall on its practicalities. Once a steady drip of news reports about cost overruns and program delays begins, internal critics will emerge. (The latest worry concerns the capacity of US shipyards to fill Australia’s order while keeping the US navy itself supplied with new subs.) There are AUKUS sceptics in the parliamentary Labor Party, but scepticism will need to turn to disaffection and resentment. When ministers and parliamentary secretaries see their budgets sliced while AUKUS is fed, internal grumbling may begin.

What else could crack Labor’s AUKUS consensus? The most immediate threat, if he takes office next year, will be Donald Trump. It’s unlikely Trump even knows what AUKUS is right now, but if he’s confronted with its existence he may reel. Australians remember his blistering response when prime minister Malcolm Turnbull described to him a refugee resettlement agreement that his administration had inherited from Barack Obama. It was a testament to Turnbull’s deft handling of the call that the president didn’t renege on what he described as “the worst deal ever.” Goodness knows what he will make of an agreement that makes the US navy smaller so a foreign navy can grow larger.

Presently, Australia is responding to the prospect of a second Trump term in much the same way as America’s other allies — lots of fretting and crossed fingers but precious little policy change. The assumption appears to be that if Trump wins, allies are in for another rough four years before the situation returns to “normal,” much as it did when Biden replaced Trump.

That interpretation requires a good deal of optimism and a peculiar reading of recent history, yet it remains the prevailing view. It is remarkable to recall that Australia proposed AUKUS to the Biden administration just a few months after the 6 January assault on the US Capitol. Our government was evidently so convinced that this outrage, and the president who had provoked it, were aberrant rather than an expression of enduring change that they almost immediately proposed to his successor the most dramatic upgrade to the ANZUS alliance since it was signed in 1951.

While media and political attention is focused on whether AUKUS can be delivered, in the background lurks a strategic question: even if we can get AUKUS done, is it even a good idea? That’s the issue The Echidna Strategy focused on. Australia’s biggest strategic asset is distance — Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney — yet the AUKUS submarine project is effectively an attempt to compress that distance when we should be exploiting it. If China ever wants to project military force against Australia, let it traverse the vast oceans that separate us. There is no pressing reason for Australia to project military power to China’s near seas and onto its landmass.

Such arguments have no purchase on either major party right now, but the real job of books like mine is to open the “Overton window” — to make the unthinkable thinkable. When AUKUS begins to sink under the weight of its misdirected ambition, political leaders will look for new ideas. An alternative defence strategy exists that is prudent and affordable, not weighted with ideological baggage from either extreme, and based on realistic assumptions about the future of Chinese and American power in our region. •

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The truth of the matter is more nuanced. The National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, carried out between 2020 and 2022 by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, tells us that 22 per cent of Australians had a mental disorder in the previous twelve months and 43 per cent within their lifetime. Large numbers, no doubt, but no larger than the 20 per cent and 45 per cent figures obtained when the study was conducted in 2007.

But hidden in these aggregated figures is a worrying trend. Among young people aged sixteen to twenty-four, the twelve-month prevalence of mental disorder rose from 26 per cent to 39 per cent, and that increase was especially steep for young women, up from 30 per cent to 46 per cent. When half of this group has a diagnosable mental illness — an underestimate, because the study only counts a subset of the most prevalent conditions — something is clearly very wrong.

A similar story of age- and gender-biased deterioration is told by the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. When an index of mental health is tracked across iterations of the survey from 2001 to 2021, older and middle-aged adults hold relatively steady but people aged fifteen to thirty-four, and especially young women, show a relentless decline beginning around 2014. The pandemic, the usual all-purpose explanation for recent social trends, can’t be held responsible for a rise in psychiatric misery that preceded it by several years, so what can?

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation offers a provocative but compelling answer to this question. Haidt, an American social psychologist known for influential books on well-being (The Happiness Hypothesis), moral psychology and political polarisation (The Righteous Mind) and upheavals on US college campuses (The Coddling of the American Mind, written with Greg Lukianoff), argues that some of the usual explanatory suspects are innocent. They don’t account for why declining mental health disproportionately affects young women, why it is occurring now or why the trendline started to dive in the early 2010s after a period of stability.

The prospect of ecological catastrophe, for example, weighs most heavily on younger people but every generation has experienced existential threats. Wars, natural disasters, and economic crises are conspicuous reasons for distress and despair, but world events have always been terrible. It is not obvious why they should disproportionately make young women anxious and depressed while leaving older and maler people unaffected. The stigma of mental illness may have declined so that people have become more willing to acknowledge it, but increases in the prevalence of mental ill-health among young people are not confined to subjective reports but also found in rates of hospitalisation and suicide.

The chief culprit, Haidt proposes, is technological. Smartphones and social media have rewired young minds to an unprecedented degree, replacing “play-based childhood” with “phone-based childhood.” Portable devices with addictive apps and algorithms engineered to harvest attention and expose children to damaging content have wrought havoc on young people’s mental health. They have done so in ways that are gendered and most severely affect generation Z. Born after 1995, these young people are the first to have gone through puberty in the virtual world.

Haidt marshals high-quality evidence for the decline in young people’s wellbeing over the past decade. Graph upon graph show inflection points in the early 2010s when mental health and related phenomena such as feelings of social connection or meaning in life start to trend downward. These trends are not limited to the United States but occur more or less in lockstep around the Western world. Their timing indicates that it is not the internet or social networking sites themselves that are damaging, but the transformation that resulted from the advent of smartphones, increased interactivity, image posting, likes chasing, algorithmic feeds, front-facing cameras and the proliferation of apps engaged in a race to the bottom to ensnare new users.

Haidt argues that the near-universal use of smartphones in children and especially pre-teens is driving the increase in mental health problems among young people. Coupled with over-protective parenting around physical risks in the real world has been an under-protection around virtual risks that leaves children with near-unfettered access to age-inappropriate sites. Like Big Tobacco, the developers of social media platforms have designed them to be maximally addictive, have known about the harms likely to result, have made bad faith denials of that knowledge, and have dragged their heels when it comes to mitigating known risks that would have commercial consequences.

There are many reasons why phone-based childhood has damaging effects. It facilitates social comparisons around appearance and popularity, enables bullying and exclusion, exposes young children to adult-focused material, and serves individualized content that exploits their vulnerabilities. It fragments attention and disrupts sleep, with implications for schooling as much as for mental health. Smartphones also function as “experience blockers,” reducing unstructured time with friends and the opportunities for developing skills in synchronous social interaction, conflict resolution and everyday independence.

Haidt is emphatic that the problem of phone-based childhood is not just the direct harms it brings but also the opportunity costs: the time not spent acquiring real-world capabilities and connections. Added to a prevailing culture of safetyism that attempts to eradicate risk and prescribes structured activity at the expense of free play and exploration, the outcome is a generation increasingly on the back foot, worried about what could go wrong and feeling ill-equipped to deal with it. Well-documented developmental delays in a range of independent and risky behaviours are one consequence, and the rise of anxiety is another.

When many children and adolescents report that they are almost constantly on their phones we should therefore not be surprised that they feel disconnected, lonely, exhausted, inattentive and overwhelmed. Haidt argues that many of these emotional and social effects are common to young people as a group, but some are gendered. Girls are more likely to be entrapped by image-focused networking sites that promote perfectionist norms, decrease their satisfaction with their bodies, and expose them to bullying, trolling and unwanted attention from older men. Boys are more often drawn into videogames and pornography, which foster social detachment, pessimism and a sense of meaninglessness, sometimes combined with bitter misogyny.

Haidt reminds us not to think of children as miniature adults, but as works in progress whose brains are malleable and developmentally primed for cultural learning. “Rewiring” may be an overstatement — brains never set like plaster and cultural learning continues through life — but the preteen years are a sensitive period for figuring out who and what to look up to, a bias easily hijacked by influencers and algorithm-driven video feeds. Older adults can be moralistic about adolescents who won’t disengage from their phones, but when those phones are where life happens, and when the brain’s executive functions are only half-formed, we should understand why shiny rectangles of metal and glass become prosthetic.

What to do? Haidt has a range of prescriptions for parents, schools, tech firms and governments. Parents should band together to encourage free play, promote real-world and nature-based activities that build a sense of competence and community, limit screen time for younger children, use parental controls, and delay the opening of social media accounts until age sixteen. Schools should ban phones for the entirety of the school day, lengthen recess, encourage unstructured play, renormalise childhood independence and push back against helicopter parenting. There is a social justice imperative here, Haidt observes, as smartphone use seems to disproportionately affect the academic performance of low-income students.

Responsibility for intervening can’t be left to individuals and local institutions alone. Governments and tech firms must recognise their duty of care and come to see the current state of affairs as a public health issue, much like tobacco, seat belts, sun exposure or leaded petrol. Tech firms must get serious about age verification and increasing the age of “internet adulthood” at which young people can make contracts with corporations hell-bent on extracting their time and attention. Governments can legislate these requirements, design more child-friendly public spaces, and remove penalties for healthy forms of child autonomy such as going to a playground without a parent, currently criminalised in the United States as “neglect.”

The Anxious Generation is a passionate book, coming from a place of deep concern, but most of it is written with the cool intonation of social science. The work is accessible and clearly intended for a wide readership, each chapter ending with a bulleted summary of key points. There is a refreshing humility about the empirical claims, which Haidt accepts can be challenged and may sometimes turn out to be wrong, referring the reader on to a website where updates on the state of the evidence will appear.

The part social media plays in mental ill-health is in dispute, for example, although the evidence of a correlation with heavy use is not. Haidt offers up studies supporting the causal interpretation but acknowledges that nothing is straightforward where human behaviour is concerned. Nevertheless, he is justified is arguing that his “Great Rewiring” hypothesis is now the leading account of the origins of the youth mental health crisis. No other contender appears capable of explaining why things seemed to start going wrong around the globe somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

Critics of The Anxious Generation are likely to argue that Haidt’s hypothesis is simplistic or that it amounts to a moral panic. Both charges would be unfair. A single explanatory factor rarely accounts for something as complex as a major social trend, of course, but identifying a dominant cause has the pragmatic benefit of prioritising interventions. If phone-based childhood is the problem then we have a clear target for possible solutions.

As explanations go, Haidt’s isn’t quite as simple as it might seem in any case. The advent of smartphones and all-consuming social media may take centre stage, but earlier cultural shifts that amplified the sense of risk and promote over-protection set the scene and compounded young people’s vulnerability. Haidt’s account of the elements of smartphone use that are most damaging is also highly specified rather than a wholesale rejection of the virtual world.

The mental health field often extols the complexity of its subject matter, which sits at the jumbled intersection of mind, brain and culture, but that recognition can hamper the search for agreed interventions. The usual calls to boost clinical services are understandable, but solutions that address individual distress in the present fail to tackle the collective, institutional and developmental sources of the problem.

Some proposed solutions, such as efforts to build online social connections, may be ineffective because they fail to foster the embodied, real-world connections that matter. Other supposedly compassionate responses, such as accommodating student anxiety with diluted academic requirements and on-demand extensions, may make anxiety worse by enabling and rewarding avoidance. Haidt arguably overlooks how much mental ill-health among young people is being inadvertently made worse by well-meaning attempts to accommodate it and by backfiring efforts to boost awareness and illness-based identities.

The charge of moral panic is equally problematic and doesn’t stick for three reasons. First, evidence for the harmful consequences of phone-based childhood is now documented in a way that past worries about new technologies were not. Second, Haidt’s proposal focuses on the welfare of young people rather than social decay. Although he argues that phone-based life can cause a form of spiritual degradation, his critique is primarily expressed in the register of health rather than morality. Third, although Haidt articulates a significant threat, with the partial exception of social media companies he is not in the business of lashing villains so much as promoting positive, collective responses and a sense of urgency.

The youth mental health crisis is real, and it shows no signs of abating. The human cost is enormous. If rates of mental illness among Australians aged sixteen to twenty-four had remained steady since 2007, around 350,000 fewer young Australians would be experiencing one this year. The Anxious Generation is vital reading for anyone who wants a sense of the scale of the problem and a clear-eyed vision of what it will take to tackle it. •

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
By Jonathan Haidt | Penguin | $36.99| 400 pages

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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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“The whole process was mysteriously painless,” Dumont recounts in her new book, The Pulling. She discovered that the hairs on her head “sit as shallowly as birthday candles on a cake” and “can be removed as effortlessly as a grape can from its stem.”

More than a decade later, Dumont has been pulling out strands and roots of hair from her scalp for so long that she invests in an expensive, custom-made hairpiece, especially designed to blend inconspicuously into the patchy hair that remains. The catalyst is the publication of her first book, No Man Is An Island (2016), an account of her time teaching English to asylum seekers on Christmas Island. Her motivation, she writes, was not “wanting to look nice” on the publicity circuit but the desire “to be able to stop thinking about my hair altogether.”

As in every other essay in Dumont’s finely wrought collection, “The Piece” stands alone, as well as in unison as memoir. The themes of shame and secrecy, evocatively rendered, pervade The Pulling. Entering the building for her first “hair transition” appointment, Dumont “felt the kind of edginess that I imagine a married man might feel visiting a brothel.” She is assigned Andrew, whose “dispassionate” approach and knowledge of her “problem” put her at relative ease. After her partner M, Andrew is “the second person on the planet to witness my scalp in this state: naked and defenceless.”

Dumont’s “problem” has had a name, “trichotillomania,” since 1987, when it was categorised in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, under the “dubious heading Impulse-Control Disorders Not Classified Elsewhere.” In DSM V, the current edition, trichotillomania has been reclassified under Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders but, as Dumont notes, there is no medical consensus. Some professionals liken “the disorder to a substance addiction” while others “see it as a form of self-harm.”  Like her own attempts to “get my head around the problem,” the condition, writes Dumont, “seems to resist the medical world’s attempt to categorise it. An unfathomable, shapeshifting thing.”

In The Pulling Dumont sets herself the challenge of putting into words what can’t be captured in an official diagnosis. She begins with her family of origin, and an early onset nail-biting habit, suggesting her condition has its roots in some formative trauma, but from there she avoids the obvious route. There is life before The Pulling but not yet after: hers is not a recovery memoir. If there is a dividing line it is circa 2005, when Dumont finds a book in her university library, published in 1989, by a “Distinguished Psychiatrist” who documents cases of clients with “pointless disorders.” She recognises herself in its pages and furtively photocopies the relevant section.

As the outside knowledge accumulates and she comes to know her condition through authorities other than herself, Dumont initially feels more resistance than relief. She “felt robbed” and wanting “to reclaim my singularity, I decided that even if my condition might align to others’ conditions in its generalities, surely how it manifested in me was unique.” Dumont cycles through numerous therapists, theories and key texts and while she finds some solace, insight and direction, she also remains protective of the enduring mysteries, paradoxes and specifics of her condition.

Some of the most exquisite sentences and passages, in a book full of them, detail what it is like for Dumont inside or in the immediate wake of a “ravenous episode.” To give in is a kind of surrender, what she describes as “a turning.” Then comes the “the deepest pleasure and fullest absorption” of being “inside the experience, when the world is reduced to teeth and touch, and taste.” At the end of an episode, Dumont feels “that I’ve been shipwrecked: dazed and conspicuously fragile.”

On the flipside, Dumont speculates on the view from outside, shifting between awe and shame as the dominant registers. Perhaps, from above, it might appear that “my fingers must be moving in accordance with some greater design, like a needleworker’s, or like a spider darting from point to point to build her web.” Elsewhere, she is convinced that her behaviour “must look masochistic, deviant, repulsive.”

The beauty and power of The Pulling resides in how artfully Dumont balances two sometimes competing concerns — filling a gap and sharing a secret. Dumont makes fathomable and palpable a neglected condition estimated to affect around one in fifty people — more than bipolar or schizophrenia. Readers with trichotillomania will surely be drawn in, as will any of us who have or have had a compulsive habit dating back to childhood that began, as it did for Dumont, as “just something that I did.”

Yet Dumont is as much a writer as she is a person with trichotillomania, and accordingly The Pulling exhibits the propulsive and exacting qualities of a book that had to be written and had been brewing for a long time. Here and there, she addresses the reader directly to tell us that this is not easy, or to reflect on her own motivations. “I ought to say,” she writes, “I am finding it hard to tell you, harder than even I anticipated.” In less skilled hands, such self-reflexivity could easily grate, but Dumont succeeds in creating intimacy with her imagined reader and audience. We come to learn what it has meant for the author to carry her secret, and now to share it.

Beyond liberating herself as a writer, Dumont stakes a powerful claim for all people who have been diagnosed with a condition having the authority to tell their own stories and comprehend their own experience. As she persuasively writes, “my not-knowing that my illness existed was a precondition for coming to know it as intimately as I have.” •

The Pulling: Essays
By Adele Dumont | Scribe | $29.99 | 288 pages

The post “An unfathomable, shapeshifting thing” appeared first on Inside Story.

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. •

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We may get a temporary ceasefire and the release of some hostages in exchange for some of the 4500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, but we are unlikely to see a resumption of Middle East peace efforts scarred by years of failure.

Israel’s pursuit of the Hamas leadership — notably Yahya Sinwar, the political chief on the ground in Gaza, and military commander Mohammed Deif — will likely continue until both men are found, dead or alive. That’s assuming Sinwar and Deif are still in Gaza itself, which is far from clear.

In the meantime, the world is mobilising to funnel humanitarian assistance into Gaza by land, sea and air. The American air drops into Gaza represent an extraordinary spectacle: on the one hand, Washington continus to arm Israel with munitions used to cause death and destruction among Palestinians; on the other, it is seeking to circumvent Israeli restrictions on the supply of aid across the strip’s land borders.

In the tortured history of the Middle East and America’s complex relationship with Israel — going back to Dwight Eisenhower presidency in the fifties, when pressure from Washington brought an end to the Suez crisis — there has scarcely been a more confounding moment.

In 1956, Eisenhower brokered a halt to what was known as the “tripartite aggression” after the nascent state of Israel had joined Britain and France in confronting Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez canal. In some ways that was a high point of America’s playing an honest-broker role in the Middle East, matched by Jimmy Carter’s mediation of the  Camp David Accords in 1978, which ushered in a cold peace between Israel and Egypt.

In the years since then, constructive US influence in the Middle East has waxed and waned depending on circumstance, with sporadic  interventions such as President George H.W. Bush’s push to kickstart a peace process in the wake of Gulf War I.

Bill Clinton tried but was let down by poor preparation for a Camp David II summit in 2000 between Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Arafat deservedly got much of the blame for the failure of Camp David II, but Barak, who refused to meet Arafat one-on-one, and Clinton’s feckless Middle East negotiators were also culpable.

Judged against the performance of his predecessors in managing a Middle East crisis, and depending on how the Gaza war ends, history is unlikely to be kind to Joe Biden. As things stand, the fair judgement is that Biden, with his sights firmly on his own re-election prospects, has been far too indulgent of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden might argue that his strategy of not allowing questions to arise about Washington’s support for the elimination of the Hamas leadership will prove to be correct, both politically and strategically. But his tardiness in calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, and his sanctioning of repeated US vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions demanding such a pause, has left him wide open to criticism that he has acted as Netanyahu’s enabler.

Belatedly, the US president appears to have realised both the political costs for him domestically, where many in his Democrat base are outraged, and the concomitant damage to America’s international reputation. He has consequently begun to step up his criticism, in public and private, of a war that has filled TV screens with shocking images of civilian casualties and deprivation.

This has taken far too long.

In remarks picked up last week by a “hot mic” after his State of the Union address, Biden told a Democrat legislator that a “come to Jesus” moment was approaching in his relations with Netanyahu. He made it clear he would regard an Israeli assault on Rafah at the southern end of the Gaza Strip — where about half Gaza’s 2.3 million population are huddled — as the crossing of a “red line.”

Interviewed, Netanyahu rebuffed the president, saying he would not be deterred from pursuing the Hamas leadership at risk of adding further to Gazan deaths and injuries.

In all the history of a blood-drenched Israel–Palestine conflict one date stands out: 4 November 1995. That was the evening on which Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot by an Israeli zealot opposed to peace with the Palestinians.

Not only did Yigal Amir assassinate Rabin, he also destroyed progress on the “two-state solution,” towards which Israel’s fallen leader and Arafat were groping via implementation of the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn in Clinton’s presence in 1993.

Among the bleak consequences of the Rabin assassination was the coming to power of Netanyahu, leader of the nationalist Likud bloc. To say Netanyahu has been a blight on Israeli and Middle East politics ever since would be an understatement.

In his years in power, either as prime minister or opposition leader, Netanyahu has contrived to stymie legitimate peace efforts to the point where any kind of peace in our time, even if the Gaza conflict subsides, has come to resemble a mirage.

Netanyahu may well be consigned to history if and when the war in Gaza ends and elections in Israel are held, but his malign influence will endure in the form of an explosion of settlements in the Occupied West Bank and a less obvious transfer of Jewish settlers into Arab East Jerusalem.

By latest count, Israel has turned the West Bank into a Swiss cheese of settlements and settler outposts, with something like 200 settlements and 220 outposts on land occupied in the 1967 war. All are illegal under international law since they involve a transfer of members of the victor’s population into territory seized in war.

In all, some 500,000 settlers are now living in the West Bank and 250,000 in East Jerusalem, a total of about 10 per cent of Israel’s population.

Even as late as this month, in the midst of the Gaza war, the ultra-right Netanyahu government, whose leader is beholden to extremist elements, has continued approving new settler housing in the Occupied Territories. This could hardly represent a more pointed affront to international efforts to calm the situation, given the fact that settler violence in the West Bank has spiralled since the 7 October Hamas pogrom on Gaza’s boundaries.

Behind all this is an assumption that Netanyahu is hoping to hang on to leadership, and avoid jail on corruption charges, pending a return to the White House of a president who could be expected to look more favorably on his tenure. But there is a long way to go between now and January 2025, when Trump might get his hands on power and thus loosen restraints, such as they are, on an Israeli government.

In the meantime, there is much loose talk these days about a “two-state solution.” This is glib posturing: anyone who knows anything about the Middle East understands that we are very far indeed from a realistic consideration of two independent states, one Israeli, one Palestinian, living side by side.

When next you hear a politician talking about a two-state solution without any realistic prospect of such an outcome coming about, or of that politician actually doing anything about it, reach for the smelling salts. In reality, there is barely a pulse detectable in America, or among its allies, of a willingness to exert real pressure on Israel to engage realistically with the Palestinians towards a two-state solution.

Such is the depth of animosity and mistrust — and, yes, raw hatred — between Palestinians and Israelis that, short of divine intervention, or the arrival of an Israeli or Palestinian Nelson Mandela, or preferably both, there is little cause for optimism.

In fact, there is hardly any cause at all, not least because the Israeli right is adamantly opposed to a two-state outcome, leaving aside the likelihood of civil conflict if any leader in Israel proposes the dismantling of settlements and moves towards negotiations on a Palestinian state — even if there was a Palestinian entity capable of assuming leadership responsibility across the West Bank, and Gaza.

This might be hard to accept for the two-state-solution industry among academics, commentators and politicians groping for an off-ramp for the world’s most confronting conflict. But there has scarcely been a bleaker moment in a history burdened by failure and a feeble US presidency.

If there is a counterpoint to Biden’s weak hand, played weakly, it is Ronald Reagan’s example when he picked up the phone in the Oval Office in 1982, responding to what he was seeing on his television screen, and rang Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.

In its invasion of Lebanon to rid that country of its Palestine Liberation Organisation presence, Israel was using its airforce fighters as “flying assassination squads” to pound Palestinian positions in Beirut.

“Menachem, this is a holocaust,” Reagan said. The Israeli offensive ceased.

Contrast that with Biden, who can’t even persuade Netanyahu to faciliate aid shipments into the Gaza Strip. This is both shameful, and farcical. •

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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

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Ambitious? Yes. Cyrus Vance, president Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, called it “a daring stroke.” Foolhardy? Many thought so, including members of Carter’s staff.

Failure was a real possibility and would reflect badly on Carter, already struggling with a perception that he lacked authority. Egypt and Israel were sworn enemies who had been fighting wars since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Carter took Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains outside Washington, and kept them there for the next thirteen days. A media blackout prevailed until an agreement was reached. Kai Bird, author of The Outlier, a 2021 biography of Carter, described his approach as “sheer relentlessness.”

Sadat and Carter wore down an intransigent Begin until he succumbed, agreeing to a peace treaty with Egypt, including relinquishing control of the Sinai Peninsula, taken from Egypt in the 1967 war, and the dismantling of Israeli settlements there.

The agreement also included the election of a self-governing Palestinian authority in the West Bank within five years, together with (according to Carter’s detailed record) a five-year freeze on Israeli settlements there. Within three months, Israel started on a major expansion of West Bank settlements, with Begin denying the freeze had been part of the official agreement and Carter telling his staff that Begin had lied to him.

The peace treaty with Egypt, the strongest Arab state, stuck, although it cost Sadat his life. He was assassinated in 1981 by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who condemned him as a traitor for the Camp David accords.

Carter’s hopes for a broader Middle East peace have proved elusive ever since, although he could clearly see the consequences. Near the end of his presidency he wrote in his diary, “I don’t see how they” — the Israeli government — “can continue as an occupying power depriving the Palestinians of basic human rights and I don’t see how they can absorb three million more Arabs in Israel without letting the Jews become a minority in their own country.”

Nevertheless the accords were a notable achievement and unimaginable in the context of the Middle East politics of recent decades. Carter reaped a political dividend but also paid a cost: relations with the enormously powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States were never the same again. They had not expected an American president to act as an honest broker.

Carter’s single term in the White House is generally rated among the less impressive in the presidential rankings. Yet his presidency has undergone a re-evaluation given his significant achievements in foreign and domestic policy, which look all the more substantial from today’s perspective.

In the tradition of the best political biographies, Bird gained access to volumes of material, including the copious personal diaries Carter kept as president as well as those of important figures in his administration. To learn that senior members were eating sandwiches at an important meeting in the cabinet room may not be vital to our understanding but it does point to a notable attention to detail.

Reading the narrative from the inside confirmed much of what I observed from the outside as a foreign correspondent in Washington during most of the Carter presidency. But it did so in much starker relief.

For example, the tensions between secretary of state Vance, the diplomat, and national security adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński, a cold war warrior, were evident at the time, but not their depth. Bird provides instances of what he called Brzeziński’s “highly manipulative” approach; Vance called him “evil, a liar, dangerous.”

Carter, a peanut farmer from small-town Georgia with a distinctive southern drawl, was an improbable candidate for the White House. He was a practising Baptist for whom, unlike many politicians, his religion was more than a veneer.

In a south where the echoes of the civil war still resonated and segregation continued in practice if not in name, he took a stand against racism. Yet he also was a skilled politician, elected as governor of Georgia despite his reputation as not being a typical white southerner and pragmatic when he thought he needed to be, including by downplaying his anti-racist credentials.

Still, running for president was a huge leap. He wasn’t taken seriously until he won the New Hampshire primary, and even then he was viewed with scepticism by leading members of the east-coast Democratic establishment. “He can’t be president,” said former New York governor Averell Harriman. “I don’t even know him!”

Sceptics dismissed him as self-righteous. His promise to voters that “I’ll never lie to you” prompted his friend and adviser Charles Kirbo to comment, perhaps not completely in jest, “You’re going to lose the liar vote.” But he came across to voters as sincere and authentic. And then, as now, coming from outside Washington was an advantage.

Circumstances played a large part: his Republican opponent was Gerald Ford, the sometimes hapless vice-president who had served the balance of president Richard Nixon’s term following Nixon’s resignation over Watergate. Even then, Carter won only narrowly.

In elite Washington, Carter’s team of knockabout southerners were often dismissed as hicks. But, like Carter, they were not easily deterred.

Carter brought a luminous intelligence, idealism and diligence to the White House that stands in stark contrast to the era of Trump. He argued that the world was not so easily categorised in traditional American black-and-white terms — that there was more to foreign policy than a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. He preached against the “inordinate fear of communism” that had led to Washington’s embracing of some of the world’s nastiest right-wing dictators. The Vietnam war, he said of this approach, was “the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty.”

Bird writes that Carter rejected “any reflexive notions of American exceptionalism. He preached that there were limits to American power and limits to what we could inflict on the environment.” America didn’t go to war during Carter’s presidency — an exception up to that time and since.

He elevated human rights in foreign policy. It earned him derision from hardheads but it enhanced America’s reputation abroad, its so-called soft power.

Like any politician, though not as often, he compromised and backtracked when he judged that politics required it. Against his better instincts, he approved development of the MX missile, an expensive boondoggle championed by defence hawks, writing in his diary that he was sickened by “the gross waste of money going into nuclear weapons.”

In the wake of the OPEC oil embargo, when he was trying to persuade Congress to pass legislation to restrict energy consumption and provide funding for alternatives such as wind and solar, he diarised that “the influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable.” To set an example, he put solar panels on the White House roof and predicted that within two decades 20 per cent of the nation’s energy would be generated by solar power. He hadn’t count on his successor, Ronald Reagan, who removed the solar panels as one of his first acts as president, nor the ideological climate wars that followed.

While those actions were triggered by the energy crisis, he was receptive to the emerging issue of climate change. Just before leaving office, he released a report from his environmental think tank predicting “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social and agricultural patterns” if the world continued to rely on fossil fuels. It was a prescient warning almost half a century ago.

Carter’s domestic reforms included deregulation of sectors of the American economy, including banks and airlines, thereby increasing competition and reducing prices, though also bringing negative consequences. Consumer regulations led to mandatory seatbelts and airbags and fuel efficiency standards — something Australia is finally getting around to introducing almost half a century later. Environmental laws were passed to reduce air and water pollution; highly contested legislation locked up a large part of Alaska as wilderness and national parks, preventing oil and gas exploration.

In foreign policy, the Panama Canal treaties relinquished American control of the canal, returning sovereignty to Panama. Carter completed the normalisation of relations with China started under Nixon and negotiated an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union.

Other reforms proved to be harder sledding. Legislation on health reform that Carter thought could pass Congress was judged inadequate by Democratic liberals such as senator Edward Kennedy, who championed comprehensive national health insurance and used it as a platform to unsuccessfully challenge Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. It would take another thirty years for Barack Obama’s administration to enact significant, if still not comprehensive, healthcare reform.

Carter was never completely accepted by the traditional Democrats that people like Kennedy represented. It came down to suspicion about his Southern roots. Too conservative for northern Democrats, he was too much of a liberal for many southern Democrats and Republicans.

By 1979, with Americans waiting in long queues to buy petrol and paying what were then exorbitant prices for the privilege (US$1 a gallon), Carter’s presidency was at risk of sliding into oblivion. Against the almost unanimous advice of his staff, he decided on another Camp David retreat, this time a domestic summit, inviting some of the nation’s leading citizens to come up with ideas for the nation’s future. What was unusual then seems extraordinary now.

Over ten days a parade of “wise men” travelled to Camp David to diagnose the nation’s ailments and remedies. As with the Begin–Sadat summit, the rest of the nation was kept in the dark by a media blackout.

Carter emerged to give an address to the nation like none other. Sounding more preacher than president, he said America faced a fundamental crisis of confidence that no amount of legislation could fix. Americans were losing their faith in the future, worshiping “self-indulgence and consumption.”

Taking the side of the people while lecturing them at the same time, he said he no more liked the behaviour of a paralysed Congress pulled in every direction by special interests. The immediate test was beating the energy crisis, on which he announced a series of initiatives taking in a windfall profits tax on the oil industry to finance the development of domestic sources of energy, including coal and a national solar energy “bank.” (His focus was on cutting dependence on imported oil, rather than climate change.) He announced plans for rebuilding mass transit systems and a national program for Americans to conserve energy.

Contrary to the fears of his hard-headed advisors, the speech was a great success, reflected in surges in Carter’s approval ratings of 11 per cent in one poll and 17 per cent in another. He was able to convey that most precious of political commodities — sincerity.

But these and other achievements were overwhelmed late in his term by the Iranian hostage crisis. Its origins lay in the Islamic revolution and the toppling of the Shah, who the CIA effectively had re-instated as ruler of Iran in 1953 following the previous Iranian government’s nationalisation of the oil industry. Concerned by the risk to Americans in Iran, Carter resisted efforts to allow the Shah to seek refuge in the United States; but he eventually succumbed to pressure from David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other establishment figures to allow him in on the pretext of urgent medical treatment.

Two weeks later, Carter’s worst fears were realised when Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six hostages. When diplomacy failed, Carter authorised a complex and risky rescue mission involving ninety-five commandos, a C-130 transport plane and six helicopters. A series of mechanical failures and accidents, including a collision between one of the helicopters and the C-130, resulted in the mission being abandoned.

The hostage crisis plagued the remainder of Carter’s term, reinforcing perceptions of him as a weak president. It subsequently became clear that the campaign team for Republican nominee Ronald Reagan worked behind the scenes with Iranian representatives to delay the release of the hostages, promising a better deal if he won the election. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, had negotiated freedom for thirteen of the hostages the previous year and told Carter years later that he had rejected approaches from Reagan officials offering an arms deal if he could delay the release of those remaining.

The hostages were released on the day after Reagan’s inauguration following his landslide win in the 1980 election. Soon after taking office, the new administration, despite publicly maintaining Carter’s embargo on arms sales to Iran, secretly authorised Israel to sell military equipment to Iran.

