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.

But Albanese was also that very modern species: the student politician who came to parliament via a career as a political staffer and party official. His only experience of paid work outside of professional politics occurred while he was a student. After university, he was employed as a staffer by that doyen of the Sydney left, Tom Uren. He married Carmel Tebbutt, who would also become a politician and rose to the position of deputy premier of New South Wales. He spent more than a quarter of a century in parliament before becoming prime minister. His was a long game, and there was nothing inevitable about where it led.

These were the outward expressions of Albanese’s rise: prominent in campus politics at the University of Sydney; NSW Young Labor president; rising political staffer; NSW Labor assistant general secretary at twenty-six, and therefore de facto leader of the left in the party machine; member for Grayndler at thirty-three. He would go on to hold senior positions in the shadow ministry during the Howard era and cabinet office under Rudd and Gillard, as well as being leader of the House. But Albanese’s more private world disclosed a complexity barely hinted at in these impressive career landmarks.

Albo — the nickname that attached to him from boyhood — was born in Sydney on 2 March 1963 and raised by his mother, a disability pensioner and Labor Party member, in public housing in Camperdown. The official story was that Anthony’s father, an Italian ship’s steward named Carlo, had died in a car accident soon after marrying his mother. They had met while Maryanne was travelling on an ocean liner to Britain.

Early in his teenage years, Anthony learnt from Maryanne that she had never married Carlo, and that he had not died. Nonetheless, Anthony made no attempt to find his father for many years. He was close to his mother, who held lofty ambitions for her son: she told friends Anthony would one day become prime minister. In the meantime, she had a short-lived and unhappy marriage to another man, whose surname Anthony briefly adopted before reverting to that of a father he had never met.

Albanese attended Catholic schools and then the University of Sydney, where he studied economics. The university had a broad left that took in a wide range of ideologies and affiliations, and Albo, a charismatic figure, got on well with people across the spectrum of radical politics. His affiliation, however, was with the ALP Club, and he was best known on campus for organising a successful campaign to defend the teaching of political economy, a program that offered a left-wing, Marxist-inflected alternative to neoclassical economics.

But Albo regarded grown-up Labor politics as the real game. He had joined the party in 1979, still at school, and would later rise through the ranks of the Young Labor organisation, which, unlike the NSW Labor Party, had a left majority.

Albo was determined that NSW Young Labor would remain left, and he displayed an early ability to round up the necessary numbers. The origins of the NSW Labor left, also known as the Steering Committee (and from 1989 as the Socialist Left), stretched back to the Labor split of the 1950s. Of its sub-factions, the “soft left” was closely associated with the Ferguson family: Jack, who was Neville Wran’s deputy premier, and his sons. The alternative and rival “hard left” was the group to which Albanese gravitated. While the right was their mutual foe, there was no love lost between the two left sections.

Anthony took over many responsibilities connected with his mother’s precarious health and finances. While mother and son were devoted to each other, the absence of his father shadowed Albanese’s life. Even the pronunciation of his name was unsettled, then as now.

Tom Uren, a former boxer, prisoner of war and leading minister in the Whitlam government, took him on to his staff and became a mentor and even something of a father figure. Uren was by this time an elder statesman of the NSW left but on the outer in the Hawke government, which had little interest in taking up the kind of ambitious policy associated with Uren’s time as urban and regional development minister (1972–75). A deep affection developed between the older and the younger man. Before the decade was through, Uren was publicly describing young Albo as a future Labor leader.

In 1989, Albanese won the position of assistant general secretary of the NSW Labor Party. This was no bit part. Having emerged in the early 1970s out of a power-sharing arrangement between the majority right and minority left factions, it was one of the toughest gigs in backroom politics. As the left’s man in the Sussex Street party office, the assistant general secretary could expect relentless obstruction, and not a little hostility; there was no pretence of comradeship across factional lines. On one occasion, while Albanese was overseas, his rivals from the right faction turned his office into a library and changed the locks.

But Albanese was already a tough political operator. For many ordinary Australians, their first encounter with him would have been in a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the 1994 election for mayor of Leichhardt, Rats in the Ranks, even though he remained off-screen. Albanese was alone among the main players in refusing to cooperate with the filmmakers and appear on-screen. In this, he showed an astuteness about the damage that might have been done to his political career if he had been seen as centrally involved in the plotting of what proved to be an unseemly struggle for a minor local office.

The future prime minister won preselection for the safe Labor seat of Grayndler ahead of the 1996 federal election that saw the defeat of the Keating Labor government by a resurgent Coalition under John Howard’s leadership. Normally, preselection would have been a near-guarantee of election. On this occasion, there were predictions that it might be more difficult because of the controversy aroused by the building of a third runway at Sydney Airport. Albanese faced a candidate from the No Aircraft Noise Party, who won enough of the vote to reduce the Labor candidate to a bare majority of the primary vote.

In his first speech to parliament, Albanese began by thanking his mother, who had raised him “under very difficult economic circumstances” and instilled in him “a strong sense of social justice and fairness.” His “politics as a democratic socialist,” he said, had “been developed from my experience in life.” He defended the public sector and criticised “strict adherence to dry economic philosophies.”

These were noble words, but he soon showed on the floor of the House his fighting instincts, honed in Sussex Street and party conferences at the Sydney Town Hall. In April 1998, he made a memorable attack on Howard: “You can trim the eyebrows; you can cap the teeth; you can cut the hair; you can put on different glasses; you can give him a ewe’s milk facial, for all I care; but, to paraphrase a gritty Australian saying, ‘same stuff, different bucket.’” The usual phrase would have been “same shit…” but Albanese was sufficiently familiar with parliamentary rules to know that he would not have got away with that.

He continued: “Here is a man who lived at home until he was thirty-two. You can imagine what he was like. Here were young Australians demonstrating against the Vietnam war, listening to the Doors, driving their tie-dyed kombi vans, and what was John Howard doing? He was at home with mum, wearing his shorts and long white socks, listening to Pat Boone albums and waiting for the Saturday night church dance.” It was very impolite but contributed to Albanese’s image as a bomb-thrower.

There was more to Albanese than such fun and games. He opposed a bill that Liberal parliamentarian Kevin Andrews introduced to overturn voluntary euthanasia legislation in the Northern Territory. He pursued reforms to allow same-sex couples to gain access to each other’s superannuation on the same basis as heterosexual couples. These years also provided Albanese with an opportunity to demonstrate his devotion to another part of that Sydney working-class trinity: he was centrally involved in the successful campaign to save South Sydney from the National Rugby League’s effort to get rid of it.

As Albanese’s standing in the party grew, his views on matters such as the leadership came to count for a great deal. He supported Kim Beazley in both of his periods of leadership (1996–2001 and 2005–06) and Simon Crean (2001–03), until the latter decided, without consulting him (or, indeed, the caucus), that Labor would oppose a new airport for western Sydney. He opposed Mark Latham’s ill-fated ascension to the leadership in December 2003 and three years later supported Beazley against Kevin Rudd while maintaining a strong relationship with the man who would take Labor to victory a year later.

He also gained increasingly important shadow ministries. After Labor lost the 1998 election, he was shadow parliamentary secretary for family and community services. Later, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs and the arts were added. He arrived on the frontbench as shadow ageing and seniors minister after the 2001 election loss, followed by education and training, and then the environment. When Rudd became leader, he got the infrastructure and water portfolios. Having come to be seen as a skilled tactician, he rose to become manager of opposition business in the House.

Here was the story of a man playing to his own strengths and interests, rising steadily rather than as a shooting star (in contrast with Latham), building trust with straight-talking, discretion and competence, and wielding power and organising numbers in the party as an old-school factional leader.

Albanese’s marriage to Tebbutt, the birth of a son, Nathan, and the devastating death of his beloved mother in rapid succession in the early years of the new century mellowed him. He enjoyed warm friendships with some members of the opposition. And he commenced a search for the father he had never known. In a highly emotional encounter, he met an elderly Carlo on a visit to Italy in 2009. A missing part of his life fell into place.

Albanese was a heavy hitter in the Rudd government that came to power in 2007. With ministerial responsibilities covering infrastructure, transport, regional development and local government, he had an important role in a government that said it wanted to renew nation-building after years of neglect under Howard-era market fundamentalism.

The establishment of Infrastructure Australia was integral to this effort: there were major investments in road and rail, but the global financial crisis distracted the government from its larger ambitions towards everyday survival through quick, smaller-scale spending projects. Albanese, as a member of the left long sceptical of inflated claims for the value of markets, supported the thrust towards a more ambitious role for government.

Albanese was leader of the House — and therefore responsible for the smooth running of parliament — as well as a loyal Rudd supporter, despite his misgivings about some of the prime minister’s bad calls, notably the abandonment of legislation for an emissions trading scheme. He was dismayed as Rudd’s critics moved against the prime minister in mid 2010 in favour of the deputy, Julia Gillard. Albanese and Gillard had an association going back to student politics but had never been close. Albanese believed the switch ill-judged, but he took on the task of talking with Rudd to persuade him that he should not run in a leadership contest that he was destined to lose badly.

While known to be a loyal Rudd supporter, Albanese continued as a senior minister in Gillard’s government both before and after the 2010 election that sent Labor into a minority government facing a resurgent opposition led by Tony Abbott.

Unlike many of his colleagues, Albanese managed to avoid the impression that he was a plotter. Trusted on both sides of the bitter Rudd–Gillard rivalry, his reputation as a party man, his astute leadership of the House and his capabilities as a minister made him valuable to whoever was in office.

His factional leadership was another reason why he was to be taken seriously. Albanese’s value only increased when Labor, lacking a majority in the House, depended on the support of Greens and independents. He formed excellent relations with the independent parliamentarians on whom Labor depended for continuation in office. Some 561 pieces of legislation were passed during Gillard’s prime ministership, and each required someone to reach beyond the Labor Party to gather the numbers needed. That someone was often Albanese.

He also had the melancholy duty of engineering the replacement of Harry Jenkins as speaker with the Queensland Liberal National Party member Peter Slipper, a manoeuvre Albanese had devised to get Labor an extra vote in parliament. While many regretted the idea when Slipper became mired in scandal, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and Albanese conceived and executed the plan well.

Rudd’s destabilisation of Gillard’s leadership couldn’t but draw a figure of Albanese’s standing into the fray. Just how involved in the decline and fall of Gillard he became remains contentious. But when Rudd challenged Gillard’s leadership in February 2012, Albanese held a media conference in Sydney at which he shed tears for what the government had become. There were references to his mother and her three great faiths and to the values on which he had been raised. What the party had done in June 2010 in replacing Rudd with Gillard was wrong, he said, and he would now be voting for Rudd. “I like fighting Tories — that’s what I do,” he added.

It was a supreme performance of the party man, an old-fashioned demonstration of tribal loyalty in an era of fluid identities and shifting allegiances. Gillard had refused his offer to resign, she won the leadership vote, and Albanese continued as a minister in a tired, staggering government.

Rudd defeated Gillard in a second bid to return to the leadership on 26 June 2013. Nobody accuses Albanese of doing the numbers for Rudd, yet few doubt that his involvement behind the scenes must have been significant. Those who recalled Rats in the Ranks might have been reminded of Albanese’s presence during that drama, always off-screen but a player nonetheless. Albanese’s reward came with the office of deputy prime minister. He was conscious of the honour. As so often at significant moments in his career, he would return to where he had come from: “It says a great thing about our nation that the son of a parent who grew up in a council house in Sydney could be deputy prime minister.”

That was true, but he would have only a few weeks in the job. On 7 September, the government was swept from office and Abbott became prime minister. There were small consolation prizes for Albanese: an inner-city pub had named a beer after him, and he had been given the chance to host the ABC’s music video program Rage.

Rudd had left a parting gift. The parliamentary leadership was now to be decided, in part, by a vote of the ALP’s rank and file. Party members’ votes would count for half the weighting; those of a diminished caucus would make up the other half. Bill Shorten, a figure from the Victorian right, contested the leadership; so did Albanese, representing the left. There were weeks of speeches and debates. Most agree that the ritual was a positive one, generating friendliness and goodwill, and engaging ordinary members in a novel outbreak of party democracy. Indeed, the experiment was seemingly so successful that it has never been repeated.

Albanese won the rank­and-file vote easily, but Shorten gained sufficient support in caucus to win the contest. Several members of the left voted for Shorten; Albanese was left to lick his wounds just ahead of a final, emotional visit to his dying father in Italy.

In running for the leadership, Albanese had formally announced that he regarded himself as a potential future prime minister. Inevitably, and even allowing for the protections that Rudd’s reforms offered an incumbent leader between parliamentary elections, that also made him the most obvious alternative to Shorten. Whenever Shorten was faring poorly in public esteem, there would be chatter about the possibility of an Albanese leadership.

Meanwhile, Albanese worked hard to raise his public profile, to show that he was neither just a Sydney brawler nor a man destined to rise no higher than second-rank portfolios. His profile was raised by a regular slot on Nine’s Today with his Liberal Party friend Christopher Pyne. He cooperated with a biography written by leading journalist Karen Middleton, which was published in 2016. (I have relied on it, among other sources, for information.) A photograph of a young and handsome Albanese from 1985 — dubbed “Hot Albo” — circulated widely on social media from the time of the leadership election of 2013, quite obviously with his cooperation.

Albo also cultivated an image of retro hipness as “DJ Albo,” performing the role of disc jockey at pubs and clubs — sometimes for charity, sometimes as a party fundraiser — with an emphasis on 1980s and 1990s numbers. He assured journalists that it was “part of who I am” and not a publicity stunt aimed at winning over younger voters. In truth, it was likely something of both.

Labor’s strong performance at the 2016 double dissolution election largely put paid to chatter of a change of leaders. Shorten had almost edged out Malcolm Turnbull, who seemed a beaten and bitter man on election night. In the circumstances, Albanese quickly ruled out any challenge to Shorten, who therefore retained the leadership unopposed.

In the years ahead, prominent members of the political class found it increasingly hard to visualise a future Albanese prime ministership. Some considered him worthy of it but thought that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others believed that he had kept too many of his old left-wing sympathies. Inevitably, new prospective leaders gained attention, notably Tanya Plibersek, a fellow member of the NSW left. But Albanese had the virtue of patience. His views might have become milder over the years, but he had the lodestar of his upbringing. It was hard to accuse him of believing in nothing, of being a mere careerist. He could also sound the right note at the right time. His 2018 Whitlam Oration was widely perceived as a call for the party to “engage constructively with businesses” at a time when Shorten’s rhetoric seemed likely to alienate “the big end of town.”

He was entering an era, too, in which the political insider was on the nose. Albanese celebrated twenty years in parliament in 2016, managing in that year to hold off a challenge in his electorate from the Greens after a redistribution in their favour. The Greens challenger professed radical ideas of a kind that might once have been close to those of a younger Albanese. Albanese’s marriage to Tebbutt ended in early 2019 — they had been together for three decades and married for nineteen years.

Both personally and professionally, Albanese seemed to have reached a crossroads. As the Coalition government lurched from one crisis to the next, and from one leader to the next — Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison in 2018 — a Shorten Labor government seemed more likely than not. A Labor victory at the 2019 election would have ended any prospect of an Albanese prime ministership.

Since September 2013 Albanese had been shadow infrastructure and transport minister, also covering tourism — responsibility for cities was added in 2014. But the best he could look forward to in a Shorten government was a role of secondary importance, doing the kinds of things he had done before. He was not close to Shorten and was never part of his inner circle; Albanese was only brought onto the tactics committee in 2016, ahead of that year’s election.

Shorten and Labor’s shock loss at the 2019 election changed things entirely; Morrison retained the prime ministership and Albanese assumed the Labor leadership without a contest. The Victorian right’s Richard Marles was his deputy. Albanese had secured the prize he coveted in vain in 2013, but the pathway to the prime ministership, even in the third term of a deeply mediocre government, looked treacherous. Morrison’s majority was, like Turnbull’s had been, a small one, but the margins needed to win many seats had blown out, especially in Queensland.