The hostage crisis was not the only reason for the relatively rare election loss by a first-term president. Carter’s support was sapped by the 1970s ailment of stagflation — high inflation and stagnant economic growth — together with the energy crisis. Reagan, the former Hollywood actor, had an appealing personality and a now-familiar slogan: “Make America great again.”

James Fallows, speechwriter for the first two years of the administration, says that Carter invented the role of former president. He certainly had an active four decades of public life following the presidency, with the 110-strong staff of the Carter Centre in Atlanta working on human rights, preventive health care, election monitoring and international conflict resolution.

Carter raised millions of dollars for a program that virtually eradicated guinea worm, a parasitic disease that had disabled and disfigured 3.5 million people a year in Africa and India. His centre helped distribute twenty-nine million tablets in Africa and Latin America for the treatment of river blindness, another disease caused by a parasitic worm. “Americans got used to seeing this ex-president, dressed in blue jeans with a carpenter’s belt, hammering nails into two-by-fours for a house under construction by a team of volunteers for Habitat for Humanity,” Bird writes.

In the 1980s, he spoke out about the concerns he had developed about the Middle East when he was president but he had judged were too dangerous to express publicly. “Israel is the problem towards peace,” he said, citing particularly the expansion of settlements on the West Bank. Accused of bias, he responded that “a lot of the accusations about bias are deliberately designed to prevent further criticism of Israel’s policies. And I don’t choose to be intimidated.” In 2006, he published his twenty-first book with the provocative title, particularly then, of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, earning him epithets such as “liar,” “bigot” and “anti-Semite.”

By then Carter had been awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development.”

After he was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 he said, “I’d like for the last guinea worm to die before I do.” Nine years later, aged ninety-nine and in palliative care, he is still going, if not strongly — a metaphor for a lifetime of indefatigability. •

The post Prescient president appeared first on Inside Story.

The problem is clear in the latest Closing the Gap annual report, a masterful example of sophisticated political management and bureaucratic obfuscation. This tightly organised combination of new and previous policy commitments, 2023 achievements and key actions for 2024 purports to outline the Commonwealth’s strategic priorities for the next year. But closer analysis reveals deep-seated flaws in policy design, strategic omissions and evasions and a deep-seated lack of ambition, all wrapped in a slick presentation replete with selective case studies, graphics, some useful governance charts and an avalanche of uninformative facts and figures. There is nothing strategic about this document.

The previous government was more inclined to blame the victim, cut funding and pursue punitive policies. It reshaped the Closing the Gap architecture, reconstituting and expanding its targets. Most importantly, it created a new National Agreement on Closing the Gap that directly engaged First Nations in shaping policy while shifting the bulk of political and policy responsibility — and future blame — to the states and territories.

For Labor, the failure of the Voice referendum has exposed a deficient policy framework and diminished its preparedness to pursue substantive reform. In desperation, it has fallen back — holus bolus — on the previous government’s policy architecture.

Despite their tactical and ideological differences, both major parties have used excessively complex bureaucratic processes, extremely low transparency, high-flown promises and the tactical politicisation of specific issues to divert attention from more important underlying issues. Their guiding principles appear to be to deflect, defer and delay.

A fundamental problem with the national agreement is that its policy architecture is extraordinarily over-engineered. It was designed not by a single committee of state, territory and Commonwealth bureaucrats but by negotiations between that committee and a committee of Indigenous representatives. The asymmetric power imbalance inevitably produced an imperfect structure.

It is hard to believe that the government negotiators didn’t see the ramifications of the extraordinarily complex structure that emerged from the negotiations. It created multiple choke points at which multi-party consultation and coordination is required, encouraging a culture of inertia and stasis.

To take just one important example, the agreement identifies nineteen targets and four priority reforms and allocates responsibility for implementation to eight state and territory jurisdictions along with the Commonwealth and the Australian Local Government Association. The Coalition of Indigenous Peaks — which itself has a nascent federal structure in each state and territory — is also ostensibly an equal partner.

No line of sight nor responsibility exists between any one target and any one government or minister: responsibilities and accountability are shared across a highly complex geographical and sectoral matrix involving layers of mainstream and Indigenous-specific programs. National-level data is deficient across all targets and all four priority reforms, at least partly because the targets themselves have been poorly chosen and loosely specified. Most importantly, the targets are not aligned with dedicated investment strategies.

The four priority reforms at the heart of the agreement would best be seen as overarching frameworks. But they have been broken down into arbitrary elements to be measured and reported on, notwithstanding the vagueness of these elements and their poor fit with existing data. Instead of bringing macro-level strategic coherence the four priorities have been converted into arenas of micro-focused navel-gazing.

While the agreement requires each jurisdiction to publish an annual report and develop an on-going implementation plan, the joint council that manages its operation decided some years ago to shift to annual implementation plans, adding a further layer of process. Instead of being a roadmap laying out each jurisdiction’s multi-year pathway to each target, the plans merely recount innumerable actions and funding decisions, most with limited timeframes.

The latest Commonwealth implementation plan lists sixty-five commitments of varying significance; state and territory plans are generally much more complicated. A requirement that jurisdictions explain how they would “close the gap” has been transformed into a requirement to publish a profusion of meaningless facts and intentions to develop plans.

By combining that latest implementation plan with its annual report the Commonwealth has signalled its unwillingness to develop and lay out a longer-term roadmap. Its decision-making is very much at odds with the recent Productivity Commission review of Closing the Gap, which recommends that implementation plans reflect a more strategic approach.

Any serious attempt to lay out such a roadmap would involve two elements that are seemingly anathema to the Australian government. First, the Commonwealth would need to establish a framework to coordinate the disparate and largely inadequate efforts of the states and territories. This is a glaring hole in Closing the Gap’s architecture and desperately needs attention not just from the Indigenous Australians minister but also from the treasurer, the finance minister and the prime minister.

Notwithstanding its potential to give First Nations people access to policymaking, the national agreement has formalised a regression across the federation towards the inertia last experienced before 1967. Labor would face few insurmountable obstacles if it resolved to reverse direction and effectively coordinate government efforts to deal with Indigenous disadvantage across the federation. A failure to do so will risk Closing the Gap imploding under its own weight.

The second element of a realistic and effective roadmap would be an estimate of the size of the multi-year investments required. This would facilitate better decision-making, assist in placing the myriad demands on governments in perspective and assess the financial costs — the imputed shortfalls in funding, in other words — that First Nations Australians continue to bear.

Unfortunately the Commonwealth’s latest implementation plan appears designed to preclude even modest reforms like these.

Many other questions and issues aren’t dealt with in the Commonwealth’s plan. There’s space here to look at just two of them.

The Community Development Program provides income support and job search for around 40,000 participants in remote Australia. This year’s Closing the Gap annual report lists a total 1950 new jobs employment placements/jobs created under CDP. Even so, the prime minister announced that the government was “moving on” from the “failed Community Development Program” and establishing a Remote Jobs and Economic Development Program to help community organisations create 3000 jobs over three years in remote areas, at a cost of $707 million. This funding for real jobs in regions where employment opportunities are scarce or non-existent is welcome and long overdue. Unfortunately, it is pathetically unambitious. And what is the future for the 37,000 CDP participants? Will they continue in a “failed” program?

A second example: the report lists ninety-eight actions from last year’s implementation plan and reports on their status. Most are mere process matters. Nine are listed as delayed; one as “stopped.” The latter is target 9b, relating to remote essential services infrastructure (though that’s not spelt out in the report). The target, which was approved by ministers in August 2022, states:

By 2031, all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households:

• within discrete Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities receive essential services that meet or exceed the relevant jurisdictional standard

• in or near to a town receive essential services that meet or exceed the same standard as applies generally within the town…

Last year the Commonwealth declared that “delivering on Target 9b will provide vital infrastructure to support liveable, safe, sustainable and healthy communities for all First Nations peoples… The initial focus for the target will be on the development of a new Community Infrastructure Implementation Plan, in collaboration with the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) and key stakeholders.”

Why then, without explanation, has work on the implementation plan for “vital infrastructure” been stopped? Perhaps the Commonwealth fears a remote infrastructure implementation plan would encourage the states to demand increased Commonwealth funding. So much for mobilising all avenues and opportunities to overcome the entrenched inequality faced by too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

All in all, the latest Closing the Gap report makes for depressing reading. It comes across as a convoluted box-ticking exercise, overflowing with plans, partnership committees, good news stories and the like. It makes no serious attempt to look behind the available data to acknowledge and reflect on the challenges of those families caught up in extreme poverty, cycles of alcohol-and drug-induced despair, youth suicides, and the trauma of extraordinary rates of incarceration and unfathomable out-of-home-care rates for Indigenous children.

The report’s implicit agenda is to defer committing financial resources, and delay making difficult decisions. Sure, governments can’t solve all the nation’s problems, but it is inexcusable that, where governments do invest, resources don’t flow equitably.

The Closing the Gap process is perhaps the most useful way to bring these problems to the nation’s attention. Its success will require vision, political commitment and a preparedness to think through the policy issues and make decisions commensurate with the size and severity of the challenges. The Albanese government, like the government before it, has so far failed on all counts.

In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” It is time the government commissioned an independent strategic review of the Indigenous policy domain, akin to the recent 2023 Defence Strategic Review, aimed at bringing a much greater degree of discipline, rigour and, most importantly, urgency to a worsening crisis blighting the life opportunities of many tens of thousands of First Nations citizens.

The fact that the depth and severity of this crisis is largely invisible to most Australians increases the responsibility on governments to act; it is not an excuse or rationale for inaction. •

The post Gap years 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.

The Allies’ trial of Japanese wartime political and military leaders was intended to lay the foundations of a new, peaceful and democratic Japan by punishing the militarists who had led the country into a disastrous conflict. The notion that victors could judge the vanquished evoked controversy, both within Japan and internationally; yet in the late 1940s the pioneering Japanese feminist Kato Shizue could confidently write that “intelligent Japanese long ago decided that the punishment of the war criminals was inevitable, and they think the verdicts were just.”

Today, feelings are very different. Japanese conservative politicians (including prominent members of the present government) rail against what they label the “Tokyo Trial View of History,” which they blame for instilling a darkly masochistic view of the nation’s history in the minds of the Japanese population. The late prime minister Shinzo Abe was particularly emphatic in denying that the men convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East should be regarded as criminals. The seven who were executed for war crimes following the Tokyo trial — as well as others convicted and given lesser sentences — are among those commemorated in the Yasukuni Shrine, where right-wing politicians and some senior military officers go to honour the spirits of the dead. As political scientist Gary J. Bass argues in his monumental new book Judgement at Tokyo, “the Tokyo trial misfired and fizzled,” revealing “some of the reasons why a liberal international order has not emerged in Asia, despite the wishes of some American strategists.”

The paradoxes at the heart of the Tokyo trial began to be visible well before the International Tribunal opened its hearings on 3 May 1946. Bass’s book starts by guiding readers through the concluding stages of the Pacific war and the impassioned debates among allied leaders about the treatment that should be meted out to the vanquished. (US secretary of state Cordell Hull was among those who initially favoured summary executions of Hitler and Japan’s wartime prime minister, Tojo Hideki.) A central figure in the early part of Bass’s narrative is Henry Stimson, US secretary of war at the time of the defeat of Germany and Japan, who played a key part in creating the conceptual framework that underlay both the German Nuremberg war crimes trials and the Tokyo trial.

In Nuremberg and Tokyo, the wartime leaders of the defeated nations faced three classes of criminal charge. Class A was the crime of waging (or conspiring to wage) aggressive war; Class B covered the war crimes set out in the existing Geneva Conventions, including mistreatment of prisoners of war; and Class C encompassed crimes against humanity. The difficulties lay in Classes A and C. There were no legal precedents for prosecuting people for waging aggressive war, nor for crimes against humanity, and even within the victorious allied nations some leading legal commentators were concerned that the trials were imposing newly invented laws retrospectively on the defeated.

The horrors revealed at Nuremberg helped to embed the notion of crimes against humanity both in public consciousness and in international law. But in Tokyo the key charge (though not the only one) was the crime of waging aggressive war — an offence for which no one had ever been prosecuted before the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and for which no one has been prosecuted since.

As Bass vividly shows, unease and disagreement about the moral and judicial basis of the International Tribunal’s proceedings haunted the Tokyo trial. Even Sir William Webb, the acerbic Australian judge who presided over the International Military Tribunal, privately questioned whether waging aggressive war could be treated as a crime, though he managed to suppress these doubts sufficiently to concur in, and hand down, the tribunal’s guilty sentences on all the twenty-five defendants who survived the trial. (Two died during the proceedings, and another was found mentally unfit to be tried.)

A further obvious paradox of the Tokyo trial was the fact that Emperor Hirohito, in whose name the war had been fought and hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers had gone to their deaths, never appeared in court. By the time Japan surrendered, the US government had decided that it would be politically expedient to retain the emperor as symbolic leader of the new Japan. Despite protests from Australia, he remained immune from prosecution.

Judgment at Tokyo, though, is not a dry analysis of judicial principles and legal arguments. It is a vivid blow-by-blow account of the trial, filled with colourful characters and moments of farce as well as tragedy. The Tokyo tribunal, though dominated by the colonial powers, was more international than its Nuremberg counterpart. Its eleven judges represented the United States, Canada, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, China, India and the Philippines, and each judge brought with him (they were all men) his own experiences, professional training and personal prejudices. They spent their time in war-devastated Tokyo living an isolated existence in the Imperial Hotel, and relations between them were often tense. Chinese judge Mei Ruao took a deep dislike to Indian judge Radhabinod Pal; the British judge, Lord William Patrick, was derisively dismissive of his Filipino counterpart, Delfin Jaranilla. They were united, it seems, only in their shared aversion to the court’s president, William Webb.

Yet this is not a simple litany of fractiousness and failure. What the Tokyo trial achieved, in very difficult circumstances, was the collection of a mass of vivid and often searing evidence of the horrors of war, including of many conventional war crimes: among them, the massacres and mass rapes of civilians in the Philippines and China, the mistreatment and killing of prisoners of war, and the brutal forced labour inflicted on tens of thousands of Southeast Asians and of allied prisoners of war on the Thai–Burma Railway and elsewhere.

While taking readers through this evidence, Judgement at Tokyo also points out the silences: most notably, the absence from the trial of any serious discussion of Japan’s use of biological warfare in China. The US and Soviet authorities were well aware of this dark story but made sure that it was kept out of the trials because they were busy trying to obtain knowledge of Japan’s biological techniques for their own purposes.

Bass explores not only the events of the trial itself but also the subsequent destinies of the judges — particularly the very different fates of Mei Ruao and Radhabinod Pal. Mei, who had been appointed to the court by the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, decided hesitantly to return to mainland China in 1949 and throw in his lot with the new People’s Republic of China. Ironically, he fell foul of the communist authorities because of his fierce criticism of Japanese war crimes at a time when China’s government was trying to improve the country’s political relationship with Japan. He was publicly condemned during the Cultural Revolution and died soon after — only to be elevated to the status of national hero under current Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whose nationalist rhetoric echoes Mei’s own insistence that China should never forget the wartime horrors inflicted on its people by Japan.

The Indian judge Pal, on the contrary, famously wrote a dissenting judgment that sweepingly rejected the right of the International Tribunal to judge the defendants. (Later, he also questioned the Nuremberg judgements and the reality of the Holocaust.) Pal’s lengthy statement of dissent made him the hero of the Japanese right, who feted him on his later visits to Japan and have cited his judgement ever since as justification for their own revisionist views of the war.

Judgement at Tokyo is based on a mountain of court records, government archives and interviews with the descendants of the judges and defendants, and Bass skilfully weaves all this together into a fascinating narrative. Despite the scale and scope of the book, though, there is one odd lacuna. It barely mentions a crucial counterpoint to the Tokyo trials: the story of the 4000-odd Japanese soldiers and military auxiliaries who were found guilty of Class B and C war crimes in trials held throughout East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific, of whom almost 1000 received the death sentence.

As Utsumi Aiko and other Japanese scholars have pointed out, these were the most tragic of the war crimes proceedings, for many of those who received the harshest sentences were low-ranking auxiliaries — some of them drafted from Japan’s colonies of Taiwan and Korea into the violent world of the Japanese wartime military only to be abandoned to their fate by the collapsing military machine that had recruited them.

As Gary Bass shows, the Tokyo trial had far-reaching implications for Japan and its Asian neighbours. Its fundamental flaw was its shakily based attempt to define the waging of aggressive war as a crime. The spectre of double standards and retrospective justice raised by this concept has never been laid to rest. This in turn allows historical denialists today not only to dismiss the trial as “victors’ revenge” but also, by extension, to whitewash the history of the war and depict the Tokyo defendants as innocent martyrs to a just cause. And the growing influence of that denialism, as Bass trenchantly observes, risks shackling Japan to a narrative of the war that is both “morally odious and historically dubious.” •

Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
By Gary J. Bass | Picador | $39.99 | 912 pages

The post Victors’ justice? 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

The post A dynamic of acceptance and revolt appeared first on Inside Story.

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

The post “Am I the one who’s missing something?” appeared first on Inside Story.

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. •

The post Back to the office: a solution in search of a problem appeared first on Inside Story.

This state of affairs came to an abrupt end with Russia’s all-out invasion on 24 February 2022. Not only did the fighting reach deep into Ukraine’s heartland, but life far behind the frontline also became militarised. Russia frequently bombards civilian infrastructure as well as cities in a type of terror warfare intended to break the will of Ukraine’s defenders. There is no longer any hinterland.

How long will this slaughter last? In August last year I warned against overly optimistic expectations, writing that “supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support.” Another six months on it is even clearer that patience and endurance will be needed if we want to see Ukraine survive and strive. We have to stop thinking in terms of short and decisive campaigns. This war has become a war of attrition.

Like Vladimir Putin, we need to think in the geographical and historical categories of what historian Timothy Snyder has memorably called the “bloodlands” — the vast territories between Russia in the east and Germany in the west, with Ukraine in the middle. This viewpoint expands the time horizon dramatically. The last three wars fought in this region were far from short campaigns. The first world war’s “eastern front” lasted from August 1914 to March 1918. The wars of the Romanov succession began in Central Asia in 1916 and elsewhere in 1918, only ending, depending on the region, in 1920, 1921, 1922 or even 1923. The German Soviet war — constantly invoked by Putin both in the run-up to the war and during Russia’s continuing cultural mobilisation — extended from the (northern hemisphere) summer of 1941 to the spring of 1945.

Hence, the normal duration a full scale military conflict in this part of the world seems to be three to four years. Ukraine has survived two so far.

But it’s not just the region’s history that suggests a long haul. Once battle lines are fully entrenched, conventional war takes time. The first world war’s western front was bogged down in costly trench warfare, with massive casualties but little territorial gains, for four years.

By the time the second world war rolled around, military specialists in all armies had found the technical means to overcome trenches, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. And yet it took the Allies close to a year after the invasion of Normandy in 1944 to defeat Germany, a country under assault from the east by the steamroller of the Red Army, from the south by the United States, British Empire forces and the Free French, and from the air by indiscriminate attack by the combined power of the US and British air forces. Both Ukraine and Russia are in much stronger positions today.

Historical analogies are miserable predictors. But they matter when historical actors think in and through them. Putin is an avid reader of history, constantly pondering where he fits in. He thinks in categories and time-spans informed by Russia’s historical experience.

While he didn’t expect Ukraine to resist so effectively and survive the initial onslaught, he had long prepared his country for a drawn-out conflict with the outside world. One indicator is the effort his regime spent on making Russia’s food system relatively independent of outside supplies. At a time when everybody praised the virtues of globalisation and international networks of trade and mutual dependence, Putin insisted Russia should be able to feed itself.

As a recent study points out, this is the kind of food system you build when you expect a long-term confrontation that might throw your country back on its own resources. Putin embarked on it over decades, at a time when barely anybody in Europe could imagine a war of this magnitude on the continent.

Putin also entrenched his dictatorship, also an anticipation of war. First came the slide towards authoritarianism that began on the first day of his presidency. More recently came its acceleration. The death last week of opposition figure Alexei Navalny is just the latest escalation of a massive crackdown that began in 2021 and quickened with the start of the all-out war in 2022. Russia is now a full-blown dictatorship.

Thus entrenched in the Kremlin, Putin expects the democracies of Europe to have the shorter breath. The way Ukraine has become a political football in US domestic politics might well feed this expectation.

We need to appreciate that this is Putin’s theory of victory: to pound Ukraine with artillery and air attacks; to bleed the defenders white by sacrificing large numbers of his own citizens; and to wait until “the decadent West” loses interest and returns to business as usual, depriving Ukraine of the weapons and economic support it needs to defend itself.

As things stand, he might well be proven right. As I wrote a year ago about the then unlikely prospect of a Russian victory:

Winning the war would require Russia to ramp up its military production and mobilisation of manpower and increase the quality of its training and leadership. It could do that over the long run, just as the Soviet Union did during World War II… It could do so particularly if some of the countries which today are sitting on the fence decide to defy the United States, NATO and the European Union and circumvent or ignore sanctions; the United States reverts to isolationism; NATO disintegrates into squabbles between its members; and the European Union implodes among disagreements between old and new, and rich and less prosperous nations.

This pessimistic scenario has not yet come to pass. Yes, Russia currently has the whip hand. It has massively increased its armaments production, found ways around sanctions and continued to field large numbers of men while avoiding all-out mobilisation. Meanwhile, the United States has shaped up as the weakest link in the chain of democracies supporting Ukraine.

But Russia has not won yet. Ukraine still has “a viable theory of victory,” as two leading military analysts recently wrote. Its military has become expert at war by attrition, which it fights intelligently, minimising its own losses while maximising the enemy’s. Supplied adequately, it will become even better at this terrible art, denying Russia victory and eventually turning the tide.

For this to happen, though, Ukraine needs the continued support of the outside world: from NATO countries, from the Europeans and from friends further afield, such as Australia. But these friends need to appreciate that this war is now a war of attrition. And those wars are not won in a day or a season.

What about negotiations? A strong commitment to long-term support should unite all friends of Ukraine, no matter whether they think that ultimately the war will end in Kyiv’s forces retaking all occupied territories, if necessary by military means (the current official Ukrainian position), or in a negotiated settlement of some sort, with compromises on both sides.

There are indeed models for a negotiated peace which, while painful, might satisfy Ukraine and guarantee its safety rather than simply giving Russia breathing space to rearm for the next assault or the chance to insist on Ukraine’s unconditional capitulation. The much-discussed “West German” solution is one such proposal. It proposes that Ukraine be divided into a democratic west with some of its eastern territories occupied or even annexed by Russia. The west would be integrated into NATO and the European Union and developed with a massive aid program similar to the Marshall Plan. This is certainly not an acceptable solution for either side at the moment, but it might well become one once exhaustion eventually sets in.

The key term here is “eventually.” Negotiating now only aids Russia in its imperialist and anti-democratic goals. Forcing Ukraine to negotiate at a moment when, with delayed and insufficient support from its democratic friends, it is on the defensive amounts to asking a democratic nation to surrender to a dictatorship. Negotiations are best held from a position of strength. If not backed by the ability to resist and indeed to inflict damage, talks with a militarily stronger opponent quickly lead to a loss of territory and sovereignty.

The Ukrainians learned this lesson in 1918 when they signed the first treaty of Brest–Litovsk with the Germans and Austrians, who subsequently occupied the country and squeezed out food reserves to feed their own war effort. The Russian Bolsheviks learned the same lesson shortly thereafter, when, devoid of the fighting force they themselves helped dissolve, they had to sign a punishing peace with the Germans just to get out of a war they could no longer fight. And, in an instance of remarkable historical justice, the Germans learned the same lesson in 1919, when they could do nothing but sign the famously unfriendly Versailles treaty.

Ukraine needs to be helped to avoid such a situation and negotiate from the position of strength, if a negotiated settlement will indeed end this war. •

The post Russia’s war against Ukraine: a longer view appeared first on Inside Story.

In Australia it is available only on YouTube, with sometimes hilarious computer-generated subtitles. As long as viewers bear in mind that “the cavalry in the birch wood” means “Captain Ma in the town of Hualin” the story will carry them effortlessly along from its gentle beginning to its bitter-sweet ending.

The Long Season is based on an even bleaker novel, Yu Xiaoqian’s The Cutting Edge of Winter. The story centres on an elderly man’s dogged search for whoever killed his son nearly twenty years earlier. The cold case investigation, with its post-industrial social criticism and #MeToo edge, mixes grim subject matter with moments of levity and ends with a message of hope. Imagine the cast of the BBC’s New Tricks in a Ken Loach movie and you’ll get the picture.

The setting is a rustbelt town in northeast China called Hualin, hometown to our ageing hero, Wang Xiang (Fan Wei), and the site of an ailing steel factory. The series is filmed in split time, the events of 1997–98 shown in flashback from 2016. Wang, once a “model worker” who drove a freight train for the factory, is now a taxi driver. His college-educated brother-in-law, Gong Biao (Qin Hao), used to work in the factory’s office; he drives a taxi too. When a chance event involving Gong’s taxi leads Wang to suspect that his son’s killer has resurfaced, the two men join forces with retired cop Captain Ma (Chen Minghao), who investigated the original case.

Much of the series’ popularity rests on the relationship between these three characters. Their dealings with each other range from bumbling strategising to resigned philosophising. Variously single, widowed and on the edge of divorce, they are in the process of coming to terms with the lives they’ve had. Their pursuit of the case, and its link with Gong’s taxi, seems at one level like a dramatic realisation of this process.

They all struggle to maintain control over their lives. Wang has prostate problems. Gong is diabetic. Health problems among people in the town and the cost of treating them make up a minor but persistent refrain. Director Xin Shuang’s father was dying while he was making the series. His close observation of the challenges of old age and the cost of hospital care may have informed his treatment of these topics.

Juxtaposed with the character-driven treatment of the three men — middle-aged in 1997, getting old in 2016 — is a plot-driven story about the younger generation. Wang’s son Yang (Yitie Liu) is a budding poet. The girl he loves, Shen Mo (Teresa Li), is a medical student with a troubled background who plays piano in a nightclub to support herself. Shen’s deaf-mute brother and his business partner run a home-made cinema showing videos on a clapped-out television. Their lives interact, often violently, with those of other young people adrift in the ruins of socialism.

Confronted with the fraying of the social fabric, the parents cling desperately to the known world of lifetime employment in a factory where workers were the masters. In one of many references to that disappearing world, episode six has Yang’s mother, Meisu, reflecting on how different life was for them.

“Our generation was used to being organised,” she says. “At home, there were lots of children, and we obeyed our parents in everything. In the collective when we grew up, we had to listen to our leaders. We’ve always felt that there’s a circle surrounding us. All our lives we just walked in that circle and no one stepped outside of it for any reason, not even to put a foot on a coin.”

By 2016, the lives of the young people have either come to an end or come to nothing. With its focus on older men struggling on in a landscape significantly devoid of women and children, the series forces reflection on what the society has done to itself.

Out of this Pandora’s box hope wings its way in episode twelve. There is justice — the corrupt manager of the steel factory gets his comeuppance — and there is a woman, a former factory worker, who offers Wang the possibility of someone with whom to “pass the days.” In a remarkable scene performed by the accomplished Fan Wei, Wang talks to her indirectly about that possibility, glancing at her occasionally in the rear mirror of the taxi he is driving.

There is also a child: Wang’s younger son, born in 1997, his origins unexplained until the very end of the series. And there is a future that lies in (where else?) Beijing, China’s centre of wealth, culture and politics, as Wang more than once states. The long-dead elder son never got there but the younger son will.

Reviewing the series for Foreign Policy, James Palmer asks “how did this brilliant Chinese rust belt noir get made under Xi?” The answer surely lies in its redemptive conclusion. At the end of the final episode the camera returns viewers to the cornfields that greeted them at the beginning of the series. The narrow-gauge railway along which the factory train once ran is still there. Wang stands by the track with a beatific visage as the train once more chuffs into view, his younger self at the controls. “Look forward,” old Wang calls to him. “Don’t look back!”

The media in the People’s Republic of China has tried to make this the central message of the series. For the Global Times, The Long Season “meets Chinese people’s demand for quality productions that deliver positive messages, such as the theme of the show: ‘Move on, don’t look back.’”

Yet the ending doesn’t feel quite right. With its series of betrayals, the story’s logic points to an alternative conclusion, the one Yu Xiaoqian wrote for the novel. There, readers discover that decades earlier, on the very day he was to be nominated a model worker, Wang witnessed the sexual abuse of a minor. Like a time-delayed bomb, his failure to report the crime precipitated the series of events that led to his son’s death. The novel ends not with him smiling in the cornfields but being forced to jump to his death.

Viewers can be grateful to the scriptwriters for leaving them with a gentler final scene. But the benign ending suggests, if not the hand of the censor then at least a process of self-censorship.

The fact that Yu Xiaoqian himself was one of the scriptwriters brings to mind the fate of Lao She’s 1939 novel Rickshaw Boy. In 1945 this profoundly pessimistic story about the failure of Republican-era Beijing to meet the modest aspirations of a rural migrant was issued in English translation with the unauthorised addition of two extra chapters and a happy ending.

Lao She was disheartened by the bowdlerisation of his work in the United States, but worse came when the Chinese-language original was savagely redacted during the revolutionary upsurge under Mao in the 1950s. The 1955 edition omitted one and a half chapters of the original, all sexual references, and some other incidental material. Lao She approved these alterations and apologised for the novel’s lack of optimism.

Optimism — “joyful socialism,” as it has been termed — is a hallmark of Chinese communism. On the small screen it is better expressed by China’s top-rating series in 2022, Daughter of the Mountains, the dramatisation of the true story of Huang Wenxiu, a village girl who makes it all the way to university in Beijing before returning home to participate in programs of poverty alleviation.

Unlike in The Long Season, where the Communist Party is hardly evident, in Daughter of the Mountains it is front and centre. Huang is a party member who rises to the position of local party secretary. She meets her death tragically in a car crash on a mountain road, one of the many slated for repairs under infrastructural plans for the region. But this is by no means a devastating finale, for Huang leaves a legacy of hope for a better future. In real life, her father paid tribute to the Communist Party for all the opportunities it had offered his daughter.

That two such very different series should have received equally high ratings in China says much about the divided self that China is today. •

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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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Blakeway receives a lot of complaints. More than one in six people in England live in social rentals (compared to fewer than one in twenty in Australia). That’s about four million households, and Blakeway’s office is the place to go if they have a beef with their landlords, whether those institutions are not-for profit housing associations or local councils.

In 2022–23, the ombudsman made 6590 orders and recommendations designed to make things right for residents, including £1.1 million (A$2.1 million) in compensation. The call on Blakeway’s services is escalating at a phenomenal rate. “This financial year we’re up 91 per cent for formal investigations,” he tells me in an online interview. “We’re trending towards 10,000 formal investigations a year.”

Demand will grow even faster if the ombudsman is empowered to extend its services to another 4.4 million households in the private rental market, a change Blakeway would welcome. Most private tenants can’t currently access the free, independent, impartial redress his office provides, but a Renters Reform Bill could make his office the single venue for managing conflicts without the need to go to court.

Blakeway took up his role in 2019. His previous experience included serving as London’s deputy mayor for housing (when Boris Johnson was mayor) and as a director of the government housing agency, Homes England. Answering my questions, he is thoughtful and considered, and not prone to strong statements. In official verdicts on the failures of social housing providers, though, he is more direct.

Last July, for instance, he delivered a scathing judgement on the consistent failings of London’s largest social landlord, L&Q, which provides homes to a quarter of a million people. He found L&Q demonstrated little empathy in responding to residents’ complaints and in some cases was overtly dismissive, heavy-handed and lacking in respect. He ordered the organisation to pay £142,000 in compensation and apply 500 remedies including apologies and repairs. He has been equally critical of other big housing providers.

Resolving individual cases, though, only achieves so much. In a new report analysing complaints by vulnerable tenants, the ombudsman identifies patterns of landlord failure around attitudes, respect and rights. A fundamental reset is needed, he writes, and a royal commission into housing and health is the way to do it.

Remarkably, the ombudsman reaches back to the 1880s for inspiration. The Royal Commission on Housing of the Working Classes was, he writes, the “only inquiry of its kind to explore the relationship between housing and public health.” The commission was set up in 1884 by Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury, who appointed himself — along with the Prince of Wales, former union leader Henry Broadhurst and several others — as one of its its members.

Salisbury believed that government-sponsored housing initiatives were vital to improve morality and health — a view criticised by the Manchester Guardian, among others, which described it as “state socialism pure and simple.” Despite the critics, the commission’s report produced “an explosion of transformative government-backed interventions, from council homes to garden suburbs.”

Britain’s subsequent tradition of regarding housing as a health issue saw significant housing developments led by health ministries. The ambitious 1919 Housing Act, for instance, which made housing a national responsibility, is generally called the Addison Act in reference to Dr Christopher Addison, the health minister who introduced it. After the second world war, Labour’s health minister Anuerin Bevan not only created the National Health Service but also, as minister responsible for housing, oversaw the construction of more than a million new dwellings in five years.

Public inquiries like Britain’s 1884 commission have also played an important role in Australia. Most notable is the Commonwealth Housing Commission initiated by postwar reconstruction minister Ben Chifley in 1943. Its report concluded that “a dwelling of good standard and equipment is not only the need, but the right of every citizen” and recommended that the national government “sponsor a government-financed housing programme.”

Up to that point, federal engagement in what was seen as a state issue had been limited. The commission provided the impetus for Commonwealth–state housing agreements over subsequent decades. While the scale of its ambition was never realised, more than 14 per cent of dwellings completed nationally between the end of the war and 1956 were built as public housing.

Richard Blakeway’s call for a royal commission “to reimagine the future of social housing” in the twenty-first century echoes similar calls in Australia. A 2021 report by the UNSW City Futures Research Centre argued for a royal commission to tackle “the scale and complexity” of the housing problem. More recently, the Centre for Equitable Housing urged the federal government to review its many and disparate housing-related outlays and bring them together in a single portfolio with clear objectives.

But both England and Australia are awash in reports from a succession of inquiries and housing research. Is the problem really a lack of data? Or is it a lack of political will?

One barrier in both countries is a basic disagreement about how to move forward. Proponents of the supply side argument say planning restrictions are limiting home building, driving up prices and rents. For them, the solution lies in looser planning and zoning rules to free up private development. Build more housing and rents will fall.

The contrary position is that market players have no incentive to build the type of homes that low-income earners can afford, especially when the tax system encourages investment in housing as an asset rather than a public good. The corollary of this critique is that government must reform taxation to reduce speculation and invest more public funds in low-rent housing.

These views are not mutually contradictory, and some action is happening on both fronts, but the supply-side argument seems to hold more sway with governments in both countries. In its 2019 election manifesto, Britain’s Conservative Party promised that it would lift residential construction to make sure 300,000 new homes are built annually in England. As parliament approaches the end of its term, completions are falling short of that figure, with about 234,000 new dwellings added to the housing stock in each of last two financial years. In a new initiative, secretary of state Michael Gove hopes to turbocharge development by compelling councils to speed up approvals for home building on former industrial or “brownfield” sites.

In Australia, the Albanese government aspires to deliver 1.2 million homes over five years, spurred by incentives to streamline planning and zoning rules at state and local levels. To hit this target developers would need to increase construction from 40,000 to 60,000 dwellings per quarter. Expert observers like Alan Kohler doubt the industry can build at such an unprecedented rate, particularly in current market conditions.

Investment in social housing has surged in Australia thanks to federal Labor’s Housing Australia Future Fund, or HAFF, and renewed state government initiatives. But after decades of neglect these projects won’t be enough to put roofs over the heads of Australians with unmet housing needs, including the 175,000 households on state and territory waiting lists for social housing.

In England, almost 1.3 million households are waiting for social housing, a dire statistic that manifests in clusters of tents pitched on the pavements of central London. In some parts of the city, more than one in ten children and teenagers live in temporary accommodation and are effectively homeless.

The Tory government says it has invested £11.5 billion since being elected to fund an affordable homes programme. It has just doubled a low-cost loan scheme from £3 billion to £6 billion to enable providers to build an extra 20,000 dwellings.

Historically, though, these numbers appear modest. In the thirty-five years after the second world war, local authorities and housing associations built 4.4 million dwellings; by 1981 almost a third of the English population lived in social housing. The share has halved in the decades since, not because demand has fallen but because there are far fewer socially provided homes. This month, the magazine Inside Housing reported that the number sold or demolished in England last year was nearly three times greater than the number completed.

An alliance of England’s largest housing associations has urged Michael Gove to invest £15 billion annually over the next decade to build 90,000 homes a year, a third of them in London. But having just lost two seats to Labour in recent by-elections and facing a wipe-out at the next election, prime minister Rishi Sunak is more inclined to woo voters by cutting taxes than by investing billions in public services.

Labour, meanwhile, is playing a cautious hand. It has promised the “biggest boost to affordable housing for a generation” but not the funding to match. Anxious to appear economically responsible, Labour has just scaled back the £28 billion green investment plan that was to be a central plank of its election manifesto. If Keir Starmer becomes prime minister, a big spend on housing looks unlikely.

As waiting lists for social housing grow, tenants lucky enough to have a subsidised roof over their heads can still find themselves in dire circumstances, reminiscent of the conditions that gave rise to Britain’s first housing inquiry in the 1880s.

In December 2020, in a case that’s become emblematic of the problem, two-year old Awaab Ishak died from a severe respiratory condition caused by persistent mould in the council home his family rented in Rochdale north of Manchester. Mould — one of the systemic problems identified in the ombudsman’s files — is also recognised as a major health threat to tenants in Australia.

Awaab’s parents had been complaining about the mould since 2017 but the local authority failed to act, saying the problem was caused by the family’s “lifestyle.” The ombudsman found many cases of social landlords adopting an accusatory approach rather than investigating other possible causes.

“Health and housing are closely aligned,” says Blakeway, “but the system doesn’t necessarily respond in that integrated way. There’s a real risk that complaints are treated in a kind of transactional way or become personalised. The risk is that they are treated in isolation, and you lose thematic qualities that complaints have, or you don’t do a root cause analysis.”

One housing worker told the ombudsman that tenants who challenge providers are “seen as troublemakers to be quashed.” This view gels with management’s dismissive response to Grenfell Tower residents who warned of urgent fire safety problems ahead of the 2017 inferno that killed seventy-two people.

Community outrage at Awaab’s death has prompted Michael Gove, the minister responsible for housing, to include Awaab’s Law in a new Social Housing Regulation Act. Landlords will now be required “to investigate and fix reported health hazards within specified timeframe.” But whether local authorities and housing associations have the resources to make quick repairs is another question.

More than one in ten dwellings in the social rented sector fail to live up to the Decent Homes Standard, the government benchmark for minimum housing conditions. And the English Housing Survey found that almost two-thirds of tenants who complain to their landlords are not happy with the response.

Tenants told the ombudsman that social landlords were quick to inform them about increased rents and service charges but poor in communicating about all other matters. Not surprisingly, this created a perception that social housing providers are “only interested in money, rather than the condition of their homes or the landlord/tenant relationship.”

An expert panel concluded that communication between tenants and their social landlords is hampered by the high turnover of stressed frontline housing workers. The panel’s Better Housing Review also found that tenants lack a strong voice and face-to-face contact with staff. Blakeway’s research confirms this finding: residents told his office that a simple knock at the door can help to maintain and improve the landlord/tenant relationship.

Funding shortfalls undoubtedly underpin these problems, and the housing crisis has been compounded by the perfect storm of Covid, Brexit, higher interest rates, labour shortages and supply chain bottlenecks. But Blakeway sees other factors at play too.

With around 2000 councils and not-for-profit associations providing social housing in England, a great variability is inevitable. Understandably, the providers’ focus has been on increasing housing supply, but Blakeway says that’s rarely balanced by consideration of what to do about ageing houses and flats in urgent need of upgrades.

He believes that providers hold to a fixed view that social housing is better than any alternative on offer to low-income tenants in the private rental market, which leads them to neglect residents’ needs.

Then there are long-term societal shifts. “If nothing else had changed,” says Blakeway, “the current population in social housing would have got older, above the national average.” That means more vulnerable residents, often concentrated coastal and rural areas.

Housing providers need to think about how to respond says Blakeway: “What does that mean for our services, for adaptations, for understanding of issues like dementia?”

This demographic transition has coincided with residents’ growing understanding of what they can demand under recent human rights, equality and care legislation. The ombudsman says housing providers haven’t done enough to modify residents’ homes in line with these laws. This has been exacerbated by cuts to other government supports. “Social landlords will very clearly say that they feel like they become a surrogate for social and health services,” says Blakeway. “That’s because they are one of the most visible and immediate touch points.”

To survive financially, housing associations are also compelled to become savvy commercial operators. Torus, for instance, claims not only to be the largest affordable housing provider in northwest England, but also “one of its biggest and fastest-growing developers and commercial contractors.” One Housing describes itself as “a group of complementary businesses driven by a clear social purpose, with a charitable housing association at its core.” Alongside social and affordable housing, it offers homes for private rent and private sale.

A lack of funding has forced providers to sweat their assets, a strategy the Better Housing Review panel said “is fast reaching its limits.” The expert panel worried that commercial considerations are distracting providers from their core purpose of providing “decent, safe homes for those who can’t afford the market.” It warns that mergers to achieve economies of scale run the risk of “working to KPIs more related to business efficiency” rather than “complex indicators such as tenant experience and satisfaction.”

Blakeway says consolidation in the social housing sector is driven by noble ambitions but notes organisations become more reliant on processes and systems as they grow. “If a resident doesn’t fit into the neat box or their issues are more complex than the system can cope with, that’s where we can see things being fractured and people through falling through gaps.”

In a 1942 pamphlet, Housing the Australian Nation, prominent Melbourne social reformers F. Oswald Barnett and W.O. Burt surveyed the appalling housing conditions experienced by Australia’s working classes and called for much greater government investment than previously imagined. Health was at the top of their concerns. Without better housing, they worried, efforts to improve health would be “seriously retarded.”

Today, the evidence is even more compelling. In England, the research group BRE calculates that it costs the National Health Service an annual £1.4 billion to treat people made sick by poor housing. Yet there are relatively inexpensive and cost-effective ways of dealing with the major risks: insulation to counter excessive cold, hard-wired smoke detectors to alert residents to fires, handrails to cut the risk of falls, ventilation to minimise mould and damp.

BRE estimates that spending to reduce these hazards would quickly pay for itself in savings to the NHS. In the private rental sector, the payback time would be between eight and nine years; in the social housing sector it would be twelve to thirteen years. (Social housing tales longer to generate a positive return because overcrowding is a major hazard and is more expensive to fix.)

The costs of poor housing go beyond healthcare to include such things as lost earnings for those who fall ill and those who must care for them. BRE calculates that total annual cost to society of leaving people living in poor housing is around £18.5 billion. As well as generating NHS savings, fixing housing hazards would create jobs, reduce energy costs, lower carbon emissions and improve property values.

Looked at this way, public investment in housing seems like a no-brainer, whether as a way of improving lives or as a prudent fiscal move. As the housing crisis deepens, the social and economic price we pay further outstrips the cost of action.

Australia is moving down a similar path to England where, in the 1980s, not-for-profit housing associations began taking on a role traditionally played by local government. Since 2006, the number of dwellings owned or managed by Australia’s not-for-profit providers has more than tripled, mostly thanks to stock being transfers from public housing authorities.

Funding from the HAFF and state programs to build new dwellings will increase the size of the not-for-profit sector and raise pressure on providers to consolidate to achieve efficiencies.But as in England, there is a risk that commercial imperatives could distract from the core business of providing decent homes for Australians priced out of the private market. This is more likely to happen in the absence of consistent public funding and clear government direction.

England has also had sixteen housing minsters in the fourteen years since the Conservatives took office. As the Better Housing Review panel commented, this revolving door means “a lack of consistent and strategic thinking and action.”  Yet the panel insists that government cannot outsources its obligations and must remain “fully accountable for the provision of decent housing nationally,” just as it remains responsible for health and education.

Like England, Australia lacks a coherent housing strategy and consultations to develop one have proved disappointing. For almost a decade, Coalition governments in Canberra insisted that housing was a state matter. While this has changed under Labor, we still have a housing minister with no housing department. As the Centre for Equitable Housing argues, the lack of a dedicated department or a consolidated housing budget statement makes impossible to properly shape or evaluate public policy.

Housing ombudsman Richard Blakeway thinks a royal commission could help solve England’s housing challenge and revive understanding of the close connection between decent homes and good health. Housing, he says, is a complex problem where solutions must be built on expertise, impartiality, independence and a long-term perspective — all things that a royal commission has the potential to deliver. Australia’s problems might be different, but they are just as serious. Perhaps here, too, it’s worth considering a public inquiry with the capacity to probe, publicise and make recommendations. •

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Australian citizen Yang Hengjun’s arrest, imprisonment and suspended death sentence for espionage could draw comparison with the case of Francis James, the eccentric publisher of the Sydney church newspaper the Anglican, who Gough Whitlam managed to spring from a Chinese jail in 1973 after convincing Beijing he was a harmless prankster.

But the two cases are quite dissimilar, especially as the comparison doesn’t give Yang credit for his genuine efforts for liberal reform in China.

As recounted by Japan-based ex-diplomat Gregory Clark, who covered the Francis James case for the Australian, James had concocted an entirely fictitious account of travelling to the Chinese nuclear test site at Lop Nor in Xinjiang and sold it to the London Sunday Times in 1969. After he was exposed by Derek Davies of the Far Eastern Economic Review as having skirted around rather than visited China, James invented another preposterous story and then went openly to China in November 1969. He was promptly arrested as a suspected spy.

Why so reckless? Getting arrested was deliberate, Clark conjectured. “Get into China via the Canton Fair, behave suspiciously, get arrested dramatically and mysteriously, and the world will have no choice but to believe that here indeed is a person who could once have roamed the secret nuclear installations of northwest China,” he wrote.

“True, being arrested by the Chinese police in those days was no joke,” Clark went on. “But he has a plan. Because he behaves outrageously and courts arrest, the Chinese will quickly realise he is a harmless eccentric playing games and throw him out of the country. Being expelled from China will add even more to the James legend.”

But things don’t quite work out that way. “The Chinese decide that he is not mad or playing games, that he really is on some secret spy mission. What James thought would be a short-term escapade ends up as incarceration and interrogation for four years. The joke very nearly ends up as a tragedy.”

Yang’s case could very well turn into a tragedy. His death sentence has been suspended for two years on condition he doesn’t re-offend. How he might spy from a prison cell is a mystery, but Chinese security would no doubt find some evidence if it wanted to. And Yang, fifty-eight, has a large lesion on one of his kidneys that could be renal cancer, treatable if operated on in time. In a previous high-profile case, that of detained Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, Chinese authorities allowed liver cancer to develop beyond hope of treatment.

Despite five years of detention and hundreds of interrogation sessions, China’s Ministry of State Security could only come up with one plausible accusation of espionage. This involves an operation thirty years ago, in 1994–97, when Yang was working for the ministry itself as an undercover officer in Hong Kong as the territory’s handover from Britain to China was approaching. Back then, according to the limited summary of evidence released with the verdict, Yang passed on forty documents containing Chinese secrets to Taiwan’s intelligence service.

But Yang had long told confidants that his superiors in State Security gave him the job of opening contact with Taiwan operatives to help ensure a smooth transition and had been happy with his trading some low-level information to win confidences. So pleased with his performance had his superiors been that they let him go to Washington with his then wife for two years as a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, while still on the ministry’s books.

The resurrection of the Hong Kong episode suggests that Yang’s interrogators found no evidence of espionage in the decades since, unless it has been withheld. So the arrest must have been for something else. And the answer surely lies in the evolution of Yang’s career as an academic researcher, popular fiction writer and political blogger, and how State Security, as guardian of the Chinese dictatorship, saw his work as a challenge and threat.

Early on, Yang certainly teased the ministry: not something that should be done lightly given it is perhaps the largest intelligence agency in the world, with an estimated 110,000 staff encompassing foreign intelligence, domestic counter-intelligence and increasingly cyber and industrial espionage. It even has its own think tank, the Institute for Contemporary International Relations, to engage with foreign counterparts and release open-source assessments. At its favoured hotel in central Beijing, troublesome figures are invited in for a “cup of tea” as a warning.

Reflecting the ministry’s staid, bureaucratic character, its cadres are supposed to be pillars of communist rectitude. At the insistence of its former political master, premier Zhou Enlai (the leader Whitlam prevailed on to release James), it has forsworn “honey traps” (sexual entrapment) and doesn’t seem to go in for overseas “wet jobs” (assassinations), at least according to John Byron, the pseudonymous co-author of Claws of the Dragon, a book based on the personal papers of Kang Sheng, Mao Zedong’s spy chief and orchestrator of his purges.

Yang tried to liven up that dour image with a trilogy of spy novels published in Hong Kong and Taiwan around 2004–05. According to those who’ve read them, they contain the mix of sex and murder found in spy books about Western intelligence services. The hero, a Chinese named Yang, is a double-agent in a vicious war between the State Security and the CIA. Smuggled copies gained a wide readership in China.

Yang joined the ministry’s elite intake as a brilliant graduate of Shanghai’s Fudan University, one of the country’s best foreign-studies schools. He received the Hong Kong assignment after a posting to the foreign department of Hainan’s provincial government.

But his role ended with his Washington sojourn. In 1999 his then wife, a professional interpreter and translator, gained a skilled migration visa for Australia. Yang emigrated too, as her dependent. The move appears not to have been a “defection.”

In Australia, as well as writing his spy books, Yang plunged back into academic study, supported by his wife, first at the University of New South Wales and then at the University of Technology Sydney, where he gained a PhD in 2007 for a thesis on political messaging on the Chinese internet, then subject to tightening surveillance and blocking.

Research contacts enabled Yang to develop a huge following for his Chinese-language blogs discussing political reform, says his UTS doctoral supervisor, Feng Chongyi. The large following gained him some income but he also relied on hospitality from friends and contacts. At some point his marriage broke up.

Although his spy books had been “too sensitive for China,” Feng tells me, Yang continued to travel in and out of China, by then as an Australian citizen. One awkward moment came on a visit to Guangzhou in 2011, when local police officers detained him. Uprisings were then sweeping the Middle East in the Arab Spring and China’s security apparatus had been told to nip any local buds. With help from Julia Gillard’s government, Feng got Yang released after four days on the condition that his detention was not publicised.

At their peak, says Feng, Yang’s blogs were followed by about a hundred “Yang Groups” in some fifty Chinese cities. But with Xi Jinping’s ascension as Communist Party secretary in October 2012 the atmospherics started changing. Xi methodically purged all rival factions, including the Shanghai faction of former leader Jiang Zemin and the Communist Youth League faction of predecessor Hu Jintao (who was later frogmarched out of the 2022 party congress that gave the green light for Xi’s indefinite rule).

Xi also cracked down on civil society: lawyers, academics, media outlets, non-government organisations. With his blogging career faced with ever-tightening controls, Yang became noticeably more cautious in what his writing and speaking, according to a foreign correspondent he used to meet in Beijing. His high-level party contacts, including former vice-president Zeng Qinghong, a key lieutenant to Jiang Zemin, were themselves on the outer.

Yang had also embarked on a relationship that raised questions among his following. His new wife, Yuan Ruijuan (also known as Yuan Xiaoliang), had been labelled a “patriotic blogger” — or, more disparagingly, a wumao (fifty-cent warrior) for the half-yuan these bloggers were supposedly paid for each post supporting the official line. Her reputation sat uneasily with Yang’s long-time aim of political opening. Some wondered whether Yang had been playing both sides of China’s internal divide.

Nonetheless, Yang was in the sights of State Security. The contacts he had made with Zeng Qinghong, a former vice-premier who had been a key lieutenant of Jiang Zemin, would have been enough to ensure that. “The CCP reforming wing under Zeng embraced globalisation whole-heartedly and pushed for alliance with the West,” says Feng. “Zeng even went so far as to find an exit for the CCP.”

In March 2017 Feng Chongyi was himself detained during a research trip in Guangzhou. Before pressure from Canberra and his university secured his release, Feng says he was questioned intensively about Yang’s activities and connections. “They said: Women hui shoushi ta! We will get rid of him!” Feng recalls.

Feng then helped Yang get a two-year visiting fellowship at New York’s Colombia University, his income to be augmented by informal daigou trading of American luxuries to China. After the fellowship ended in January 2019, Yang and his second wife, heading back to Australia, made the fateful decision to visit relatives on the way. Unlike Francis James, it was not a showdown gesture: Yang must have thought the State Security officers in his intake, by then in senior ranks, would keep a lenient eye on him.

“I told him not to go back to China,” says Feng. “He said, if they want to take me, they would have done it long ago.”

Yang’s arrest may partly have been precautionary, aimed at silencing a potentially influential figure ahead of two big anniversaries coming up in 2019: the centenary of the 4 May 1919 student uprising over the foreign concession ports reaffirmed in the Versailles Treaty, and the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.

China’s relations with US-aligned nations were already spiralling downwards. A month earlier, Canada had arrested Huawei’s heiress-apparent Meng Wanzhou on a US warrant for breaking sanctions on Iran. In return, two Canadians working in China had been arrested, effectively as hostages. Members of the Five Eyes intelligence group, which includes Australia, were blocking Huawei from their 5G mobile networks on suspicion the technology could be used for Chinese espionage or sabotage. The party and State Security had added to the deteriorating atmosphere with a new intelligence law requiring all Chinese citizens and enterprises to cooperate with intelligence services when asked.

In Australia, Malcolm Turnbull’s government had enacted new laws on foreign influence while Yang was in New York. A month after his detention Canberra blocked the Chinese businessman Huang Xiangmo, a permanent resident, from re-entering Australia because of payments to politicians allegedly to build pro-China sentiment.

Yang was in contact with Australian officials preparing the anti–foreign influence crackdown. In New York he appears to have engaged with Boxun, a US-based website and news aggregator that promotes democracy and human rights and exposes alleged corruption in China. Blocked in China itself, Boxun has been subject to cyber-attacks attributed to Beijing. Its founder, Meicun “Watson” Meng, has strongly defended Yang against his latest charges.

Yang’s harsh sentence has undermined the feeling in Canberra that relations with China, though never expected to be warm, were at least unlikely to deliver more shocks. The hope, no doubt, was that Yang would be released after sentencing for time served.

To Canberra’s China hawks, the sentence suggests that Beijing wants Australians to be a bit afraid. And the court’s two-year good behaviour: did that apply to the Australian government, they wonder, as well as Yang?

But Richard McGregor, the China specialist at Sydney’s Lowy Institute and author of widely praised book, The Party, plays down the idea that Beijing is sending a message to Australia. “It’s less about Australia and more about them,” he tells me. “On the one hand, the MSS [State Security] is likely largely indifferent to the deleterious impact Yang’s verdict will have on relations with Australia. But you could imagine that State Security deliberately demanded the harshest sentence possible as a warning to pro-democracy activists that they are risking their lives.”

For State Security, foreign relations are mere collateral damage. So is economic confidence. After a revised anti-espionage law introduced last July expanded the range of activities that can be considered espionage, raids targeted US-linked consultancy and due-diligence firms.

As the well-informed Hong Kong journalist and academic Wang Xiangwei has pointed out, State Security has gone public with its warnings, launching a WeChat account last August. “Since then, it has boldly asserted itself not only on espionage matters but also on national and international topical issues ranging from China–US relations to economic subjects, including one in which it warned against badmouthing China’s economic growth prospects,” Wang wrote.

Then, late last year, State Security put out posts blasting people who were bearish about China and “badmouthing” China’s economic growth prospects, Wang said. A few weeks later, in late January, it laid out ten conditions — mainly concerning national security, state secrets and anti-espionage law — that could lead to questioning by its agents.

State Security is unlikely to be doing this without Xi’s firm approval. Minister Chen Yixin is a longtime associate of Xi — so close that he is believed to be working on a new chapter of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” the official ideology that ranks Xi with Mao. A “pillar” of state security seems likely to join existing pillars of the economy, diplomacy, military, environment, legal affairs and culture in the official document.

Without a signal from Xi, no one in Beijing is likely to resist the expanded ministry. “In any political system it’s difficult to push back against the internal security service,” says Lowy’s McGregor. “Eventually with wolf-warrior diplomacy there was a top-level political intervention and it largely stopped. So far, the MSS’s role seems very much in line with the direction Xi Jinping has set for the country. The only incentive in China is to exceed what you think the leader wants.”

In the meantime, Anthony Albanese is no Gough Whitlam, and Xi Jinping is no Zhou Enlai, and for the China of 2024, unlike in 1973, the Russians are its second fiddle and the Americans fearful of its rise. The best hope for Yang appears to be an effort to stress his precarious health and, unfairly as it may be, downplaying the seriousness of his challenge to the Party.

The MSS cadres are unlikely to know James Thurber’s 1939 story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” or the 1947 Danny Kaye movie, but they might have seen the 2013 remake with Ben Stiller. •

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If these Voices are to be among the next government initiatives to deal with Indigenous disadvantage then we would be wise to study their history — for the idea is not new. For that reason, Max Angus’s new book, Too Far Out, an “administrative history” of the Ngaanyatjarra community of Western Australia, couldn’t be more timely.

The Ngaanyatjarra community — 1542 kilometres northeast of Perth, 750 kilometres northeast of Kalgoorlie, 560 kilometres northeast of Laverton, 1050 kilometres southwest of Alice Springs and (by my estimate) 2200 kilometres from Canberra — is remote from any recognised administrative centre. Imagine a London borough governed by officials living and working in Budapest with oversight from officials in Bucharest.

As a “nation for a continent” (in the words of Australia’s first prime minister) “remote” is what Australia does: assuming responsibility for all corners of this land is our sovereign project. Since the early twentieth century, the Ngaanyatjarra have become interlocutors of  Australia’s three-level state; less and less are they “too far out.” They have been Australian citizens since 1948 (and British subjects before that). They have become literate in English, and were fully enfranchised in 1984. Many would call themselves Christian, and their homeland has been of intermittent economic significance. They have been statistically visible — on the wrong side of the gap — since the 1970s. How their homeland became a governable region is the story that Angus, a former professor of education, wants to tell.

Until 1873–74, when William Gosse, Ernest Giles and John Forrest began to map cross-continental routes, no European had entered the region. An imagined Laverton-to-Oodnadatta stock route would have passed through but it never came into existence; only in the early twentieth century did prospectors venture there and humanitarians begin considering how the denizens of this arid interior might be protected.

From South Australia’s Christians came a proposal, in 1914, to declare reserves — “sanctuaries” — on each side of the border with Western Australia. Would the Commonwealth join them in its adjacent southwest corner of the Northern Territory? After years of negotiation the three contiguous Central Australian Reserves were gazetted in 1920–21 and this “inviolable” region of interacting desert peoples came under three colonial authorities.

But officials in Perth, notionally responsible for the welfare of the Ngaanyatjarra, had no program and no knowledge. In the 1930s, from Mount Margaret Mission near Laverton, pastor Rod Schenk and schoolteacher Mary Bennett peered east and hoped that Perth would not license the Ngaanyatjarra homeland to graziers and gold-seekers. Motor cars were replacing camels but there were still no roads. The Ngaanyatjarra were reported to be “gentle and well mannered” and evidently “contented and well fed.”

The WA government refused tenure in the region to all but missionaries. After Schenk established a mission at the Warburton range, near the reserve’s western edge, in 1934, he persuaded the government to extend the reserve boundary further west to include a permanent Euro-Australian presence, the United Aborigines’ Mission under William and Iris Wade.

With the state stinting the money needed to feed the desert people attracted to the mission, Ngaanyatjarra people, encouraged by the Wades, began competing for the government bounty on dingo scalps with “doggers” already active in the Western Desert. The state government sought to regulate the mission’s scalp dealings, and in 1947 visiting police observed the Ngaanyatjarra hunters breeding dingos for scalp harvesting. (In the mid sixties, anthropologists began learning of a dingo dreaming track starting at a site known as Nanku.)

By then, Australian governments were imagining Indigenous Australians’ secular pathway to economically independent citizenship. Officials wondered if the mission was giving the Ngaanyatjarra enough to eat and whether it was right to house children in dormitories. Native affairs commissioner Stanley Middleton (1948­–62) was committed to “assimilation,” even for the most distant and “primitive” people, but the policy raised a question: could a Christian mission on an inviolable reserve be an instrument of its residents’ progress?

Warburton mission’s government subsidy increased, but it was calculated on the assumption that many who frequented the mission were living as hunter-gatherers and dingo farmers rather than reliant on the mission. But the government began considering a plan to close the Warburton mission and transfer residents 200 miles to Cosmo Newberry, a settlement acquired by the missionaries in 1953 to train children with state government support. Warburton mission found an advocate in Bill Grayden MP, however, who persuaded the Legislative Assembly to set up an inquiry into the welfare of “natives” in the Laverton–Warburton Ranges region. Having found the people at Warburton to be in a depleted condition, the committee recommended that the government subsidise a pastoral enterprise for the Ngaanyatjarra.

A dispute ensued: visitors in 1957 (including a young Rupert Murdoch) debated how well or how badly off were the Ngaanyatjarra, what remedies they were entitled to, who was responsible for delivering assistance and whether English should replace Ngaanyatjarra as the region’s lingua franca. The records assiduously consulted by Angus suggest that the Ngaanyatjarra had no independent voice in these debates.

Meanwhile, the “inviolable reserve” was being subjected to excisions. The Commonwealth’s weapons testing program required it to establish an observation post within the reserve — Giles Weather Station, with connecting roads — and the WA government opened a third of the reserve (7500 square miles) to International Nickel of Canada in 1956. The Ngaanyatjarra thus became a “problem”: in order to protect them, authorities now had to exclude them from places where Commonwealth and company employees — in small numbers — were residing. Middleton hoped that the Commonwealth would assume responsibility for developing all of the Central Reserves; South Australia, for its part, initiated a pastoral enterprise at Musgrave Park, later known as Amata, in 1961.

To begin with, the Ngaanyatjarra are in the background of Angus’s story, but he is able to move them steadily to the foreground. The more their homeland was encroached on, the more their remaking of their life became visible to colonial authority and thus to the historian.

Some 450 residents were counted at Warburton in 1962. They were increasingly dependent on the food the mission provided. The following year a patrol officer reported that the Ngaanyatjarra were using their homeland’s recently graded tracks — even purchasing their own truck from sales of copper ore found near the mission. At this point it becomes possible for Angus to name individual Ngaanyatjarra.

A man called Tommy Simms had discovered the copper, and by 1961 the mission was managing the earnings derived by a small number of men from mining the ore and sending it to British Metals in Perth. The government wanted to develop the enterprise on a commercial footing, but the mission sought to defend its own interests and assure a degree of Ngaanyatjarra control. Western Mining offered to partner with the men, the government approved, and Simms became the first Ngaanyatjarra with the means to purchase his own vehicle (a Toyota and a Bedford truck).

In 1966 the government licensed Western Mining to prospect within the reserve and form partnerships with Simms and other individuals. Between forty and sixty men were involved in mining by 1967; in keeping with Western Desert people’s now well-known respect for “autonomy” within a continuously negotiated “relatedness,” those with tenements preferred individual partnerships with Western Mining to a cooperative. Others participated as employees. Would copper ore pave the way to the future governments hoped for?

But the Ngaanyatjarra easily disengaged from copper mining: the land was unevenly mineralised, the work was tedious, hunting remained an attractive alternative, and the mission would still feed them. “Their deep attachment was to the Ngaanyatjarra people and lands,” writes Angus, “not to a mining corporation or to a Western lifestyle.”

By the time Western Mining decided it was no long profitable to work with Ngaanyatjarra, one in ten Warburton residents had become eligible for the social security payments that now made up two-thirds of the community’s income. In 1969 the payments, previously made collectively, began being paid to individual recipients. The change was conceived and defended as a step towards “citizenship,” but it wrecked the mission’s system of communal provision.

Prospects of further income from the mining of nickel (around Wingellina) and chrysoprase had to be weighed against a growing official concern for the protection of sacred sites whose locations were being revealed to researchers during the 1960s by Ngaanyatjarra. They wanted income from mining, but in ways that respected country.

By this time, a new federal Office of Aboriginal Affairs was looking at how employment could be brought to the region in ways that aligned with local interests. An inquiry proposed that a new, federally funded Central Reserves Trust representing Ngaanyatjarra and neighbouring peoples would gradually assume control of the three reserves, re-establish Warburton mission as a planned township, develop tourism and horticulture, and permit Aboriginal prospecting. Before that happened, the Commonwealth demanded that Ngaanyatjarra land excised for mining be returned to the reserve. Western Australia complied in February 1972, while also amending its own legislation to allow a minister to approve exploration within the reserve.

Where did Warburton mission fit into this plan? Around Australia, Christian missions were relinquishing administration to Aboriginal councils. The WA government considered that its agencies — including the new (1972) Aboriginal Affairs Planning Authority — were better suited to administering Commonwealth investment in the reserves. The missionaries agreed, with misgivings, to confine themselves to “spiritual and linguistic” work. Administering the food supply — the children’s dining room and the store — devolved to Ngaanyatjarra, who were unprepared for the role. They were equally unprepared when a new Warburton Community Inc. introduced unfamiliar modes of governance in mid 1973. It was “a difficult period for all concerned,” writes Angus, but the policy of self-determination was politically irreversible.

For these policies and plans to work as “development,” much depended on which of the proliferating authorities and visitors the Ngaanyatjarra — the intended workforce and clientele — felt comfortable with. Visiting tradesmen were unfamiliar with the Ngaanyatjarra’s opportunistic approach to employment — intermittent and punctuated by spells on unemployment benefits. The local labour markets that worked in some Australian regions seemed not to apply in Ngaanyatjarra country. Teenagers rejected the daily discipline of school attendance and some residents refused to cooperate with nurses employed by the Australian Inland Mission. Blasting for the construction of a hospital upset the custodians of the Marla so much that visiting workers demanded police protection.

By 1975 Warburton was becoming known as a hostile environment for non-Ngaanyatjarra. For reasons cultural and logistical, it was proving difficult to police Warburton from Laverton. One of the Commonwealth’s responses was to assist Ngaanyatjarra to decentralise. The four resulting “homeland” communities — Wingellina, Blackstone, Warakurna and Jameson, each with its own white community adviser — were all places where Ngaanyatjarra had interacted with “whitefellas”: all were on the road network that prospectors and weapons researchers had created since the 1950s.