Labor jettisoned the policies that were seen to have created trouble at the recent election, working hard to counter a perception that its environmental policies were a danger to job opportunities without alienating too many voters committed to countering global heating. And it waved through income tax cuts that would, when they reached their third stage in 2024, involve large gains for high-income earners.

Morrison’s ill-judged response to the devastating bushfires during the summer of 2019–20 gave Albanese and Labor their first chance to gain ground. Morrison was taking a family holiday in Hawaii while the fires raged. The poor impression created by his absence was compounded by his office’s decision to obfuscate about his whereabouts.

Albanese, meanwhile, was on duty and conspicuous in the media, giving interviews, visiting bushfire sites and serving meals to firefighters. He avoided an aggressive partisanship, allowing Morrison to make, and then suffer for, his own errors. Albanese also called for volunteer firefighters to receive financial compensation for their efforts. It was a masterly performance.

After the bushfires came the Covid-19 pandemic. These were dark days, but an unexpected opportunity for Morrison to rebuild his credibility. The government instituted measures that helped avert both mass death and economic disaster. The formation of a national cabinet that included leaders of all state and territory governments excluded Albanese as opposition leader.

Inevitably, the decision-makers hogged the limelight, Morrison’s own approval rating recovered, and Albanese disappeared from public consciousness. Disruption of the normal schedule of parliamentary sittings also reduced visibility. But in retrospect, Albanese’s low profile was advantageous. It allowed him to maintain a decent distance from the government, which was beneficial when things eventually went wrong.

In the meantime, Albanese was able to offer bipartisanship on most major matters and to appear constructive while his party quietly went about developing new policies. Labor’s victory in a by-election in Eden-Monaro in July 2020 might have helped his leadership survive in dark times. He had formed a new romantic relationship, too, with Jodie Haydon, which boosted his personal happiness.

But a month after that by-election, several leading colleagues had a meeting with him that was also a warning: the party would be defeated if an election were to be held then, and he needed to improve his performance. In the wider commentariat, too, were several who thought Albanese not up to it. Even in May 2021, when Labor’s prospects looked rather better, political historian and journalist Chris Wallace thought Albanese “a bloke past his prime.”

At the end of 2020, Morrison appeared to be coasting towards another victory, and some suspected he might call an election sooner rather than later. In January 2021, Albanese was badly injured but fortunate to survive a car accident when a young driver hit his car in Sydney. The year that followed, however, saw Albanese recover both his personal health and his political fortunes. Morrison muddled pandemic management; Albanese stepped up his criticism, arguing that the prime minister had “two jobs,” quarantine and vaccination, and that he had failed at both. A new round of restrictions became “Morrison’s lockdowns.” Meanwhile, Albanese and Labor benefited from the perception that the government was hostile to measures to counter global warming, to women’s rights, and to clean and accountable government.

Labor entered the campaign for the 21 May 2022 election ahead in the polls and modest favourites to win. Albanese seemed to many to lack star quality, but he looked good, having lost weight and acquired stylish glasses. While no one could discern any great wave of enthusiasm, Labor seemed to have a fair prospect of at least minority government. Albanese has a reputation for an excellent memory, especially for figures, so it was remarkable that early in the campaign he found himself unable to recall the Reserve Bank’s cash rate during a media conference. The unemployment rate also eluded him. The media were ruthless, and Morrison pounced, presenting this lapse as evidence of Albanese’s unfitness for the prime ministership.

When, later in the campaign, Albanese responded to another question from a journalist that he believed the minimum wage should be increased at the same rate as the present level of inflation, 5.1 per cent, there was initially adverse media reaction, with Morrison now calling him a “loose unit.” In reality, Albanese’s response helped to provide Labor’s campaign with some much-needed ballast amid the activities of a media pack that seemed more interested in testing his memory than his policies.

Albanese performed effectively in the three formal debates. Labor ran a professional and disciplined campaign under national secretary Paul Erickson and, notwithstanding the occasional setback, by election day Albanese had every reason to be hopeful.

Election night began at Albanese’s Marrickville home with Penny Wong, a factional colleague, close confidant and shadow foreign minister. She would later introduce Albanese when he made his victory speech. As he had done on several occasions in the campaign, Albanese spoke feelingly of his mother, and he committed his government to the full implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for a First Nations Voice to Parliament, a treaty and truth-telling.

Labor had won a narrow majority, with a primary vote in the low thirties. Independents and Greens had taken seats, mainly from the Liberals, but the size of the crossbench was widely interpreted as a symptom of disillusionment with the old parties and an old politics. Albanese, a factional warrior from way back, in some ways seemed an unlikely herald of a new order. But he had come a long way since his 1998 excoriation of John Howard as the latest in the Liberals’ “pantheon of chinless blue bloods and suburban accountants.” Albanese could now have passed for a suburban accountant himself.

Still, he hit the ground running. He and four colleagues were sworn in the Monday following the election, just ahead of an overseas visit to Tokyo for the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (“the Quad”) with Japan, India and the United States. High in the government’s early priorities was repairing Australia’s international relationships, including with France — which resented what it saw as Morrison’s dishonesty over the purchase of submarines — and with China, which had placed relations with Australia in the deep freeze.

Albanese — as well as foreign minister Wong and defence minister Marles — spent a good deal of time overseas in the early weeks of the new government, during what was a period of considerable international turbulence following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Wong visited several Pacific nations in an effort to counter Chinese influence in the region. Albanese undertook a tightly controlled visit to Ukraine himself.

Rising inflation, accompanied by climbing interest rates, contributed to the most serious cost-of-living crisis in three decades. Energy prices were particularly troublesome, especially in light of Labor’s pre-election commitment to get prices down. In December 2022, after a tussle between the minister, Chris Bowen, and energy companies extending over several months, the government used its powers to intervene directly in the energy market to cap coal and gas prices.

An October 2022 budget delivered by treasurer Jim Chalmers advanced the implementation of election commitments in areas such as the extension of paid parental leave, higher subsidies for childcare, and more social and affordable housing. A May 2023 budget would offer further cost-of-living relief for the most vulnerable and a boost to Medicare bulkbilling. The parliament also agreed to industrial relations reforms intended to strengthen enterprise bargaining and boost wages, especially for women. A bill for the long-anticipated and long-delayed federal anti-corruption commission passed before Christmas 2022.

In the first year of the government, there were consultations and inquiries across a wide range of areas, including a royal commission into robodebt, the Coalition government’s illegal effort to extract money from welfare recipients by raising fictional debts against their names, created by averaging their income over a year. The Reserve Bank, criticised for its recent interest rate hikes when its governor had previously given the impression an increase was unlikely before 2024, was also the subject of an inquiry, as was Australia’s immigration system and the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

A consultation was launched on a proposal for an Australian Universities Accord, and another led to the launch of a new cultural policy, Revive, followed by a major financial boost to the national collecting institutions. And amid all this, the parliament found time for a two-week period of mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Albanese attended the coronation of Charles III in May 2023.

The emphasis was on order, regularity and trust — a rebuke to the Morrison government but also, arguably, to the Rudd and Gillard era. Albanese had some of the instincts of the “lone wolf,” as journalist Katharine Murphy put it, but his approach in both opposition and government had become increasingly collaborative. He relied on the competence of a strong frontbench, and he made it clear that he wanted to re-establish Labor as the natural party of government.

Like Hawke, even in his first year Albanese was criticised for being too moderate, too cautious in pushing back on Coalition-era initiatives, too attached to old ways. Several of the new independent parliamentarians expressed outrage when the government reduced their staffing entitlements. There were also criticisms, from the outset, that Labor’s middle path on the shift from fossil fuels to renewables lacked sufficient ambition.

In its defence policy, the government added crucial detail to the bare bones of the Morrison government’s AUKUS agreement, with expensive plans for nuclear-powered submarines. Critics argued that the government was surrendering Australia’s sovereignty to the United States, an accusation that Albanese and Marles denied.

The government introduced only modest increases to JobSeeker — the unemployment benefit — in its May 2023 budget, which delivered a small surplus that the treasurer said was likely to be a one-off. Yet it was committed to fulfilling its pre-election promise not to dismantle the Morrison government’s stage three tax cuts, despite the windfall they would offer the wealthy. Albanese wanted to avoid accusations of breaking a core election promise, or of profligacy.

In one area in particular, however, his approach seemed to owe more to Whitlam-era idealism than to the more cautious and pragmatic Hawke tradition. The Albanese government’s commitment to holding a referendum on the First Nations Voice to Parliament before the end of 2023 remained steadfast, even as an otherwise demoralised opposition, led by Peter Dutton, did its best to use obstructionism as a means of reviving the Coalition’s political fortunes.

These had declined to alarming levels for the Liberal Party especially, and voters were unimpressed by its attempts to lay blame for the nation’s difficulties, such as the rising cost of living, at Albanese’s feet. At a by-election on 1 April 2023 for the outer-suburban Melbourne seat of Aston, long held by the Liberals and recently vacated by scandal-plagued ex-minister Alan Tudge, Labor won a two-party-preferred swing of more than six percentage points. It was the first time since 1920 that a federal government had managed to win a seat in such circumstances.

It was hard not to read into that result a wider verdict on the performance of the government. Commentators wrote of a sense that the country was being run by “adults,” and Albanese’s own image as a likeable, trustworthy and competent leader contributed something to that impression. We do not yet know if Anthony Albanese will be a short- or long-term leader — the last in the procession of two-to-four-year prime ministers that we have had since Howard, or a more lasting proposition. His age works against Howard-like longevity, but he could well emulate Hawke’s eight years. •

This is an edited extract from the new edition of The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia’s Prime Ministers from Barton to Albanese, by Mungo MacCallum and and Frank Bongiorno, published this month by Black Inc. Inside Story readers can order a copy at a 30 per cent discount by using the code InsideStory at checkout here. 

The post The making of a prime minister appeared first on Inside Story.

Australia’s luck, Horne suggested, had acted as a buffer for the mediocrity of its elites and might well be running out. Even on that supposed sewer of public discourse, Twitter, you will occasionally find someone reminding us of the book’s killer line: “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck.”

The relevance of that famous remark to Australian public life almost sixty years later is debatable. Is “second-rate” now too generous for our elites? Do many Australians feel a great deal less lucky in 2023 than their counterparts of 1964, in an environment of global warming, soaring house prices, rising inequality and democratic decay?

Ryan Cropp has written a fine biography of Horne. Based on a University of Sydney doctoral thesis, Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country is fundamentally a study of Horne’s public life — his role as editor, writer, thinker, administrator and activist. Cropp might sometimes seem reluctant to take us too far in probing the inner or private life, but he is perhaps following some of his subject’s own hesitations in such matters.

The book is also a reminder that universities continue to produce authors who can write for a general audience without sacrificing academic rigour. Horne himself, addressing graduating students at the University of New South Wales in the mid 1980s, was critical of the taste for “legitimating rituals,” “secret languages” and “moribund Talmudisms” in universities, the trend towards over-specialisation and the contracting audiences. Cropp would surely impress him with the accessibility of his writing and ideas.

Much was happy about Horne’s childhood as the son of a schoolteacher who was also a returned soldier. His early years were spent in Muswellbrook, but as David, his father, became increasingly difficult to live with, the family moved to Sydney. David Horne’s mental health would eventually collapse, and accusations of sexual misconduct were made by a student. If Donald’s earlier life in a country town had been largely carefree, the famous pessimism associated with the early decades of his intellectual life might date from those latter experiences.

The basic outline of Horne’s early years would have been familiar enough to many young Australians of the era: the troubled Anzac father; the move from country town to big city; the bright state school boy who creates plenty of sparks at the university — editing the student newspaper as a stirrer and crusader — but leaves without a degree, his studies interrupted by unsatisfying war service.

Yet Horne also had exceptional talents, even if they took some years to yield the fruit that might have been expected to come earlier. Like many of his contemporaries at the University of Sydney he came under the influence of the Challis professor of philosophy, John Anderson, and he carried a version of Anderson’s realism and libertarianism into his intellectual and professional life.

“If history can be spoken of as having ‘lessons,’ one of its lessons is the futility of human schemings,” Horne said in the late 1940s. “Historical situations arise from other factors than, and often in spite of the desires and intentions of men.” That made any form of planning by government, or perhaps any effort at social improvement by anyone, a futile exercise.

Horne’s activities as a student journalist attracted the attention of the legendary Daily Telegraph editor Brian Penton, who employed him even while Horne remained at the university, and again a few years later. The core of Horne’s thinking, such as it was in the period before he turned forty, seems to have come mainly from his understanding of Anderson, but the hectoring, aggressive style came from Penton.

In fact, the early Horne, as painted by Cropp, is a deeply unattractive figure. The retrospective assessment of one of the friends with whom he fell out — that Horne was a “posturing prick” — seems accurate. Put bluntly, he comes across as a chancer and, at times, a bully, a master of the putdown with “weathervane critical instincts.”

Cropp allows us to see as much, but shows forbearance in offering judgement. He lets the suggestion hang over his narrative that much of the bitterness of Horne’s persona came out of personal trauma, and it is hard not to see the decline of Horne’s family life in his remark that “the harsh fact of human existence is that there are always clouds on the horizon.” He read voraciously, but the intellectual shallowness and derivative nature of most of what he had to say before the late 1950s are striking. And he could be brutal in his dealings with others, especially with pen in hand and press at the ready.

He was also good at serving powerful masters, to his (and often their) advantage, while seeking to maintain the conceit that he was really an outsider gatecrashing the party. We are familiar with his kind of elite populism from our own times. Invective triumphed over argument, ritualised scepticism over evidence, the too-clever-by-half smart alec over the searcher for truth.

All of that might have been forgivable in a student journalist or politician; it is less so in a man in his late twenties spouting nonsense about economic planning and rising totalitarianism among Canberra politicians and bureaucrats. It is among the ironies of Horne’s career that he barracked so hard in the 1940s and 1950s for the political and policy mediocrity that he would later condemn in his most famous writing.

His curriculum vitae during these years was various but untidy. He was bright enough to be among a dozen recruits into the Department of External Affairs’s diplomatic cadet scheme. He gained some pleasure from the study, but disliked Canberra and drifted towards journalism — and then back to his hero, Penton, and to Sydney. There was an early marriage to an English divorcée, Ethel, and the two of them were soon off to England. Horne thought of Australia as dull and second-rate and wanted an escape.

In Britain, living with his wife and some of her relatives on a farm — and for a time in London, which suited him better — Horne learnt that there was also a local franchise on the dull and second-rate. He became a would-be novelist: his two efforts each failed to find a publisher. Cropp presents him as somewhat in the spirit of England’s Angry Young Men of the era — but obviously without the literary success. He became involved in local Conservative politics, a would-be revolutionary of the right come to clear away the political rubbish of postwar Britain, then drifted back into journalism, writing rubbish for a tabloid before taking up a job with his old paper, Sydney’s Telegraph, in London.

For the paper he reported from Kenya, where the Mau Mau rebellion was beginning, and wrote of “terrorists,” “brutes” and “black monsters” who were “filled with an animal-like bloodlust that nothing can control.” As ever, he was good at writing what the powerful wanted to read, condemning critics of colonialism for their naivety. As Cropp points out, readers would not have known from Horne’s account that the whites were doing almost all of the killing. Still, Horne thought he might become a foreign correspondent: “Horne of Africa.”

We don’t normally think of Horne as one of the Australian postwar expatriates, presumably because his time there was only four years and his fame came in Australia a decade later. But there are good reasons to think that these years mattered a great deal to his intellectual development and later thinking. He didn’t do well among the British, but nor did he think highly of them — despite having arrived with a fairly conventional middle-class Australian view of Britain as the measure of all things. It is hard not to connect his later nationalism to this experience.

But perhaps that is to draw too straight a line — for as always with the rising Horne, it is wise to follow the money, or at least the ambition. In 1954 he agreed to return to Australia at Frank Packer’s behest: he would edit a new tabloid, Weekend. He agreed he would come back for six months, and left his wife behind in England, but he remained in Australia and the marriage ended.

Weekend was tabloid trash but sold very well, reaching a half-million circulation and boosting Horne’s stocks in the company and the world of Sydney journalism. The aspiring novelist who had abandoned mediocre Australia now built a career wallowing in that very same mediocrity as the editor of a rag that featured swimsuit models, but it also meant he was a well-paid Packer executive.

The identity as “intellectual” remained, however, and Packer was prepared to indulge him by supporting a new venture, the Observer. It was part of an efflorescence of new quality publications of the late 1950s and early 1960s that also included Tom Fitzgerald’s Nation. A talented group of writers and thinkers coalesced around these publications — Peter Coleman, a former philosophy lecturer and future politician, worked on the Observer, for instance, and the young art critic Robert Hughes would write for both publications.

Packer’s acquisition of the ailing Bulletin brought the Observer to an end, for he wanted Horne to edit it and refused to support two such publications. Horne famously modernised the Bulletin, removing the “Australia for the White Man” slogan from the masthead as well as much of the old staff. But Packer removed Horne himself from the job in 1962, causing him to fall back on tabloid editing. That was never going to last, and it didn’t. A humiliated Horne temporarily left the Packer stable.

Next for Horne came a period in advertising, and a role editing Quadrant. In many ways, his timing for the latter was poor, for that magazine, founded in 1956, was an instrument of the cultural cold war and, as would soon be revealed, was receiving CIA funding. Horne had nonetheless found a group of intellectual — and dining — companions in the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, which published the magazine.

But he was moving leftward. A cold warrior with the worst of them in the 1950s, a stance that proved a useful substitute for thinking seriously about the complexities of international politics, Horne now began to have second thoughts. Or rather, he began to think. He remained staunchly anti-communist, initially supporting Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war, for instance. The Bulletin under his editorship also published meaty — and sometimes rather obsessive — articles about communism’s influence in various corners of Australian life.

But he seems now to have regarded cold war anti-communism as an inadequate instrument for considering Australia’s place in the world. Where once it had seemed five minutes to midnight for isolated Australia in a world of unforgiving international rivalry, he now wanted to talk about the implications of the decline of the United Kingdom for a country that had long regarded itself as part of Greater Britain. He wanted to talk about how Australia, still attached to racial exclusion, might relate to Asia other than as part of an anti-communist alliance. How might Australia adapt to the opportunities offered by new technologies? How might it begin to think and act for itself instead of simply moving from under the domination of an old empire and into the orbit of that newer power in the world, the United States?

Horne was a legend of the long and liquid lunch, and an enthusiastic conversationalist. Many of his friendships with figures on the right would decline as he moved leftward. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties was more a signpost along the journey than a fork in the road: it encapsulated many ideas he had been developing, and had often already placed in print, well before its appearance at the end of 1964.

The book’s basic optimism about the Australian people was a contrast with his earlier Pentonesque attitude, which condemned them for their complacency. It was the leaders who Horne now thought mediocre. In a country where most were partisans of one or another of the parties, he confused everyone by condemning both the Liberals and Labor, Bob Menzies and Arthur Calwell.

As late as 1965, though, having returned to the Packer fold, he was playing a leading role in Liberal leader Robin Askin’s successful state election campaign (a matter Cropp strangely overlooks). He had not yet abandoned the Liberals. That would come later, with the rise of Whitlam, whom Horne came to think of as the kind of moderniser he had been wanting for years. He was devastated by the dismissal of Whitlam’s government, and played a role in leading anti-Kerr protests. Along the way he lost more friends on the right, who now saw him as a Labor stooge.

The Lucky Country had made Horne a famous Australian, and his life, ever after, was that of a celebrity, not merely a public figure. There would be many more books, including a highly regarded autobiographical trilogy, most of them worthy and interesting, all attracting significant media and public attention, yet none as successful as the first, freakish success of 1964.

Never, in Australian cultural history, has a book been better suited to a moment — but that moment passed, and more quickly than most moments because this was the 1960s. Cropp does well in taking us through the rest of the oeuvre right through to Horne’s brave, posthumous Dying: A Memoir, without dwelling too long on any particular publication.

Horne would leave journalism for academia — the University of New South Wales — in the 1970s, and he turned out to be rather good at it, even as he continued to balance the life of national figure with the everyday duties of university work. He read widely, including theoretical works by Antonio Gramsci and Roland Barthes. Where his earlier books had been intuitive and polemical, he now sought to provide greater system and depth. It was a testament to his openness of mind that he was willing to do so, and Cropp rightly gives him credit for it.

He was prolific, a workaholic, a buzzing enthusiast for ideas, books and argument. He took on the role of chair of the Australia Council for the Arts and threw himself into that with the same energy that he gave to most things. He was a co-founder of the Australian Republican Movement in 1991, but found himself increasingly marginalised. It is surely remarkable, and disgraceful, that neither the ARM nor the Howard government was able to find a place for him at the Constitutional Convention of 1998. By then, he was a venerable elder but seemed to come from another time. Still, he continued to write, to publish books, and to ponder the country’s future.

As in any successful biography of a complex subject, puzzles remain. Just how much of the bitterness of Horne’s early career in public life, and the pessimism of his theory of history, came from the ordeal of his father, and how much from Anderson and Penton, is hard to say. Similarly, the greater optimism, and pluralism, of Horne’s mid- and late-life public persona seem to map rather uncannily onto a second and happier marriage to Myfanwy (née Gollan), herself a journalist and the daughter of a journalist.

Two children, a girl, Julia, and a boy, Nick, came along to complete the family, and the impression is of a happy home, if one designed to ensure that Donald was able to get on with his professional life, and especially his writing, without too many disturbances or interruptions. Cropp has a little to say about these matters on the way through and especially near the end of the book — enough to suggest their importance to the public man and the critical thinker and writer. But they form a subplot in this book, not the main story.

Cropp concludes that we will not have another Donald Horne, and it is easy enough to see why that would be so. It is one of this book’s achievements to contextualise his remarkable career and show how our own times are not his. Horne was what Patrick Buckridge, Brian Penton’s biographer, has called an “editor-intellectual.” Penton was the model, and figures such as J.D. Pringle and Paul Kelly would come later. But in an age of media concentration and shrill op-ed commentary, that species is dead, even while Kelly lives on.

Horne’s career assumed the existence of a public sphere in which one could participate as a citizen, a place where ideas could be debated between rational beings, possibly oiled by a few bottles of wine. Horne’s early efforts often failed to rise to that ideal, but in the second half of his life he played the role of editor-intellectual and then citizen-intellectual with notable success.

In our own times, civil disagreement has become more difficult, even as Australia, as a nation, faces dilemmas that are sometimes uncannily similar to those Horne grappled with: how to respond to the decline of a great empire; how to respond to the changing balance of power in our region; how to modernise our political life and constitutional arrangements so that they better reflect our present rather than our past. Horne’s example of vigorous but respectful disagreement, as Cropp shows in this compelling and important biography, is well worth revisiting. •

Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country
By Ryan Cropp | La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. | $37.99 | 384 pages

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What does all of this mean for Australia? Possibly not much. Nothing seriously resembling national grief has prevailed, whatever the politicians and media are telling us. The passing of a woman who has simply been there throughout the lives of most of us has a certain poignancy, and she commands respect for being good at her job and being willing to do it to the best of her ability to the very end — which quite reasonably translates into “devotion to duty” in the seemingly endless tributes.

Media companies have been on the lookout for anyone who has ever found themselves in the general vicinity of Her Majesty so I might as well share my experience. I did but see her passing by just once. It was the centenary of the office of Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom in 2010 — what could very loosely if not quite accurately have been called the centenary of British–Australian diplomatic relations — and I was at a function in Australia House in the Strand, which was also the occasion for the launch of a book I had helped edit.

The royal couple sat on the stage of the grand Exhibition Hall during the formalities and then made their way around the room, the Queen politely formal in the usual way, Prince Philip more chatty. Their progress complete, they took their leave — I suppose they were there an hour — and it was hard not to admire two elderly people who had performed duties of such formidable dullness for much of their lives. And here they were still at it long after most people were enjoying their retirement.

They lived lives of great privilege, of course, and it is right — in an age when the descendants of those oppressed by the British Empire draw attention to that legacy — that her reign should be seen as entangled in a messy, difficult and often brutal imperial history. Elizabeth II’s life began when that empire was at its greatest extent, and the early part of her reign coincided with some of its most appalling violence. It would be a remarkable act of erasure — and a highly political one — to pretend that the only thing that matters in her career is that she was the kind of woman willing to dance with Ghana’s leader Kwame Nkrumah at a ball in 1961. (But that matters in judgements of her role, too. In the United States of the time, African-American men were still occasionally being lynched for forwardness with white women.)

Older Australians will have memories of royal visits and of Australian Women’s Weekly covers from a time when the Queen herself and the monarchy as an institution did express something important about the country’s national identity. Many — perhaps most — Australians were proud to be British, proud to belong to the Empire and then, when that disappeared, grateful to belong to the Commonwealth, even if only because it gave the country’s athletes a decent show of a solid medal haul.

That pride gradually declined as Britain turned to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s and Australia turned to the United States and Asia. The monarchy itself has come to matter a great deal less to most of us than it did back then. One of the most striking features of the Palace Letters — the correspondence from 1974–77 mainly between Sir John Kerr and Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen’s private secretary, released in 2020 after Jenny Hocking’s High Court victory against the National Archives of Australia — was that they evoked a world in which the monarchy still seemed to matter.

Kerr took seriously the idea that the monarch’s place in Australian life could be protected and even strengthened; it helps explain his outrageous behaviour. Charteris also clearly believed that this battle was still one worth fighting, which might help explain why he so foolishly engaged in discussion with Kerr about the nature of the governor-general’s reserve powers.

It was much more common in my youth to see pictures of the Queen on the walls of public buildings than it is today, and in some subtle way she still seemed to be one of us — not like, say, Olivia Newton-John and Paul Hogan, but not quite a foreigner either. Yet it is still startling to watch footage of old Olympic ceremonies of the late 1960s and early 1970s — in full colour — with Australia’s rare gold medal victories accompanied by “God Save the Queen.”

Royal visits evoked greater excitement in the 1970s — and in the 1980s, too, with the arrival of the young and glamorous Princess Diana — than they did ever after. Writing to the Palace in early 1984, Sir Ninian Stephen, the governor-general of the day, said of republicanism that “even its most optimistic supporters see it as a far-off beacon rather than as any at all immediate goal. It counts for little in practical affairs but is always good material for articles in Sunday papers or for questions in opinion polls.”

Most Australians, if they bothered thinking about such matters at all, continued to see the monarchy as worthy of retaining in their Constitution, even as public opinion shifted toward a sense of its unimportance to them — at least that is what political scientist Luke Mansillo’s research on polling tells us of the 1980s. I can’t recall the last time I was invited to toast the Queen at an event in Australia; was it the evening, at our end-of-school dinner in 1986, when we also toasted Pope John Paul II?

Things did change in the 1990s, with the rise of republicanism in the Keating era. While the nation debated that issue we also, from 1994, ceased to expect new migrants to pledge allegiance to the monarch. The monarchy, especially in light of the family problems of the Windsors, suddenly seemed less relevant to a confident, multicultural, Asian-facing Australian society. Ninian Stephen had distinguished nationalism from republicanism in 1984; by the early 1990s, though, republicanism had become an expression of nationalism for many more Australians. Cultural and political identities were coming into alignment.

The Queen’s death will inevitably make the question of Australia’s becoming a republic more pressing. Some republicans — Malcolm Turnbull has been the most prominent — urged Australians simply to put off the matter until the Queen’s passing. But Turnbull’s attitude to this question belongs to a much longer tradition whereby politicians proclaim the republic inevitable while always finding reasons to put it off until the week after never. Anthony Albanese’s position, at least superficially, looks a bit more promising for republicans. Labor’s priority is constitutional recognition for Indigenous people and the Voice to Parliament. The republic will come after that. Or so we’re told.

My own feeling is that the aftermath of the Queen’s death will provide republicans with little comfort. It is true that the often embarrassing media coverage — which seems rather like I imagine it would be to swim in a pool filled with molasses — will place in the spotlight some of the absurdities of the system, especially for a country such as Australia that likes to imagine itself as independent.

Yet, while monarchy means little to Australians in practical terms, it is still meaningful as celebrity and spectacle. The pageantry around the monarchy will be in full flight in the time ahead. Leaving aside the Queen’s funeral, which will be a grand, solemn and sombre ritual, the coronation of Charles III will follow, presumably in the new year. I doubt that the parlous state of a post-Brexit United Kingdom will do anything to encourage economy or restraint. It is more likely to have the opposite effect, for a cynical and failed British elite has every reason to promote fantasy and escape when the prison of reality is so cold (quite literally for many in the coming winter) and discomforting.

Presumably, an investiture of William as Prince of Wales will also follow before too long — the last was of his father, in 1969. And we’ll no doubt get our own royal visit from the new king in due course, and it will be different — carrying the gravitas of a serving head of state — from those he made as a mere prince and Geelong Grammar old boy. The Prince of Wales and Princess of Wales will also need to tour as the Prince of Wales and Princess of Wales. So it goes.

These occasions will be a joy to many journalists and perhaps to many other Australians, too. For a time they will relish the novelty of a new king with all of the changes that will bring to everything from the heads on our coins to the names of lawsuits. Yet even after this novelty wears off, the old problems for republicans will remain. What will the republic look like? How do we elect its president? They were the rocks on which the ship was wrecked last time, in 1999, and they still loom treacherously.

Almost a quarter of a century on, we trust our politicians even less than we did back then. Overcoming such obstacles will be no less formidable in the post-Elizabethan age. •

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I kept an eye on the obituaries, tributes, tweets and posts after Stuart’s passing — there had never been any prospect of Stuart himself going down the rabbit hole of social media — and I can’t recall anything quite like it. Alongside the sadness, affection, admiration and gratitude, the word that kept cropping up was “generous.” It’s an accurate description of Stuart but also, perhaps, inadequate. There’s no shortage of stories of Stuart’s generosity, not only from the usual suspects — students and colleagues such as me — but also from teachers, journalists, politicians, public servants, librarians, archivists, think-tankers and publishers. And there was a grateful, even besotted, reading public.

Stuart’s ability to read a manuscript and return it with detailed comment a few days later was legendary. We loved him for this selflessness, as for his loyalty. But his greatest act of generosity was to encourage us to find our own way of being historians. How easy it would have been for a man of such prodigious brilliance and unbending willpower to try to remake those he influenced into carbon copies of himself, or to assemble a devoted but dreary circle of disciples. Instead, Stuart lived what academic freedom might be.

What we so inadequately call Stuart’s generosity was just one expression of his understanding of what it meant to be an academic and a historian. For Stuart it was about citizenship. But citizenship can’t exist in the absence of other citizens: in his generosity, the only thanks Stuart wanted was that its beneficiaries would do the same for others when it was in their power. His understanding of the historian as citizen was why he took on all those leadership roles — in his own university, Melbourne, but also as president of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Historical Association, as chair of the Civics Expert Group, as a member of library councils and school history curriculum committees. It continued into what we might ironically call his retirement, as president of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History and chair of the Heritage Council of Victoria.

Stuart was incapable of writing a bad book, but my own favourite is A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries, published thirty years ago. It’s the one that spoke — and still speaks — the most to me, and the one that speaks to me most of Stuart himself: or at least of how he understood his own public and professional role. The “visionaries” in A Colonial Liberalism were George Higinbotham, Charles Pearson and David Syme. Along with some famous lines from Robert Burns’s “A Man’s a Man for a’ That,” Stuart kept a picture of Higinbotham on his office wall for years. I’m not sure if Stuart had heroes — leaving aside names such as Peck, Kennedy and Hudson — but it’s plain that Higinbotham was for him a powerful exemplar of what it meant to be a democratic citizen in this country. He was radical by intellect and conviction, fearless in his politics, firm in defence of principle, and generous — there’s that word again — in his sympathies. I think Stuart found much to admire in Pearson and Syme, too: Pearson was an academic historian, after all, and Syme a Scot. But Higinbotham was Stuart’s man.