People from Docker River (a welfare settlement established in the Northern Territory in 1968) and Amata (a South Australian settlement established in 1961) also moved to the four communities. The Central Reserves were being repopulated using resources deliberately or inadvertently provided by a variety of non-Aboriginal intrusions. Their viability was based largely on welfare payments, as Angus writes, for the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs “had given up pretending that some large-scale economic enterprise, leading to regular paid work, was just around the corner.”

As public health practitioner David Scrimgeour tells it in his recent book, Remote as Ever, a cohort of whites with relevant skills was emerging from southern capital cities to work alongside these Western Desert people. They believed that self-determination could work as long as it was re-spatialised according to Aboriginal wishes and resourced according to their rights as citizens. For Indigenous nations living almost entirely on imported food, the “smoothly operating well-stocked store” was each new community’s foundational institution. Schools and clinics (each with itinerant staff) followed. Able to move among Ngaanyatjarra’s five communities, people occupied their homeland with fewer material constraints; but it was difficult to service “communities” so transient.

The 1967 referendum had created the potential for intergovernmental relationships to change in ways that could work to the advantage of Ngaanyatjarra. The Commonwealth sought to treat the entire Central Reserve as a single “tri-state” object of reformed administration. Decisions in Canberra meant that the Ngaanyatjarra began to look more to the local Department of Aboriginal Affairs office in Alice Springs and less to state officials in Perth. WA government agencies increasingly faced demands from community advisers who answered to Canberra.

Empowering the Commonwealth at the expense of the states caused tensions among non-Indigenous officials. A major Commonwealth innovation in 1977 was to lump unemployment benefits into a single payment to each community — the Community Development Employment Projects, or CDEP, schemes.

When their expectations were not met, Ngaanyatjarra were sometimes violent towards service providers, making policing (where, how many, what methods) a policy issue in the late 1970s. Christian evangelism (including a “Christian Crusade” in 1981) and new by-laws in Warburton reduced but didn’t stop alcohol abuse and petrol-sniffing. Angus argues convincingly that outbreaks of “lawlessness” preceded the 1970s transition to “self-determination.” But the question remained: could the institutions of self-determination reduce the frequency and severity of such “turbulence”?

A certain level of turmoil did not stop the Ngaanyatjarra and their neighbours to the east from collective action using the Commonwealth’s and South Australia’s land rights policies. The formation of the Pitjantjara Council, the continuing interest of mining companies in the reserve’s nickel, and the pro-mining stance of WA premier Charles Court stimulated the formation of the Ngaanyatjarra Council in March 1981. In well-publicised lobbying, the council demanded inalienable freehold title to the WA portion of the Central Reserve.

An inquiry initiated by a subsequent premier, Labor’s Brian Burke, recommended in 1984 a way to legislate land rights. With claimable land amounting to 47.2 per cent of Western Australia’s total area, the Liberal Party argued, as it would in 2023, against “a set of rights which will be attributable to one small group of our population,” and it had the numbers in the Legislative Council to defeat Labor’s bill.

Burke’s government was impressed by the mining industry’s public relations campaign and lobbied for the Hawke government to abandon its planned national land rights bill. Would the Ngaanyatjarra accept a ninety-nine-year lease and the prospect of a nickel mining town (with jobs for Ngaanyatjarra) instead? The Ngaanyatjarra suggested that the government use existing legislation to lease the reserve land and other desired portions to a new body — the Ngaanyatjarra Land Council — some land portions with ninety-nine-year, others with fifty-year leases. Mining companies would apply to the land council, not the mines minister, for permission to explore, with a right to take any refusal to independent arbitration. Visitors could apply to the land council for permission to enter land under lease.

This 1988 deal, which Angus describes as “a masterfully executed compromise,” has lasted through several changes of government.

Because roads are an essential part of the Ngaanyatjarra’s adaptation, it mattered that, not being rate-payers, they could not vote in shire elections. When the franchise was extended to all adult residents, voter turnout among Ngaanyatjarra was much higher (40 per cent in May 1987) than among all other voters in the Shire of Wiluna, which extended to the west. Recognising that the shire was now two regions distinguished by need, revenue base, economic activity and cultural outlook, the WA government split the Shire of Wiluna in half and established the Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku in the eastern portion in July 1993.

This belated municipal enfranchisement of the Ngaanyatjarra was by then paralleled in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC. Replacing the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1989, ATSIC was made up of elected regional councils with responsibility for certain Commonwealth programs. At first, ATSIC comprised sixty elected regional councils; after amalgamations for the second round of elections in December 1993, there were only thirty-five. Ngaanyatjarra objected to being amalgamated with neighbours to their west (Martu) and south (Spinifex mob) and took legal action against the electoral process that chose the Western Desert Regional Council. Their objection — not wanting to be represented by strangers — remains a familiar theme of Indigenous Australian politics. Warren Mundine — campaigning against the 2023 referendum — cited the Ngaanyatjarra as an ally in his critique of the Voice co-design process proposed by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma.

“By the mid-1990s,” Angus concludes, “the Ngaanyatjarra Council could justifiably claim that the region had become self-managing within the state and Commonwealth legal frameworks.” He lists formally incorporated enterprises (transport, stores) the Ngaanyatjarra have developed through collective action.

In an afterword, he briefly takes the story to the present. He condemns the Howard government (1996–2007) and its successors for modifying, then abandoning, the single most important financial basis of “self-management,” the CDEP. An older set of expectations regained authority in government and to some extent among the wider public: the Ngaanyatjarra would develop (must develop) into job-seekers (with “work-like habits”) despite their region still having almost no labour market (other than that provided by the CDEP).

In his valuable ethnography of the social and linguistic practices that have evolved within Ngaanyatjarra transactions with governments, The Dystopia in the Desert, former Ngaanyatjarra employee Tadhgh Purtill argues that the community, its advisers and distant public servants have tacitly agreed never to confront the tensions between the different practical senses of a word that all feel obliged to use: “development.”

Ethnography yields an account of something on which all governance rests: embedded, routinised ways of describing Ngaanyatjarra circumstances. As Purtill observes, talk and text can be seen as enacting a kind of political truce. That is, they shield the fantasy of remote Aboriginal assimilation from a reality test it could not survive. Purtill’s point of view is elusive; he seems, at times, to be a whistle-blower unmasking a systemic rort of public funds. Yet in his account of mutual complicities the reader can see an adaptive structure, a buffer against the ongoing (and potentially lethal) chaos that is settler colonial authority in its liberal democratic form.

Well advised and adept, the Ngaanyatjarra litigated against the smashing of the CDEP in 2021. They won a $2 million payment and a government promise to negotiate a new framework of public financial support. Angus concludes his book wondering how that will work out in a political system that equates centralised decision-making with administrative rationality. There is a Ngaanyatjarra voice, but it is nothing without an attentive listener. •

Too Far Out: An Administrative History of the Ngaanyatjarra Homelands
By Max Angus | Hesperian Press | $66 | 295 pages

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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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As recent summers go, this has been a relatively successful one for Australian cricket. The test matches have kept fans’ attention, the crowds have been good and the television audiences robust. But the season also brought with it the most ominous sign yet of an existential threat.

The team South Africa sent to New Zealand to play the test series was very much a second eleven. Why? Because it wanted to give priority to its own relatively new Twenty20 competition. South African officialdom ordered all players with deals to play in the SA20 to stay home. They cancelled a one-day series with Australia a year earlier for the same reason.

Twenty20 matches have been played since 2003 between countries and domestically, but the format took what turned out to be a radical new turn when the Indian Premier League, or IPL, emerged in 2008. That league’s ten city-based franchises bid against each other for players’ services, with each team allowed several international players. It has become by far the richest cricket competition in the world: last year the media rights for 2023–27 sold to Viacom18 and Star Sports for US$6.4 billion, making the value of each match US$13.4 million. Its contracts with leading players dwarf their payments from official sources.

(Most women’s contests, by contrast, have been short-form matches, and nearly all cricketing nations have well-established domestic and international Twenty20 calendars for women. The franchise model — Australia’s Women’s Big Bash for instance, which began in 2015 — is also popular, although only in 2023 did a women’s competition become part of the IPL; the prices paid for leading players immediately soared into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, a welcome boost for traditionally underpaid players.)

None of IPL’s fast-multiplying imitators — including Australia’s Big Bash League — has reached anything like its heights. Age journalist Greg Baum says that at least twelve domestic Twenty20 competitions now exist, not only in South Africa but also in the Caribbean, Pakistan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Many of these competitions have teams owned by IPL franchises: all six South African teams, for example, and three of the six teams in the UAE’s ILT20. As IPL franchises set up more satellite operations, they may gain even more commercial leverage and be able to offer multi-competition or even year-long contracts to players.

For the players, these competitions offer new and lucrative opportunities. For several — especially from poorer countries where official payments are much lower — the competitions promise a lucrative twilight for their career, tempting them to retire from test cricket earlier.

But they are also shaping players’ careers much earlier. Already some players — from the West Indies, for example — give priority to the new competitions over test cricket. Increasingly, they can have a professional career while only occasionally interacting with the sport’s established structures. Australia’s up-and-coming twenty-six-year-old, Tim David, will play in seven different competitions in 2024, four of these non-Australian. Former England batsman Alex Hales is on the books of six clubs around the world; in those circumstances, being loyal is playing for only one club in any given competition.

The accelerating profusion of franchise-based competitions presents challenges for the mainstream cricket industry, which has already faced and only partially overcome two other challenges.

The first of these, already alluded to, is the balance between the format that brings in the most income and spectators — limited-over “white ball” cricket — and higher-status “red ball” test cricket. The second is the increasing dominance of audiences for international sporting events over those watching domestic competitions. Even though domestic competitions are crucial to the viability of the sport, some have suffered a decline in both audiences and income. Australia’s Sheffield Shield is a dramatic example: its crowds are a fraction of what they used to be, and it receives only fleeting attention in the media.

Cricket Australia’s response has been less than convincing. The Sheffield Shield now plays five rounds from early October to the beginning of December, has a nine-week hiatus, and then plays five final rounds in February and early March. A final eventually comes, anti-climactically, in late March, only to be broadly ignored by the nation’s media and a sporting public by now focused on football. It must rank as one of the most bizarre professional sporting fixtures in the world.

Australia’s answer to the IPL, the Big Bash League, has two fundamental weaknesses compared with the original. The first is that the best and best-known Australian players are rarely able to participate because of overlaps with test matches. David Warner, for example, one of the biggest drawcards in Australian cricket, didn’t play in the BBL for nine years, has played far more IPL than BBL matches, and has almost certainly made far more money playing for the IPL than for Australian teams.

The second structural problem is that overseas stars come and go depending on the other financially rewarding commitments they have, and are often missing at the season’s crunch time. Already this year, Brisbane Heat captain Colin Munro and teammate Sam Billings and the Sixers’ James Vince have all abandoned the BBL, and missed its final round, to join their ILT20 teams in Abu Dhabi.

Discontent with such weaknesses has even been expressed by the sport’s broadcaster. In 2022, in an unprecedented legal action, the Seven Network sought to get itself out of its $450 million broadcast deal by arguing that Cricket Australia had failed to deliver the BBL at the contracted quality and had thus depressed viewer numbers. Peace has apparently since been restored.

Cricket Australia is certainly subject to conflicting cross-pressures, but the fixtures for the Sheffield Shield and BBL strongly suggest that it has failed Sports Scheduling 101. Its main response has been to pack the cricket calendar ever more tightly, loading it up with too many events of little significance.

After the fifty-over World Cup finished in 2023, Australia played India in a series of Twenty20 matches. But most of each team’s best players were rested. It was still called an international fixture, but I wonder if any cricket fans can remember, or care, who won. Quantity is no substitute for quality; what’s needed is not more matches but more structured, meaningful contests.

What makes the challenge even more difficult is the fact that cricket’s problems are occurring amid rapid changes in the larger media–sport complex. The ever-increasing growth of gambling is the first of these problems: especially online gambling, which can cross national jurisdictions. In just three years from 2018 to 2021, legal sports wagering in the United States grew from less than US$5 billion in bets placed to US$57 billion. More than a million gambling ads were aired on Australian free-to-air TV and radio last year, with an unknown number more on pay TV and streaming services.

Apart from the human problems associated with gambling, cricket has had particular problems with corruption — namely match fixing and spot betting — associated with illegal gambling. In private leagues with weak checks and balances these problems could easily increase.

The second recent trend is “sportswashing,” a term that was selected by the Language Council of Norway as its 2021 word of the year. Sportswashing refers to the effort to improve one’s image, or redirect public attention away from human rights abuses and other shortcomings, by sponsoring global sport spectaculars. Wealthy Saudi Arabia, a noted human rights offender, has made significant inroads into tennis, golf and soccer. (The Saudis might also be using their financial muscle to create continuing profit flows from these sports.) So far the major Middle Eastern involvement in cricket has come from the United Arab Emirates.

The media part of the media–sports complex is also in flux. Streaming services increasingly assert themselves in what was the preserve of free-to-air and pay TV services. Amazon recently reached a deal with the International Cricket Council for the exclusive broadcast rights to ICC games in a deal spanning 448 live games in 2024–27. None of these games is on Australia’s anti-siphoning list, which primarily covers games played in this country. But Australians — probably along with people in the other participating countries — will have to pay to watch the next cricket World Cup. It may make the broadcasters and the ICC money, but it could substantially reduce the viewing audience.

Tackling this mix of problems will require concerted international action by the cricketing nations, but here too obstacles exist. Test cricket seems to be viable in England, Australia and India but much more fragile elsewhere. Moreover, one country, one vote doesn’t prevail in international cricket policymaking. India now accounts for 80 per cent of international cricket revenue, so any solution must be acceptable to it; equally, though, any lasting solution must also see funds flowing to the poorer countries.

In the immediate future the proliferation of franchise-based domestic Twenty20 competitions will play havoc with cricketing schedules. While past and present champions will solemnly declare their continuing commitment to test cricket, cricketers from other countries and those not quite in the top echelon will vote with their feet.

Within these manufactured contests, the dynamics are yet to become clear. How much team spirit will be generated in a group of players brought together by commercial opportunity? Despite the profusion of fan merchandise, how involved will spectators be in competitions between recently created franchises? Rather than traditional rivalries built up over decades, these may be soulless contests. “Ever since I was a child I wanted to play for the richest franchise” doesn’t quite have the same resonance as “Ever since I was a child I wanted to represent my country.”

All these competitions are essentially parasitic structures (as indeed was Kerry Packer’s World Series cricket in the 1970s). Feeding off the talent nurtured by the representative institutions, they offer undreamt-of riches to the most marketable stars. But they do nothing to build the future of the game. If the balance of power — financial and political — between the representative institutions and the franchises swings too far, the problems are likely to be more severe than the sound of members at Lords spluttering into their gin and tonics. •

The post Ashes to ashes appeared first on Inside Story.

The theme served three purposes. First, it was memorable — hearing the music all these years later, I still think of the masked avenger before the Swiss freedom fighter. Second, television programs went to air at a certain time of the week (The Lone Ranger, for me, was Saturday tea time) and the music served as an alarm call. It even began with a fanfare of trumpets and French horns that could summon you from another part of the house. Today, when many people watch “linear” television only for news bulletins, news themes still often begin with some sort of fanfare.

The third purpose of the Rossini was that it was cheap, and this was a hangover from radio days. It was some time after the advent of radio before anyone thought to employ composers to write themes or incidental music, and it was the same with television. In the short term, much of the music came from stock recordings, and they weren’t always of the highest quality — the trumpets and horns were never quite together at the start of The Lone Ranger. Burlingame’s book tells us that sixty-seven of the eight-nine cuts of incidental music in the series were classical pieces by the likes of Liszt and Tchaikovsky together with a library of generic “Western” music by uncredited studio composers. Most of it had been recorded in Mexico in the 1940s.

By the mid 1950s, television drama was taking music more seriously and this involved drafting film composers to ply their trade in the new medium. Accordingly, Bernard Herrmann, who had composed the theremin-heavy score for The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951, was invited to supply the theme for the first season of The Twilight Zone eight years later and came up with a score consisting of drifting minor-key harmonies and dreamy harp arpeggios, not unlike his contemporaneous score for Vertigo.

But this is not the theme most people associate with The Twilight Zone, the one with the famous four-note ostinato on an electric guitar. That came the following season (the theme was changed to underline the fact that these were new episodes) and was the result of someone editing together two scraps of library stock. Their composer, the Frenchman Marius Constant, was unaware his music had been used, let alone edited, let alone turned into a theme, and his name never appeared on the credits. As Burlingame explains, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the composer realised how significant his music had been. Having dinner with some American friends, he dropped into the conversation that he had written the theme for The Twilight Zone.

“There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by an enthusiastic outburst,” Constant recalled; “it was as if I had confessed to having written Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” The anecdote alone demonstrates how important TV had become in people’s lives.

Burlingame’s excellent book, which is full of such stories, is a nostalgia trip, no doubt about it; but it is also what its author intended: “a history of a vastly underappreciated realm of American music.” Divided into television genres — Westerns, detective series, sci-fi, drama, comedy, news, cartoons and so on — it charts the rise in importance of the sound of television and the role of the composer. As soon as composers were attached to projects, music began to establish, from the outset, the pace of the show — the powerful swagger of Fred Steiner’s Perry Mason theme, say, or the five-in-a-bar hell-for-leather of Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Impossible. With words added, the theme could prime new viewers with details of a show’s dramatis personae; it could even provide the backstory. This was particularly true in the case of comedies.

“Flintstones! Meet the Flintstones!” was the viewer’s invitation, in 1960, to “have a gay old time” with “the modern stone-age family.” Many thousands of years later (in 1963), the family of the future was afforded more specific introductions: “Meet George Jetson, his boy Elroy, daughter Judy… Jane, his wife.” In the 1970s, prime-time cartoon comedies went out of fashion, but when they returned with a vengeance in the form of The Simpsons (1989–) the opening sequence was a nod to both those earlier shows. Danny Elfman’s theme, though it had dispensed with lyrics, borrowed the rising melodic line of “Meet George Jetson,” while, in a pointedly ironic reference to the Flinstones’ trip to a prehistoric drive-in, which is how that show began each week, we saw the Simpson family rushing home to sit on the couch and watch themselves on telly.

“Come ’n listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed,” was the first line of a song with words and music by Paul Henning, the creator–producer of The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71). The banjo-accompanied song told viewers, at the start of each episode, why and how “a poor mountaineer” and his family had ended up in a Beverly Hills mansion, without which knowledge the show wouldn’t have made much sense. As another producer, the screenwriter Sherwood Schwartz, remarked, “a puzzled audience cannot laugh.”

Schwartz himself was obliged to come up with the theme song for Gilligan’s Island (1964–67) ahead of CBS’s commissioning the show because the president of the company believed it was impossible to give enough backstory for a new viewer. Schwartz was no songwriter, but he stayed up late and wrote a calypso-style number (the island, after all, was in the Caribbean) that at least satisfied the studio. Later, working with composer and music director George Wyle, Schwartz developed the familiar shanty-esque song — “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale” — that provided an introduction to all the characters and a recap of the “fateful trip” that had led to their predicament.

“Here’s the story of a lovely lady,” was the start of a hyper-efficient lyric that explained how the “lady” in question and her “very lovely daughters” had grown acquainted with “a man named Brady” and his sons, and in no time at all (in fact, fifty-eight seconds) become The Brady Bunch (1969–74). You could start watching any of these shows mid-season and know all you needed to know by the time the opening credits are over.

In The Addams Family (1964–66) we scarcely needed the “kooky/spooky/ooky” words to let us know what was going on because lined up on our screens, as if for a family photograph, was the family itself. They weren’t smiling, they snapped their fingers ominously, and really that, together with the sound of the harpsichord, did the job. Perhaps most radical, though, was All in the Family (1971–79), in which Archie and Edith Bunker (Caroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton) sat at a piano each week and sang their theme song (“Those Were the Days”) to the studio audience and to camera. The longer she did it, Burlingame relates, and the more laughs she got, the more raucously off-key Stapleton would sing.

When the first edition of Burlingame’s book appeared in 1996, it ended with a lament that the great days of television were gone, while hoping they might one day return. Almost on cue, cable TV hit its stride, with streaming not far behind. In some ways it seemed as though television music was starting again from the same place.

The Sopranos (1999–2007), eschewing the score its creators believed would manipulate the viewer, opted for existing music (not classical this time, but pop). Stock music was also back, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (2001–) using a twenty-five-year-old library track he had first encountered on a California bank commercial. But composed music was changing, too, the new widescreen televisions taking us closer to the characters and drawing subtlety from composers, even in signature themes. With no need of fanfare-style tunes or (in the age of bingeing) songs that filled in the backstory, David Carbonara’s mesmerising Mad Men (2007–15) theme, the creeping menace of Hildur Guðnadottir’s score for Chernobyl (2019) and Siddhartha Khosla’s wittily compelling music for Only Murders in the Building (2021–) would all have seemed a little underdone in TV’s first golden age.

Is the second golden age already fading? It could be. Certainly the theme is now at the viewer’s discretion, for as the opening credits roll on your favourite show, the streaming service on which you’re watching it will invite you to “skip.” If it’s your third or fourth episode of the evening, you might well be tempted. •

The post Sit right back and you’ll hear a tale appeared first on Inside Story.

Accompanying Jimmy on the journey were sundry family members, including three sons and two nephews. They were in search of the family home that Jimmy’s father, Mar See Poy, had left in 1914 and to which he returned after being deported from Australia in 1926. The moment when Jimmy approached the front door, recalls his nephew Phillip, “was remembered [by all] as an emotional ‘high point.’”

Jimmy’s is one of several stories about Chinese immigrants and their hometowns told in a new collection of essays, The China–Australia Migration Corridor. The corridor in question is a virtual one, constituted by the movement of people to and from Sydney and what is now the municipality of Zhongshan, in Guangdong province, where Sha Chong village is located. The stories have a number of common elements: more than one generation, an extended lapse in time between migration and return, a “house-hunting” quest — which is central to the book’s heritage theme — and the “affect,” or emotional content, of the journeys. Jimmy’s has all these characteristics.

The book is an outcome of the Heritage Corridor project, launched in 2017 by Ien Ang and Denis Byrne at the University of Western Sydney. Ang brings to this project a long history of engagement with migration, race and identity. Byrne is an archaeologist working in the field of critical heritage studies. Together with anthropologist Phillip Mar (Jimmy’s nephew), historian Michael Williams, research fellow Alexandra Wong and PhD student Christopher Cheng (now graduated), they have been collecting stories of return as part of an investigation of Australian-Chinese built heritage. The nine chapters in the book, to which the entire research team has contributed, are concerned with memories and material remains almost in equal measure.

The book’s publication follows closely on that of Byrne’s 2022 monograph, The Heritage Corridor: A Transnational Approach to the Heritage of Chinese Migration. Both books are concerned with the migration corridor “as a transnational field of material heritage.” With the concept of the corridor, Byrne takes aim at both the idea of a national heritage bounded by the nation-state and the related top-down definition of heritage. Focusing on the flow of people and money between Sydney and Zhongshan, the project’s researchers have kept an eye on grassroots heritage-making at both ends of the corridor.

Zhongshan, which covers an area considerably larger than Sydney, is part plains, part hills. It used to be called Xiangshan, meaning “fragrant hills”: hence the title of Michael Williams’s informative opening chapter, “Villages of the Fragrant Hills.” Its present name, as a footnote by Williams tells us, is a legacy of its most famous emigrant, “Father of the Republic” Sun Yatsen (1866–1925), also known as Sun Zhongshan. Sun was founder of the Kuomintang, or KMT — the Chinese Nationalist Party, to give it its English name — which was China’s governing party in the years 1928–49. The place that bears his name is the only one of 2000 or so Chinese counties to have been named, like Sydney, after a historical figure.

Zhongshan was a major source of migrants to Pacific Rim countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accounting for perhaps a plurality of Chinese residents in New South Wales and Queensland before and during the White Australia era. In their chapter “Zhongshan in Sydney’s Chinatown,” Ang and Wong note the dominance of Zhongshan natives in the Sydney branch of the KMT, founded in 1921. KMT party members met (and still meet) in built-for-purpose headquarters at 75–77 Ultimo St, Sydney, constructed in 1921 by Robert Wall and Sons. Locally, the party probably served in lieu of a native-place association for Zhongshan people; internationally, it was also headquarters of the Australasian KMT, the party’s regional branch.

The Sydney building has a counterpart in the party’s Victorian state headquarters in Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, which features a facade designed by Walter Burley Griffin. Support for the KMT was strong in both cities but rested on different native-place foundations. In Melbourne, Zhongshan immigrants were well outnumbered by natives of See Yup, a cluster of four districts geographically contiguous with Zhongshan but distinguished by language sub-group and local-place networks.

With strength in numbers, high profiles in Sydney Chinatown’s commerce and politics, and considerable prominence in the business history of China itself, the Zhongshan migrants and their descendants were a natural focus for the Heritage Corridor project. The decision was facilitated by the fact that Michael Williams’s 2018 book, Returning Home with Glory: Chinese Villagers Around the Pacific, 1849–1949, also focused on Zhongshan, provided ready-made foundations for this differently themed project.

Like Williams’s pioneering book, the project foregrounds the home district of the migrants — the place to which they sent money and letters and to which, before the second world war, they not infrequently returned. They typically came from the poorer villages of the hills, which in the first half of the twentieth century sent abroad up to one in every three of their able-bodied males. With their skewed sex ratios and untended fields, these “sojourner villages” (qiaoxiang) became the beneficiaries of overseas remittances and the source of further migration.

A high degree of mobility is a well-known feature of Chinese migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Emigrant men periodically returned home for family reasons; a son born in China might then, in his turn, come to Australia as a student or to help in the family business. This was partly an effect of White Australia–era immigration restrictions, which produced a strange pattern of migration in which a family might be in Australia for three generations before anyone was actually born there. The Ma (Mar) family, represented by several people interviewed for this book, is an example.

If these accounts of comings and goings are the warp of the book, then “heritage-making” is its weft.

Byrne distinguishes rather sharply between “heritage from above” and “heritage from below”: the former is evident in the national and state registries of heritage sites; the latter is exemplified in the “quest for the ancestral house” in the course of which “old houses are brought forward into the landscape of the present.” But something exists between “heritage from above” and “heritage from below.” The examples of Sydney’s Kwong War Chong building, discussed by Ang and Wong, and the Ma and Kwok family mansions of Zhongshan discussed by Byrne himself, show that local government in both countries has a significant role in preserving historical buildings, even if — in the case of Sydney at least — the intervention followed community lobbying.

Nonetheless, the book’s accounts of heritage-making as a grassroots social process are persuasive. Returning to the ancestral village and finding the ancestral home, Byrne argues, means inscribing the past in the present. This reading is given force by the fact that the process, in very many cases, involves communicating meanings from one generation to the next. When Mabel Lee went to Zhongshan in the late 1970s it was because her father wanted to go: “He would say, ‘If you don’t take me, I’ll be dead.’” Gordon Mar and his brothers took his mother back in 1997, at her insistence, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer: “She felt it was her duty to bring her sons back to the village to be acknowledged.”

The other aspect of heritage-making concerns the material sites of meaning: the village, the house, sometimes even objects within the house. The buildings described and discussed range from commercial buildings in Dixon Street to “remittance houses” and schools in Zhongshan, built with money sent or brought back to China. Byrne presents a useful typology of these houses, which at the upper end were palatial. The same is true of schools, the focus of Christopher Cheng’s PhD research. Photos of multistorey buildings with porticos, columns, and cupolas show the ambitions of the donors.

Read from cover to cover, The China–Australia Migration Corridor leaves a strong impression of buildings in Sydney, on the east edge of one continent, juxtaposed with buildings in Zhongshan, in the southeast corner of another. For Byrne, these two clusters represent the two ends of the transnational corridor. Yet they also seem to define a period of history. In her chapter on “(Un)making Transnational Identities,” Ang repeatedly refers to a sense of closure in the Zhongshan–Sydney connection. Kam Louie, born in Zhongshan in 1949, is the only one of a family of many siblings ever to have returned to his home village, and his own children show no interest in going. For Gordon Mar, a one-off visit “seems to have reinforced his Australianness rather than his Chineseness.”

Like everyone else interviewed for the book, Louie and Mar are at the tail-end of a history of chain migration and eventual settlement that began under the Qing dynasty in the middle of the nineteenth century. The return to Zhongshan, accompanied in some cases by renewed investment in the ancestral village, followed the huge historical rupture created by war and revolution in China. When a new history of Chinese-Australian journeyings is written to cover subsequent migration, it will mostly be about people from other parts of China whose lives have been shaped by different historical circumstances.

This is an engaging collection of essays that makes an important contribution to the field of Chinese-Australian history. Like all good scholarly books, it opens up new research questions. The concept of “corridor” powerfully evokes the historical connections between Zhongshan and Sydney, but a corridor has walls. Who benefited from Zhongshan networks? Who was left outside those notional walls? How did other native-place connections operate in Sydney’s small Chinese community? Did native-place cleavages inform political cleavages? And in this small community, with its limited number of women of Chinese birth or parentage, who married whom? •

The China–Australia Migration Corridor: History and Heritage
Edited by Denis Byrne, Ien Ang and Phillip Mar | Melbourne University Press | $40 | 288 pages

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When the International Refugee Organization sent him to faraway Australia in 1948, it probably sounded like an adventure. But the nineteen-year-old found himself doing back-breaking work in an isolated mine surrounded by dense Tasmanian forest. He would later tell government officials that it was “200 years behind European working conditions.”

After a year, Jakob decided he was finished with capitalist Australia and would return to the Soviet Union. Many of his peers were unimpressed by his decision — it even sparked a brawl during which he was stabbed. But his pro-Soviet migrant friends considered him a true patriot. Celebrating with them and a little drunk, the young refugee boasted that he would give the Soviets intelligence on Australia and go to Korea to fight the Western capitalists.

Unbeknown to Jakob, his audience of friends and acquaintances that night included two spies: a Soviet MVD colonel and an undercover agent for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO. Concerned by their informant’s report, Australian security officers began keeping an eye on Jakob. They followed him all the way to the docks when he sailed for the Soviet Union. Dissatisfied with the West and full of praise for his Soviet homeland, he was considered a threat to Western security.

This is not the familiar refugee story told in countries like Australia: a story of desperate, hard-working migrants who gratefully become loyal contributors to their new homeland. Jakob had certainly been desperate — he became a forced labourer at just fourteen — and, for the most part, he had worked hard in Australia. But the war and displacement produced complex, shifting identities that didn’t simply disappear when the shooting stopped. And life in the West didn’t always live up to its promises.

The second world war had left forty million or more people displaced in Europe. Some wanted nothing more than to return to their homes, but for others, particularly those from now Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, the home they had left no longer existed. As the International Refugee Organization worked to solve this “refugee problem,” thousands of Russians who had lived through the war in East Asia were being displaced by China’s communist revolution.

Most of these refugees, whether in Europe or China, were stridently anti-communist. Many had good reason to be, having lived as exiles after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution or through the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The views of “White Russians” and Eastern Europeans who considered their homelands “captive nations” would fit neatly into the West as the fresh storm clouds of the cold war built on the horizon. Increasingly, each Soviet refugee was a propaganda victory for the West: these were individuals choosing freedom, expressing hatred of communism by voting with their feet.

Some, however, harboured more ambivalent views. A few could even be called “Red”: communists, socialists, trade unionists or, most commonly, pro-Soviet patriots who were proud of the victorious Red Army and their homeland’s achievements since the communist revolution. “Displaced persons,” known as DPs, were resettled primarily in countries that now defined themselves as the anti-communist West, with the largest contingents going to the United States, Australia, Canada and Israel.

The lives and experiences of anti-communist DPs — the refugees who became model migrants in the West — have been chronicled in the rich scholarship on postwar migration that has proliferated since the 1990s. Yet Soviet refugees with left-wing views, DPs like Jakob who did not fit the model, have remained essentially invisible.

Surveillance and the persistent shadow of espionage were central parts of their lives in the West. Former or current Soviet citizens who were Russian speakers and left-wing sympathisers threw up multiple red flags for Western intelligence organisations, which often struggled to understand their traumas, experiences and intra-community politics. Many had been socialised in the Soviet Union, their political views shaped by complex lives in Europe and China.

In the cold war West, their ideas took root in new ways. Ideological convictions — that the world could be better and fairer, or that the worker’s lot was difficult — mingled with personal ones, shaped by memories of lost homes, murdered family members or forced labour. These ideas made them potential threats, forcing them to negotiate the incursions of state security into their everyday lives.

In many ways, it is because these refugees loomed so large in the eyes of intelligence agencies that we struggle to catch sight of them. The lives of “ordinary” people are often difficult to locate in official records, but that marginalisation was compounded by cold war anti-communism and surveillance.

Left-wing Soviet DPs had particular cause to recede from view by lying about their politics and backgrounds or simply keeping their own counsel. They knew they were being watched; most were aware that both the state and other migrants regarded them with suspicion; very few recorded their experiences. History maintains a sense of irony, though: the very surveillance dossiers that marginalised these migrants can now provide the historian with a window into their worlds.

Intelligence agencies are notorious for their secrecy and reluctance to reveal the details of even decades-old operations. When they do reveal information, it is typically on their own terms and in the service of their public image — take, for example, the declassification of the CIA’s Canadian Caper operation, which formed the basis of the film Argo.