Stuart’s early research was in British labour history and his two books on British Marxism have secured him a secure place as one of its most creative and penetrating interpreters. The history of communism and the radical left was there at the beginning, in the middle with The Reds, and at the end in The Party, completed with great fortitude during his illness. It was the subject that brought within a single frame Stuart’s own commitment to the left, his engagement with theory and ideas, his valuing of tradition, and his belief in the importance of political and labour history, broadly conceived, and told as a national story in an international context.

Stuart’s fascination with the lives people made in the Communist Party — so many of them working-class autodidacts — remained to the end. He’d been a party member, understood its culture deeply, and wrote memorably about these women and men. But Stuart here was also in this, I think, disclosing something of himself as a historian. He valued the breadth and variety that historical enquiry offered; more than most scientists experienced, he thought. In this way, being a historian is also to be a sort of autodidact. You’re always teaching yourself something new.

Stuart has been a highly original and deeply influential interpreter of our country, working on a large national canvas but never losing sight of the local, the particular and the idiosyncratic. He continued to write political history, and to make the case for its importance, at a time when historical fashion moved in other directions. But Stuart’s political history was also social, labour and economic history: his was no stuffy tale of high politics, of maps and chaps, nor a dogmatic account of the unfolding of history toward some inevitable outcome. Having as a young man immersed himself in Marxist theory, Stuart was indulgent towards younger scholars who followed their own theoretical paths, sometimes into marshes and bogs that he could see with clarity well before others. But he was uneasy about the fragmentation of history into narrow specialisms, avoided it in own practice, and warmly encouraged other foxes who knew “many things” while still loyally supporting hedgehogs with their eye on the “one big thing.”

Stuart was a stylish, engaging writer with a superb sense of rhythm. He always resisted the urge, which can be overwhelming in those with these gifts, to be too clever by half. He did not waste his talents ingratiating himself with the powerful by coining politically useful but intellectually vacuous phrases for them to use as guided missiles against their opponents. I recall discussion at a conference a few years back. How could historians influence policy? Should they write one-page briefing papers for ministers? A slide deck, perhaps, or a workshop with public servants? The best thing they could do, Stuart suggested, was write an important book. Stuart had recently done just that: Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s. It won prizes; it beat one of mine in a couple of shortlists.

Have you heard of Second Wind and Shadow King? No, I didn’t think so. They were placegetters to Phar Lap in the 1930 Melbourne Cup. I’m able to empathise with those two nags, huffing and puffing as they trailed behind the champion by several lengths.

Something remarkable happened a few years after Australia’s Boldest Experiment was published. It had its own second wind. Everyone, it seemed, was reading it: in the think tanks, in the federal Labor shadow cabinet, among the Twitterati — indeed wherever you encountered anyone who thought a global pandemic might also be an opportunity to make something better. Here was Stuart, now gravely ill, demonstrating again that it is only through reimagining the past that we can even begin to imagine a better future, as well as how it might be won. His historical and progressive commitments had come together in an almost miraculous alignment.

This radical historical imagination is why so many of us held Stuart in awe — not because he wrote lots of good books — great books — or kindly commented expertly on our work in a timely way. How Stuart would have hated the term “role model”! His own standards in prose, happily, were set by the great English historians of the nineteenth century, especially Macaulay, with a just dash of P.G. Wodehouse. So, I’ll use another word that might just have passed muster. Stuart has been a formidable exemplar of a historian’s life. Many of us have spent careers doing our best to negotiate his example, hampered by having a poor fraction of his talent and discipline. Fortunately for us, he was slow to judge when we inevitably fell short.

I recall encountering Stuart in a university caff in Calgary where we’d arrived for a conference. Typically, he had his nose in a book, brushing up on his Canadian history. The first business to be transacted was deliberation on the truly glorious fact that there were two Canadian historians known as Professor Careless and Professor Wrong. But after that, it was clear that what mattered most about Canada was that his daughter Mary and her partner Phi were there. No one who has known this warm and gracious man could have overlooked how much his family meant to him. I offer my deepest condolences to Martha, to Mary and Jessie, and to all in Stuart’s family. •

This eulogy was delivered at Ormond College on 30 November 2021. 

▶ Stuart Macintyre’s articles for Inside Story

The post The citizen historian appeared first on Inside Story.

But neither of the comparisons quite worked. Company mergers and acquisitions alone accounted for a massive $11 billion-plus in 1987; Aus­tralia had never seen anything like it. Yet while he recognised that “eventually the stock market will take a tumble,” Gottliebsen was optimistic: not only had unprecedented wealth been created but also the foundations of even greater wealth were being laid.

That the entrepreneurs’ castles were built of sand seemed to elude even the most experienced business journalists. As during every previous boom, there was something deeply alluring in the idea that this one was different. A recognition that “many of the new men were essentially traders, buying other people’s assets rather than creating new ones” was leavened, they believed, by the “aggregations of substance” they had supposedly assembled.

Of all the corporate battles of the 1980s, the greatest was between John Elliott and Robert Holmes à Court. It would be hard to conjure up two men less alike, but both wanted control of BHP, Australia’s largest company.

The chain-smoking, football-loving Elliott’s public persona was that of the rugged Aussie bloke without polish or pretension, one with the tastes and manner of an ordinary working man. “In an era when males are tending to become effeminate, he is the opposite end of the graph,” wrote journalist Keith Dunstan in 1985. A com­edy program that used rubber dolls to satirise Australian public life presented a beer-swilling, fag-smoking Elliott whose nose resembled more an ele­phants trunk than the admittedly ample version on his face. The Elliott doll’s verbal signature was to exclaim “pig’s arse!” often backed by a thunderous belch.

But in important ways Elliott epitomised a new breed of Australian businessman. A scion of the Melbourne middle class — to put him through a private school, his parents ran a milk bar on top of his father’s day job as a public relations man — he was among the first to complete a Master of Business Administration at Melbourne University. From there, he worked for the consulting firm McKinsey, including eighteen months in its Chicago office, returning to Australia determined to apply American management know-how to the local scene.

Elliott was a planner, a businessman who believed that gut instinct and dogged determination were of no use without a clear strategy and a talented team of executives. Having set his sights in the early 1970s on an old and underperforming Tasmanian jam company, Henry Jones IXL, he gained the critical backing of powerful members of the Melbourne business establishment for a takeover bid. Sir Ian McLennan, the chairman of BHP, was a supporter, as was Sidney Baillieu Myer of the namesake retailing firm, and Roderick Carnegie, Elliott’s boss at McKinsey and later managing director and chairman of the giant mining company Conzinc Riotinto of Australia.

Elliott assembled a team of smart young men who, from their modest offices in South Yarra near the old IXL Jam Factory — redeveloped as a collection of posh shops and boutiques — went on to take over the old SA pastoral company Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort in 1981. McLennan, at seventy-two, emerged from retirement to become chairman of the com­pany being run by his forty-year-old protégé, identifying it more closely than ever with the Melbourne business establishment. The spectacular acquisition of Carlton and United Breweries for almost $1 billion followed two years later: coming as it did in the very week the Australian dollar was floated, it could be construed as cutting the ribbon on the age of the 1980s entrepreneur.

The dramatic chain of events was triggered by another takeover specialist, Ron Brierley, who had built up a stake in CUB, to which its board and chairman, seventy-one-year-old Sir Edward Cohen, responded with something less than a vigorous defence. Elders IXL was already effectively a subsidiary of CUB, which owned just under half the company, so Elliott was deeply interested in any attempt by an outsider to accumulate a large parcel of CUB stock.

While Cohen dithered over legal technicalities, Elliott and his advisers brushed off their contingency plan for just this kind of eventuality. Having decided that only a full takeover of CUB would work financially for Elders IXL, the nimble Elliott raised the $700 million cash he needed from three foreign banks in just a couple of days, incidentally contributing to the federal government’s decision to float the dollar. BRW declared the rapid-fire takeover of CUB a “victory for the smart, fast-moving, MBA-style business breed over the entrenched traditionalist.” CUB’s board would not be the last to find itself unable to withstand the pressures of the new kind of corporate life that emerged in the 1980s.

By early 1984 Elliott led one of Australia’s largest and most successful companies. He was powerful and well paid but not personally wealthy by the standards of the era’s really big men, since he owned only a modest stake in the company he led. He was also unusual among the major entrepre­neurs of the period in wearing his political allegiances on his sleeve, eventually becoming federal president of the Liberal Party in 1987 after an earlier stint as treasurer. His supporters in the Liberal Party talked of him as “the rich man’s Bob Hawke” — to which an obvious retort might have been that prime minister Bob Hawke was already the rich man’s Bob Hawke — and he had publicly expressed political ambitions as early as 1973.

As the Liberals floundered under Andrew Peacock’s leadership following the 1983 election, and again under John Howard after the 1987 defeat, Elliott emerged as one possible answer to their problems. The talk about a transfer to politics continued through the 1980s, as if the party didn’t already have enough destabilising factors to contend with.

Elliott often gave the impression that he regarded the current crop of politicians — on both sides — as a collec­tion of mediocrities, and that all the country really needed was to hand over the reins to a successful businessman — that is, to someone just like him. He repeatedly revealed an absence of political finesse, publicly criticised the policies and leadership of his own party, and made a habit of impugning the very vocation that he claimed to be interested in practising. His policy ideas were also frequently impractical, while his understanding of history, to which he made frequent allusion, was embarrassingly shallow. Churchill and Thatcher were his heroes: like them, John Dorman Elliott would save his ailing country from the squabbling, weak-kneed bunglers.

Holmes à Court cut a very different kind of figure: aristocratic in bearing, prone to long and seemingly thoughtful silences, carefully chewing over his words, dry in wit, polished in manners, refined in taste. Distantly related to Lord Heytesbury, a nineteenth-century British politician and diplomat, he called his private company Heytesbury Securities and used the family insignia as his own. He had garages full of classic cars and studs of valuable thoroughbreds, but did not bet. And when his horse, Black Knight, won the 1984 Melbourne Cup, he was a long way from Flemington, tucked up asleep in London where he was doing business.

While Holmes à Court was not given to advertising his political allegiances, his wife Janet was left-wing and his own loathing of racism as a young man appears to have been one of the reasons he decided to live in Australia rather than Rhodesia or South Africa. The financial journalist David Uren noted that Holmes à Court “never indulged in the union-bashing oratory or monetarist pontificating common among his peers in the business world.” When unions, worried about a possible threat to the steel plan developed by Labor industry minister John Button, expressed opposition to his bid for BHP, he had little difficulty reassuring them that they had no cause for alarm, and he similarly managed to charm powerful members of the Hawke government.

All the same, Gareth Evans, federal minister for resources and energy, confessed in his diary in March 1986 after dinner with the Holmes à Courts that he was becoming irritated with the entrepreneur’s “absolutely unashamed arrogance — if that’s the right word: maybe it’s better to say ‘supreme self-confidence.’” Yet Evans remained impressed with “the sheer class of the man… which is manifestly in a cate­gory above and beyond any of his competitors, and light years beyond that which BHP itself can muster.”

Holmes à Court launched his first bid for BHP in 1983 using a tractor distribution company called Wigmores. Few took the bid seriously and Holmes à Court was able to acquire only a small number of shares. A sec­ond attempt in 1984 was a more serious proposition: this time he built up a 4.5 per cent stake. His masterstroke, however, was to enter into an options agreement with another aggressive share raider, John Spalvins of Adsteam, which in essence allowed him to continue secretly building his stake while BHP thought he was actually offloading its shares. In October 1985 it came to light that Holmes à Court owned an alarming 11 per cent of the company.

With a share-market value by 1986 of around $10 billion, and more than 60,000 employees and 180,000 shareholders — many of them in for the long haul — BHP would be a glittering prize for any entrepreneur with the wit, resources and luck to gain control of it. When the social researcher Hugh Mackay investigated Australia’s attitudes to big business in 1985, he found that BHP had “a special status in that many people appear to feel themselves qualified to comment” on its performance and management. He attributed this specialness to BHP’s dominant position and corporate advertising in which it deliberately placed itself in a close relationship with the com­munity, with the result that the community felt that it had a right to criticise as well as to praise.

BHP also mattered to government for these kinds of rea­sons, for its role as a major producer of what had become the country’s most lucrative export commodity, coal, and for the $3.4 billion in tax, royalties and levies it delivered every year.

The Hawke government flirted with the idea of applying a national-interest test to Holmes à Court’s ambitions. For its part, BHP wanted the government to block him by using a Trade Practices Act provision prohibiting the transfer of monopolies. In early March 1986, Hawke government ministers heard each side in the struggle make its pitch, BHP executives first, led by their managing director Brian Loton, and then the lone figure of Holmes à Court the following day.

When treasurer Paul Keating told Loton they would also be seeing Holmes à Court, the BHP man replied, “I know, Paul, I’ve got to tell you he’s fantastic; you know he’s his own finan­cial adviser, his own lawyer, his own analyst and his own operator. He’s phenomenal.” Holmes à Court didn’t disappoint, easily outshining the BHP team. Cabinet, after reassurance from Keating, rejected the idea of interfer­ing in the matter. When Stewart West, the only minister to put up any resistance, predicted “a great unity ticket in caucus against the cabinet’s proposal,” Keating replied, “It won’t be the first time that caucus has leapt to the defence of the Melbourne Club.”

Keating and almost everyone in cabinet had again signalled sympathy with the risk-takers against the establishment. As far as big takeover bids were concerned, the free market and the national interest were now one — and this idea would increasingly overtake the government’s attitude to the economy as a whole. While attracting much less attention than the decision to float the dollar, the government’s hands-off approach to the struggle for BHP was hardly less significant. The reasoning was simple, and based on the very same assumption as the decision to float: the market knew best. If the financiers were prepared to bankroll a bidder and a company’s shareholders were willing to sell at the price being offered, then that was the most rigorous national-interest test available.

As one of its critics, Brian Toohey, put it in 1987, the government believed “the market is always right. It commands respect, because, behind its apparent volatility, it makes impersonal, objective judgments… What would have been dismissed a few years ago by Labor advisers as an ideology of unswerving self-interest is now accepted as ‘market sentiment’ faithfully reflecting some undefined, but greatly revered ‘fundamentals.’” Here indeed was a new way of thinking, especially for Labor, Toohey added; to question the mar­ket was to risk being “branded a fossil from the Whitlam era.” But this economic rationalism also hitched the government to a wagon that would provide a wild ride in the years ahead.

Markets, as Toohey suggested, were not impersonal things. They were made of people, and the Melbourne establishment showed that it was still capable of closing ranks against a raider from the west. When Holmes à Court looked likely to take control of BHP unless a third player intervened decisively — and it was clear it would not be the federal government — Elliott was able to repay some old debts to the Melbourne establishment that had long backed him, while using the threat to strengthen the company he led.

In January 1986 Holmes à Court announced a bid of $1.295 billion, which would have given him 39 per cent of BHP. Given the spread of small share­holders, that was quite sufficient to control the company. Talks between Elliott and BHP about defensive action began; Elliott saw BHP as a potential backer of the interna­tional expansion of his brewing interests and didn’t want the company to fall into the hands of an interloper. But there was no agreement between the two companies about how to deal with the threat from Holmes à Court, and BHP looked like it might suffer the same fate at his hands as CUB had suffered at Elliott’s.

Elliott decided to take action without BHP’s knowledge or cooperation, in the hope of getting the Big Australian to the negotiating table. Elders would acquire just under 20 per cent of the company, ideally forcing the company into a billion-dollar investment in Elders IXL as a defensive cross-shareholding arrangement.

On 10 April 1986, having lined up a couple of billion dollars from bankers, stockbrokers operating for Elders were offering to buy BHP shares for 72 cents more than the closing price of the previous day. There was much excited speculation that Elliott was behind the $10 million per minute splurge on the Melbourne Stock Exchange, and just before two o’clock he called BHP’s Brian Loton to confirm the rumours. After more buying on overseas exchanges overnight and in Melbourne the following day, Elders had a stake of almost 19 per cent of BHP, close to the maximum permitted without announcing a formal takeover bid.

It had been a frenzied day of trading, the boom’s emblematic moment. BHP responded quickly by taking out a $1 billion shareholding in Elders IXL, a prudent measure since anyone who now gained control of Elders would, as a result, also win a large stake in BHP. But Elliott didn’t enjoy negotiating with his rival Holmes à Court. They met over two-and-a-half hours on the Saturday morning following the Elders raid, each refusing to sell his stake to the other. Holmes à Court offered to take over Elders on terms he thought might be attractive to Elliott: “We’d get control and you’d get to be prime minister.” As was common in negotiations with Holmes à Court, the meeting was punctuated by long periods of silence. “We spent a lot of time just looking out of the window,” Elliott recalled, “which pissed me off because I was anxious to get away to the footy.”

By the end of May Holmes à Court would own about 28 per cent of BHP’s shares — not enough to control the company, but too many for him to be ignored indefinitely. Both he and Elliott would be appointed to the BHP board in a peace deal agreed later in 1986, although no one imagined that either of these ferociously competitive men could remain content with this arrangement for very long.

But Elliott’s fortunes, seemingly so high, were destined to plummet during the late 1980s as he desperately sought to raise his status from a highly paid executive to a super-wealthy, freewheeling, all-powerful entre­preneur. To achieve that goal, he and some of his IXL cronies created a company called Harlin Holdings as the vehicle for a management buyout of Elders IXL. This ethical minefield involved his taking possession of a company that he was being paid by shareholders to run in their interests.

Backed by BHP money, Harlin acquired about 18 per cent of the group in 1988. In the following year Elliott, worried that the emergence of another large investor would dilute his influence, agreed to take up another 17 per cent of the company at $3 per share from friendly shareholders. When the regulatory authorities insisted that he make the same offer to all shareholders, his problems began to get out of control.

Elliott expected that few would wish to sell at what he regarded as a low price, but he was inundated with offers and ended up with 56 per cent of the company and a $3 billion debt: far more than could be serviced by the dividends he would receive from his investment. In 1990 he stood down as chairman of Foster’s Brewing Group, as the com­pany was now called, after it reported a $1.3 billion loss; he was booed at its annual general meeting.

BHP finally pulled the plug on its financing of Elliott’s activities in mid 1992, calling in a $1 billion debt. Pursued by the National Crime Authority for years in connection with one of his deals in the 1986 play for control of BHP, a decade later Elliott was acquitted of charges of theft and conspiracy involving $66.5 million after a court found the NCA’s pursuit of Elliott unlawful.

Elliott seemed to enter the 1990s with plenty of money — if less than he once had hoped for. He became a major grower of rice and miller of flour, and retained the presidency of his beloved Carlton Football Club, which named a new stand after him. He was a survivor of the 1980s, albeit much diminished in stature from the business star who planned to enter politics to save the country from socialism and mediocrity.

In the more straitened early 1990s, though, Elliott’s style of business, politics and masculinity seemed to belong to a bygone era. The magic was gone: more of his businesses collapsed in the early 2000s, and breaches of the rules governing player payments brought his downfall at Carlton, too. The final blow was struck when his name was erased from the grand­stand that had honoured him. •

This is an edited extract from The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (Black Inc., 2015).

The post The dealmaker appeared first on Inside Story.

This six-part series is the latest in a long line of TV series and telemovies set in Australia’s 1980s, including dramatisations of the magazine industry (Paper Giants: Magazine Wars) and the lives of prime minister Bob Hawke (Hawke), ultramarathon runner Cliff Young (Cliffy) and rock group INXS (INXS: Never Tear Us Apart). Each appealed to the nostalgia of two groups who have money to indulge their taste for it: boomers and generation Xers, who were either young or middle-aged during that decade.

But more years have passed, making The Newsreader as much period drama as The Doctor Blake Mysteries, or — going back further — the long-running serial The Sullivans. The latter, set in Melbourne in the second world war, began screening about three and a half decades after the beginning of that conflict. The Newsreader is set in 1986, thirty-five years ago.

Centred on a television newsroom, the romantic drama at the show’s heart involves “difficult” star newsreader Helen Norville, played by Anna Torv, and ambitious up-and-comer Dale Jennings (Sam Reid). It is hard to avoid the parallels with the American romantic comedy Broadcast News (1987), in which the telegenic “star” is the blond, glitzy and shallow newsreader Tom Grunick, played by William Hurt. That film’s romance lies in the triangle between Grunick, the talented and highly strung Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) and the intellectually substantial but physically unremarkable Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), who is destined to be the also-ran in both his professional career and his love for Jane.

The Newsreader’s Helen combines many of the qualities of Broadcast News’s Tom and Jane. Like Tom, she is glamorous, popular and an on-screen natural: the cameras love her. Like Jane, she lives for her work, she wants news to be more substantial and serious, and her private life is a bit of a disaster. Dale is likeable and handsome in a slightly dorky kind of way — the kind of colleague who is subjected to good-natured teasing to his face and mild ridicule behind his back. He keeps a videotape collection of all his TV appearances, has worked a little too hard to get his voice right, and blows his first chance to read an “update” by reading too fast — a colleague suggests he’d make a great race caller — and then too slow. (I was again reminded of Aaron in Broadcast News who, finally given the chance to read to camera that he had long craved, sweats so profusely that he seems in danger of collapse.)

A love triangle is developing in The Newsreader, too, although not one that would have been risked in a mainstream comedy like Broadcast News. Gay cameraman Tim (Chai Hansen) is sufficiently obsessed with the developing relationship between Dale and Helen to let Dale know that his interest is other than platonic. And there are plenty of hints that the boyish Dale’s sexuality remains somewhat unresolved.

TV often evokes past times through their consumer technologies, and the 1980s — the last decade before the digital revolution — especially so. At the beginning of the first episode, the producers of the 6pm news have a mishap with some footage on a video cassette: a replacement has to be made. Messages arrive on fax machines — more than the computer, the key office technology of the era. Our eyes are assailed not by bright pastels of the kind often used to evoke the 1960s and 1970s but by the relentlessly subdued beiges, tans and fawns of wood-panelled settings, if not of Jane’s spectacular shoulder pads.

But the office politics speak to our own times as much as the 1980s. Those who have the most power are male, stale and pale; I’m no expert on the subject, but I have a feeling this world wouldn’t be completely unrecognisable to today’s journalists. The experienced boss, Lindsay (William McInnes), is both exasperated with Helen and dependent on her for ratings — and ultimately protective of her in an old-fashioned way that is tinged with the hint of sexual attraction. The male anchor, Geoff Walters (Robert Taylor), evokes something of the gravitas of the two venerable Brians of 1980s TV news in Australia, Henderson and Naylor; but his insecurity and taste for intrigue mean he can’t quite pull it off. His highly ambitious wife Evelyn (Marg Downey) stokes his ambitions, convincing him that great days are still ahead for him.

Women’s power is more fragile, uncertain and conditional. Helen drives a hard bargain, but because she teeters on the edge of falling apart she never quite carries the freight of that very 1980s figure, a woman succeeding in a man’s world. Perhaps better evoking women’s professional life in that era is Noelene (Michelle Lim Davidson), a Korean-Australian, who is seemingly the newsroom’s most competent employee. It’s clear she’s going to spend a career being taken for granted and cleaning up after people like Rob Rickards (Stephen Peacocke), a likeable enough Aussie sporting jock without too many social graces who seems to be vaguely sweet on her.

Each of the three episodes so far has centred on a historical event evocative of the time: Halley’s Comet, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and the release of Lindy Chamberlain. In this weekend’s episode, it will be the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson paired with the bombing of the Russell Street Police Station. All sorts of other period references are strewn through the first three episodes: Paul Hogan makes an early, obligatory appearance as Australian of the Year, and it isn’t long before we are discussing AIDS and, on a lighter note, the new butterfly enclosure at Melbourne Zoo and the Cabbage Patch Kids.

There is something slightly fetishistic about all of this: the effect is sometimes like “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” that Billy Joel song packed with historical references. But history is essentially used as a way of orienting and providing the setting for the romantic drama. No one is likely to come out of The Newsreader with a much better understanding of the 1980s than they already have, and it is hard to imagine anyone who didn’t live through the decade making much of the many events that are referenced.

The Newsreader is enjoyable enough, sometimes funny, pleasingly nostalgic and well acted. The writing is engaging rather than sparkling. But perhaps the gestures to banality are part of the point, for the series is self-conscious about the stereotypes, clichés and fictions in which television news trades, then and now. And it is in its evocation of that media world — one that was on the cusp of radical transformation — that The Newsreader might be at its sharpest. While it is hardly an elegy, its characters do sometimes appear to be sleepwalking into a night that will bring to their cosy little world greater terrors than anything their own times were capable of sending their way. •

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The Vetting of Wisdom has many of these qualities. We are drawn into the struggle for control of a Melbourne private school, identifying with the heroine, headmistress Joan Montgomery, barracking for her supporters even in their missteps, willing the plotters to fail, hoping for right to defeat might while suspecting that in the end the numbers will tell a different story. As they do. But we are also reminded that power gained and exercised by a highly motivated but out-of-touch minority can sometimes be fragile. Those who managed to push Montgomery out of her position soon found themselves sidelined within their own church. It is easier to pull down than to build — and that is a lesson in power with relevance to organisations of all sizes.

The book is more than an account of a factional war. It is also an affectionate biography of an influential educator by a former school captain, Kim Rubenstein, now a distinguished professor of law at the University of Canberra. And it is obviously a labour of love — a tribute to a woman, Montgomery, who wasn’t able to depart the school on her own terms, with due recognition of the esteem in which she was held by peers, parents and pupils.

Its setting matters. Presbyterian Ladies’ College was the national leader in girls’ education, established in 1875 on the understanding that it would offer an education “equivalent to that provided by the leading colonial boys’ schools.” There was controversy from the earliest years, since its headmaster, Charles Henry Pearson, formerly a professor of modern history at King’s College London, was soon moonlighting as a political activist who advocated a land tax to break up the estates of the wealthy landed class. He would go on to serve as a Liberal parliamentarian and minister and was, by the time of his death, one of the world’s more influential public intellectuals because of his book National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893).

The title of The Vetting of Wisdom is borrowed from a newspaper article published during the battle for control of the school, and references a novel by one of the school’s many distinguished former students, Ethel Richardson, better known as Henry Handel Richardson. Other famous “old girls” include Vida Goldstein, destined to become a feminist activist, and the young woman who became Dame Nellie Melba. We are dealing with Melbourne Brahmans here, but also with a school that has played a significant part in the educational life of the nation.

The origins of the dispute lay in the merger of three Australian churches — Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational — in 1977 to become the Uniting Church. While most members voted to join the new church, a Presbyterian minority was determined to continue separately. That raised the question of what would happen to the schools associated with the three denominations. A “property commission” awarded the two most prestigious of them, PLC and Scotch College, to the Continuing Presbyterians. Litigation by the school council resulted in PLC’s becoming an independent corporate body, but the system for deciding the council’s subsequent composition virtually guaranteed the Continuing Presbyterians a permanent 12–5 majority.

None of this would have mattered if the Continuing Presbyterians hadn’t been determined to return the school to what they regarded as the straight and narrow. They believed PLC was too secular, too concerned with academic excellence as understood in a profane world dominated by the fallen, and too little concerned with sound religious instruction based on the Bible. They denied they were fundamentalists, but there was the strong whiff of the Covenanters about them. Certainly, no one who read this book would imagine that the civil wars ended with the Battle of Worcester.

In some ways, Montgomery was an unlikely target. The daughter of a bank manager, she had a long and impressive record as both a teacher and headmistress before her appointment to PLC for the 1969 school year. Like many of the women who were the leaders in this world of private girls’ schools, she remained unmarried: it was hard for this lapsed Catholic reader not to think of the parallel with the nuns who ran the Catholic girls’ schools of the same era, often with a similar independence.

Yet Montgomery was hardly a radical. The school was unmistakably Christian and provided solid religious education, although with a comparative and analytical dimension that didn’t please the critics. It also welcomed girls who were not Presbyterian. Rubenstein is herself Jewish and recalls that Montgomery went to the trouble of acquiring a Hebrew bible as a graduation gift, rather than the Christian version offered most other girls.

Montgomery had initiated “Liberal Studies” and “Human Relations” — including sex education — programs in the 1970s, which some critics managed to inflate into a dangerous trend towards humanism and even Marxism. Yet, while these gentle gestures to the revolutionary changes of the era were handy targets for her enemies, they don’t appear to have been the central issue. Rubenstein believes it was Montgomery’s emphasis on preparing girls to participate in society as the equals of men that was at the heart of the dispute.

Rubenstein also hints at another possibility. In the mid 1950s, after she had returned from Britain, Montgomery had asked Max Bradshaw, the session clerk at the Hawthorn Presbyterian Church where she had previously worshipped, for a transfer to Toorak, to which members of her family had also moved. When Bradshaw refused, Montgomery replied, “Oh, have I been excommunicated?!” It was Bradshaw who would lead the charge against Montgomery two decades later. Was he still nursing a grudge against a woman who, not yet thirty years old, had shown such an intolerable level of independence? Were similar kinds of monsters being made in the PLC of the 1970s and 1980s?

Montgomery was forced out of her job at sixty but has continued as a respected educator and citizen in the decades since. This deeply affectionate but well-researched portrait has been prepared by its author over many years. Rubenstein is a conscientious biographer who, while wearing her allegiance on her sleeve, has done her best to enter the minds of Montgomery’s opponents, who often behave intolerantly and unattractively. But we do need to understand such people, not least because the legacy of the conservative gender code they did so much to uphold remains with us, and notably in many of our private schools. The outsized influence still wielded by some of the male products of those schools is a problem for all of us. •

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All is not lost for the government. The media bandwagon has changed gears in recent days and, possibly feeling pity for a regime so unable to present its citizens with clear public health messages, seems to have decided to take on the job itself. To take just one example: this week’s episode of Media Watch was largely devoted to countering the “beat-up” over AstraZeneca. It reported on other media but did so in a way that made it clear Paul Barry thinks we should stop worrying and learn to love the jab. It was essentially an op-ed.

The prospects for a government that can rely on help of this kind from the supposedly left-leaning ABC should not be written off. But it doesn’t deserve such help. The vaccination disaster is the worst national public policy failure in modern Australian history, rivalled only by Paul Keating’s early-1990s recession “we had to have.”

Australia will eventually complete its vaccination program — presumably, some time in 2022 — and it might even manage to do so without the loss of several hundred more lives to Covid-19. But the casual approach we have seen so far, especially in getting aged care workers vaccinated, means that we are far from out of the woods. Still, it is too easy to blame the nation’s vaccination ordeal on an incompetent government and its publicity-obsessed leader. There is more to it than the frailties of any particular government.

What we have seen in recent months is the workings of a hollowed-out national government. It has decent systems — run by the Australian Taxation Office and Centrelink — for shuffling money around, provided you are not a robodebt victim. It has some agencies that have been able to undertake their regulatory work effectively, helping to keep the economy going and supporting efforts to manage public health.

But when it comes to hands-on service delivery, the federal government now seems rather hopeless. It is incomprehensible that it placed so many eggs in the AstraZeneca basket; no explanation has ever been offered, and many journalists seem to have the attention span of a goldfish in such matters.

It was not always the case that federal governments were so distinguished by what they could not do. Writing a quarter of a century ago, the historian A.T. Ross showed that in the interwar period the federal government pursued a defence policy based on the development of a local capability in munitions production — called “self-containment” — so that Australia would not depend on overseas supply. At the heart of the effort was a Munitions Supply Board, established in 1921, which would provide incentives for companies to produce locally by funding research and development. It even set up government factories in priority areas, to pioneer complex production processes. Ross went so far as to argue that Australia was saved from invasion in 1942 by its industrialisation more than by the United States of America.

Those were the days when federal governments held the hose. There is an even more telling example for our own times: the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1919. The effectiveness of the government-led vaccination program is open to question, especially as it was another decade or more before flu was recognised to be viral rather than bacterial, but the ambition is worth recalling.

Even before the Spanish flu arrived in Australia, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories — established as recently as 1916 — was working on a vaccine. CSL had collected sputum from returning soldiers who had already been exposed to the outbreak, and used agar — derived from a Japanese seaweed — to grow the bacillus. The vaccine comprised a mixture of chemically killed bacteria, some recovered from the deceased victims of earlier flu outbreaks.