In some cases, researchers can appeal to legislation. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act provides a well-trodden path to accessing FBI and CIA files. A similar provision in Canada allows requests for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s files. But both have, to differing degrees, proven limited in recent years. Britain’s MI5 is subject to very few access measures, releasing files only as it chooses. Further, its release policy targets higher-profile individuals, leaving the files of more ordinary subjects unknown and unknowable for historians.

By comparison, access procedures in Australia are quite liberal. A dedicated application process via the National Archives of Australia provides greater access to security files if one is sufficiently patient. These dossiers are still redacted, equivocal and frustrating, but they provide unique glimpses of a left-wing presence among the DPs. Presumably, similar migrants ended up elsewhere in the West.

Though they had chosen life in the West rather than the East, and in some cases had experienced the worst that Soviet communism had to offer, these migrants continued to align themselves with the political left. For the most part, they were not activists. They tended not to join Australian political parties and their ideas did not often fit neatly under labels like “communist,” “Marxist” or “Trotskyite.”

Their views were idiosyncratic patchworks rather than refined political doctrines, reflecting lives lived across East and West in turbulent times. Their experiences of Soviet terror and state support, Nazi and Japanese occupation, concentration camps and forced labour often informed their understanding of the twentieth century’s prevailing political philosophies more than books or manifestos. Their politics played out at street-level: in living rooms, church halls, night clubs, theatre groups, factory floors and discussions over glasses of wine (or vodka) at parties.

Though some refugees chose Australia specifically for its distance — the furthest they thought they could get from the Soviets — the cold war arrived there, too. By 1948, as the revolution in China compounded still-heightened fears of invasion by neighbouring Asian countries, anti-communism gained a firm foothold in Australia.

As the historian David Lowe has written, the cold war was “Australianised” with settler-colonial anxieties about maintaining white racial homogeneity and preventing territory loss. Australia saw itself as part of the English-speaking world but was surrounded by a decolonising Asia-Pacific region with a growing socialist and communist presence, and so sought the security of close ties with Britain and the United States.

One result was the formation of ASIO in response to American concerns about Australia’s lax security and a Soviet spy ring in Canberra. Domestically, the cold war flared in 1950–51 as Australian troops were shipped to Korea and prime minister Robert Menzies attempted to ban the Communist Party. A referendum on the ban saw the public drawn into an increasingly heated debate about communism, national security and civil liberties.

Similar tensions were sparked in 1954 by the defections of Soviet officials (and spies) Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov — an incident soon christened the Petrov affair. Vladimir Petrov had socialised extensively among Soviet migrants in Sydney and many of them waited with trepidation as ASIO investigated and a royal commission enquired.

Both moments were cold war watersheds for Australians, a time when debates about communism and espionage hit close to home. But they hit even closer for Soviet refugees as their homelands and the ideologies they had lived under and knew intimately were discussed in daily newspapers and nightly news broadcasts. Many of the refugees knew Petrov personally; the affair played out in their lives in distinctive ways, providing new, rich layers to our history of this event.

The Petrov affair’s most iconic and enduring moment — Evdokia Petrov, her husband having already defected alone, being escorted across Sydney’s airport tarmac by two Soviet couriers — was heightened by thousands of anti-communist Eastern European migrants. They turned out to protest what they saw as the forcible return of a terrified Russian woman to a dire fate in the Soviet Union. Many had themselves felt at risk of a similar fate, in Europe’s DP camps, and arrived with placards and raised voices to warn Australians and their government of the Soviet Union’s cruelty.

These anti-communist exile groups existed alongside and often in conflict with smaller communities of left-wing migrants. For some, joining a left-wing group related more to opposing diaspora norms — their vitriolic anti-Soviet rhetoric and strong attachment to the church — than cold war politics. Less conservative social mores and better entertainment often helped too, especially for young refugees. But whether they intended it or not, many were then cast into cold war conflicts.

Sydney’s left-leaning Russian Social Club brought DPs into the orbit of the broader Australian left and the Petrov affair. A corresponding Social Club was also set up in Melbourne, in 1952, though it seems to have been short-lived. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet embassy officials stationed in Australia, who were often working covertly as spies. A host of left-wing Jewish organisations were also established by, or drew in, postwar migrants, such as the Jewish Councils to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism in Sydney and Melbourne, the Volkscentre in Darlinghurst and Kadimah in Carlton.

Left-wing migrants often participated across multiple groups and sometimes became involved with Australian-run organisations as a result. The typical “communist front” groups which proliferated across the West — Australia–Russia societies (later renamed Australian–Soviet friendship societies) and peace councils — were also hubs for left-wing Soviet refugees. The Melbourne friendship society even had, for a time, a DP as chairman. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet officials but also attracted Australian surveillance, and thus, interactions with spies on both sides.

Most put down roots in Australia, establishing themselves in new communities and becoming neighbours, friends, fellow churchgoers and colleagues of both other migrants and those born in Australia. Some shifted between communities, burying their earlier years, and some became more conservative with age. Most were naturalised, giving up Soviet passports or statelessness in favour of Australian citizenship — though, again, they pursued this in order to access specific benefits, rights or stability just as often as a desire to become Australians.

With naturalisation, they became Australian voters. Soviet refugees’ voting patterns are near impossible to ascertain, but both Labor and Liberal parties tried to some extent to cultivate migrant votes. Few of the left-wing group (even if pro-communist) appear to have associated directly with the Communist Party of Australia, but some refugees joined or maintained connections to the Labor Party.

But not everyone settled down. Australia was not typically a refugee’s first choice, and some moved on to other countries, such as Canada or the United States. Some never made it past the two-year work contract, deported for absconding from their assigned employment. Others did their best to get themselves deported: one way to obtain a cheap ticket back to Europe.

The other way, for Soviets, was voluntary repatriation. The Soviet Union wanted its “stolen” DPs back and Soviet citizens who wanted to return could often do so at Soviet expense. Repatriation figures were only ever a tiny fraction of the tide of Westward migration during the early cold war — between 1947 and 1952, some twenty-eight Soviet DPs returned from Venezuela, twenty-two from Argentina, sixteen from Canada, nine from South Africa and only two from the United States. Nevertheless, they reflected the fact that life in the capitalist world could also be harsh, especially if you were a refugee.

In Australia, the two-year work contract was often a catalyst and some, like young Jakob, left soon after completing it, homesick and dissatisfied. Others remained longer, even decades, before making the decision to repatriate. China Russians could also return if they secured the appropriate paperwork, though the Soviets likely would not foot the bill. Nevertheless, some did repatriate.

But whether they chose to stay in Australia or not, many Soviet refugees lived through the early years of the cold war in the West. As these battle lines were drawn, they had to pick a stance: leave politics behind and remain quiet, become anti-communist “cold warriors,” or accept the surveillance and suspicion that came with life as a pro-Soviet “enemy alien.” •

This article is adapted from Ebony Nilsson’s new book Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West, published by Bloomsbury Academic.

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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

The post The younger Menzies appeared first on Inside Story.

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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It’s little surprise that five of the six abstentions came from nuclear weapon states: the United States, China, Israel, Pakistan and India (joined, oddly, by South Sudan). But in a dismaying display of power politics, France and Britain voted with Russia and North Korea to oppose assistance to people and landscapes irradiated during decades of nuclear testing.

Diplomats representing Western powers are prone to talk about “the international community,” “the rules-based order” and “democratic versus authoritarian states.” But on this occasion the jargon was undercut by the willingness of London and Paris to line up alongside Moscow and Pyongyang to avoid responsibility for past actions and to limit reparations.

With the International Court of Justice debating genocide in Ukraine, Myanmar and Palestine and UN agencies seeking to defend international humanitarian law, the hypocrisy of major powers has been polarising international opinion. Developing nations are increasingly challenging an international order that sanctions official enemies, at the same time as absolving major powers of the responsibility to deal with their own breaches of international law.

Over the past three years, ambassadors Teburoro Tito of Kiribati and Akan Rakhmetullin of Kazakhstan have coordinated international consultations on how the nuclear assistance provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, should be implemented. Articles 6 and 7 of the treaty, which entered into force in January 2021, include unprecedented obligations on parties to the treaty to aid nuclear survivors and contribute to environmental remediation.

Kiribati and Kazakhstan might seem an unlikely couple, but they have bonded over a common twentieth-century legacy. Both nations’ lands, waters and peoples have been devastated by cold war nuclear testing, and in each case the responsible countries refuse to take responsibility. Britain and Russia have bonded, too, but in their case, they’re united in their refusal to assist their former colonies.

After conducting twelve atmospheric atomic tests in Australia in 1952–57 — at the Monte Bello Islands, Emu Field and Maralinga — Britain sought a new location for developing and testing more powerful hydrogen bombs. During Operation Grapple, the British military conducted nine atmospheric thermonuclear tests at Malden and Christmas (Kiritimati) islands in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, which is today part of the Republic of Kiribati.

Just as Britain chose the “vast empty spaces” of the South Australian desert and the isolated atolls of Kiribati for its tests, Moscow sought similar expanses within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Over more than four decades, it held 456 nuclear tests in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan. The history of Soviet testing in the Central Asian republic and its radioactive legacies, spread across more than 18,000 square kilometres, has been documented by Kazakh scholar Togzhan Kassenova in her compelling 2022 book Atomic Steppe.

Once the TPNW was adopted, Kiribati and Kazakhstan led efforts to develop mechanisms for dealing with the health and environmental effects of radioactive fallout. After seeking technical advice from survivors, nuclear scientists and UN agencies, they developed a set of proposals for action and a UN resolution seeking international support.

Now adopted by the UN General Assembly, that resolution proposes bilateral, regional and multilateral action and the sharing of technical and scientific information about nuclear legacies, and “calls upon Member States in a position to do so to contribute technical and financial assistance as appropriate.” It requires UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres to seek members’ views and proposals about assistance to nuclear survivors and report back to the General Assembly.

Like most non-binding UN resolutions, this one is couched in the cautious diplomatic terminology required to forge a consensus among 193 UN member states. How then do the French and British governments justify their vote against assistance to nuclear survivors, a decision echoed by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un?

When I put questions to France’s ambassador to the Pacific, Véronique Roger-Lacan, the French foreign affairs ministry replied, justifying its decision to stand with North Korea and Russia “because this resolution does not recognise the efforts already undertaken and because it aims to establish an international liability regime which ignores ongoing bilateral or national efforts, to which we are committed.”

According to the ministry, the French “fully” assume their “responsibilities and do everything we can to compensate all victims of nuclear tests, in accordance with the law of 5 January 2010 relating to the recognition and compensation of victims of French nuclear tests, modified in 2017. In this respect, France has in recent years strengthened its human and financial resources allocated to managing the consequences of the tests, including the identification and assistance of potential victims.”

It’s true that in 2010 France established the Comité d’Indemnisation des Victimes des Essais Nucléaires, or CIVEN, a commission to evaluate compensation claims from civilian and military personnel who staffed French nuclear test sites. But CIVEN’s significant flaws mean it is disingenuous to suggest that successive governments are “managing the consequences of the tests.”

President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to respond fully to demands for assistance have been widely condemned by Mā’ohi political, church and community leaders in French Polynesia, where France conducted 193 nuclear tests from 1966 until as recently as 1996. They note, for example, that during its first five years of operation CIVEN approved only 2 per cent of claims submitted by personnel exposed to hazardous levels of ionising radiation at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls.

Changes to the law since 2017 have improved the compensation process, but CIVEN still rejects more than half of all applications. Political and community leaders in French Polynesia continue to push for further reforms as well as an apology for the ongoing trauma caused by thirty years of testing.

In 2022 the French government created a special Mémoire des Hommes website dedicated to the Mā’ohi Nui nuclear testing program and began declassifying some relevant documents. But only archives relating to the Pacific Testing Centre are eligible for declassification — not those that cover France’s atmospheric and underground tests in Algeria between 1960 and 1965. France used its North African colony to conduct four atmospheric nuclear tests at Reggane and thirteen underground tests at In Eker in the Sahara desert, tests that continuing three years beyond Algerian independence in 1962 to give Paris time to build its testing bases in the South Pacific.

Indigenous survivors and researchers from the Nuclear Truth Project continue to call for better access to nuclear archives and the release of the documentary evidence required for compensation programs. They have also developed protocols to ensure any efforts for remediation and assistance are focused on redress for both historic and future harms from nuclear activities.

December’s UN resolution is just one step in a longer campaign to deal with the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons under the TPNW. Seventy countries have now ratified that treaty, and the nuclear weapon states are getting anxious.

The United States, France and Britain — the three states that tested nuclear weapons in Oceania — first tried to ignore the TPNW, but as the number of ratifications mounted, they began to actively oppose it. In our region, eleven Pacific island countries and territories have ratified or acceded to TPNW and the remaining colonial dependencies have also joined the call for assistance to nuclear survivors, even though they can’t sign the treaty.

In September last year the Assembly of French Polynesia unanimously passed a resolution in support of the TPNW. As ICAN France, the local affiliate of the International Campaign to Abolish the Nuclear Weapons, noted, “while French Polynesia cannot currently access the assistance and rehabilitation outlined in Articles 6 and 7 of the TPNW due to France’s non-ratification, it sends a resounding message in favour of the treaty to Paris.”

President Moetai Brotherson of French Polynesia says the Assembly resolution sends an important message to Paris. “It’s not legally binding, so that’s probably one of the reasons they don’t really care about it,” Brotherson told me in November. “But it has a symbolic value that is very strong. For us, it’s only natural that we have this kind of position taken at the parliament. It’s a message we want to send to the world — that nuclear weapons are dangerous and we can destroy this planet if we are not cautious about it.”

In Australia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands and French Polynesia, Indigenous communities affected by nuclear testing want the weapons states to provide funds for independent, comprehensive radiological surveys of nuclear test sites and surrounding communities. They also want the nuclear powers to monitor, secure and remove nuclear wastes on a scale and standard comparable to the clean-up of domestic nuclear sites in their home territory.

As they ended their twentieth-century test programs, the Western powers used the Pacific Ocean as a dumping ground. A 2017 French government report on ocean dumping of nuclear waste admits that 2580 tonnes of nuclear waste in concrete drums was dumped in the ocean at site Oscar off Moruroa atoll in the eight years from 1974. Seventy-six tonnes of untreated radioactive waste had already been submerged at the nearby November site between 1972 and 1975.

ICAN France has also documented significant amounts of nuclear waste buried in the Sahara desert after France’s seventeen nuclear tests in Algeria, even though the French government still refuses to communicate details of the waste and landfill locations to Algerian authorities.

British nuclear test sites in the Monte Bello Islands and South Australian desert are also scarred with the radioactive legacies of atmospheric tests and the hundreds of experiments — including burning uranium and plutonium — conducted on the land of the Anangu people. The nuclear threat to these sacrifice zones is not over. Last year, Barngarla traditional owners won a long battle to protect their country and storylines from the proposed establishment of a radioactive waste on their land near Kimba in South Australia.

France’s answers to my questions about why it joined Russia and North Korea to vote against the Kiribati/Kazakhstan resolution might have been less than satisfactory, but British high commissions in the Pacific declined to respond at all.

Unlike France and the United States, Britain doesn’t have a compensation commission for survivors of nuclear testing. In fact, Britain has a shameful record of nuclear secrecy: in 2018, the National Archives withdrew public access to key files about British nuclear testing in Oceania.

Over more than thirty years, British, Australian, NZ and Fijian military veterans who served at British nuclear test sites in Kiribati and Australia have unsuccessfully lodged a series of cases and appeals before British courts and the European Court of Human Rights. They have sought damages under civil law for the illnesses they attribute to their service at nuclear test sites. Britain’s defence ministry has consistently opposed these claims, unfailingly appealing against lower court rulings that assisted veterans.

A fatal problem for the veterans is that they lack documentary evidence of rates of radioactive exposure for military personnel — evidence still buried in the British archives. Last month, the UK Daily Mirror reported how successive governments have maintained the cover-up, with government agencies refusing to release relevant data. “In 2018, the UK Ministry of Defence claimed it ‘had no information’ about blood testing during the nuclear trials,” the newspaper reported. “Last year the Atomic Weapons Establishment, an MoD agency, admitted it holds up to 5000 files, including a list of 150 specific documents mentioning blood and urine tests taken during the weapons program.”

At a time of warfare in Europe and the Middle East, the actions of these nuclear weapon states highlight their hypocrisy. As civilians are massacred in Ukraine and Gaza, developing nations are mobilising through the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court to end a culture of impunity for states that declare themselves democratic. •

The post The feckless four appeared first on Inside Story.

I would reward him, or acknowledge him, with words like this:

Someone much better than me at pulling out figures from such reports has used a pen and paper to work out where the ACT overspends compared to the rest of Australia and where it under-taxes.

And that was the point: Tim could do with a piece of paper and a pen what I couldn’t do, and what most people couldn’t do.

Anyway, I was about to move from one office in the press gallery to another to work with him as his deputy. I happened to be speaking to Melbourne economist Nick Gruen, who told me that Tim Colebatch was extraordinary.

Gruen said he had read something Tim had written, based on figures no one else knew about, and asked Tim where he had got them from. He said Tim sent him Tim’s figures — pages and pages of photocopied calculations done by hand. Tim had dug into several different documents (before the age of spreadsheets), copied out masses of figures by hand and combined them to discover something that wasn’t at all apparent from any of the individual documents. It must have taken hours. Nick said he had a vision of Tim’s wife (Mary) watching the television while Tim did sheet after sheet, calculation after calculation without complaint.

And then when I got to the Age, Tim did it all the time.

Peter, I know you’re doing the jobs figures today. I’ve just pulled out the six-month trend growth for each state, set it alongside the previous six months and this is what it shows…

Tim’s figuring produced a much greater insight than the Australian Bureau of Statistics press release or summary itself, which almost everyone else was content with.

It was not only journalists and those of us who worked with Tim who noticed this. When he died, an ABS official who had dealt with him wrote on the social media platform X that:

Most journos develop stories by cutting-pasting from media releases. Tim was a whip-sharp user of economic data who actually read statistical publications to develop his own take on the situation.

Another wrote:

As a public servant often required to provide background on the how of policies or programs to journalists, I can vouch for how genuine was Tim Colebatch. No journalist approached an inquiry with more open-mindedness, understood the issues more deeply, nor cared more.

Tim’s method — open-minded methodical inquiry — gave us truths that no one else had discovered.

In 2011 when high inflation figures came out and all manner of highly credentialed journalists began writing that there was a breakout and that inflation would stay high, Tim looked inside the figures and saw that almost all the underlying pressure was ebbing away, even though the official measures of underlying inflation didn’t say so. Tim wrote this, explaining why, was not thanked by his highly credentialed competitors, and was right. Soon after, inflation dived to a new lower plane and didn’t return to where it had been, until Covid.

All through 2011 the employment numbers seemed suspiciously flat. The usual growth was missing, making it look as if the economy was off the boil. Through a tip-off at a conference, Tim had learnt that it wasn’t employment that was behaving strangely, it was the way the ABS calculated its figures. The Bureau multiplies the number of people it surveys by whatever number it needs to in order to represent the Australian population.

But the Bureau’s estimates of the Australian population had been wrong, and it had been slowly winding down the multiplication factor each month throughout 2011, which made it look as if employment hadn’t been growing, even though it was. The contact at the conference would have found it hard to explain to anyone else what had happened. I didn’t think Tim would be able to explain it in the Age. I suggested he hold off until we could finesse it. He said no, he would write it then and there, which he did in perfectly clear English, helping change people’s understanding of where the economy was heading.

For readers, Tim made his writing look simple, easy, obvious, and obviously right, even though to produce it he had had to do some very complicated figuring — the kind of things few other people could do. And he gave what he wrote moral force. He would make the reader feel that anger was justified, that something was egregiously wrong even though it hadn’t seemed egregiously wrong until Tim had uncovered it.

In most years until the Howard government halved the headline rate of capital gains tax in 1999, more landlords made money than lost it: landlords as a group made money renting out properties, which is how it should be. After Howard’s change, landlords as a group lost money, every single year. Landlords became losers, overwhelmingly deliberate losers, in order to negatively gear and sell their properties later for a capital gain that would be barely taxed.

Of course landlords dived into the market pushing owner-occupiers out of the way. Of course this pushed up prices. Of course this meant that Australians who would once have been owner-occupiers had to make do with renting from the same people who had pushed buying out of their reach. Of course it was wrong. Tim made you feel outraged with him, even about things he would not have been outraged about until he had uncovered the data.

In a piece for Inside Story in 2017 entitled “Yes, There Is Such a Thing as Too Much Immigration,” Tim presented findings that affronted him, partly because he wished they weren’t true. He said that in net terms an extra 474,000 people had found full-time jobs over the previous eight years. But only 74,000 of the jobs went to people born in Australia. The official figures had been “ignored by analysts” (which is probably because they, like me, wouldn’t have known where to find them).

“I am unambiguously pro-immigration,” Colebatch wrote, “but if the level and nature of the immigration are not working for us, I suggest we turn down the tap.” That wasn’t a conclusion Tim had wanted to come to, but it derived from the data, the only source of truth.

One night (we worked late more often than not) I asked him what kind of reporting he liked best. Was it political reporting? Was it what the government was planning? He said it was statistics. Because they were the truth: the pure truth rather than being in part the product of spin or in part an account of who had said what.

Which isn’t to say Tim didn’t like politics. His reporting on electorates, polls and political trends was unmatched. And it was a resource for other reporters. Tim understood each Victorian seat, the distribution of preferences in each seat, how counting would develop, what a change of boundaries would do, and the way in which each Senate count would evolve over a fortnight.

Writing in Inside Story last April he raised the possibility that Anthony Albanese might turn out to have led Australia’s last majority Labor government. We won’t know for some time whether that turns out to be correct, but we can know, right now, that it was a possibility that presented itself to Tim after a careful and deep dive into everything electoral.

Remarkably, Tim didn’t think that what he did was extraordinary. Never in his writing did he suggest it was, and nor did he talk down to the reader. He took the reader (and fellow journalists) with him on a journey and made it seem obvious.

Australia Day wasn’t a thing back in 1971, but Tim joined the Age on 25 January, the eve of Australia Day, as one of five cadets, the only one who was a graduate. Mark Baker, who joined with him that day, said he wasn’t like the others:

We were juveniles, bemused, in awe of Tim. Bespectacled, he carried books in a stylish cloth shoulder bag and was always reading. While we were working out how to type with two fingers, Tim was writing serious analysis pieces on Bangladesh.

Tim quickly gravitated to writing analysis, and then editorials, but editorials grounded in data, writing lightly but not once-over lightly. And some of his editorials were masterpieces. One, prepared as a summer holder, examined official Tasmanian reports about plans for flooding the Franklin River. When it was published, while Tim was overseas, it turned the Franklin into an issue on the mainland. Victorians were talking about it.

Tim took on the environment round and kept reporting on the plans to destroy the river. He reported from the Franklin during the 1983 election campaign, explaining how the Commonwealth could stop the damming, which it did.

Some of Tim’s colleagues have told me he was a contrarian. But he wasn’t. He wanted to know the truth wherever it took him. One colleague from near the beginning, Tony Walker, put it better. He said that what defined Tim was his outsider’s perspective. This made Tim, he said, “not a typical product of Melbourne Grammar.” He was prepared to find out and analyse, rather than regurgitate his prejudices.

Although Tim must have started out with some prejudices. He told me that before he started reporting from Melbourne’s parliament house, he’d assumed that the Labor members of parliament must have been pretty good, representing the interests of the workers. Then he saw them.

Someone else reporting Victorian politics at that time was Frank McGuire, who worked in parliament house for the Melbourne Herald while Tim worked for the Age, and who later became a member of Victoria’s parliament. He told me that Tim set the standard for factually accurate, evidence-based, insightful analysis. While it has always been important, these days it’s rare.

In his obituary for the Age, Tim’s long-term colleague Damien Murphy paints him as something of a time capsule, carrying with him the ethos of the time when quality journalism, centred around the Age, took off:

Many of the journalists of the 1960s and 1970s took its ethos and went on to become huge influences in print, television and radio across Australia: They included Mike Willesee, Jennifer Byrne and Neil Mitchell. Eight edited metropolitan daily newspapers. Others chose literature, the law and politics. Some returned. But only one member of that generation remained on staff in a direct unbroken link to the era.

At a time when so much of modern political reporting became transactional — “I’ll report this in return for you telling me that” — Tim wouldn’t do it. In Canberra, the treasurer’s staff would hand me information in return for what they hoped would be good publicity. They never tried it with Tim.

Not that Tim wouldn’t engage with them. At press conferences, he would call them out. When treasurer Wayne Swan presented a graph that Tim thought was dodgy, Tim simply stood up and said so, and why. I remember thinking at the time that no one else in the room would have had the courage — and the confidence in their own judgement — to do that. From few other people would the treasurer have meekly accepted it.

Tony Walker had a word for this quality of Tim’s — “unyielding.” Tim wouldn’t say something unless he was sure it was right, and then he wouldn’t retreat for the sake of maintaining relationships. Michelle Grattan, his long-time Canberra colleague, put it this way: he constructed his own journalistic framework and operated within it, rather than running with the pack.

More than many other people, journalists (including myself) are needy. We thrive on praise. I’ve never known Tim to seek it out, and when we worked together I rarely offered it, although I figured he knew how extraordinary I thought he was. Afterwards, when he retired, and later as his days were becoming numbered, I told him every time we met.

It was the same in the office — he hated noise, he hated interruptions, he hated messiness. There are those who say Tim’s corner of the Age office in parliament house was messy. They are wrong. It was piled high with papers and ABS reports, but it was extremely neat. Tim knew where every single document was and could find it instantly.

In the office he ran the beer fridge and used it to send money to children he supported. Two of his keenest interests were India and Indonesia, where he wanted to go as a correspondent but never did. He did go to Washington, in the Reagan years, and was earlier tapped for a post, China correspondent, which he turned down because, legend has it, he had just been made president of the North Melbourne tennis club.

He reported on tennis for the Age and Inside Story. He loved tennis, he played tennis well, he was a ball boy at what’s now the Australian Open, and he met his wife Mary at the tennis.

And he loved Melbourne. This is important, and was important for Tim’s decades of work in Canberra. He had a mental social and electoral map of Melbourne. He knew how people felt in Melbourne, in different parts of Melbourne, and he could write about it with more understanding and moral force than people who hadn’t left.

His meticulously researched biography of Victorian premier Dick Hamer, whom Tim dubbed the liberal Liberal, owed everything to Tim’s deep understanding of Melbourne and also to Tim’s total respect for the truth.

In 2022, in the early days of his treatment, Tim wrote a review of another biography of a Victorian leader — Sumeyya Ilanbey’s biography of Dan Andrews. Tim said she depicted Andrews as someone who decided issues on political grounds and treated “their merits as secondary.” For Tim, there was no greater transgression.

I remember getting ready to leave the office one night. Tim was still there, working with sheets and sheets of paper and doing sums with a pen.

“What are you doing, Tim?” I asked.

“I am looking at British temperature records from the 1800s,” he told me. “I am trying to get a handle on the extent to which there has been global warming.”

“Tim, no one else would do that,” I said. “Everyone else uses secondary sources.”

“Shhh! Don’t tell,” he replied, and I left him to go on checking.

In October last year, Tim and I caught up at our local cafe, as we had done regularly for years. He told me the antivirals seemed to be holding back his cancer, but he didn’t think that would last.

And then he apologised. He had been up into the early hours of the morning attending a virtual press conference held by the International Energy Agency in Paris to outline its update on the path to limiting global warming to 1.5°C. He had interrogated the officials online, and he told me he still thought that if a lot of things fell into place we might just keep global warming to 1.5°C.

And then he walked home to write the piece. He concluded it by saying the Albanese government was

in danger of overpromising on targets while underdelivering on policies to achieve them. Its carbon price is limited to 200-odd companies, it is walking both sides of the street on fossil fuels, and most of the reviews it has launched have yet to produce outcomes. This is what happens when you allow the political staff to take charge of policy.

It was his last message to readers of Inside Story. •

The post How journalism should be done appeared first on Inside Story.

Among the various negative consequences of a vainglorious attempt to implant Western-style democracy on the banks of the Tigris is the empowerment of Iran as a regional force. Prior to 2003, Iran had barely recovered from a debilitating 1980–88 war with Iraq. Its efforts to spread power and influence across the region were constrained by war wounds and a weak economy. After 2003, however, Iran found itself the principal beneficiary in a Middle East power game gone badly wrong.

Overnight, it acquired an oil-rich client state, Iraq, on its western flank and a virtually unimpeded gateway for spreading Shiite influence across the region via surrogates including Hezbollah, its client in Lebanon, and an embryonic and ultimately lethal relationship with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Not all the fallout from the disastrous American intervention in Iraq was negative. The Arab Spring of 2010–12 raised hopes, all too briefly, that autocratic regimes like those in Syria would succumb to popular uprisings, partly driven by social media.

Over time, though, autocrats reasserted themselves. In the process, Iran’s influence continued to spread. In Syria, for instance, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bolsters Bashar al-Assad’s regime against ongoing civil conflict.

The upheavals following the Iraq war also helped to facilitate Russia’s re-engagement in the Middle East. Moscow has become a significant player across the region with relationships that extend from Syria, where a Russian intervention helped to save Assad’s regime, down into the Gulf.

Russia’s renewed influence includes what is effectively a security pact with Iran and a push to sell arms into a region already awash with armaments. Acknowledging the weakened and weakening US position in the region, Gulf states like Saudi Arabia have improved their ties with Moscow.

Sometimes overlooked is the fact that Russia, China and Iran have mutual security ties. They have conducted joint naval exercises in the Arabian Sea. China is heavily dependent on Middle East crude oil. It’s a far cry from 1972, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat sent Soviet advisers packing and tilted his country towards the West, and America in particular. That year marked a nadir of Soviet influence in a region broadly regarded by Moscow as its sphere of interest — a nadir from which Vladimir Putin’s regime has sought to recover.

If the historian Barbara Tuchman had been alive to update her magisterial critique of American foreign policy, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, she would surely have included the Iraq invasion in her summation of misguided policies with far-reaching consequences.

This brings us to 7 October 2023, the day Hamas militants broke of a Gaza security cordon in which Israel had assumed, wrongly, they were contained. The massacre of combatant and non-combatant Israelis has had, and is having, metastasising effects across the region. In many cases, though not all, Iran is a common denominator.

This is not to say that Tehran doesn’t have legitimate security interests in a hostile Middle East environment. But its support for disparate players ranged against America’s client, Israel, is a principal cause of the current mayhem.

Without Tehran’s backing, it is doubtful Hamas would have been in a position to carry out its brazen 7 October incursion. Absent Iran’s military training, arms and diplomatic support, Hezbollah in Lebanon is unlikely to have become the force it is.

In Yemen, Iran’s nurturing of the Shiite Houthis enabled its client to withstand brutal efforts by Saudi Arabia to bomb its forces out of existence. In recent weeks, Tehran’s supply of cruise and anti-ship missiles and drones has given the Houthis the capacity to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, through which 15 per cent of the world’s seaborne trade usually passes.

Iran’s regional power play brands itself as an “arc of resistance” aligned with its Shiite co-religionists in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria (whose heterodox Alawite rulers represent a branch of Shiism), and with Sunni fundamentalist Hamas in Gaza. This is resistance primarily to Israel, but also more broadly to efforts by the United States to assert itself in a region where its credibility has been eroded by mistakes like the Iraq war and virtually unconditional support for an Israel whose treatment of the Palestinians fuels resentment.

Long gone are the days when Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state at the time, could broker a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Now Kissinger’s latest successor, Antony Blinken, shuttles forlornly between Israel and Arab capitals constrained by his own weak president and the prerogatives of American domestic politics in an election year.

The Biden administration has been shown incapable of restraining Israel’s merciless attacks on Gaza, which have left more than 25,000 Gazans killed, according to the Hamas health ministry, and vast swathes of the enclave uninhabitable. American cover, direct or tacit, for Israel’s brutal tactics against Hamas has further stretched Washington’s credibility in the region.

On the other hand, support for Hamas among Arab regimes is tepid, if not hostile. This attitude has been conditioned by concerns that Hamas’s version of radical Islam, incubated in Egypt in the 1920s, will spread and thus create an internal threat for those regimes.

Self-preservation is the prime concern of the hereditary rulers of oil-rich Gulf states, but at the same time they can’t ignore the horror among their populace at what they are witnessing on their television screens. The Biden administration’s resistance to calls for a ceasefire has strained relations with traditional allies, like Jordan, the majority of whose population is of Palestinian origin.

The continuing spillover from the generations-old conflict between Israel and Palestine has also intensified a shadow war far beyond the Gaza Strip. Evidence of this can be seen, on the one hand, in Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders in Syria and Lebanon and its elimination of a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, and, on the other, an upsurge in attacks on American bases in the region.

Meanwhile, it is hard to see a realistic conclusion to the Israel–Palestine conflict as long as Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s prime minister. For virtually his entire political career Netanyahu has sought to frustrate reasonable efforts towards a resolution of the issue. At every turn, whether in office or in opposition, he has contrived to stymie a process that might lead to a reasonable compromise.

Since his earliest days in politics he has been a sponsor of Israeli settlers in the territory occupied in the 1967 war. The number of settlers has reached a point where it will be virtually impossible to unscramble the settlement egg without risk of civil conflict in Israel itself. Some 500,000 Israelis now live in the occupied West Bank and another 200,000 in Arab East Jerusalem; many are militant Zionists who believe they are occupying the biblical home of the Jews.