By February 1919 CSL had already distributed more than a million doses, and orders arriving at CSL’s new Parkville premises were being met within twenty-four hours. CSL would eventually produce something like three million doses for a country with a population of only about five million. In Sydney, the Prince Alfred Hospital and the Royal North Shore Hospital were each making a vaccine. Nurses sometimes donated the blood needed to make the product. Vaccine depots were well patronised, and heavy demand did occasionally lead to shortages and the administration of part-doses.

There was some vaccine hesitancy, then as now, but certainly with more reason. The vaccine content was based on guesswork — which was wrong, as it turned out — and the needles were much bigger and really hurt. A Dr Joel, who reported “results which are nothing short of miraculous” for the CSL vaccine among the sailors on his watch as a naval doctor, gave the hesitators short shrift: “Conscientious objectors, if the legislature has not the courage to compel inoculation, should be isolated from the rest of the community, it being pointed out to them that we object not so much to their attempted suicide as to their carrying the disease unmitigated to those who are not tired of life.”

No extensive clinical trials were carried out; nor was there a rigorous approval regime. Governments didn’t need to worry whether one or two in a few hundred thousand recipients might get a blood clot. They did not have the political nightmare of the pink batts saga a few years behind them, a permanent reminder to government that if your efforts to save the country from a global crisis result in the tragic deaths of four citizens, that is all that anyone will recall. Citizens certainly won’t remember the million houses that were successfully insulated, or the carbon emissions reduction achieved. They won’t be convinced by arguments that workers are too often losing their lives on building sites yet no one calls a royal commission to investigate.

Some recent commentary suggests the CSL vaccine might have benefited recipients by boosting their immune systems. In a way, though, whether it worked or not is rather beside the point today. The scientists were operating in the context of extremely limited knowledge about influenza, and they did their best to protect the Australian people, with the rapidly rising capacities of a national government behind them.

The confidence of the Australian federal government of that era of nation-building is striking — as is the contrast with its low ambition and incapacity today, despite its vastly greater size and the massive material, intellectual and technological resources now at its disposal. We should all be alarmed by what the federal government has shown it cannot do — by its incompetence in both words and deeds — as well as by what the present occupants don’t regard as any of their business.

The lesson has relevance to much more than pandemic management. Is it any wonder that people are looking to state governments to protect them, and turning to nutters on the web for health advice? •

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In 1984 the high-profile businessman and Liberal Party identity John Elliott, president of the Carlton Football Club, led an initiative to form a breakaway league. The VFL responded by changing its governance structure and redoubling its efforts to corporatise the sport. Pressure mounted to close grounds and merge clubs, or to move some clubs interstate to tap into new “‘markets.” Fitzroy — a team based in an old but now gentrifying inner suburb — was still enjoying fair success on the field in the mid 1980s but only narrowly averted an attempt to move it to Brisbane in 1986 (a move that would eventually be forced in 1996).

Efforts to merge or move clubs provoked lively grassroots resistance on the part of supporters for whom the Saturday afternoon ritual was a link not only with a loved place — the home ground — but also with a way of life pursued by their parents and grandparents. The defiant and successful movement in late 1989 to save the struggling western suburban Footscray from a merger with Fitzroy drew on loyalties to class, club and community, a sense that others looked down on the western suburbs, a feeling that malign forces were trying to destroy something precious and loved.

For those who fought to save Footscray, one of the problems was the VFL’s obsession with creating a national league, one that would extend the code — or “product” — to Sydney and Brisbane as well as encompass the major football-playing states of South Australia and Western Australia. By 1991 what was now called the Australian Football League included clubs from all five mainland states.

For a time it seemed that rich men would become not merely the presidents but also the owners of teams. The major experiment of this kind involved the Sydney Swans, a club that emerged from the northward relocation of the declining South Melbourne team in 1981. The effort to place the Swans on a secure financial base and promote the game to a Sydney audience flushed out “medical entrepreneur” Dr Geoffrey Edelsten, then unfamiliar to most members of the public but better known to the Australian Taxation Office.

Since graduating in medicine from Melbourne University, Edelsten had enjoyed a colourful if rather chequered career as a medico, businessman and playboy. He had produced pop records, owned a nightclub, established his own flying doctor service, run health studios, set up a high-tech pathology laboratory in the United States, and offered a Family Health Plan in Sydney — which looked to police rather like a medical insurance business minus the necessary licence. He had even sponsored the Bluebirds, a troupe of dancing girls whose presence at Carlton home games was intended to add an American-style razzamatazz and sexiness.

By the mid 1980s — now grey-haired but still with an eye for female talent — he had married a professional model, Leanne, more than twenty years his junior. Edelsten was now best known for operating a chain of Sydney surgeries that, in their decor and design, had more in common with brothels than most people’s image of a humble general practitioner’s rooms. But then Edelsten was no humble general practitioner, even if all his patients needed to do to enjoy the luxurious facilities provided by “the Hugh Hefner of medicine” was to flash their green and gold Medicare card.

“His surgeries are decked out in gold, with salmon pink velvet couches, enormous chandeliers and mink-covered examination tables,” reported one journalist. “Gold-clad hostesses and a small robot offer refreshments and educational advice to patients, who are told that if they wait more than ten minutes to be attended to they are entitled to a free Instant Lottery ticket.” The surgeries also came with white baby grand pianos; a pianist was sometimes paid to entertain patients while they waited.

The glitz of the surgeries was matched by the Edelstens’ private life. There was the $6 million home in Dural and luxury cars with numberplates that said “Macho,” “Spunky” and “Groovy.” And there were Edelsten’s gifts to Leanne, which supposedly included a pink helicopter — that it was pink Edelsten always denied, but many people swear that they saw it — and, the Daily Telegraph reported, “a $100,000 pink Italian sports car lined with white mink.”

In late July 1985 the VFL agreed to award the licence for the Swans to Edelsten in preference to the bid of another businessman, Basil Sellers (a man “of much more conservative bearing,” according to the Canberra Times). The league needed to get the Swans noticed in a tough market, and Edelsten appeared to be just the kind of showman capable of helping it out. Indeed, the syndicate to which he belonged played up the glamour as a means of distinguishing itself from the other bidders. It promoted the Edelstens as embodying Sydney’s colour, playfulness and hedonism in contrast with the sober restraint of Melbourne. Edelsten exuded flamboyance, wealth and success, and Leanne — present when her husband learned that his Swans bid had been successful and wearing, according to one report, “a sequined white jumper, red leather pants and wet-look white thigh-length boots” — was central to his image.

Media reports said the price was $6.3 million, a figure that casual observers assumed had been carved out of a much greater fortune, but it soon became clear that the deal was a rather more tangled one. Edelsten eventually handed over about $3 million, mainly other people’s money. It looked increasingly as if he was really a frontman for other interests, but there was no denying his ability to attract notice. He was helped by a spectacular, long-maned, blond full-forward named Warwick Capper, who wore striking white boots and shorts even tighter and more revealing than the usual skimpy kind. He, too, briefly became an image of Sydney spunkiness and flamboyance.

Edelsten’s association with the Swans gave his surgeries publicity that allowed him to evade the prohibition on doctors advertising their services, but it was the doctor’s business interests outside football that caused him problems soon after the award of the licence. A Labor senator, George Georges, alleged under parliamentary privilege that Edelsten was the “Dr X” named in a parliamentary committee report as being investigated for medical fraud. Edelsten took out a full-page advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald declaring his innocence. An exposé of Edelsten’s business methods in the satirical magazine Matilda, which imputed various forms of lurid criminality, added further damage and provoked a lawsuit.

Worse followed: Edelsten soon stood accused of having hired the notorious hit man Christopher Dale Flannery to assault a patient who had given him trouble. He had already stood aside as Swans chairman but still had a long way to fall. He subsequently became bankrupt, divorced, and was struck off the medical register and sent to prison. And as the 1980s passed into mythology, his and Leanne’s lifestyle was seen to epitomise the era’s excesses. •

This article draws on The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (Black Inc., 2015).

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Compare that with former education minister Dan Tehan, speaking in June last year: “To power our post-Covid economic recovery, Australia will need more educators, more health professionals and more engineers, and that is why we are sending a price signal to encourage people to study in areas of expected employment growth… Universities need a greater focus on domestic students and greater alignment with industry needs… If you are going to do ancient Greek, do IT with it.”

Or the present education minister, Alan Tudge, on university research: “Too often, our research does not make it through to translation and commercialisation — it falls into the ‘valley of death’ between academia and industry, between theory and real-world application… How can we strategically direct our investment to de-risk universities and businesses reaching across the valley of death, and drive a higher return on public funding?”

Menzies matched his sentiments with actions. Before he looked at the report of the 1957 inquiry into Australian universities, he asked its chair, Sir Keith Murray, to record the essential points on a piece of paper. When Murray wrote down four or five rather expensive recommendations, Menzies didn’t bat an eyelid, telling him that “he thought he could promise to meet in full the essential proposals.” Murray wondered whether “any chairman of any government committee in any country ever had such an immediate and such a generous response.”

It is perhaps unfair to counterpose the giant of twentieth-century Australian politics and a couple of less outstanding members of the modern political class. But both, like Menzies himself, have built careers on the back of university degrees from prestigious institutions. Both went on from exclusive private schools to complete a string of degrees from Australian and overseas universities. Both did a Bachelor of Arts; Tehan even wrote his master’s thesis on the Frankfurt School Marxist Jürgen Habermas.

In fact, it would be hard to conceive of two politicians who have taken greater advantage of the educational opportunities provided by that globally unique mixture of private privilege and public provision that underpins what we call meritocracy in this country. And yet it’s probably unfair to single out this pair for any special blame when it comes to Coalition higher education policy. It was a mess before Covid. It will be a bigger mess after it.

That bigger mess is the result of the Coalition’s opportunistic change of heart about the future of “the enterprise university.” Researchers Simon Marginson and Mark Considine used this term about twenty years ago to describe the university that had emerged from “the Dawkins revolution,” that series of reforms undertaken by Labor minister John Dawkins in the second half of the 1980s.

Of course, what happened in Australia was part of a global trend. As Raewyn Connell argues in her excellent critique, The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change (2019), “The face of the modern university, as it smiles out from the television news, is a neat middle-aged man or woman in a well-cut business suit, speaking with confidence about markets, league tables and excellence.”

Marginson and Considine drew attention to the replacement of collegial structures with strong executive control, corporate governance, an increasing reliance on marketing, and the adoption of performance targets. Traditional departments based on recognised disciplines now competed with centres and institutes funded by “soft” money from government or business. Chronic underfunding of most activities, despite the reintroduction of university fees for domestic students, drove a “pseudo-market” in which universities filled the gap with international fee income and the aggressive pursuit of research funding.

The quest for international students, in particular, unleashed something of an entrepreneurial, some might say buccaneering, spirit among university managers. Judgements about quality increasingly came down to what the customer — otherwise known as a student — thought good, bad or in between. Despite diverse histories, universities came to look even more like one another. The model of the enterprise university presented them with an increasingly narrow set of possibilities.

In the years since Marginson and Considine, universities have increasingly focused on international league tables, despite their obvious flaws. University administrators have reinvigorated the worst kind of cultural cringe as they seek to imitate the elite universities of Europe and North America. Interestingly, Tudge has identified a preoccupation with these league tables as among universities’ many sins. This is of a piece with the larger hypocrisy of the Coalition, whose policies have given universities every encouragement to pursue this dubious measure of excellence.

It’s true that the Coalition didn’t create the enterprise university. Rather, its contribution has been to reduce public funding and increase student fees, forcing the universities to become more reliant on non-government sources of funding. It has sometimes tried to make the pseudo-market more like a real one, in this case driven by students — both domestic and international — transformed into walking ATMs (to borrow an image Connell picked up from a student at the University of Sydney).

The most recent example is Tehan’s Job-ready Graduates Package, which manipulates fees to redirect students away from the humanities disciplines supposedly incapable of leading to gainful employment and into the areas favoured by the government. It sets prices in this pseudo-market that bear no relation to demand for the “goods,” but if its real goal is to push an even greater share of the cost of education onto graduates, it is highly successful. It also cuts funding to the science disciplines. As I said, a mess.

Unsurprisingly, universities turned to international students to fill coffers that could not be filled by domestic student fees or by research grants that invariably fail to meet the full cost of the research. Meanwhile, governments helpfully established an immigration system based on a bewildering array of temporary visas that provided international students with the inside running towards permanent residency. In these ways, universities and governments have been partners in creating the discredited business model that has made Australia’s universities so vulnerable to the pandemic, and which the Coalition suddenly finds so on the nose.

Before the pandemic intervened, though, the flow of income from international student fees was paradoxically bestowing ever-greater independence on universities and ever-greater power (and, usually, higher salaries) on their vice-chancellors. Further down the ranks, if you were a dean who happened to be running a faculty raking in the dollars from this source — and needless to say, business degrees were more popular than those in the arts and humanities — you were one of the university’s princelings. The rest of us waited hopefully, like Lazarus at Dives’s table (and not in vain at my university, I’m pleased to report).

Now that Australia’s borders are mainly closed to international students, the Coalition has discovered a new mission for universities. Their main purpose is “to educate Australians.” According to Tudge, they are also supposed to “produce knowledge that contributes to our country and humanity.”

The reality, however, is that as long as Australian universities are teaching an overwhelmingly domestic student cohort and research funding remains at its present level, there is no business model operating or in prospect that will allow them to maintain the quality of their research and achieve the commercialisation being urged on them. Along with the arts, the universities have been the also-rans of the pandemic. Thousands of staff members have lost their jobs. A sector already too reliant on casual labour is becoming more so. In its recent budget, the government cut funding to universities further, virtually assuring further job losses and course cuts. An already demoralised sector almost seemed too exhausted to care. It certainly wasn’t surprised.

Commentators have puzzled over why the government felt compelled to help almost every corner of the economy except the universities. The belief that the Coalition hates the universities simply because it sees them as dominated by its “lefty” critics probably contains some truth. Similarly, universities contain few men in high-vis clothing, a demographic that Scott Morrison, in particular, sees as the key to keeping his job.

Still, all of this seems a bit simplistic. Instead, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the very independence and affluence that the lucrative international student market conferred on the universities created resentment among conservative politicians. The universities became too big for their own boots. The best-paid Australian vice-chancellors — with salaries around $1.5 million — earn several times the salary of a federal government minister. Even the average salary is several hundred thousand more than that of the prime minister. Reward for talent and responsibility is all very well, but this is probably not the best way to win friends and influence people in government. Universities who cry poor are likely to elicit a degree of cynicism.

Also influencing the political right is a lingering perception that universities are institutions of a vaguely socialist kind whose workers enjoy a level of feather-bedding unavailable elsewhere in the economy, courtesy of strong unions and vice-chancellors prone to softness in dealing with them. On this view, academics, and perhaps especially vice-chancellors, talk the language of public interest but are at heart rent-seekers looking for more resources, power and prestige.

To this cocktail has been added something else — long a presence in Coalition politics and on the political right but magnified in the era of Brexit and Trump: a know-nothing populism that sees the pursuit of culture wars as both the means and the end of political life. Its strains are much weaker in Australia than in the United States, but they exist, and they fuel a suspicion of science — especially climate science — and an outright hostility to university humanities and the arts sector.

This kind of warfare is believed to be good for votes, and especially for votes in marginal seats in regional areas and outer suburbs. The stereotypical tradie supposedly regards academics as wankers and universities as cesspits. He — and we are talking about blokes — doesn’t associate universities with (useful) medical science but with (false) climate science and (useless) humanities. In reality, of course, public trust in universities remains high, though there is no evidence that this attitude translates into a popular desire to hand over more of the taxpayer coin to keep them going.

Meanwhile, parents who agonise over the quality of school education seem strangely uninterested in universities. Once their kids are in — and able to enjoy the advantages that we know tertiary education can bestow in terms of career and life — keeping an eye on quality seems to be rare. Parents who would revolt if the science lab in their kids’ local high school wasn’t up to scratch don’t seem to care much if, say, there are gaping holes in the university library roof, even if they found out about them. Universities Australia, which claims to speak on behalf of the sector, has been able to do little to mitigate this indifference, and nor has the National Tertiary Education Union.

If there are too few votes in universities, governments will also find it hard to get interested. Australia’s federal system might be a hindrance here. I suspect your average state government, which doesn’t provide the funding, cares more than any federal government about the prestige of its local universities, and certainly more than any conservative federal government. There is little sense of national ownership, and only an attenuated belief that “great” universities help make the country “great.”

In the universities themselves, the pressures on staff and students have been significant. Despite its financial challenges, life at my own university, the ANU, is probably much better than in many of its counterparts. But teaching loads are certainly on the way up, and morale is fragile. The pandemic has drawn attention across the economy to the exploitative nature of much casual work in the Australian economy, and has magnified its social costs. This is also true of universities, some of which have found themselves accused of wage theft by casual employees.

The online technologies deployed to keep teaching going during lockdowns are not going away, although there is quite rightly impatience among many students about the lack of personal connection with teachers and other students. Much of the teaching in my own department is now done in person. Initially, students seemed greatly enthused to be out of their bedrooms and back in classrooms. In time, though, attendances — especially at lectures — tailed off to the levels familiar before the pandemic.

Some predict Covid has finally killed the lecture, and wish it good riddance. But some of us are less certain that this is a good thing, or if the lecture is truly on the way out. The art of listening is worth cultivating, as that champion listener Hugh Mackay argues so persuasively in his new book, The Kindness Revolution.

Where do Australia’s universities go from here? As the former Melbourne University vice-chancellor Glyn Davis has pointed out, path dependence ensures that change is not easy. Universities have long had an orientation towards professional training, and the expectations of parents and students will ensure that continues.

But what does professional training mean in the 2020s? The pandemic has dramatically illustrated that professionals can only operate successfully in their own field if they are able to use knowledge generated in others. Medical experts have had quick-and-dirty lessons in the complexities of mass communication. Economists have learned that their ideas about how governments should respond to the crisis won’t work if they are based on a faulty understanding of the epidemiology. Public servants have had to grapple with the complexities of mass psychology. Some journalists — perhaps the ultimate generalists — have made complete fools of themselves with their suddenly acquired DIY medical expertise.

What we might need in the post-Covid university is a new degree program — the BIH, or Bachelor of Intellectual Humility. But the virtues it would teach should form the foundation of all university education.

We could also take up Davis’s notion that we should encourage greater variety in our institutions. This is, of course, easier said than done. The Dawkins reforms were supposed to do as much by requiring each institution to enter into an agreement with the federal government that effectively set out what it would do in exchange for its funding. In reality, powerful impulses towards standardisation and rationalisation produced a national system in which institutions amalgamated and grew. The new behemoths then plunged money into persuading prospective students, here and abroad, that they were better than the rather similar place just up the road.

The mega-universities that emerged from these processes are problematic institutions. They often have terrific cafes, but they are large, bureaucratic and unwieldy. They make a virtue of scale, as if there were not first-class universities around the world that are a quarter of their size and one-tenth as managerial. They are too big to have a distinctive identity or sense of community beyond whatever nonsense the marketing department happens to be pushing this month. They have become alienating to many staff and students. Several are parade grounds for some of the worst excesses of managerialism.

As institutions, they waste resources by competing with one another instead of doing what many academics do every day, and what would be both practically and ethically more sensible: cooperating in the pursuit of knowledge, understanding and education. Why, for instance, have two competing law schools in one small city when you could cooperate to enhance the education of students across institutions? A government that wanted to create a better university sector — and one more responsive to the needs of the nation — would break up the mega-universities and give them incentives to achieve excellence on the back of their smaller scale, including by working with their local communities.

Academically, these big universities are each trying to do pretty much the same kind of thing: what’s a university these days without its own business, law and medical faculties? This is not a pathway to either teaching or research excellence. It’s more likely to create a dull common standard — good enough for your politician seeking to make it through to the next election, but not for a democracy seeking to make its way in a complex world.

Most interestingly, the prevailing model departs from the norms that have otherwise been heavily influential in this country, those of the United States, where variety is taken for granted. Where Alan Tudge seems to imagine that  every institution across the land can take up commercialised research, the elite universities of Europe and North America recognise a range of different ways to create sustainable excellence — including, God forbid, by being elite teaching-intensive institutions.

Of course, getting from here to there is very difficult. In theory, the revenue generated by international student fees could have given universities room to manoeuvre, but those funds often went into a seemingly chaotic and unplanned expansion. And now they are gone.

One way out of these problems may well be to provide funding incentives for institutional distinctiveness. This should mean something better than doling out extra money to regional universities to keep the bush happy or secure marginal seats. It would require governments to recognise that excessive central control of universities will create a system more likely to stifle creativity and excellence than to promote it. In fact, these changes would almost certainly need a more independent funding authority, along the lines of what once existed, and which Davis has more recently advocated.

Thinking thoughts like these on a recent Saturday, I found myself on the ANU campus. Specifically, I was in the precinct known as Kambri, a sparkling redevelopment of the old student union area now full of retail outlets, cultural facilities, student residences and learning spaces (formerly known as classrooms) that opened in 2019. In many ways, it epitomises the modern university as a location for consumption.

Students were milling about: chatting, eating their lunch, drinking coffee, even whispering sweet nothings to one another on quiet benches. Music came from some speakers in the middle of the courtyard. Some of the businesses had remained closed after the pandemic, but most were trading. Here was the university as a living, breathing organism.

But the ultimate test of that, of course, is toilet graffiti. I recall one of my fellow politics students writing a thesis on the subject back in the 1980s. And there it was, in the Kambri men’s loo:

I love examining my white male privilege.

Gives me a warm feeling deep down inside.

I see hope for Australian universities yet. •

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The former governor-general, by this time living in his European exile, wanted the copy to help him write his memoir, Matters for Judgement, which he hoped would vindicate his role in the dismissal of the Whitlam government and make him a lot of money. Family members later deposited that copy in the National Archives and, under the instrument of deposit they signed, made the letters available to researchers in 2005.

Meanwhile, the Archives had ruled that its own Palace Letters were “personal,” and therefore not ordinary Commonwealth records subject to the Archives Act. Until a court overturned this ruling — as the High Court of Australia would eventually do in a 6–1 decision in May last year — the letters would be closed to researchers for many years, if not indefinitely.

Here was the delicious conundrum: if the Archives’ ruling that the original set of letters was “personal” — a ruling designed to prevent access for researchers — were followed to its logical conclusion, then access to Kerr’s copy of the correspondence, also deemed personal, would be in the hands of the family.

When the Archives finally produced the documents covering the deposit of the copy, Jenny Hocking and her lawyers, who brought the Palace Letters case to court, had growing confidence in the likelihood of success. Their mistake might have been to underestimate the challenge of fighting someone who gets to change the rules after the game has begun.

Even as the litigation was in progress, the Archives was quietly renegotiating the instrument of deposit with Kerr’s stepdaughter. Under the new conditions, the letters were to remain closed for fifty years after the end of Kerr’s appointment as governor-general — until December 2027, that is — and their release would then be subject to the approval of Buckingham Palace and Yarralumla.

This is how a “pro-disclosure” organisation, as its director-general David Fricker likes to call the National Archives, does its business. In her account of the Palace Letters case, Hocking justly calls the actions “devious, artful, and devastatingly effective.” At one point, Hocking reports Fricker’s complaining to her of the money he was burning up to fight to withhold the letters: “It’s really eating into my budget.”

Fricker is now out and about calling for an injection of government money to digitise a large collection of at-risk records, especially photographs, films and audiovisual materials. The case that the Australian community will lose a significant trove of its cultural heritage if this material is permitted to deteriorate any further is unassailable. The problem was also highlighted in a review of the Archives completed by former public servant David Tune in January 2020.

Even allowing for a pandemic, the fact that it took the federal government until March 2021 to release the review, and only then under pressure from the media and a barrage of freedom of information requests from Senator Rex Patrick, does little to inspire confidence in any early boost to funding, although we all live in hope. While the philosophy of government funding for the Australian War Memorial is perhaps best summed up by Matthew 7:7 — “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” — Canberra’s other national cultural institutions are less fortunately placed. Amanda Stoker, the responsible minister, greeted the review with the news that the government “would not be rushed.”

The Tune review dealt with plenty of other matters, too. Much of its report is devoted to examining how to achieve a “whole-of-government” approach to records and archives, including the massive volume of digital records now being generated. It recommends a greatly expanded presence for the National Archives inside the individual agencies themselves.

Historians, though, were more likely to turn to that part of the report concerned with access. Their longstanding grievance has been the excessive amount of time the National Archives takes to clear documents more than twenty years old, which are available, in principle, to researchers. There are various grounds for withholding documents, yet all but a small minority are released in full or in part (that is, with some redactions) once they have been examined. But that can be slow. To take one example from my own experience: it was only on 3 October 2019 that I received notification of a decision on a foreign affairs file I had requested in 2014 in the process of researching a book I published in 2015. Even after five years, the process was not yet complete; I was also informed that “there is information on this item that remains withheld pending advice from another agency on whether it remains sensitive.”

The Archives routinely refers records to the originating agencies for advice about whether a file should be released and, if so, whether it should be issued in part or full. Without any apparent sense of irony, the notification also informed me that “Archives has processes in place to ensure that items are examined as efficiently as possible. Most examination is completed within ninety days” but “it can take longer than the statutory ninety days if information in an item needs to be referred to another agency for advice.”

Part of the Archives’ modus operandi when confronted with these failures has been to point to the problem posed by a small number of researchers requesting a very large number of files. But I have always found this argument too reminiscent of the grade three schoolteacher who regrets that the class will not be allowed any playtime because a group of naughty children up the back is spoiling things for the rest.

In fact, the figures provided in the Tune review paint a more nuanced picture. It is true that among the Archives’ backlog of 22,000 requests are four applicants who have requested more than 1000 files each. But other figures are more interesting. Sixteen applicants have requested between one hundred and 999, and another seventy between twenty-five and ninety-nine. These numbers seem to me indicative of researchers — many of them historians — simply doing their job (or, rather, trying to do their job). The online description of a record often gives a poor indication of its contents, so researchers must sometimes consult many files before finding what they want. A project substantially dependent on the Archives could well run to several hundred requests. In any case, just over 1300 applicants in the backlog are requesting fewer than one hundred files each.

When I sat on the Canberra consultative committee of the National Archives, I received many complaints from researchers who had hit a roadblock. I recall one academic who had decided to take a research trip to Japan because many of the records the National Archives had not yet permitted him to see were freely available there. Another, who was writing a doctoral thesis substantially dependent on National Archives material, eventually took the Archives to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, but even that didn’t seem to work. His local member, Malcolm Turnbull, did his best to help out.

I left the committee because it didn’t seem the best way for key interest groups to influence the Archives’ policies — I was representing the Australian Historical Association — and after several years I had tired of the twice-yearly delivery of the bad news about the backlog of requests. It’s also notable that the much more significant Archives Advisory Council doesn’t include a single university-based historian. The council is supposed to have thirteen members, but currently has only ten. Its numbers were recently reduced by one with the departure overseas of News Corp journalist Adam Creighton, well known for his pandemic commentary in the Australian and on Twitter.

The Archives Act was a model of its kind when it passed in 1983 — an admirable contribution to Australia’s administrative law that played a big part in the exponential increase in our understanding of the nation’s twentieth-century history. Today, by way of contrast, its operations are a barrier to research across a vast domain of our modern history. Even if your file has been cleared for research, you need to allow five business days between ordering it and receiving it in the Archives’ reading room.

There is a feeling among researchers that while the Archives definitely needs much more money, it also needs to do better itself. •

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

“Ain’t she what?” the narrator enquires. “A phony.” “I wouldn’t have thought so.” “You’re wrong. She is a phony. But on the other hand you’re right. She isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can’t talk her out of it. I’ve tried with tears running down my cheeks.”

It’s a fictional conversation I recall these days whenever I see Scott Morrison hamming it up on television. Is he a phony? Or perhaps he’s not a phony because he really believes all the crap he believes.

Perhaps he believes it was pressingly important for the government of the Commonwealth of Australia to legislate tougher sentences for anyone putting pins in strawberries. Perhaps he believes it was necessary to reopen Christmas Island because of the passage of the medivac legislation. Perhaps he believes his daughters should be kept away from public schools because they’ll be infected by other people’s values. Perhaps he believes “negative globalism” poses a dire threat to Australia’s democracy. Perhaps he believes heading for Hawaii with his Pentecostal friends during a bushfire crisis and having his office lie about it is legitimate behaviour.

Perhaps he believes a man can’t make up his mind about how to respond to an alleged rape until he’s consulted his wife. Perhaps he believes the rule of law would be irreparably damaged if a rape allegation against his attorney-general were the subject of an inquiry. Perhaps he believes a businesswoman deserves the sack for presenting her executives with watches as a reward for delivering a massively lucrative contract.

Perhaps Scott Morrison believes it really is always someone else’s fault.

The prime minister might believe all these things, and, like Holly, he might be a real phony. On the other hand, he might believe none of them, or only a few of them, and therefore be an opportunist. In their latest book, How Good Is Scott Morrison?, Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen seem to lean towards the latter judgement. They worry over Morrison’s “lack of empathy and authenticity,” as displayed most vividly in his response to the bushfires of 2019–20, and especially the unnerving gaucheness during his visit to Cobargo.

The failure of Morrison’s leadership that summer may well be the most serious example of prime ministerial ineptitude in Australian history. I can think of only one instance of comparably poor judgement: that of Billy Hughes in 1916–17, whose antics not only failed to achieve the result he wanted — the introduction of conscription for overseas service — but also split his party and divided the country so badly he probably reduced voluntary recruitment and support for the war.

Yet Hughes was a prime minister of substance, in the sense that he exercised power with purpose. In Morrison’s case, there seems to be little more than the desire to get one over his opponents and win the next election. To be sure, he talks about “doing” a lot: about getting on with things, about not letting the obsessions of the “Canberra bubble” divert his attention from what he thinks electors are after. This is a large part of the image that Morrison has crafted for himself: the practical suburban “daggy dad” in touch with the common man — he rarely shows much interest in the common woman — because he is one himself.

In a sense, it’s the ordinary image-making of democratic politics, and hardly sets Morrison apart as unusual. But there does seem to be something unusual about Morrison’s obsession with image at the expense of substance, which it’s hard not to connect with the path he trod to get into parliament via tourism marketing and political campaigning. If Tony Abbott governed like an opposition leader, it would be fair to say Morrison does so like a campaign director. This might be helpful in winning elections — it’s worked once, anyway — but as a foundation for leading a country it’s often been found wanting.

Errington and van Onselen argue that Morrison’s approach to pandemic leadership was shaped by the failures of his response to the bushfires. It’s a reasonable case, even if it must involve some degree of conjecture. They don’t present Morrison as possessing either the wisdom of Solomon or the inspiration of Churchill. He came out of the bushfire experience chastened as well as needing reassurance.

Theirs is a portrait of a politician who learned from his earlier mistakes, and whose worst instincts — to go to the footy early in the pandemic, for example — were leavened by the greater caution of state premiers, governments and health officers. But Morrison was more cautious than some of his colleagues. Within the government, some backbenchers and a minister, Peter Dutton, favoured a Swedish-style quest for herd immunity. Meanwhile, the treasurer Josh Frydenberg was apparently curious about the “major social experiment” being undertaken by Donald Trump. I imagine his curiosity has now been satisfied.

Errington and van Onselen don’t offer a particularly flattering account of Morrison as pandemic prime minister. “There really isn’t anything of substance under the political marketing veneer,” they write. They see the national cabinet as essentially a public relations exercise on the prime minister’s part, as well as an opportunity to sideline public scrutiny. More generally, they believe Morrison is unwilling to take responsibility, a champion buck-passer who is forever seeking to lay blame on others — state governments, especially Labor ones, being handily in view.