Netanyahu has been a godfather of this process both from the perspective of his own ideological attachment to a Greater “annexationist” Israel and out of political expediency. In his continued efforts to hold on to power and avoid possible jailing for corruption he has aligned himself with some of the most extreme elements in Israeli politics.

His reluctance to countenance a “two-state solution” if and when the guns fall silent is consistent with his opposition over many years to an accommodation with the Palestinians except when it has been politically expedient for him to show some flexibility.

He is a prime minister on borrowed time. It is highly likely, even inevitable, that once the Gaza war subsides Netanyahu will be obliged to step aside. An inquiry into events leading up to 7 October, including intelligence failures, will almost certainly hold him accountable.

None of this is to suggest the Palestinians are blameless. A weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has contributed to a vacuum being filled by more radical elements. It might be an inconvenient detail, but if elections were held in the Palestinian territories today Hamas would almost certainly prevail, credited with its resort to armed struggle.

What then are the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians under the two-state formula discussed over many years? This is the holy grail of Middle East peacemaking and, like the holy grail, it is likely to remain mythical.

That is unless America and its allies in Europe and the Middle East are willing to impose a formula on Israel and the Palestinians. The only way that will happen is if Washington puts Israel on notice that financial aid, military assistance and diplomatic cover will be jeopardised if it doesn’t engage in realistic steps towards formalising a Palestinian state.

Since this is highly unlikely under any reasonable political scenario, the Israel–Palestine conflict will remain an open Middle East sore with the likelihood, even the certainty, that terrible events will erupt from time to time. As we’ve seen in recent months, these events — and the ever-present risk of a much wider conflagration — will test not only America’s resolve but also that of the international community.

The risks are manifest. In an American election year, with the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, a volatile situation in the Middle East may well become even more incendiary. While it is not in either America’s or Iran’s interest for the conflict to escalate out of control, that possibility can’t be excluded given both the circumstances and personalities involved.

We can but speculate as to America’s response to the events of 7 October if Trump had been in the White House, but it is most unlikely that he would have had a calming influence. Biden may have been ineffectual in constraining Israel, but Trump could well have made a bad situation a whole lot worse.

Then there are Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Both sides of American politics have said Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability would constitute a red line. In the event of his winning the presidency, would Trump resist pressure to conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s facilities as it creeps ever closer to acquiring the ability to manufacture and weaponise a nuclear device?

It was Trump who abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration. The single most irresponsible foreign policy decision of Trump’s administration, it undid an agreement aimed at persuading Iran that its interests would be better served by desisting from enriching weapons-grade uranium.

All this means that even when the Gaza war is over, a proxy war between Iran and the United States and its ally Israel will persist, made worse by an erosion in America’s ability to influence events or stop its principal ally from pursuing policies detrimental to Western interests more generally.

With the Middle East in turmoil, history tells us that once a thread is tugged from a regional tapestry things can unravel, and unravel fast. These are perilous times. •

The post March of folly appeared first on Inside Story.

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. •

The post Open season appeared first on Inside Story.

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 result of all that consulting has just been summarised in a thirteen-page report that shows respondents want governments to do much more than just “manage” homelessness. They want them to prevent and eliminate it by making sure “all Australians have access to safe and adequate housing.”

The summary identifies twelve principles to guide the plan towards this worthy outcome. The principles are sound, and include recognising housing as a basic human right, ensuring housing is accessible and sustainable, and engaging people who have experienced homelessness in designing programs and services. They also propose a “housing first” approach to homelessness that gives people a home before helping them to deal with challenges like mental illness, addiction and unemployment.

The report lists a few practical suggestions too, including stronger tenants’ rights and inclusionary zoning rules to guarantee new residential developments incorporate social and affordable housing.

Many of its key proposals, though, come down to money: building more social housing where it is most needed, for example, and providing sufficient homelessness services to meet demand.

Such aims can’t be achieved without a much higher level of dedicated, consistent government funding. Indeed, the report includes “secure funding and support” as one of its twelve guiding principles. Yet it offers no guidance as to how the necessary revenue might be raised. This is not because people engaged in the consultations failed to put forward ideas; rather, it’s because the most obvious way to secure funding for housing initiatives is to change the way housing is taxed and that’s something the government doesn’t want to talk about. Right from the start the consultation was framed to bracket out any such discussion.

Two new pieces of research reinforce just how glaring and regrettable this exclusion is.

The Centre for Equitable Housing has drawn together current and historical budget data from across different government portfolios to provide a comprehensive picture of federal housing expenditure over time. It found that tax concessions like negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount are eclipsing expenditure on other housing programs. The combined annual value of these tax breaks is more than ten times the sum Canberra disburses each year to the states and territories to build social housing and tackle homelessness. As a result, 43 per cent of federal government housing support is flowing to the top fifth of income earners, while just 23 per cent goes to the bottom fifth.

The report also found that the numerous but disparate housing-related measures in the federal budget lack clearly articulated objectives. In their absence, negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount operate as “a shadow housing policy” driving up prices by encouraging speculative investment in existing housing stock rather than new construction.

The Everybody’s Home campaign, meanwhile, has calculated that the revenue lost to investor tax breaks over the coming decade could fund 550,000 new homes for low-income households. That would be more than enough to eliminate social housing waiting lists around the country.

The single mention of tax in DSS’s summary of its consultations comes in this sentence: “Private investors and landlords need incentives like tax breaks and subsidies to provide more social and affordable housing.” It’s as if negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount are invisible, or don’t exist, and we’re being asked to invent a set of new industry supports to build affordable homes without any reference to the multibillion-dollar concessions already in place.

Again, this isn’t because participants in DSS’s consultations forgot to mention negative gearing and the capital gains discount. Both were raised at the “community conversation forum” I attended in Geelong (and not just by me). While DSS has yet to upload all 517 submissions to its Engage platform, many of those that are available raise tax reform as an essential consideration in the development of the national housing plan. These include submissions by local governments such as the City of Melbourne and Brimbank City Council, by housing providers and support services such as Mission Australia and the Western Homelessness Network, and by expert organisations such as RMIT’s Centre for Urban Research and SGS Economics and Planning.

In a joint submission, the peak industry bodies National Shelter and the Community Housing Industry Association state the problem clearly:

Currently the ability for housing markets to supply enough homes to meet the population’s needs is distorted by settings for capital gains tax and negative gearing that prioritise speculative housing acquisition for capital return over strategies that aim to ensure every household is able to meet their need for affordable housing. A key goal for the Plan should be to explore opportunities to apply taxation settings that support achievement of long-term housing outcomes over speculative investment returns.

True, statements like this go beyond the narrow focus areas offered up for discussion in the original DSS issues paper, and every page of the summary report includes a disclaimer that it “may not include all views presented by stakeholders.” Yet the same disclaimer says that the document doesn’t represent the views of the Australian government. So even though Labor finds it politically inconvenient to talk about negative gearing and capital gains tax, that’s no reason for the report to shy away from such topics.

To invite community members, housing practitioners and experts to engage in a national dialogue and then to ignore what they have to say makes a mockery of the process of consultation. The Albanese government said it wanted to hear ideas on how to tackle one of the most pressing social and economic issues confronting the nation. Many of us took that invitation at face value and went to considerable lengths to contribute. We can only feel let down. •

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China has long sought diplomatic relations with Tuvalu. Individual officials at various levels in Tuvalu have reported frequent offers of aid if their island state makes the break with Taiwan, and international media raised the potential of a switch after Tuvalu’s 2019 election.

Why might Tuvalu decide to switch to China? And does it matter?

Personal connections, leverage and ongoing aid projects all provide insight into the first question. In a political system without parties or clear pro- and anti-China factions, personal connections matter. Two members of Tuvalu’s parliament are elected from each of its eight islands to make up the country’s sixteen-member parliament, and the prime minister is then elected by MPs from among their number. Some parliamentarians are friendly towards China (and others supportive of Taiwan), and if a pro-China MP were to gain the prime ministership they would certainly have the influence to push for a switch. This alone may have prompted Paeniu’s warning that Tuvalu could switch relations after the upcoming election, but this has potentially been true after any of Tuvalu’s elections.

Leverage is also important. Taiwan is heavily aligned with the United States and Australia, and Washington has pushed Tuvalu to maintain relations with the government in Taipei. Ironically, Tuvalu’s acquiescence has put it at a disadvantage, for the United States tends to focus its attention and aid on Pacific nations that have relations with China.

Tuvalu has recent experience of how leverage can work. In 2021, when Tuvalu was in full Covid lockdown, the state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, or CCECC, helped transport Tuvaluan ministers via Guangzhou to COP26 and other meetings. The result — a sudden renewal of aid promises by the United States — showed that China could not only provide substantial aid to Tuvalu itself but also prompt the United States to increase its assistance. The fact that Taiwan, with its close ties to the United States and Australia, could never enable such leverage was suggested just this week by Tuvalu’s finance minister, Seve Paeniu, who is guaranteed a seat in the new parliament.

How was CCECC able to transport Tuvaluan ministers out of Tuvalu during Covid? The tendering methods used by the Asian Development Bank, or ADB, and the World Bank to award development projects, especially cost-based tendering, often favour Chinese companies and contractors. Although Tuvalu is allied with Taiwan, CCECC workers and supervisors were stationed on some of Tuvalu’s outer islands until 2022 as part of a major ADB-funded project to improve harbours. CCECC’s state ownership demonstrated firsthand for Tuvalu what cooperating with China on aid or development might look like.

For companies like CCECC, there is literally no political or financial downside to lobbying on behalf of China. If Tuvalu switches, they win political capital in Beijing and contracts for work on the ground. While many Chinese company managers resist the embrace of China’s party-state because it’s a bad look or it’s simply not their main priority, CCECC is a pure state-owned enterprise, unfettered by complex ownership structures or the need to please foreign stock exchanges.

When the Solomon Islands government was considering its diplomatic switch in 2019, CCECC’s regional manager visited Honiara to lay out US$500 million worth of development assistance on offer if Solomons leaders showed the wisdom to change their allegiance.

If Tuvalu’s new parliament chooses Beijing over Taipei, CCECC’s fingerprints will undoubtedly be visible. Yet research also indicates that the decision to choose one or the other allegiance often comes down to highly local and pragmatic choices. Tuvalu’s original decision to go with Taiwan had nothing to do with democracy or freedom: at the time, Taiwan was still enduring the longest period of martial law the world has ever seen. Tuvalu chose Taiwan because it had a problem with illegal Taiwanese fishing vessels and reasoned it would have more leverage if it recognised the Republic of China.

The same logic of better futures — the prospect of future investment, aid and diplomatic attention — will doubtless be used by Tuvalu’s next leader, regardless of whether the choice is to stay or to go.

The second question — whether Tuvalu’s decision matters — produces a different answer depending on where you’re sitting. Along with Taiwan, Australia is the only country with a diplomatic mission in Funafuti, and our diplomats would clearly prefer the status quo to continue. The Solomon Islands’ switch — facilitated by a leader with a longstanding history of bad blood with Canberra — represents the extreme end of possible outcomes, but Australia can also do without clumsy attempts by Chinese diplomats to influence local media or provide inducements to politicians to keep Tuvalu in Beijing’s column. It could also do without any impact a switch might have on finalisation of the Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union.

In Beijing, another diplomatic switch so soon after Taiwan’s presidential elections would be welcomed, although you’d have to spare a thought for whomever they send to Funafuti. China’s Pacific diplomats look a harried bunch at the best of times; being under so much scrutiny in such a small town is not an enviable assignment. Taiwan’s new government, meanwhile, would find the question of why they continue to invest limited resources in a losing hand hard to avoid. For Tuvalu, the choice is theirs to make, and we should all respect their decision. •

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In the absence of traditional naval warfare, the rationale for maintaining large naval forces has rested largely on the idea that trade routes must be maintained. Most of the time this argument has relied on an analogue of Lisa Simpson’s tiger-repelling rock — the claim that the very existence of large navies is the reason trade flows so smoothly.

Now, however, the catastrophe in Gaza has spilled over into a conflict in the Red Sea. The Houthi rebel movement in Yemen, backed by Iran and opposed to the United States and Israel, has begun attacking ships in the Red Sea, deterring many from travelling through the Suez Canal. One estimate puts the fall in traffic at 30 per cent.

Despite the claims of naval advocates, the Houthis were not deterred by the presence of the large naval force set up to counter them. Combined Task Force-153 was established in 2022 by the Combined Maritime Forces in the Middle East to “specifically address maritime threats in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.” News reports speculated that the goal of the task force was to counter the Houthi threat.

Evidently, this goal was not achieved. After unsuccessfully attacking Israel itself (in response to the invasion of Gaza, which in turn responded to the Hamas terror attacks, which in turn…), the Houthis began attacking Israeli-owned ships in November, and have since steadily increased their range of targets to include most commercial shipping.

The United States and Britain have responded with an impressive expansion of their naval forces, including a carrier strike group, Typhoon fighter jets and submarine-launched cruise missiles. Houthi drones have been downed and Houthi bases and military launch sites targeted with air strikes.

The effectiveness of this response remains to be seen. In the absence of ground forces, air strikes have rarely compelled an adversary to surrender. And the last attempt to keep the Suez Canal open by force, undertaken by Britain, France and Israel in 1956, ended in a humiliating fiasco which produced the opposite of its intended outcome.

But let’s suppose that the continued presence of this naval force is sufficient to deter or destroy Houthi attackers and allow normal shipping to be maintained. Is this benefit sufficient to justify the required expenditure on naval forces?

If the United States decided not to maintain the forces necessary for an operation of this kind, it could save the cost of one of its eleven carrier battle groups. With a naval budget of US$220 billion a year, that would be a saving of US$20 billion a year.

But what if the canal remained closed? When a land or air route is interrupted by armed conflict, the usual response is to take a longer way around. (The tragic consequences of not doing so were illustrated by the destruction of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014.)

In the case of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, the long way around is via the Cape of Good Hope, an extra distance of around 2000 nautical miles (or about 15 per cent) in the distance from Europe to Asia. About 12 per cent of world trade normally uses the canal, so the average shipping time for all goods would rise by around 2 per cent if the canal were closed. Even for traded goods, shipping costs are only about 7 per cent of the final price, so any impact on global inflation would be imperceptible.

We can look more directly at the costs by considering estimates that the cost of a round trip from Europe to Asia would increase by “up to” US$1 million. With about 8500 round trips per year, that’s a cost of at most US$8.5 billion. On that figure, even if the threat posed by the Houthis remains indefinitely and the current force manages to keep shipping flowing, the costs to the United States would far outweigh the benefit to global shipping.

But is protecting the shortest routes for global shipping so crucial an objective that it can’t be compromised, regardless of costs? It’s worth considering some alternatives.

Protecting global shipping is a form of foreign aid. For the cost of a carrier battle group the United States could nearly double its entire overseas development aid budget, saving many millions of lives. Alternatively, the money could be spent at home, for example on repairs to America’s crumbling transport infrastructure system or on making its schools safe for children to attend.

At least the United States is big enough and rich enough to afford an annual US$20 billion subsidy to the shipping industry. The same can’t be said for Britain, a smaller and poorer country experiencing a public sector crisis. Role-playing as a global maritime power is an exercise in imperial nostalgia Britain can scarcely afford.

Similar points apply to Australia, where we have spent around $500 billion this century on our navy, largely justified by the supposed need to protect vital shipping routes. We would be better off spending much of this money on improving our domestic transport system or meeting vital social needs in health and education.

More generally, the only use of military and naval force that should be treated as unquestionably necessary is self-defence against invasion. All the other supposed benefits — creating jobs, projecting power and protecting trade routes — should be subject to the same cost–benefit test as other expenditure. Many, perhaps most, military expenditures would fail that test. •

The post Maritime mathematics appeared first on Inside Story.

Traditional photography, as we seem destined to refer to daguerreotype or digital or anything in between, records something captured in what immediately becomes the past. That doesn’t mean a photograph represents a historical truth — there are many ways, including deliberate fakery, by which the camera can lie. But however much an image may trick or mislead us, we can still be confident that it has its roots in history, that something happened, even if that something was designed to fool us.

That is what is changing. AI images fundamentally challenge the relationship of the image with the past. It is true that AI image-making (or AI-assisted, as some would more carefully express it) does in one sense depend on the past, in the form of the vast number of extant photographic images that AI draws upon to do its work. But the resulting “photography-like” image is indeed new — the person, the object, the event that it depicts did not exist. Nothing, so to speak, happened.

Given the way the ground is shifting, it isn’t surprising that we are witnessing an upsurge of interest in telling photography’s story so far. The huge stocks of photographs held by galleries and libraries and museums, sometimes deliberately collected but often accumulated almost by chance, are increasingly being brought to the forefront, as curators and historians of photography grapple with the most effective ways of displaying and contextualising examples from the vast stocks of images at their disposal.

Three current exhibitions — one at the National Gallery of Victoria, the others at the State Library of New South Wales and the National Archives of Australia — reflect this upsurge of interest. In the words of David Campany, a contributor to the splendid catalogue of the NGV exhibition, Photography: Real and Imagined, photography “finds itself centre stage again.”

The NGV first began collecting photographs more than fifty years ago with a brief “to acquire both Australian and international photography.” The collection began with an emphasis on documentary photography but moved rapidly into what, to use the shorthand, is generally termed art photography. This distinction may once have seemed clearer than it does now, when we are much more likely, as Susan Bright writes in her catalogue essay, to see photographs as belonging “on the spectrum,” somewhere between the polarities of reality and imagination.

Whether a photograph is seen as real or imagined, as documentary or art, amateur or professional, these categories are in fact “intertwined,” to use Bright’s term; whatever its status, whether as snapshot or artistic triumph, the photograph is evidence of something that happened in the past.

Among the exhibits at the NGV is German photographer Thomas Struth’s well-known image Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001). It shows a group of gallery visitors posed in the act of viewing the Telephos frieze in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. For all kinds of reasons, including scale and complexity of composition, Struth’s image announces itself as art.

Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001). National Gallery of Victoria

We are hardly surprised by this — it is part of an exhibition, and it is in an art gallery. The past of 2001 — a group of people arranged around a room in a gallery — is shown in contemplation of the past of more than 2000 years before, suggesting how any photograph, whatever its primary intent, also acts as a record of the time it was made. That photographic record may be as open to interpretation as the surviving fragments of an ancient frieze, but both photo and frieze qualify as history as well as art.

In looking at photographs on display on the walls of a museum or a library, as opposed to a public or private art gallery, we are very much primed to read the images the other way, as history first and art, if at all, second. The exhibitions currently at the State Library of New South Wales and the National Archives of Australia take different approaches to the question of photography’s role in illuminating the past, and of how we should read photographs on display as history — but also, sometimes, as art, depending both on the innate qualities of the image and the institutional setting.

Shot: 400 Photographs, 200 Photographers, 3 Centuries inaugurates the State Library’s new photography gallery, a subterranean space created out of an old storage area once filled with “empty filing cabinets and the like.” It is difficult to think of a more striking metaphor of how photography has assumed a much more prominent role in our public collections, pushing its way forward by way of adaptive reuse.

The role of photography as historical record is emphasised by the organising principle of the exhibition — at least one photograph from nearly every year from 1845 to 2022. The library holds something in the order of two million photograph images; 400 are on display in Shot. This disparity in these numbers gives some idea of the curatorial task involved in choosing what to include.

The library’s inauguration of a dedicated space for displaying photographs is to be applauded, but it is hard not to notice, when descending into the former storage area, how limited that space is. The walls feel crowded, with some images mounted so high that details are almost out of visual reach. They can be examined more closely, however, on one of the wall-mounted monitors that have been distributed around the display area.

This combination of physical and electronic display seems deliberately to be raising the question of how we most effectively comprehend the vastness of Australia’s archive of photographic history. The viewer is being encouraged to see the images on the walls as a starting point, an encouragement to engage in further exploration online. “These 400 works,” we are advised in the useful if all too brief booklet that accompanies the exhibition, “convey some of the rich rewards to be gained by examining the archive as a whole,” suggesting how the role of curator is moving speedily through a process of democratisation — just as photography itself has undergone a similar process over many decades.

On the evidence of one moderately busy morning, that strategy is working: the monitors in the room were all taken up by people zooming in on details of the image — or seeking out further background information, or comparing one image with another — while others patiently waited their turn.

Shot explicitly challenges any distinction between “art” and “documentary” photography, consigning that distinction, not altogether convincingly, to history, to the twentieth century when “the ‘art-hang’ was a popular method for exhibiting the work of artist-photographers.” The library doesn’t abide by that distinction, instead choosing a middle way between a gallery-style “art-hang” and what might be called a documentary-hang. “If they’ve got visible sprocket holes, for example, that’s how we reproduce them.”

The many photographs in the library’s collection have been “sourced from official documents,” from shoeboxes and mantelpieces and from the archives of newspapers and portrait studios, but there are also images that we would conventionally think of as being more at home on the walls of art galleries. Max Dupain’s The Sunbather is there (in two versions) along, for example, with a beautiful autochrome Still Life (1912–20) by an unknown photographer, and Anne Zahalka’s 1988 Cibachrome print The Sisters, which also, as it happens, includes a still life, in the bottom right hand corner of the frame. Zahalka’s is a brilliant image, its forthright compositional techniques — its multiple references to framing, for example — and its combination of visual formality and domesticity inviting reflection on what a difference a frame makes.

Anne Zahalka’s The Sisters (1988). State Library of New South Wales

The inclusion of works by Dupain and Zahalka emphasise the fact that, in addition to their status as photographic art, these images are also part of Australian history and of the time in which they were made. The exhibition makes the further point that all manner of photographic output — studio portraiture, holiday snaps, photojournalism, police mug shots, “art photography” — documents the past, and indeed that examples of all those genres have a place in the library’s collection.

“Most of the Library’s photographs,” remarks curator Geoffrey Barker in the exhibition booklet, “have been acquired for their documentary value rather than for their artistic or aesthetic value, but… when visitors look at these photographs they will realise that often there’s not much between them and art photography.”

Some images, rather more than others, bear out this contention. Photo Kiosk (1949), for example, by the little-known Brian Bird, captures a moment in history, but it would also look perfectly at home displayed among the work of the world’s great mid-century street photographers. As an indication of the richness and variety of the library’s holdings — and by extension of the country’s photographic heritage — the exhibition is best seen as it suggests we see it, as an incentive to look further, to explore and curate these collections for ourselves.

Brian Bird’s Photo Kiosk (1949). State Library of New South Wales

The selection criterion for Focus: Australian Government Photographers at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra, is quite different. This is a selection of the images produced by the professional photographers employed, in various capacities and under various departmental headings, by the federal government. This system of direct employment lasted from its inception in 1939 until 1996, when it gave way to outsourcing.

The job of these photographers was, as Martyn Jolly puts it in his introduction, to “show off” Australia, its landscape, its industry and way of life. The photographs were destined to be printed in brochures and departmental reports, often without attribution. “They weren’t,” says Jolly, “taken for the gallery wall.” And yet here they are, framed and attributed and looking very much like art.

Many photographers worked for the government in this way. Eighteen are represented in the exhibition, complete with names and brief biographical details, the recovery of which in many cases required diligent research. Only one, the pioneering Aboriginal photographer Mervyn Bishop, could be described as widely known outside professional circles.

The names of the other seventeen will almost certainly be less familiar, including that of the sole woman among them, Jocelyn Burt, for whom entry into the world of professional photographers was no easy task. “I ran headlong into male chauvinism before I even started to work professionally,” she says in her laconically knockabout memoir Shutterbug in the Bush (1981).

Seeing these works displayed alongside one another gives an idea of the tightly encompassing brief to which the photographers were working. The human subjects look happy or purposeful or occasionally pensive, with few images of suffering or deprivation and only occasional ones of delicately implied sadness. People are typically arranged in groups, working on some common task or engaging in sport or leisure activities in a spirit of cheerful competitiveness. (Buildings, meanwhile, are shown as modern and clean-lined, embodying Australia’s commitment to the future.)

We cannot help but be conscious of how people have been directed to stand here or there or hold their heads just so. In John Tanner’s Workers at the BHP Steelworks (1956), for instance, a trio of men in hard hats gazes towards the future. One of the men is shown with his arm draped over the shoulder of his colleague, looking very much as if this is the first time he has ever done such a thing. And yet the image works. It conveys both the social constraints and the essential optimism of the time, suggesting by the bright-eyed way in which the men look into the distance that, those social constraints notwithstanding, the future is open.

John Tanner’s Workers at the BHP Steelworks (1956). National Archives of Australia

While the emphasis is on the vitality of youth, the relatively fewer images of older people treat them with an amused affection. In Jim Fitzpatrick’s Fruit Connoisseurs Assess the Produce (1968) three elderly women in complementary hats look balefully at a display of apples, determined not to be fooled by anything less than the best, while in Keith Byron’s Veteran Punter Outsmarts the Flies (1969) the veteran of the title, with netting draped over his hat, conveys a similarly robust resourcefulness.

It is Byron’s work, along with Mervyn Bishop’s, that most stands out among these resonant images; Bishop’s for his ability to capture both social disadvantage and genuine spontaneity in his pioneering photographs of First Nations people, and Byron for his instinct for unshowily combining documentary and art. Byron’s Tensions Run High Among Brokers at the Melbourne Stock Exchange (1968), with its multiple visual cross-references, is one to keep coming back to.

Given that the national stock of photographs is almost unimaginably vast, it is not realistic to think that more than a very small proportion can ever be displayed on the walls of cultural institutions. Just as we are all photographers now, so we are being encouraged to become curators too, exploring and researching the national collections for ourselves.

We don’t yet know where artificial intelligence is taking the practice of photography itself but, as Martyn Jolly points out, AI can already assist immeasurably in productive searching, finding links and illuminating correspondences that might otherwise emerge only by chance. Whatever its implications for the future of photography, when it comes to getting the most out of the photographs we already have, AI could well be a good thing. •

Photography: Real and Imagined
The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, until 4 February 2024

Shot: 400 Photographs, 200 Photographers, 3 Centuries
State Library of New South Wales until 3 November 2024

Focus: Australian Government Photographers 
National Archives of Australia until 10 June 2024

The post What a difference a frame makes appeared first on Inside Story.

Historian Benjamin Wurgaft and anthropologist Merry White’s Ways of Eating: Exploring Food through History and Culture features no images produced by a food stylist; nor does it include instructions about how to make any dish. Instead, the authors interweave stories and analyses of food — its production, its preparation and the meanings people attach to eating — to provide a fascinating cultural and historical overview.

People hunted and gathered food for thousands of years before they developed systems of agricultural subsistence. Wurgaft and White concentrate on how food was produced after agriculture’s arrival, noting the debates that rage in archaeology about its origins. Did people invent cultivation, drawing on observations of the reproductive cycles of animals and plants? Or did climatic change foster the conditions for sedentary settlements that required more intense food production?

Technological changes, migration and population pressure all contributed, and it is probably impossible to isolate any specific causal chain. But whatever the essential conditions were, the results were transformative — of landscapes, ecologies, work, crops, foods and ways of eating.

Wurgaft and White begin by exploring how the domestication of plants and animals spread across world. Drawing on James Scott’s historical analysis of state formation, they dismiss the notion of simple linear progress from nomadic barbarism to settled civilisation. Pastoral nomadism and sedentary farming coexisted for millennia. But they note that farming does appear to “encourage a particular style of cooperative work and social life” and that the material qualities of grain — it can be stored, transported and exchanged for other goods — “aided the rise of the state.” Wheat, rice and corn fed courts, armies and bureaucrats.

The relationship between imperialism and agriculture is complex and the authors succinctly summarise debates about their interaction. Roman and Persian empires, for instance, were built on the wheat that flourished in the regions they originally occupied. The Han Chinese empire was based on rice, and — as the authors write — “no other civilisation, until the rise of industrial agriculture in modernity, reached the same heights of agricultural productivity.” Deforestation, terracing and irrigation, nitrogenous fertilising and soil modification enabled intensification on a grand scale.

All along, productivity and population growth were interacting with changes in agricultural practices and cooking techniques. Deforestation, for example, meant that food preparation had to be quick in order to use a minimum amount of fuel; hence, the invention of the wok and a cuisine using small, thinly sliced meat and vegetables.

As Wurgaft and White observe, we know much more about the dining habits of the wealthy than we do of the poor. The feasts of Roman emperors, medieval courts and aristocratic households were far more likely to be documented than the everyday meals of peasants. Moreover, they were more varied and abundant. Descriptions of patrician feasts, from the Romans to the British Edwardians, reveal an astonishing range of meats, imported fruits and beverages. Patterns of consumption have always reflected economic and social status, with bread and cakes made from fine, white flour exclusively for the rich, and coarse grains providing bread and porridges for the majority. When famines strike, the poor starve.

The history of changing food and eating habits is the history of the movement of people, plants and animals across continents and between nations. During the Middle Ages, people from northern Europe encountered new foods as they waged wars and made pilgrimages. Conquerors brought back new ingredients and slaves who knew how to prepare them; pilgrims returned with a taste for “foreign” dishes and drinks. The use of rare and exotic ingredients, then as now, was indicative of wealth, social status and worldly sophistication. Spices, imported from China, India and the Middle East, were used not only to preserve food but also to display social status and cultural capital.

But the most dramatic transformation of European and Asian cuisines occurred during the “Columbian exchange” that followed the conquest and colonisation of the Americas. Historian Alfred Crosby, who coined the term in his 1972 book on the subject, revealed the complexity and extent of transatlantic exchange and the magnitude of its impact across the globe. Wurgaft and White endorse his view that this constituted a “tectonic shift” in agriculture, staple foods, national cuisines and eating habits.

Plants and foodstuffs now associated with Mediterranean cuisines, such as tomatoes, capsicums and corn, were initially treated with suspicion. Potatoes — disparaged as suitable only for peasants and their animals — were embraced by the bourgeoisie after cooks discovered their delicious flavour when combined with cream and butter. It is difficult to think of Italian food without tomatoes and astonishing to imagine the foods of Korea, India and other Asian countries without chillies.

People and plants flowed in both directions. Sugar, originally from India, was an established crop but a luxury foodstuff in Spain by the sixteenth century. Until the eighteenth century, honey remained the main culinary sweetener for rich and poor throughout Europe; then, with colonisation and the exploitation of African slave labour, sugarcane plantations flourished in the Caribbean.

English sweet puddings, German cakes, Belgian chocolate and French patisserie, all relatively recent inventions, evolved in the context of the Atlantic slave trade. Rice varieties from West Africa were introduced to feed slaves in the Caribbean and Central America, and were only gradually replaced by Asian varieties a century later. Peanuts arrived in Northern Africa from Peru and Bolivia, and were incorporated into many regional African cuisines. Creole cuisines in the southern states of America were dominated by rice and Old World vegetables, especially okra.

Ways of Eating, a broadbrush history written for a general readership, is full of fascinating stories. Vignettes interspersed between chapters describe specific food producers, foodstuffs, culinary techniques and cultural ideas about food. White, recounting a visit to a coffee plantation in Panama where the highly prized gesha beans are produced, compares her tour to a hajj, not only a signal of “a coffee person’s seriousness of intent” but also a means of gaining esoteric knowledge and status in the world of coffee connoisseurs. Gesha coffee’s apparently unique flavour ranges “from a tea-like smokiness to something like grapefruit peel.”

Novelty, rarity and heritage varieties continue to lure the gourmet and the chef. Pepper and cinnamon, once rare commodities, are now so common as to be mundane. Even so, spice’s exotic appeal persists, and for the discerning consumer Tellicherry pepper from Malabar or Kampot pepper from Cambodia are more prestigious than common black pepper, their use in a recipe lending cachet to dish and chef.

The emphasis on authenticity or the exact replication of a dish from a region or a restaurant menu is a recent phenomenon. White suggests that those who denigrate dishes that don’t match some culinary Platonic ideal make “a fetish of the social and environmental conditions that make an ingredient or dish possible.” Food has fashions and recipes have always depended on the availability of ingredients as well as the skill and imagination of cooks.

In fact, all “national” cuisines have adopted novel foreign ingredients and adapted recipes to local tastes. Japanese Hawaiians invented Spam sushi. After Senegalese soldiers in the French colonial army developed a taste for nem, sold as street food in Hanoi, some returned home with Vietnamese wives whose adaptations of the recipes using local ingredients naturalised these fried rolls. Senegalese nem are different from the Vietnamese originals — but they are not ersatz, just distinctive. The same can be said of Japanese croissants or Australian gelato. White and Wurgaft are clearly connoisseurs of food, but their book challenges ideas about refined taste, authenticity and tradition.

Colonisation, commoditisation, industrialisation and globalisation have transformed diets at an unprecedented rate. Rare and exotic ingredients that were formerly delicacies for the wealthy can now be found on supermarket shelves. Food has always provided ways of expressing cultural identity, regional differences, degrees of sophistication and economic status. Wurgaft and White trace these processes over centuries and across the globe. Their conclusions are both celebratory and thought-provoking.

Agriculture has brought humans extraordinary benefits, but it has also resulted in disastrous depletion of soils and environmental devastation. Many foods arrive in our homes with a heavy carbon footprint. The most common foods touted as “fair trade” are coffee, bananas, tea and cocoa — all grown in countries where many people, including growers, continue to live in poverty. There are ironies and paradoxes in contemporary ways of eating, and the combined forces of history and anthropology are excellent ways of thinking about them. •

Ways of Eating: Exploring Food through History and Culture
By Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White | University of California Press | $45.95 | 256 pages

The post Making a meal of it appeared first on Inside Story.

Schreiber is the author of several literary essays and biographer of Susan Sontag. The original edition of this memoir was a bestseller in Germany and stands out among the flood of books addressing our supposed epidemic of loneliness. The idea that social connection is the key to happiness and disconnection the root of mental ill health has become the new commonsense, stamped into our consciousness by lockdowns and compelled distancing. Many writers have offered diagnoses of the problems of loneliness and prescriptions for overcoming it, but few provide such a vivid first-person account and fewer still bring such an erudite sensibility to the task.

The backbone of Alone is life-historical. In 2019 Schreiber has an epiphany that things are going wrong; by Christmas “I stop believing that this life, as I live it, as I live it alone, is a good life.” He is partly restored by a writing trip to Switzerland, struggles through the compounding isolation of the pandemic, and embarks on a trip with friends to the Canary Islands that turns into a sort of sabbatical. Along the way he finds a series of therapeutic diversions, all of them physical activities that relieve some of his self-consciousness: gardening, hiking, knitting and yoga.

Off this narrative spine Schreiber hangs a series of meditations on the solitary condition, heavily supported by big thinkers. His intellectual tastes run philosophical and French, and anyone with a passing acquaintance with the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s will recognise many of his theoretical muses: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard. At times the insights are rich, especially in contrast to the shallowness of some psychological and sociological accounts of loneliness, but at other times the price seems high. I had hoped never again to encounter the word “phallogocentrism,” but there it was. And do we need a deconstructionist to tell us that we should not insist our friends conform to all of our wishes?

Schreiber’s analysis of friendship is powerful, pointing out its many forms and virtues — it is non-exclusive, voluntary, enduring — but showing how often it is made to defer to coupledom and the “grand narrative” of romantic love. Friendship is often pictured as a stage of life prior to nesting, and Schreiber notes with some disdain how many couples withdraw inward, a dynamic especially evident during the pandemic. Even so, he is scathing about how friendship has been misrepresented in the Western philosophical tradition, in which he claims it is portrayed as a quest for similarity and equality, the perfect friend idealised as “another oneself.” There is an element of straw-manning (and patriarchy-bashing) here, but Schreiber is adamant that friendship needs to be celebrated for its embrace of diversity rather than sameness, a conviction that resonates with his emphasis on the importance of friendship in queer communities.

He is equally incisive and contentious on the topic of loneliness. Drawing the standard distinction between loneliness and being alone, the latter an objective lack of social contact, the former subjective distress over the degree or quality of contact, Schreiber writes of the pleasures and benefits of solitude, admitting to enjoying some aspects of pandemic isolation. Being alone can be good and loneliness is not all bad. Though painful, it is not a disease, and the important lessons about loss and compassion to be learned from it mean it should not be dreaded. Some hand-wringing about the loneliness epidemic is reactionary, he suggests, motivated by nostalgia for the traditional family.

But Schreiber also muddies the conceptual waters. Solitude would normally be understood as positively valued aloneness, but he criticises it as “the presentable, dignified version of loneliness,” a word people use to deny the shameful reality of their true but taboo feelings. Although he sometimes confuses the picture by using solitude and loneliness interchangeably, Schreiber adds some useful complexities here. Loneliness may be distressing but also ethically and existentially desirable, and solitude may be a pathway to self-knowledge but also a cover for self-deception.

Schreiber makes no attempt to hide his ambivalence about being alone. He can present himself as bravely fronting the challenges of solitude and rising above coupled conformity but also admit to holding petty resentments and vulnerabilities. He can clothe his loneliness in grand ideas and social critique but also express his unhappiness with naked honesty. In one breath he flays romantic relationships and claims not to want them anymore, and in the next he confesses to feeling unlovable.

At times these vacillations suggest a cerebral Schreiber who reads the loftiest French theory and criticises the idea of self-care as “the ultimate victory of neoliberal late capitalism” while coexisting uneasily with a visceral Schreiber who likes to watch Friends, loves yoga and acknowledges that his neurotic misery may be due more to a lack of sunshine and exercise than existential angst.

Schreiber is a perceptive and relatable writer. He grapples with many of the same trials of social life that we all face, trials that became significantly more challenging in recent history. As a character in this memoir, he is not so much rounded in the literary sense — deep, complex and many-faceted — as he is jagged. The conflicts and quirks that other writers might edit out are on candid display in this book. It is well worth spending a few hours of quality solitude with it. •

Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living
By Daniel Schreiber | Reaktion Books | $34.99 | 152 pages

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The protagonist of this narrative is Sir Nicholas (“Nicky”) Winton, a London stockbroker of German-Jewish background who became appalled at the plight of refugees who had fled Germany to Czechoslovakia during the years leading up to the second world war and became committed to their rescue. The film, with its moving articulation of Winton’s life, moves back and forth over fifty years, between the exploits of his younger self, played by Johnny Flynn, in 1938, and his older self, played by Anthony Hopkins, who in 1987 is feeling he ought to have achieved more, that his earlier efforts should have borne more fruit. One of the film’s triumphs is how these two versions of the same man interact so convincingly over the decades.

The film opens with black-and-white images of refugees and a title announcing Hitler’s takeover of Austria and Sudetenland in 1938. It then cuts to the old Winton pottering round in his very messy study — a study full of documents presumably connected with the late 1930s — in Manchester in 1987 and his younger wife Grete (Lena Olin) is wondering what this mess is all about. The next image depicts the old man diving into a pool, the crash cutting to a sequence of wartime mayhem and refugees. By this time both periods of the film have been established, as well as Winton’s happy marriage in old age.

Back to London in 1938 the young Winton, in a reversal of time, echoes his older self by calling out “Home” as he returns, such detail reminding us that we are watching two men who are both, at different times of their lives, preoccupied by the need to put “one life” to good use.

“I have to do something,” says the younger one. This need leads him to Prague, where he is appalled by the plight of refugee children, most often Jewish, and recognises the need to organise their rescue. He makes contact with his forceful mother (Helena Bonham-Carter, in what may be a career-peak performance), who is also trying to push for wider concern, and financial support, for refugee children.

This is a film of telling images rather than a conventional series of cause-and-effect related events and it may sometimes seem a little straggling as it pursues the anguish of the children in refugee camps and their separation from their families. American reviewer Brian Tallerico’s somewhat negative response — “What One Life is about is powerful, but this is not a powerfully made film” — seems scarcely justified, even if the film doesn’t conform to the structural elements of “classic Hollywood cinema.” There is no denying the passionate and poignant feeling that underlies such moments as those revealing children on the kindertransport that is intended to carry them away from the dangers of Prague.

Also at issue is the crucial importance of raising the money in England to arrange for further such rescues. It is never just a matter of Winton’s becoming a hero; others are similarly motivated, including the tough-minded Doreen (Romola Garai), with whom Winton makes contact when he goes to Prague, his similarly formidable mother, who stresses the desperate need to raise financial support for further rescues, and his strongly motivated friend Martin (Ziggy Heath as the young man, Jonathan Price as the friend of Winton’s later life).

Hawes stresses scenes of children waving farewell to their anguished parents as they are being sent off to foster homes rather than lavishing attention on the heroic status of the young Winton. Indeed, as suggested above, the older Winton, fossicking around letters and papers of fifty years earlier, is almost self-reproachful that he did not achieve enough.

Like some of the most memorable recent films, including Past Lives, One Life relies more on such images and the emotional responses they set in motion for the viewers’ attention than on the more usual plotting of commercial cinema. Though relationships emerge, such as those between young Winton and his mother, or between young Winton and Doreen or Martin, or in the married life of the older Winton and Grete, these moments are not allowed to dominate the narrative: more important is how they work their way through the larger and often dreadful war-generated events.

When the older Winton meets up again with Martin, he asks reflectively, “Do you ever think about the children and what became of them?” This concern is what focuses our response to the ageing Winton, who seems not to have sought accolades for the acts of goodness that his younger self helped to bring about.

This reflection on what happened fifty years earlier brings the film to its denouement. Hawes, working from the screenplay by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, brings One Life to a heart-wrenching ending that utterly eschews sentimental feel-goodism. Johnny Flynn’s young Winton captures the youthful urge to do something of vital importance without any sense of flamboyance, while Hopkins, reflecting on this, creates a complex sense of the older Winton, who feels he should have done more. Between them (and there is a telling image of them both in the older man’s imagination) these two actors have created a quietly unheroic hero at the heart of a film that leaves us pondering the atrocities of which humans are capable and how selfless goodness might deal with them. •

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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.

A famine that killed tens of millions of people? Blame it on natural disasters and that damn Khrushchev. Political campaigns that became wildly murderous? Not our fault — those excesses were the work of overly zealous, even rogue, local officials. Any awkward truths that can’t be swept under the carpet must be explained away, woven together with half-truths and lies into the fringe of the carpet itself.

Journalist Ian Johnson’s new book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, relates the stories of people, extraordinary in their tenacity and courage, who persist in peering at the mess under that carpet and unpicking the tightly knit threads. They sneak their cameras into former labour camps to reveal human bones still protruding from the soil, interview the last survivors of famines and massacres, and create online archives and offline samizdat journals to record their findings. Among their number are the “citizen journalists” who record history in the making, including those who documented scenes in hospitals and elsewhere in Wuhan during that city’s draconian Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020.

For thousands of years, as Johnson notes, history has been “inseparable” in China from the concept of moral instruction. The independent researchers devoted to historical investigation he is writing about believe that “a moral society cannot be based on lies and silence.” But to refute the lies and break the silence, these intrepid men and women, sometimes armed with little more than curiosity, a smartphone and internet access, must play a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with security forces.

Many do their work under suffocating levels of surveillance. Others have been put under house arrest or worse, with some prison sentences longer than those handed out to convicted rapists. If they risk their freedom and even their lives to shine a light into some of contemporary Chinese history’s darkest corners, they do so because they believe that “the party’s monopoly of the past” is “the root of their country’s current authoritarian malaise.”

These “counter-historians” are generally less interested in the elite machinations behind catastrophic events than the “degradation of the individual” after the events have been set in motion. To discuss the culpability of party leaders would be asking for even more trouble, of course. But they are genuinely devoted to recovering and honouring the stories of ordinary people. At the same time, Johnson writes, they tend to avoid “heroizing” the victims. The histories they produce may necessarily be incomplete, but they are persuasively nuanced.

The carefully constructed official history, by contrast, is intolerant of nuance or deviation. Engraved in textbooks, promoted in films, enshrined in museums and embodied in the sacred sites of “Red tourism,” it lies at the heart of the party’s legitimacy. It narrates the story of how the communists saved the Chinese people from a “feudal” past as well as the Japanese enemy without and the class enemies within. It tells how the party has kept China safe in a hostile world, governed it wisely and justly, and raised it from poverty to prosperity and power.

Over the past eighty years the party has produced three historical resolutions, “each a cartoonish version of history” intended to justify the rule of the latest leader. The official history endorses the party’s right to rule China today, more than seventy years after the revolution that brought it to power. It paves the way for that rule to continue into the future without any need for checks and balances or popular elections.

To raise questions about the great famine or the systemic nature of the violence during the land reform era or the Cultural Revolution is to ask, in effect — why are you still the boss of us?

The party watched with apprehension and then with horror as the policy of glasnost (transparency) championed by Gorbachev in the mid 1980s led to a rush on the Soviet Union’s historical archives. Soviet citizens were suddenly free to remember and discuss the savagery of the Stalinist era: the political purges, the famines, the midnight knocks on the door, the desolate and murderous gulag of labour camps, the ruined and wasted lives. Just six years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

Lesson taken. The Chinese Communist Party’s post-Mao leadership, also shaken by the mass pro-democracy protests of 1989, tightened control over political and intellectual discourse. Yet independent thinkers, many of whom had personal experience of upheavals like the famine and Cultural Revolution, both as participants and victims, were compelled to record, research and analyse. Work that couldn’t be published in the mainland was frequently published in Hong Kong.

Among those who laid the path walked by the generation described in Sparks were the oral historian Sang Ye, the writer Liu Binyan, the historical investigator Dai Qing and the journalist Yang Jisheng. If there is one criticism I have of Sparks, otherwise an exemplary, well-researched and vital book, it’s the author’s failure to mention these pathbreakers, the post-Mao pioneers of the movement to which the people he writes about belong. Another curious omission is Wang Youqin, whose epic archival work on the victims of the Cultural Revolution was published in English in an abridged and edited form in 2023.

Johnson’s focus, however, is on more recent times. He observes that a confluence of events and trends in 2003 led to a surge in grassroots history writing. Contributing factors included popular outrage over the government’s suppression of news about the SARS epidemic that year and the application of market forces to Chinese media, which led to a partial liberation from direct control by the party. Xi Jinping’s ascension less than a decade later marked the end of this brief golden age and the beginning of what Johnson describes as Xi’s “forever crackdown” on “historical nihilism.”

And yet the independent historians persist, driven by the importance of what they are doing. The focus of their work may be as narrow as the experience of a single county in a single month of the Cultural Revolution or as broad as the question of guilt and the value of apologies. Collectively, their work reveals that even when the Communist Party shifts the blame for mistakes and crimes onto a few bad eggs, it rarely punishes them, and if so, even more rarely to any degree commensurate with their crimes. They also demonstrate that violence has always been far more pervasive and systemic than the official story suggests.

It’s not just the Communist Party that resists telling these stories. Many of those who have suffered through the events these historians are studying don’t want to talk about them. Some just want to put the trauma behind them. Others don’t want to get in trouble or jeopardise their children’s futures. They have buried the past to rebuild their lives as though, Johnson writes, “The suffering somehow cheapened this world of newfound prosperity, a reminder that it was built on violence.” In a different context (the Wondery podcast Ghost Story) the British historian Nicholas Hiley has discussed the “destabilising” nature of revealed historical truth — the past is not always a happy place and the truth does not always set people free. And yet we carry that past around with us — and it informs the present whether we like it or not.

Ian Johnson is a veteran, Pulitzer Prize–winning China journalist and a Sinophone whose work balances academic rigour with good storytelling. Sparks is the culmination of years of meeting with and even going on reporting trips with the underground historians he profiles here. He inserts between the chapters short vignettes, “Memories,” that offer, in his words, “sketches of people, places, and iconic works of counter-memory that demonstrate the ambition of China’s underground historians: to write a new history of contemporary China in order to change their country’s future.”

Sparks takes its title from a samizdat journal from the 1950s whose history has been uncovered by one of the historians Johnson profiles. The book joins a growing list of publications in English that together are creating a far richer picture of China’s history than that to which non–Chinese speakers have previously had access. They include works like Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone and Wang Youqin’s Victims of the Cultural Revolution, both of which were edited and translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian; Louisa Lim’s brilliant Indelible City, about Hong Kong; Jonathan Clements’s essential new history of Taiwan, Rebel Island; and Tania Branigan’s Red Memory, in which Wang Youqin features heavily.

Johnson contends that the “vibrancy of China’s counter-history movement” — which also includes creative reconstructions of historical events and personages by artists and writers — “should force us to retire certain clichéd ways of seeing China.” These include the tendency to see its authoritarianism as successfully monolithic. While not denying that “these are dark times,” he champions the counter-history movement as a significant form of resistance. As one of the young members of the group behind the original samizdat journal Spark put it back in the 1950s, “If you do not break out of silence, you will die in silence.” •

Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future
By Ian Johnson | Allen Lane | $55 | 400 pages

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While Lumby was working on her book Matthew Lamb was embarked on something different and quite unusual: a two-volume cultural history of Moorhouse. Lamb’s project is also a biography, but the extra length allows him room to explore in more detail the writer’s intellectual development and his role in challenging the restrictions on Australian publishing in the years he was active. Lamb’s first volume, Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths, has just been published.

Both biographers spent time talking to Moorhouse before his death in 2022 and both combed through his extensive archives, so their books raise questions about the role of writers in creating their own lives. In recent years, we’ve seen Ann-Marie Priest’s detailed biography of Gwen Harwood, written after the poet’s archives were opened after many years of restricted access, Brigitta Olubas’s meticulous study of Shirley Hazzard, written with the approval of Hazzard and her friends, and Bernadette Brennan’s sympathetic account of the novelist Gillian Mears, so closely based on the writer’s archive that it reads almost as if Mears had written it. All these subjects clearly wanted a biography to be written, even when, like Harwood, they played off the various aspirants to the role of biographer.

Moorhouse certainly wanted his life examined, and he had a keen understanding of his own role in Australian social and cultural change. But the relationship between a writer’s life and their fiction can present difficulties for a biographer who wishes to secure the facts but can’t afford to ignore the parallels. While a biographer is bound by the records, the subject’s memories so often prove unreliable when they’re compared with the documentary record or the memories of their friends and colleagues.

Lamb has written elsewhere about the peculiar difficulties of recording the life of an author whose stories were often based on real events. As Moorhouse told a friend, a fiction, once written, obliterated the real memory on which it was based. And sometimes Moorhouse was not the only writer using the material: Lamb offers examples of Michael Wilding writing counter-stories to those of his then friend.

One of the effects of this fictional use of real life has been an underestimation of the art in Moorhouse’s stories, to the point that he felt the need to constantly insist on it.

Lamb set out to read all Moorhouse’s work, including the short stories he wrote in high school, his journalism and his essays for the Workers’ Educational Association, and place them in the context of the author’s life. He also tries to encompass Moorhouse’s own reading and the influence of his various mentors to build a narrative of his intellectual development. And he keeps an eye on the shifts in Australian cultural life and the legal restrictions it faced.

Strange Paths is as much about changes in Australian print culture and sexual attitudes as it is about Moorhouse’s life. It is this contextual material that justifies this second, extended biography.

Beginning with a short account of governments’ restrictive controls over local publishing from the very beginning of European settlement, Lamb traces the evolution of censorship and copyright laws in parallel with the lives of Moorhouse’s forebears in the colonies — in his father’s case in New Zealand. Young Frank was born into a society in which publishing was tightly restricted and writers were forced to accept low royalties from a British-controlled book trade.

Lamb makes Henry Lawson’s and Joseph Furphy’s difficulties relevant to Moorhouse’s later struggles for authors’ rights. Despite his popularity, Lawson battled financial difficulties; Furphy’s novels satirise the impossibility of recording Australian speech under the prohibitions on obscenity. The book’s treatment of the two men signals Moorhouse’s position in a tradition of Australian writing and sets up his later challenges to censorship and his part in the campaign for author royalties.

Moorhouse’s education in country public schools might appear limited, but Lamb reveals that encouraging teachers gave him access to magazines like Southerly and Meanjin. At home, he could read his firmly anti-communist father’s copies of Free Spirit, the forerunner of Quadrant, and discuss cold war politics. Though he was expected to follow his two older brothers into the family’s agricultural machinery business in Nowra, his parents were ready to accommodate his aspirations to be a writer. His mother even consulted the poet Rosemary Dobson when she visited Nowra for a talk.

Though Moorhouse later became known as a sexual adventurer he was as ignorant about sex as any other school student growing up in Australia at the time. Like so many Australians of his generation, he and his girlfriend Wendy gathered what information they could from biology textbooks and “hygiene” instruction books that often relied on euphemism. He might have appeared more liberated than the rest of us, but he negotiated the same conventional upbringing, churchgoing and smalltown values that dominated Australian life in the 1950s and 1960s. An exceptional high school student, he learnt the importance of self-education and self-discipline early, writing stories that Lamb reads as evidence of his teenage preoccupations.

The influence of his parents’ devotion to self-help, the philosophies of Rotary and the guidance of the scouting movement was obvious in Moorhouse’s fascination with theories of living. As a young man he was distinguished by an eagerness to learn and a curiosity about people and their behaviour. He read the available books on psychology and sexuality by Hans Eysenck, Alfred Kinsey and Sigmund Freud, and was committed to the “spirit of enquiry” advocated by his journalist mentor, John Penfold, though a long-term homosexual relationship undermined the “Frankness and Sincerity Theory” he advanced as the basis of his relationship with Wendy, now his wife.

He also understood that fiction offers a way for a writer to describe and speculate about human behaviour, including intimate desires evaded in journalism and academic writing. His experiences as a journalist in Sydney, Lockhart and Wagga Wagga gave him the chance to make stories from small events (jellyfish on the beaches of Sydney in one case) but also convinced him that he needed to break free from the cynical, heavy-drinking culture of journalism.

A position with the Workers’ Educational Association in Sydney gave him the chance to explore his ideas about changing print media, sociology, film and folk music. Explore he did, at one point participating not only in the WEA but also in the Film Study Group, the Sydney Left Club, the Libertarian Society and the Push, though he resisted the libertarian view that literature was only an illustration of a philosophy or directed at some didactic goal.

According to Lamb, he regarded the literary imagination as “a form of inquiry in its own right,” a means of exploring reason and its limitations. In practice he also embraced it as a means of examining social taboos and the sexual lives hidden behind prevailing social and censorship conventions.

Strange Paths provides details of Moorhouse’s several encounters with the law. In 1967 his quite unerotic story about a young man’s disappointing visit to a prostitute, “A Barmaid, a Prostitute, a Landlady,” led to a Melbourne bookstall being charged for selling obscene material. In 1969, when the banning of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint brought the censorship controversy to a head, Moorhouse was part of the Tharunka editorial team that challenged the obscenity laws. In 1973 he was convicted for distributing The Little Red Schoolbook and assaulting the police who had found copies in his car.

Also that year Moorhouse and his publisher agreed to take up the cause of authors’ copyright, successfully suing the University of New South Wales for breaching his copyright by allowing staff and students to photocopy his story “The Machine Gun.” This, too, was an important breakthrough for Australian writers’ freedom to publish and support themselves.

Two things stand out in this account of Moorhouse’s life. One is how his study of popular culture, sociology and the media developed ahead of any interest in such subjects among academics. His time as a university student had been curtailed by his commitment to writing, as a journalist and as a writer of fiction, but he immersed himself in the range of areas that interested him.

Like so many other brilliant Australian writers who didn’t finish university — Hazzard, Harwood, David Ireland, Peter Carey and many others — writing was itself a form of self-education. But the outreach elements of university campuses — the libraries, the magazines, the clubs and visiting lecturers — have provided essential support for the intellectual life of these outsiders; as universities increasingly adopt utilitarian practices they may need to be reminded of their duty to artists and other intellectuals beyond their boundaries.

The second element is Moorhouse’s commitment to fiction writing as an intellectual pursuit free from the demands of political ideologies or moralities. When fiction so often appears to be either mere entertainment or didactic instruction from those who know better than the rest of us, Moorhouse understood that art offers the freedom to explore ideas and areas of life that challenge prevailing conventions. Of course, his work provokes arguments about feminism, sexuality and personal behaviour. That, too, is a role of fiction. Lamb’s book is not a work of literary criticism but his care in placing Moorhouse’s writing in a detailed historical context is revelatory. It places literary writing at the centre of social change.

This first volume takes us to the end of 1974, with the publication of The Electrical Experience and the release of Between Wars, the film Moorhouse wrote for director Michael Thornhill when he was thirty-six. So Lamb’s project has quite a distance to go. Impatient readers will choose to read Lumby’s more concise account, but historians of the recent past will find plenty to absorb their interest here. I may be the ideal reader for this version as I try to make sense of A.D. Hope’s negotiation of Australian censorship at an earlier time. Lamb’s book shows one way that a writer can be placed in an extensive cultural context. •

Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths
By Matthew Lamb | Knopf Australia | $45 | 480 pages

The post Writing life 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

The post Ancient autocrats appeared first on Inside Story.

That delicious sentence was written by a woman born Umm El-Banu Assadullayeva, and comes from Days in the Caucasus, her memoir’s first volume. It reveals a distinctive juxtaposition in her prose, in this book and in its sequel, Parisian Days. There’s a curious self-effacement combined with a resolute lightheartedness and flashes of wry wit, the work of a woman whose life was a rollercoaster of heartache, love and adventure.

She was born in 1905 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, and came to be known in twentieth-century Paris as the writer Banine. Her mother had died giving birth to her, her three sisters were quite a bit older and her father didn’t remarry for many years, though the family “welcomed polygamy and disapproved of celibacy.” The family she wrote of were “oil millionaires” — stupendously, one might say ridiculously, rich — who in one generation had leapt from peasantry to plutocracy from the oil discovered on their land.

She was a lonely but happy and imaginative child. Her father, still in his thirties and, like his brothers, thoroughly Europeanised from his travels, had hired a Baltic German governess for his daughters. Fraulein Anna was Banine’s mainstay, a mother substitute and “guardian angel” who schooled her in German and encouraged her to learn the piano.

But her paternal grandmother, “a large, fat, authoritarian woman, veiled and excessively fanatical,” ruled the roost, sticking to the old traditions. She loathed Christians, spoke only Azeri, a Turkic language itself a sub-branch of Azerbaijani, wore the clothes typical of observant Muslims at the time, and preferred sitting on floor cushions to any of the sumptuous European-type furniture to be found in the “reception rooms” of Banine’s father’s apartment.

Thus, here was a young girl buffeted between two radically different influences and traditions, though apart from the grandmother the family was not particularly religious. Banine took refuge in books and daydreaming, the necessary humus for any writer it seems, although it took many years before she became one.

Azerbaijan (Persian “land of fire,” for the spontaneous fires occasioned by its oil slicks) was part of the Russian empire. Its people were mainly Christian Armenians and Shiite Azerbaijanis who, as Banine describes it, periodically massacred each other in revolving reprisals. A smattering of Georgians and Russians also lived there. In the year of her birth the empire was in turmoil, until Tsar Nicholas II made his small, grudging concession to democracy.

Then, early in 1918, the year Banine turned twelve, Nicholas was forced to abdicate, not long after which the province became the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and Banine’s father, now remarried and father to a son, was its minister of commerce. When the Bolsheviks solidified their control, the province lost its independence. Her father was thrown into prison.

The family’s traditionally pragmatic attitude to sex and marriage is relevant here. Polygamy was normalised in Islam, as was same-sex coupling for young unmarried males. For Banine’s father and others of his generation this was changing, but marriage in the upper class was still essentially a business proposition with love reserved for extramarital liaisons.

In this scheme of things the hymen was the husband’s trophy, pleasure an incidental consideration. Banine’s cousin Gulnar, for instance, was eager to get married so she could indulge her sexual appetite with a succession of partners in addition to her promised husband. But Banine, the dreamer, longed for a different trajectory, and had fallen deeply in love with a dashing Bolshevik commissar. Unlike any of Gulnar’s conquests, hers was an intensely romantic affair fuelled by a mutual love of literature (he her Prince Andrey, she his Natasha) but had yet to be consummated. There were plans, though, for her to elope with him to Moscow and be wedded there.

Knowing nothing of this, the family had two other suitors in mind. One was another cousin, the other a man who’d ingratiated himself by helping get Banine’s increasingly weak and emaciated father released. Then there was the problem of getting her father to Paris, where his wife and young son were waiting, and it was this same man’s connections he depended on for that. Still the dutiful daughter, and even though she hated her father for “blackmailing” her, she agreed to marry the man.

“Filial affection,” as she wistfully defined it, won the day. Without a word to her commissar, she failed to turn up at the designated rendezvous that would have swept her off with him to Moscow. Instead she was yoked to a man twenty years her senior whom she loathed with all her heart. She was all of fifteen.

The tone of the memoir’s sequel is even more bittersweet. In Days in the Caucasus she had written of her father and two sisters eventually finding refuge in Paris. Parisian Days finds her on the Orient Express to join them. In Paris her father and stepmother are renting a large, luxurious apartment on the fashionable Rue Louis Boilly, where they stay until they run out of jewellery: “the sole, slim remains of our oil barons’ fortune, democratised, collectivised, nationalised, volatilised in the revolutionary explosion, which consumed all our privileges in its flames.”

From the moment of her arrival, Banine is enthralled with Paris. She is even happy when her father’s “last pearl” is sold and they are all forced to move from the Rue Louis Boilly apartment. Now on her own, she is lent a maid’s room seven flights up in a building on the Champ de Mars, and like many Russian émigrés of the day, some of whom were princesses, she finds work as a mannequin in an upscale Parisian fashion house.

What are they to make of her too-Oriental looks, her large derrière, not to mention the over-fuzzy Azerbaijani hairstyle? She moves to another, more simpatico house, and there she picks up tricks of the trade. But although she makes friends easily there and the job is her only means of survival, she is unrelievedly bored. Augmenting their pitiful wages as courtesans, the women talk exclusively of beauty, clothes and catching ever more wealthy men. They dub Banine the “little Caucasian goose.”

Salvation comes in the form of an older sister. Zuleykha, a painter, had settled in Paris long before, and she and her Spanish husband José, another painter, set up a bohemian salon in their studio compound. (Banine referred to it as Josézous.) “The guests drank, ate, debated and danced with the passion of youth and exotic temperaments prone to excess of all kinds. We couldn’t get away without a bullfight, almost as noisy as a real one.” Her sister and brother-in-law introduce her to the Montparnasse nightclubs and Paris’s huge community of Russians who’d fled the revolution.

These are the Années folles, those crazy years that spanned the end of the first world war and the onset of the Depression. And though she is definitely the young hanger-on, the timid third wheel, she revels in the company and ambience. She is watching, listening, slotting it all into memory.

In a curious way, poverty has released her, as it has softened her father. Regretting her coerced marriage, he readily sanctions divorce. (Because of her refugee status and the husband’s Turkish residence, this is more easily said than done.) Nonetheless the conjugal experience leaves her resolutely chaste for years. The Montparnasse campaigns to correct this routinely fail, even when intensified by the surprise arrival of long-lost cousin Gulnar, who has finally made it out of Baku through her own particular version of the legerdemain that émigrés were forced to adopt. Within a matter of minutes, Gulnar has Banine abandoning her seventh-floor maid’s room and sharing a flat with her.

Was Gulnar the full-blown sexual predator portrayed? The relationship was doubtlessly complicated, yet I detect the writer at work here. Striking, full-lipped Gulnar is the perfect foil, a gift to any memoirist. As is Jerome, the cultured Frenchman who acts as a kind of psychopomp, ushering the two women through the high life of Paris, its sparkling nightlife and the tangles of their love lives. As for Banine, she finally succumbs to the blandishments of one of Jerome’s rich friends, an older Orléans widower surgeon to whom she was unaccountably mean and who, after some time and hardly surprisingly, unceremoniously dumps her.

And so Parisian Days ends. Gulnar has sailed off to America, having bagged a handsome, young, fabulously rich Texan. As generous as she is acquisitive and life-loving, she has left behind all her money for Banine, the handsome husband offering her a pension. Needless to say, Banine is stunned. “My cousin whom I had so often envied and hated overwhelmed me with largesse.”

Alone now, she finds her way to the Bois de Boulogne, considering her future. Because of Gulnar’s wholly unexpected legacy, she can contemplate leaving the fashion house and chance her arm at writing. The book’s last sentences encapsulate the special amalgam of bravery and self-deprecation that characterises its protagonist throughout: “Life was waiting for me. I had to go and meet it despite the burden of my reluctant heart.”

Banine’s first published work was a novel, Nami. Set in Baku and Russia, and based on her experiences of the revolution and civil war, it appeared in 1942. She made her name in Parisian literary circles with Days in the Caucasus, published three years later. Parisian Days appeared in 1947. She wrote in French, which by then had become her natural language. I Chose Opium deals with her conversion to Roman Catholicism. It too had a sequel, After. She also supported herself translating Dostoevsky’s books and those of other writers into French.

Banine is in the process of being rediscovered. Anne Thompson-Ahmadova, the translator of these two books into English, tells us that Days in the Caucasus was reissued in French in 1985. Banine revised Parisian Days in 1990, and it is this version that Pushkin Press has published. The Soviets invited Banine to Baku after Days in the Caucasus appeared, but she declined the invitation, a decision she regrets in an author’s note to its reissue. An Azerbaijani translation didn’t appear until 1992, the year of Banine’s death.

Not having read Banine in her original French, and as is the case with any such translation, I can only take Thompson-Ahmadova’s on trust. Once or twice I came across a phrase where the English rang just a little too colloquial, but overall she seems to have captured the flavour of the author’s voice, and the vividness of the people and events she brought to life.

It’s always exciting to see a long-neglected writer resurrected, and what a gift to readers Days in the Caucasus and Parisian Days are. Others have praised Banine for being another Colette, and there is some truth in that. But I doubt if there’ll ever be another Banine. •

Days in the Caucasus
By Banine | Pushkin Press | $34.99 | 274 pages

Parisian Days
By Banine | Pushkin Press | $34.99 | 255 pages

The post To Paris, from the land of fire appeared first on Inside Story.

Evidence of seemingly immovable obstruction isn’t hard to find. Oil and gas companies have resumed investment in exploration on the assumption that internal-combustion vehicles and gas-fired electricity generation will be around for some time to come. Everywhere the expansion of solar and wind power is being obstructed by NIMBY objections to new transmission lines, complex permitting procedures, and grids designed to distribute power generated by coal and gas. Higher interest rates have added to the obstacles facing solar and wind projects.

Against this seemingly immovable resistance is ranged the irresistible force of massive reductions in the cost of solar photovoltaics, or PV, and, to a lesser extent, wind. The result has been a huge expansion in production capacity, estimated at 650 gigawatts a year in China alone. Geopolitical concerns have meanwhile driven the United States and other countries to reduce reliance on China through “friendshoring,” the expansion of production capacity outside China.

The International Energy Agency estimates that global solar PV manufacturing capacity will reach almost 1000 gigawatts in 2024. This exceeds current projections of demand so much that the IEA warns “the industry is rushing headlong into a supply glut.”

That warning implies that stocks of unsold inventory will build up, as is already occurring. As the growth of stocks becomes unsustainable, prices will fall to a point where demand and supply are brought back into balance. Where will that equilibrium be found?

It is easier to look at the supply side first. Solar module prices have fallen to historically low levels of US$0.14 per watt, a decline of nearly 40 per cent since the beginning of 2023. These are stunningly low prices. In the absence of soft costs, and assuming 7 per cent interest, and 2000 hours of operation per year, the cost of electricity from such a module would be a mere 0.5 cents per kilowatt hour. Even at these prices, though, solar PV producers are rushing to invest in new production capacity.

The decline has been accelerated by a fall in the price of polysilicon, the raw material for a solar cell, as well as reductions in the amount required for a cell with given capacity. Solar cells now require only two to three grams of polysilicon per watt of capacity. With polysilicon prices now below US$10 per kilogram, that’s no more than 3 cents per watt.

The next big input to the production of solar cells is electricity itself. Solar PV manufacturing has tended to be located in coal-intensive provinces of China, notably Xinjiang and Jiangsu. But as the glut of solar modules develops, manufacturers will find it more economical to “eat their own dogfood,” using surplus modules to supply the electricity to produce new ones at ever lower costs.

Improvements in the efficiency of solar cells along with increases in the surface area of modules translate into reductions in installation costs. With solar cells now very cheap, manufacturers have an incentive to focus on design changes that produce lighter and more flexible modules, further reducing costs.

In other words, even a severe glut seems unlikely to result in sustained reductions in output. Rather, manufacturers will accept lower profit margins and seek ways to cut costs even further.

The demand for energy is growing and nearly all of this demand can be met by electricity in one way or another. As solar generation capacity increases, the benefits of using solar PV to meet the growing demand will become more and more evident. Battery storage is expanding rapidly too, threatening the role of gas-fired electricity as a source of “dispatchable” electricity — electricity that can be turned on or off at short notice.

What happens when such an unstoppable flood of generation capacity runs into the seemingly immovable barriers of entrenched interests and political resistance? The outcome will undoubtedly be messy, but one way or another the flood will find its way around, over or perhaps under the barriers.

The problem of transmission lines provides one example. New solar generation is now commonly sited near where coal-fired power plants have been shut down, thereby taking advantage of already-installed transmission lines. But once solar costs fall enough, it becomes economically sensible to buy and demolish coal plants in order to use their transmission capacity for solar. That’s increasingly true even when the plants are nowhere near the end of their operational life.

Rooftop solar provides another way of avoiding constraints on transmission capacity. It’s politically popular, so regulators have shied away from onerous permit requirements in most jurisdictions. Thanks to the incentives provided by the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme, as well as its sunny climate, Australia has been a world leader in rooftop solar. That will only accelerate as the cost of solar modules drops. In fact, the cost reduction associated with that decline is so great that, even in the absence of government incentives, rooftop solar will soon be an attractive option in any sunny climate.

Another possible path is the production of “green hydrogen” using electrolysis to split water into its components, hydrogen and oxygen. The low price of electricity implied by a severe glut of solar PV would make electrolysis competitive with coal-based technologies. Replacing these polluting technologies with electrolysis to meet existing demand for hydrogen would use about 2300 terawatt hours, or nearly twice the global total solar PV generation for 2022.

The shift to hydrogen would be constrained by the massively increased need for electrolysers, which are currently produced on a much smaller scale than would be needed. Nevertheless, production of even a modest share of current hydrogen demand would absorb any glut in solar PV production. And the prospect is that demand will increase sharply, most notably in steel production.

One way or another, the force of massively increased solar production capacity and ever lower costs will breach the “immovable barriers.” But compared with an efficient and orderly transition, the process will be slower than is needed, and the costs will be much greater. •

The post Irresistible force meets immovable object appeared first on Inside Story.

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. •

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During those two weeks the Financial Review began a series on “the new middle class.” It opened with a long article analysing survey results that revealed how households on $140,000 a year — a lot of money in those days — didn’t consider themselves particularly well-off. Great, I thought — this’ll make for a solid ten or fifteen minutes. I hurried over to the presenter of the program and showed him the article. “Good God,” he exclaimed after reading the opening paragraphs. “How do people manage on that kind of money?”

Sociologists Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell open their new book, Uncomfortably Off, with an incident that makes a similar point in a slightly different way. In an episode of the BBC’s Question Time during the 2019 British election campaign, IT consultant Rob Barber accused a Labour MP of lying when he said the party’s plan to lift taxes on high earners would only affect people on the highest incomes. Labour wouldn’t be lifting taxes for the remaining 95 per cent, the MP promised.

“But you are!” Barber replied angrily. “Because I’ve read your policy!” The tax would apply to incomes above £80,000, and that meant he’d be among those who’d pay it. “I’m nowhere near the top 5 per cent, let me tell you. I’m not even in the top 50 per cent.”

Barber was wrong: a salary of £80,000-plus put him comfortably in the top 5 per cent of earners. (At around the same time, an Australian earning $180,000 would have snuck into the same bracket here.) His likely mistake, according to Hernando and Mitchell, was to habitually compare himself with people who earn as much as he does or, more importantly, those who earn much more.

As its title suggests, Uncomfortably Off attempts to explain why people on relatively high incomes don’t feel particularly affluent. (Hernando and Mitchell’s interviewees, all British, were drawn from the top 10 per cent of earners, though not the top 1 per cent.) Partly it’s because, like Barber, they compare themselves with people who earn more than they do. Partly it’s because their spending has increased as their incomes have risen and they have to find the money to cover increases in school fees, rising private healthcare costs and mounting lifestyle expectations.

These pressures contribute to what the authors call a fear of falling — the fear that they or their children will end up further down the income ladder. And those pressures have only worsened in recent years. The Conservative government’s austerity program of 2010–19 encouraged wealthier households to abandon overstretched public schools, healthcare and other publicly provided services, adding to the pressure on household finances, and the growing crisis in British schools, hospitals and community care has only added to the incentive to bail out.

But why would well-heeled earners look up rather than down when they’re assessing their own position? Increasingly segregated schooling and housing, more marriage within rather than between income groups, much less shared experience of healthcare and other social services, a greater focus on paid work and its monetary rewards — these are a large part of the explanation, say Hernando and Mitchell.

“All these tendencies,” they write, “mean that it’s increasingly rare for high earners to get to know people outside their usual interaction with friends, family, work and education, especially when other networks (such as those based on religion or hobbies) either dwindle or move online.” Asked to place themselves in the income hierarchy and feeling under pressure, they compare themselves with the relatively small segment of the population that seems typical to them.

This wouldn’t be quite such a problem if it weren’t for the fact that wealthy people have disproportionate political power. Once they withdraw from the spheres that most people inhabit — government-provided schools, healthcare or childcare, for instance — it’s no longer in their interest for those services to be adequately funded. This sets up a malign cycle: underfunded public services push people who can afford it into the hands of private providers. Their services cost more — often much more — and that puts pressure on their own finances, increasing their resistance to taxes and making them more likely to support government cutbacks.

Some of these trends are hard to reverse. We can’t do much about people marrying within their own milieu, for example. But we can begin the slow process of changing that milieu. The obvious place to start is in the school system, where private schools (generally the preserve of the wealthiest families) are reinforcing social segregation to an alarming degree.

Hernando and Mitchell conclude that cracks are opening up in the fearful barriers wealthy Britons have erected against an increasingly underresourced public sphere. “This book’s aim is to invite the top 10 per cent to consider a future in which, for the price of giving up the barriers through which they seek to distinguish themselves from the rest” — a price that would include higher taxes — “they could become less anxious, more secure and less isolated.”

Can Australia learn from Britain’s uncomfortable wealthy? While 7 per cent of British children are educated in private schools, the Australian figure is 35 per cent. Add in selective government schools, particularly in New South Wales, and our school system rates among the most segregated in the Western world. But the groundswell of support for the Gonski report (before it was fatally compromised by federal and state governments of both varieties) shows the soil is fertile. •

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care about Inequality
By Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell | Policy Press | £19.99 | 256 pages

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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

The post Modi’s expatriate army appeared first on Inside Story.

Apart from its isolation, Tasmania encapsulates extremities. First there is the primeval environment, containing the second-largest rainforest of its kind in the world, now besieged. In the past there has been the near extermination of the Indigenous people, while the simultaneous convict experience was more pervasive and shaping than elsewhere in the country. There remain persisting poverty and lower levels of education among the non-Indigenous than almost anywhere else. All these elements give the island state a particular importance in understanding the nature of settler Australia.

“Change came slowly,” Flanagan writes of the Tasmania he grew up in, and until recently “it was possible to conceive the nineteenth century as a time not unlike now.” The past receded more quickly, “people died younger and memory struggled to see over the great embankments of history — the war, the depression, the Great War.” Yet it projected forward in unrecognised continuities: everyday speech was still peppered with convict terms; labourers on the big sheep properties still received the old convict rations, supplemented by meagre wages. Occasionally a cruel convict man trap, designed to ensnare escapees, might be found in the bush.

Rural Tasmania, while cluttered with ancient gossip, was in denial about convict ancestry and the persistent Aboriginal presence. Except on rare, electrifying occasions — as when the limousine of the visiting governor was stolen by some miners who drove it about with an Aboriginal local character in the governor’s seat, waving to the locals. “A bitter joke which cut every way,” writes Flanagan.

The author is highly appreciative of his parents: of his schoolmaster father, solid and decent, a survivor of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, who — perhaps partly because of that — believed in the power of small acts of kindness. And his mother, impetuous, boisterous, funny, crimped by the codes of her time and place but for all that fiercely loving. “My parents were frugal,” Flanagan writes, “not simply because they had to be careful, but because they saw little reason in making life about money.” They faced the world with dignity, looking at fate squarely in the eye.

The full contrast came some time after. Flanagan left school, worked as a labourer, and had a near-death experience on the Franklin River (grippingly narrated here). He then decided to go to university, and on graduating won a coveted Rhodes scholarship. But he came to see Oxford, with its superior airs, as a citadel of conceit. He ended up rejecting it — and academic history as well. “In Tasmania,” he came to write, “history was not a story of progress… nothing ever quite went forward and everything finally returned. There was no straight line… only a circle.”

To this Flanagan would eventually bring a necessary double-sightedness — on the one hand understanding what impels the agents of destruction but, at the same time, “be on the side that loses everything.” Readers of The Narrow Road to the Deep North will be familiar with this approach, evident in the empathetic depiction of Japanese officers on the Burma–Thailand railway.

Question 7’s hybridity comes to the fore with two great arcs that run through the book. To round them out, fictional techniques are used — very tellingly in the case of the romance between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. But Flanagan’s primary purpose is to link Wells’s famous novel The War of the Worlds to Tasmania. This is easier done than might be imagined, for there is a passing reference to the eradication of the Tasmanians in the text, while it seems the germinating idea for that novel had been Wells’s discussion of the Tasmanians’ fate with his brother, as they went for a walk in the English countryside. In a daring leap, Flanagan calls the invading British settlers Martians, and — in retrospective revenge — decides the denizens of Oxford are best tagged that way too.

The second arc is no less daring. A second Wells novel (of 1914) is cited as the first to deal with atomic war. Flanagan traces the development of the idea of the atom bomb, again resorting at times to fictional techniques. His purpose is singular. The opening section tells of his journey to the site of the prison camp where his father was a slave labourer, but finds even the memory of it scarcely remains. At the same time, he knows that had there been an American invasion of Japan instead of the Bomb, his father would have been killed along with all the other Allied prisoners. Richard Flanagan cancelled; instead, a child of the A-bomb. The fortuity of his birth, the fortuity of his later survival. Contingency and fate, and the arbitrariness of destiny, loom large in this book. It poses many fundamental questions.

As Peter Carey recently remarked in the Age, “Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last hundred years.” He may very well be right. •

Question 7
By Richard Flanagan | Knopf | $35 | 280 pages

The post Double-sighted in the deep south appeared first on Inside Story.

Then there was the unexpected jump in numbers. Net overseas migration for the 2022–23 financial year hit a record 510,000 people, more than 25 per cent above the 400,000 anticipated in the May budget and more than double the October 2022 forecast of 235,000. Not only are more people arriving but fewer are leaving, especially students; the catch-up after Covid means many international students are still in the early stages of their courses and won’t return home for two or three more years.

Combined with the shenanigans of sacked former home affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo, these developments have made it easy for the opposition to conjure up an image of out-of-control migration and link this to housing shortages and other pressing issues. Immigration isn’t the cause of a housing crisis decades in the making, but the surge in arrivals does make a tight rental market even worse.

Arrival numbers would have been no lower under a Coalition government and Australia’s population would be higher if not for Covid. But facts count for little in an overheated debate. Migration is now Labor’s problem and it would be easy to construe the release of its new strategy as an attempt to wrest back the initiative on this fraught topic.

But the strategy is no knee-jerk response. It is the product of months of work, building on an expert panel’s finding that the migration program is “broken” and a report by former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon confirming widespread abuse of Australia’s visa system.

The strategy adds detail to the government’s early responses to those two reviews and affirms its commitment to keeping both unions and business onside. It shows a government aspiring to wholesale reform rather than bolting yet more fixes onto an already unwieldly, overloaded and outdated migration machine.

In its existing form, the system satisfies no one. Employers and migrants complain about high costs, slow processing and uncertain outcomes, while the public questions the scale and integrity of the program. In their joint foreword to the strategy, the responsible ministers, Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles, recognise the need to restore migration’s “social license.”

The strategy articulates four policy objectives, and while they are not ranked, the tone and content of the strategy indicate a descending order of priority. Migration, it says, should first, raise living standards; second, ensure a fair go in the workplace; third, build stronger communities; and fourth, strengthen international relationships.

To achieve the primary aim of higher living standards the government wants to refine migration to boost productivity, counter the perceived impacts of an ageing population, fill skills gaps and expand exports.

One step is to reform the points test, which scores and ranks applicants for permanent skilled migration according to their age, qualifications, experience and English language proficiency. A discussion paper will canvass options that are likely to give greater weight to the skills and qualifications of an applicant’s partner and downgrade factors that are “poor predictors” of labour market success, such as studying in a regional area and fluency in a community language. The aim is to reward skill over “perseverance” so that international student graduates working in their professional fields have a faster route to settlement while graduates stuck in lower-level jobs are screened out and leave Australia.

Another measure introduces a “skills in demand” visa to replace the “temporary skills shortage” visa. This is more than a name change. The government had already lifted the threshold wage for temporary skilled migrants from $53,900 to $70,000 to ensure that these visas are not used to recruit cheap labour. (The threshold, frozen since 2013, will now be indexed annually.) New rules allow temporary migrants to switch employers and sectors more easily, which should improve productivity as these workers move to jobs where their skills are more highly valued.

Labour market testing will be simplified, employers can pay sponsorship fees periodically instead of up front, and visas will be issued more swiftly, with the government committing to a median processing time of just seven days for applicants in the top “specialist skills pathway.” This applies to workers earning at least $135,000, who will no longer have to match one of the occupations in demand identified by Jobs and Skills Australia (though the category is closed to trade workers, machinery operators, drivers and labourers).

Workers paid between $70,000 and $135,000 are on the “core skills pathway” and must still have an occupation identified as being in shortage, with a promise that these lists will be updated more frequently to better reflect rapidly changing labour market needs. Both the core and specialist pathways will offer a route to permanent residency.

The details of a third “essential skills” pathway are yet to be worked out. This option will apply to lower-paid, hard-to-fill jobs with a focus on the care economy. The government says it will “further consult” on lower-wage migration next year, but any arrangements will be sector-specific, capped in size, closely regulated and designed to maintain the primacy of Australia’s relationship to the Pacific as “a guiding principle.”

The latter is a reference to objective four of the strategy — strengthening international relationships — and we can expect further development of PALM, the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme, which has its genesis in a seasonal labour program for workers from Pacific island nations and Timor-Leste. Only 3000 Pacific islanders were working seasonally in Australia in 2016, but by October 2023 there were more than 38,000 PALM participants. The original scheme was broadened from horticulture to meat processing and other agricultural industries, and then extended to encompass tourism, hospitality, retail and care. It is mostly limited to regional and rural areas, but is no longer just seasonal, with workers granted visas for between one and four years.

But the scheme remains purely temporary, with no path to permanent residency. Pacific workers can bid for one of 3000 new Pacific Engagement Visas offered annually, but success is a matter of luck. Former top immigration official Abul Rizvi has highlighted a sharp rise in PALM workers applying for protection as refugees and attributes this to dissatisfaction with their treatment in Australia. He says the “silliness” of the Pacific visa lottery will just add to PALM workers’ frustrations and suggests the government should instead help them “develop higher level skills as a pathway to permanent residence, especially skills relevant to the regional communities in which they are currently working.”

Rizvi’s sensible suggestion points to an enduring dilemma of low-skilled migration. Once workers secure permanent residency they tend to quit poorly paid jobs in remote locations and move to better-paid positions in cities. Keeping migrants on temporary visas limits their labour market mobility and ensures they stay put, but it’s a recipe for disaffection and exploitation.

The structure of the PALM scheme runs counter to the second major policy objective in the new migration strategy, “ensuring a fair go in the workplace.” By allowing temporary skilled migrants to shift jobs more easily, the government has increased their power to challenge underpayment and resist unreasonable demands. Temporary skilled migrants who suffer abuse will have six months instead of two to find an alternative sponsor and be less reliant on any single employer to support their applications for permanent residence. The contrast with the purely temporary PALM scheme that ties workers to specific employers and regions is stark.

To tackle abuse, the government has introduced a bill to make it a criminal offence for employers to misuse visa programs to exploit temporary migrant workers. This recommendation by Allan Fels’s 2019 Migrant Workers’ Taskforce was ignored by the previous government.

The idea of a “fair go” also has a domestic element. The government wants to ensure that migrants don’t displace local workers or bring down their wages. Its primary move here is to tighten entry requirements for international students to ensure that their main intention is to study, not work. The strategy erroneously calls this closing “back doors and side doors” when, in reality, Australia opened the front door wide to support the growth of education for export; unsurprisingly, international students walked through in large numbers.

New barriers are being erected. International students must pass a higher English language test and prove they have significantly more savings. They will find it harder to switch from one course to another, especially if they appear to be going backwards — by, for example, swapping from a degree to a certificate-level course. The government will prioritise visa processing based on the “risk level” of educational institutions. Applications to study at top-tier universities will sail through while visas to attend private colleges languish in the bureaucratic pipeline.

The Australian Skills Quality Authority will also have extra funding to crack down on ghost colleges, those dodgy providers that are shopfronts for obtaining a visa with work rights.

Evidence of a more stringent approach is already apparent. In 2018–19, the last full year of Coalition government before Covid, only 13 per cent of student visa applications lodged outside Australia were rejected. In 2022–23 (the first full year of a Labor administration) 20 per cent were knocked back. The change was especially pronounced in offshore VET applications, where average rejection rates grew from 38 per cent under the Coalition to 46 per cent under Labor. The perception that Dutton was tougher on border control than his successor as home affairs minister doesn’t match reality.

Labor is also winding back generous post-study work visas, which the Morrison government made even more attractive in late 2021 to help international education “roar back” after Covid. Visas will be shorter: three years instead of four for a PhD and two years instead of three for coursework masters. The eligible age limit will be reduced from fifty to thirty-five years.

When the Gillard government introduced the 485 post-study work visa a decade ago, some of us warned that it would produce a large new cohort of “permanently temporary” graduates — migrants living and working in Australia for years without any prospect of settling. This has come to pass. Of the almost 200,000 temporary graduate visa holders in Australia, most are stuck in limbo. They struggle to find jobs in line with their qualifications and do low-skill work that will never enable them to amass the points needed to qualify as skilled migrants. It makes sense to rein the scheme in.

Over time, these measures could see international student and graduate numbers decline further than they would have, which may reduce the pool of casualised and precarious labour staffing kitchens and delivering meals. On the other hand, the government has reinstated restrictions on working hours lifted during the pandemic. Students can work a maximum of forty-eight hours each fortnight, up from forty hours pre-Covid. Some will need to work more “off the books” to make ends meet, making them vulnerable to ruthless employers.

The government will also evaluate another visa category rife with wage theft, poor working conditions and sexual harassment — working holiday visas — which have morphed from a cultural exchange program into a low-wage labour scheme, especially for agriculture. The scale of abuse has repeatedly been documented over the past decade, and it’s hard to see how the program can be rehabilitated short of scrapping the second and third visas backpackers can acquire if they complete three or six months of “specified work” in regional Australia. As with the PALM scheme, linking work and visas makes young travellers beholden to employers, often in remote towns and isolated workplaces. The PALM scheme is, at least, more closely regulated.

Improved conditions for student workers and backpackers would be a significant achievement and help to restore public faith in the migration program, even if we had to pay more for our food and collect our own takeaway. Whether the proposed measures can achieve this is an open question, but Labor is at least demonstrating a level of intent that was absent under the Coalition. In the words of former senior public servant Martin Parkinson, who chaired the expert review, the migration system has suffered “a decade of almost wilful neglect.”

The government hopes to meet the third objective of the migration strategy, “building stronger communities,” by shifting the emphasis from temporary to permanent migration and providing greater clarity about who can (or can’t) hope to settle here.

The commonsense implication is that permanent migration is more conducive to building “a cohesive multicultural society.” But the strategy is silent on family migration, apart from the strange formulation that the government will support “relationships with family abroad.” That doesn’t sound promising for overseas-born Australians who want to bring parents here to live with them. Parent migration could build stronger communities but clearly runs counter to the higher-priority goals of boosting productivity, filling skills shortages and slowing demographic ageing.

The conundrum of parent visas has been left to fester so long that the shocking blow-out in applications and waiting times means many parents are likely to die before they get a visa. This is causing distress and anxiety for tens of thousands of families.

One immediate option would be to suspend new applications pending a review of the system, just as Canada did in 2011. This would halt the growth in the waiting list and buy time to figure out what to do while working through the backlog. It is cruel to keep applications open and foster false hopes.

The migration strategy draws quite a clear outline of the government’s vision for skilled migration, even if there is lots of colouring in to do. When it comes to family migration, though, the page remains virtually blank, and the government is still “exploring” what visa settings are “appropriate.”

To support all four objectives, the migration strategy promises to make the system easier to navigate and administer. This entails, among other things, merging or closing some of the one hundred “visa products” to simplify offerings, as well as adding extra staff and upgrading IT systems.

The challenge will be to find a balance between the clear regulations and procedures needed to process a high volume of visas efficiently, on the one hand, and retaining enough flexibility to fit individual circumstances, especially in compassionate cases, on the other. Whenever the migration system re-gears, some people get chewed up, including many with compelling reasons to stay in Australia. Foreign parents of Australian-citizen children, for example, will often cycle through a series of temporary visas in a desperate bid to stay close to their sons or daughters. This will get harder as visa rules tighten. It would be ironic and disappointing if attempts to streamline migration mean even more decisions landing in the lap of the immigration minister in the form of last-ditch appeals for him to exercise discretion under various “god powers.”

The strategy is pitched as a bid to get migration working for the nation: “For workers. For businesses. For all Australians.” Noticeably absent from this top-line list is a desire to get migration working for migrants. The strategy (and the ministers’ language promoting it) tends to present migrants, especially student visa holders, as highly calculating and instrumental — as people who use “back doors and side doors” to milk the system for whatever they can get or even engage in outright rorts.

What gets forgotten is that circumstances and aspirations change, especially for young adults at a formative stage of life. Students may come to Australia with every intention of leaving when they complete their courses but then discover new freedoms and possibilities that were not previously available to them. Perhaps they can openly express their sexuality, their creativity or their politics for the first time. Perhaps they find a new vocation or meet the love of their life.

Yet the strategy essentially tells young temporary migrants: please come to Australia for a few years but don’t put down any roots, or even put out feelers, unless you are pursuing an occupation in demand and can help build Australia’s economy. Not only is this unrealistic, it also shows we might be the ones who are calculating and instrumental.

As long as we rely on international students to fund our higher education system and backpackers to pick our produce, temporary migration will continue at a high level. The least we can do is be honest with temporary visa holders about their limited prospects for building a life in Australia, and the new strategy points in that direction. Yet we should recognise that this might inflict an emotional and psychological toll.

In their foreword to the migration strategy, the immigration and home affairs ministers say they want to bring migration levels “back to normal.” It’s not clear what might constitute “normal” in 2024, but a better-targeted and more efficient system would certainly be an achievement, especially if it offers greater clarity and certainty, reins in workplace exploitation, and reduces the number of migrants who are rendered permanently temporary and stuck in a state of being not quite Australian. What it won’t do is resolve the practical and ethical challenges that arise when the number of migrants coming to Australia on temporary visas is so much greater than the number who can hope to settle here. •

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As surprising as the announcement might have seemed, a long history lay behind it. Until the first meeting of signatories to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, in 1995, Canberra was largely seen as being on the same page as other Pacific nations (outwardly, at least) on climate change concerns. Then, at a tense South Pacific Forum meeting in 1997, prime minister John Howard refused to sign up to binding targets for emissions reductions. Other Pacific leaders eventually relented, agreeing instead that nations would “adopt different approaches” at the upcoming Kyoto talks.

Has prime minister Anthony Albanese finally repaired the “climate rift” with Australia’s Pacific neighbours? Although Tuvaluan critics of the Falepili Union treaty are rightly sceptical of Canberra’s commitment to climate justice, Mr Albanese was among the leaders who assented to the Forum Communiqué’s aspiration for what it labelled “a Just and Equitable Transition to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific.” In doing so, they echoed the Port Vila Call for a Just Transition to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific made by six Pacific countries, including Tuvalu, in March this year.

That call reflects an international effort to negotiate a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty inspired by the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Advocates argue that such a treaty — unlike the Paris climate agreement, which doesn’t explicitly name coal, oil and gas — would directly target their phasing out and outline a plan for a fair transition to clean energy.

If the phrase “a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific” rings a bell, you’re not mistaken — the phrase gestures to the campaign for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific that began in the mid 1970s. In 1985, with France continuing its nuclear weapons testing on Mururoa atoll and anxieties deepening about US military installations on Australian soil, those efforts culminated in the declaration of the South Pacific as a Nuclear Free Zone in the Treaty of Rarotonga. The French had bombed the Rainbow Warrior just a month earlier.

But the link between nuclear weapons and climate change goes well beyond inspiration. Historians have excavated how nuclear weapons testing shaped the US cold war–era science that shed light on the mechanisms of global warming. Likewise, the scientific debate over a nuclear winter helped to convey the possibility of widespread human-induced destruction on such a scale that even non-combatant nations would be affected. A nuclear war would have no winners.

Climate change was now seen as an issue the world’s governments should tackle multilaterally. As concerns about ozone depletion and acid rain had shown, the atmosphere respects no territorial borders.

This message was articulated clearly in the statement arising from June 1988’s Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security conference in Toronto. “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war,” agreed the largest such gathering of scientists and policymakers to date. Participants called for a global convention to coordinate scientific research and spell out concrete measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Nearly four decades later, security returned to centrestage in Chris Bowen’s annual parliamentary climate change statement last month. “The currently identified national security threats from climate change already present serious risks to Australia and the region, but they will become more severe and more frequent the further warming targets are exceeded,” the climate change and energy minister argued. “Climate change is an existential national security risk to our Pacific partners and presents unprecedented challenges for our region. It is likely to accentuate economic factors already fuelling political instability, including risks to water security across the globe.”

The implication of rising temperatures for the world’s coastal areas — home to half of humanity — was an early concern of scientists and policymakers responding to climate change. This vulnerability was especially clear in the Maldives, where storm surges in early 1987 had flooded the capital, Malé. After president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom raised the issue at that year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and then at the UN General Assembly, the Commonwealth Secretariat commenced its own study of the likely effects of climate change on its member nations, which in turn commissioned studies of the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and Tonga.

With Malta prepared to raise climate change at the General Assembly in late 1988, the South Pacific Forum discussed the issue at its October meeting in Tonga. It joined other pressing concerns for the region, including fisheries exploitation, political upheaval and telecommunications. Subsequent gatherings of Pacific and other island nations in the Marshall Islands and the Maldives reiterated the existential threat that rising sea levels posed to their countries.

A 1989 booklet, A Climate of Crisis: Global Warming and the Island South Pacific, described the looming threat as a “climate bomb” that “threatens the physical and cultural survival of several Pacific societies. They are the innocent victims of the northern hemisphere’s 300-year orgy of fossil fuels.” Announcing Australian funding for a regional network of sea level monitoring stations in August 1989, prime minister Bob Hawke explained that it would help “ensure that we are well aware of what the region is in for.” Pacific concerns were reiterated at that October’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Malaysia, where leaders responded to the Commonwealth Secretariat’s report with the Langkawi Declaration.

Australia’s own scientific research on climate change meant Canberra was well aware of its implications for the Pacific. Following Malta’s call for the “Conservation of Climate as part of the Common Heritage of Mankind” in October 1988, Australia’s representative at the UN General Assembly, Michael Costello, expressed Canberra’s concern about the “potential for climate change to cause serious economic and social disruption in countries of the South Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.”

The following year Tuvaluan prime minister Tomasi Puapua described to an Australian parliamentary committee the “possible impact of the greenhouse effect on his country,” which was “one of Tuvalu’s major security concerns.” Climate change represented a “potentially catastrophic” threat to the “very existence” of atoll states like Tuvalu, the committee reported. “In the worst scenario the entire populations of these small states may end up as environmental refugees, seeking resettlement in countries such as Australia.”

Canberra’s framing of Pacific island vulnerability as a security issue reflected almost a decade of assessing the prospects of newly independent and decolonising neighbours like Tuvalu. Nor had the Soviet Union’s recent efforts to extend its influence in the region gone unnoticed. “Environmental problems, if unchecked could threaten our security,” warned Australia’s foreign minister, Gareth Evans, pointing to the “devastating effect [of rising sea levels] on the small island countries of the South Pacific.”

Echoing concerns voiced in the United States and Britain, Evans anticipated hundreds of thousands of “environmental refugees” “who would look mainly to Australia for resettlement.” “In short,” he argued, “quite apart from the cost in human misery and dislocation to the island communities, which of course are ample reasons in themselves for our concern, it would jeopardise vital Australian national interests.”

Puapua’s successor as Tuvalu’s prime minister, Bikenibeu Paeniu, continued to assert the vulnerability of island nations on the world stage. In the wake of Cyclone Ofa and early meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he told the Second World Climate Conference in late 1990 that it would be “an injustice should we in Tuvalu and the island nations, be denied our right to live in our homeland.” He continued: “We contribute little or nothing to the problem and yet we will be the first to suffer. Our survival is at stake.”

Although the island nations were ultimately disappointed with the climate conference’s pared-back ministerial statement, they came away from Geneva having formally organised themselves as the Alliance of Small Island States, or AOSIS. With the legal support of the recently formed British group, the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development, the island nations understood that their interests might be better served collectively as a UN bloc in the upcoming negotiations of the UNFCCC.

Australian negotiators were quietly sceptical of the motives of larger developing nations, which they believed to be more interested in a renewal of the New International Economic Order. But they acknowledged the difficulties facing small island nations. After a meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee of the UNFCCC in late 1991, they reported to Canberra that AOSIS members were “genuinely worried about the adverse consequences for them.” As the small island states had stressed during the negotiations, “The very existence of low-coastal and small vulnerable island countries is placed at risk by the consequences of climate change.” Although AOSIS sought more ambitious provisions, the final text of the UNFCCC would go on to explicitly acknowledge their particular vulnerability to the “adverse effects of climate change.”

Australia was one of the first signatories to the UNFCCC at the Rio Earth Summit in mid 1992. The AOSIS nations followed soon after, including Nauru, Tuvalu and Kiribati, which were not yet UN members. Upon signing what they saw as a weak treaty without targets or timetables for emissions reductions, that trio joined with Fiji to expressly declare that were not renouncing their rights under international law concerning state responsibility for the adverse effects of climate change.

The Earth Summit offered Prime Minister Paeniu an opportunity to share Tuvalu’s position with a much broader audience. Thanks to the promotional efforts of Greenpeace, he addressed a full press conference on the implications of rising sea levels for his country. “There would be no land left for us,” he said. “There cannot be any other home for Tuvalu. Even if we were offered 10,000 acres in Australia, it won’t be the same Tuvalu.”

This was the scenario to which the leaders assembled at the recent Pacific Islands Forum returned. Having made a declaration on the preservation of their maritime zones in 2021, they now called for the preservation of their statehood and cultural heritage in the face of climate change–related sea level rise. Fearing the worst, Tuvalu had already set out to become the First Digital Nation — a project Funafuti hopes “will allow Tuvalu to retain its identity and continue to function as a state, even after its physical land is gone.”

Despite the existential threat that climate change poses, successive COPs have demonstrated the challenge of making manifest a planetary ethic for real global climate action. As in the late 1980s, however, asserting the security implications of climate change continues to allow for the alignment of territorial interests with atmospheric concerns that don’t recognise political borders.

Those territorial interests are really what’s at stake when government negotiators descend on cities like Paris and Dubai for what have become annual climate talks. For all the hot air those talks produce, there remains room for hope: regardless of territorial size or emissions, every party has a single vote on the future. •

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