He also hates criticism, or even just being questioned. He often lacks in judgement. He has little interest in anything except tactical advantage. He is pragmatic yet stubborn. Having failed to treat a crisis as an opportunity, they suggest, he might already have blown whatever prospect he had of leaving a policy legacy of any worth. But they imply that he doesn’t much care.

How Good Is Scott Morrison? was completed well before the recent ordeals that have made Morrison’s prime ministership look as bad as it did while he was telling us it wasn’t his job to hold the hose. As I write these words, former Australia Post boss Christine Holgate has just appeared before a Senate committee where she delivered Morrison a richly deserved bollocking for humiliating her in parliament and bullying her out of her job. He has repeatedly shown a want of judgement in his handling of a range of issues related to women, especially allegations of sexual assault, harassment and misconduct on his own side of politics.

The authors point to Morrison’s efforts to weave an image of his leadership as “protective masculinity.” They might have done more to explain how and why this schtick has never worked for Morrison. A short answer might be that he’s gone out of his way to evade the kind of responsibility that this particular, usually conservative image of political leadership implies. According to such a view of gender relations, real men do hold the hose, a point that Tony Abbott, for all his failings, seemed to understand.

Worse, Morrison has swung between trying to seem as if he’s engaging with these issues in a manner sympathetic to women’s concerns and resorting to a snarling vindictiveness. Morrison’s private life may well be as unblemished as he is forever telling us, but as a political leader he seems, like William McMahon before him, amoral rather than immoral, and mean in the way Richard Nixon was mean. His office was backgrounding against alleged rape victim Brittany Higgins while he was professing public sympathy for her plight. He then used a media conference, ostensibly called to announce that he was listening to women and prepared to act on their concerns, to issue a thinly veiled warning to journalists that he was collecting dirt on them — even as he hopelessly muddled the details of an incident involving one of those concerned, Samantha Maiden.

This pure specimen of the modern political class is the first of Australia’s post-truth prime ministers: his leadership is very much a product of the Trump era and its pathologies. It is not that Morrison lies; politicians often do that. Nor would it be fair to suggest he lies as frequently as Donald Trump, for that would hardly be possible.

It’s more that Morrison, like Trump, says things that anyone paying attention can immediately recognise as untrue. His image of the good citizen is not so much one who believes what he says but one who is so disengaged from politics that they either don’t know or don’t care.

For all that, Errington and van Onselen believe Morrison will win the next election. Or, rather, they believed he would win when they wrote their book, since Morrison was “as politically dominant as he’d ever been.” “Morrison has the next election in the bag,” they assure readers. Even if the vaccine rollout falters, they suggest, as it now has, Morrison will be able to control the narrative. Voters won’t care that the Coalition “has achieved very little” in policy. “A defeat for Morrison would be as unlikely as was his victory in 2019,” they declare.

Here is a well-known hazard when venturing analysis in a rapidly changing political environment. The election punditry on offer from these two is probably of no more use than the kind of thing you might pick up at the bar in the Rooty Hill RSL, for the authors have evidently now changed their minds. In last Saturday’s Weekend Australian, in an article titled “The Botched Rollout Could Spell Doom for PM,” van Onselen wrote that “the degree of difficulty for the Coalition winning a fourth term is real.” More amusing is the “edited extract” from their book in the same edition of the paper. Edited indeed: they now think that Morrison’s slowness in responding to women’s concerns and in dealing with the problems of the vaccine rollout have “left him more vulnerable as a political leader than at any time during his prime ministership.”

It’s a pity that the authors don’t give more attention to Morrison’s life and career before he was elected to parliament. There is a fresh sense of familiarity in the squalid manner of his preselection for the seat of Cook — the latter fell into his lap when, after he was defeated eight votes to 160, his allies leaked various false allegations to the media about his opponent. With the dubious content of the government’s dirt files now being strewn around media conferences, all this now seems more pertinent than a few months ago when one of van Onselen’s colleagues at the Australian was comparing Morrison to John Curtin.

Morrison’s religious beliefs receive cursory attention — the authors seem quite unable to make up their minds if his Pentecostalism really matters — and his family life and undistinguished career at Tourism Australia even less. It’s becoming hard to escape the sense that Morrison remains at heart a small-time Sydney politician, without the intellect, vision, moral compass or judgement to do much more than position himself tactically. When Errington and van Onselen recount his raising some trivial matter of internal party machine politics during what was supposed to be a discussion of Covid-19 responses with Gladys Berejiklian, it’s another of those telling moments when we have a glimpse of an authentic Morrison.

The authors’ Coalition sources are obviously impressive, and we meet “the magnificent seven” — those said to be Morrison’s closest confidants — early in the book and then at intervals throughout. Revealingly, none are women. The accident-prone Stuart Robert is apparently his closest colleague, as well as a friend and co-religionist, which may help explain how repeated failure seems to have had no dampening effect on Morrison’s view of that man’s merit. Alex Hawke and Ben Morton are the only other serving politicians on the list. No one would describe any of these three as being in the front rank of Coalition ministers.

The rest of the seven are mainly staffers or public servants, including chief of staff John Kunkel and principal private secretary Yaron Finkelstein. Department head Phil Gaetjens, the prime minister’s “head butler, serving cooked-up political fixes when the bell rings” — as Labor’s Katy Gallagher put it — is in the seven, which is completed by businessman and donor Scott Briggs. These are the kinds of men who help make Morrison’s miracles happen. Some of them also help get rid of those pesky “events” that bedevil prime ministers.

How Good Is Scott Morrison? is a brightly written account that reveals how the pandemic challenged and changed a government whose members had long ago fallen prey to the banalities and trivialities of pre-pandemic politics. Errington and van Onselen recognise the government’s achievements — which included a willingness to listen to experts — without seeking to pretend this was an effort without its darker side: the government tended to hide behind its experts to avoid accountability. The Coalition also took the opportunity to lay the boot into its accustomed enemies among the young — who were often unsupported casual workers — and in the arts community and the universities.

In fact, the pandemic provided an opportunity for settling scores in the culture wars, while women were poorly treated in the major stimulus packages. Australians stranded overseas experienced brutal indifference. The federal government was fortunate not to receive harsher criticism for its failures in aged care. The Victorian government largely carried the can for the outbreaks in Melbourne during last year’s second wave of infections.

This is a long way from a whitewash: among many scathing observations of Morrison and the government, the authors point to the hypocrisy of the monumental build-up of debt and deficit by Coalition parties that routinely accuse Labor of profligacy. Whatever the justifications for JobKeeper, it provided wide opportunities for corporate profiteering, with Liberal Party mates and donors inevitably prominent among the beneficiaries. Some of that money will end up back in Coalition coffers as political donations.

The authors might well have given a little more scrutiny to the role of the media company for which van Onselen writes, News Corp, in providing leeway to the Coalition on a wide range of issues, latitude that it would never have allowed a Labor government. It is striking that their account of Morrison’s prospects at the next election doesn’t discuss one of the most significant assets he will have at his disposal: the fact that most of the country’s commercial media companies will be barracking hard for his return. •

The post Once a winner appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s not like walking into a Centrelink office or a motor vehicle registry. If you work across the lake at the university, as I do, you’ll probably have heating in your office, but you’d be lucky to have air-conditioning. As an economy measure, they stopped providing office bins years ago.

The main cast on Capital Hill looks good, too. Politics might be show business for ugly people, but many staffers could pass muster on the red carpet. You’ll see women in pencil skirts and heels, men in snazzy dark suits with silk ties. The effect is a halfway house between nightclub and L.A. Law.

At the beginning of a sitting week, usually on Sunday, politicians and staffers descend on Canberra. Most pull long hours and everyone seems to be performing for everyone else. Many will have their eye on their next career step, and quite a few on the several steps after that. Some likely imagine a future victory speech thanking “the true believers” or proclaiming a surprise election triumph a “miracle.”

On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, they have Wednesday on their minds. That night, they empty into the more glamorous of the restaurants and bars around Manuka, drinking, networking, hooking up. They’re still performing. They still have their eyes on the prize.

The parallels with the latter years of school for teenagers, and with university life, can be striking — a similar sense of newly gained freedoms being tested, of rules being stretched or broken, of jostling for attention and position in a pecking order up for grabs, and in which much is seen to be at stake. It’s no particular surprise that the rape accusation against the Coalition’s Christian Porter that shook Australian politics this week is a story of late school and early university. It’s no stretch to see connections and continuities here.

We are now being permitted to see with greater clarity the dangers in how this culture has evolved, especially its threat to women. The system rewards the kind of thrusting and unscrupulous behaviour that is now all too common in Australia’s decrepit political parties. And it validates a personal aggression that is especially valued when performed by men.

Some politicians themselves also roam this world, rather like feudal barons, as has become clear enough from the revelations of sexual relationships between them and their staffers. Some get right into the party atmosphere, sleeping it off on a couch the next day. Sexual relationships or occasional flings occur among politicians, staffers and journalists, occasionally leading to “and they lived happily ever after” — if not for abandoned spouses and aggrieved children — and sometimes to a less pleasant denouement.

When things go sour, it’s easy enough on this lawless workplace frontier to move those who cease to be flavour of the month — usually female staffers — sideways or even out the door. Some, finding their careers stalled after harsh experience, decide to leave.

Brittany Higgins’s testimony that she was raped by a fellow Liberal staffer has led many women who have worked at Parliament House to tell their own stories. Those that have so far made it into the public sphere have not usually been about rape, but they have covered workplace bullying, sexual harassment and gender discrimination. There appears to be a growing public acceptance of the view that Parliament House is not a safe place for women.

The experiences women recount are often harrowing in their details, but at their heart most come back to two points. One is unchecked power. The other is male domination.

Parliament House is more like Dodge City than a modern workplace. Under the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act, politicians exercise a level of arbitrary power that is increasingly anomalous. In essence, it’s an elaborate racket designed by politicians to serve the interests of politicians.

The arrangements provide those who take advantage of them with a vast pool of free labour — hours chalked up to experience, party service and favours to be conferred in the future. It’s also a system in which people with power are rewarded with the deference of young, impressionable and smart people who call them “the boss” and devote most of their waking hours to doing their bidding.

Everyone who achieves a position of even modest seniority or power in a profession is likely to experience deference. Those with integrity and maturity try to redirect that impulse into a mutual respect that empowers others. No doubt there are many among Australia’s 227 elected federal politicians and their senior staffers who behave responsibly and ethically. But we also know that among them — as well as among staffers who aspire to their jobs — there are the bullies, the foul-mouthed, the greedy, the drunks and the gropers. And there is sexual violence.

There was a time when parliamentary systems didn’t really bother to pretend that those inside the whale were like the rest of us. Take a look at any of the older chambers, such as Victoria’s splendid Legislative Council. It resembles the gentlemen’s club it has been for much of its history, an antechamber to other gentlemen’s clubs still to be found on Collins Street.

But politicians have increasingly sent out the message that they are just like us — only more committed to public service. Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with modern politics knows this is rubbish. As one former staffer put it to me, they are more likely to be the “weirdo dorks” who flourished in university politics. Or they have had a solid career pumping out propaganda for a think tank. Or maybe they inhabited a union back office. If they worked for a bank, it wasn’t as a teller.

Unchecked power enables both male and female bullies. But Parliament House is a place where much more power is exercised by men than by women. Some carry a well-developed sense of entitlement, nurtured in wealthy families and expensive all-male private schools. It’s telling that at the very time the lecherous and abusive behaviour of adult “boys” on Capital Hill is in the spotlight, so is the sexual exploitation by private school boys of the girls in their social circles.

The most powerful inhabitants of the Potemkin village, immune to serious scrutiny of their singular arrangements in the past, might have given rather too little attention to what the public thinks of this self-indulgence. A little-noticed aspect of the Barnaby Joyce affair of a few years ago was the easy and mistaken assumption that a politician’s private life is his own business, and divorce a regrettable but unavoidable reality of modern life. Perhaps so: but this doesn’t mean that people are also willing to elect as president of the local parents’ and citizens’ association a man who leaves his wife and four daughters for a younger staffer, pregnant by him, at the same time as he opposes marriage equality.

The “anything goes” values of Manuka and Kingston at Wednesday drinks are not those of Australian suburbia. The enthusiastic moralisers of Capital Hill — so evident again in the brutal dealing with the unemployed last month — might be about to receive an overdue taste of their own medicine. One can only hope that the result is at least a safer workplace for women, who have every right to a career in and around politics — and maybe even some grappling with the unenviable task of helping to retrieve the place from the disturbing depths to which it has sunk. •

Also on this topic — Marian Sawer: Dealing with toxic parliaments

The post Sunday I’ve got Wednesday on my mind appeared first on Inside Story.

I am among the latter group, having become a Member of the Order of Australia, or AM, on 26 January 2019. When I saw an email in my inbox from Government House a few months before that announcement, my expectation was that I was being asked for a reference for another nominee: I’d written a couple in the past. Like many who receive such awards, the news that I was to be a recipient came as a pleasant surprise, but I had no difficulty thinking of plenty of others — including in my own field of endeavour — who seemed equally or more worthy.

I was also conscious of being honoured for doing my well-paid job, a frequent criticism of these awards. I justified it to myself with the attitude that, like many professionals, I do more than what strictly might be considered “my job.” That said, I don’t think that what I do involves anything like the devotion or sacrifice of the many Australians who spend decades involved in voluntary work for no pay and limited recognition. Many of these are to be found in the list of people receiving Medals of the Order of Australia, the lowest award in the hierarchy. We know less about those who miss out entirely.

The hierarchy itself is open to criticism: isn’t this a perpetuation of class structures, reminding us of how our awards replicate those of the United Kingdom, even as they gradually replaced the old imperial honours from the mid 1970s? The addition of knighthoods to the Order by Malcolm Fraser and, later, Tony Abbott was a further reminder of where our system’s origins lie — in the British Empire — and the kinds of symbolic national work being attempted by those who fiddle with it. (Not very successfully in either case, as it happened: John Kerr and Prince Philip are among the few recipients of the AK.)

Defenders of the system say the community nomination process demonstrates the more democratic nature of the Australian system, yet it is obvious that some groups are very active, organised and successful in promoting recognition of their own. It is all very well to enjoin people to use the nomination system instead of whingeing about it, but this is easier for the better-off, better-educated and better-connected than for other Australians. The inequalities of outcome, in terms of gender, ethnicity and class, reflect this problem and will not easily be overcome.

There is also a growing suspicion that community nomination provides ample opportunity for ideologically motivated individuals and groups to use the system for trolling the rest of us. I don’t see this as an argument for getting rid of the system: when I scan the lists each Australia Day and Queen’s Birthday I see hundreds of deserving winners. The major controversies have admittedly been about a small number of decisions, usually out of left field — or more likely, right field — in each announcement, which perhaps get more media attention than they deserve. But I do see need of serious reform.

One possible way forward might be to adopt a devil’s advocate system. The Council for the Order of Australia should already be asking itself a simple but important question about every potential award: will this decision bring the Order into disrepute? If it is already asking this question, there are signs it isn’t always coming up with the right answer.

The appointment of a devil’s advocate would create a parallel process in which serious research is undertaken into decisions with the potential to bring the Order into disrepute. It would be the role of this individual, supported by a small research team, to gather information that might tell against a particular proposed awardee. That would then be fed into the decision-making. The bar for exclusion would be high — it should only happen rarely — but the declining reputation of the system would suggest that the bar is currently in the wrong place.

I am well aware that this might seem like a “political correctness” test, or even a proposal for “dirt files.” But the reality is that handing out these awards is a fundamentally political exercise: amply demonstrated, as if one needed to make the case, by the significant number of politicians who receive the highest gongs in the Order.

Those involved in making awards like to assure us that they leave their politics at the door, and that what one believes should not determine one’s choice of who deserves a gong. This is nonsense, of course. Every time an award is handed out, it’s a statement about what kinds of behaviour and belief we consider within the pale, about what those who are influential in these processes value most, and about which achievements they see as less worthy or even unworthy.

Happily, I have never seen anyone honoured for “services to the white supremacist community.” The award of an Order of Australia to a neo-Nazi would get the public bollocking that it deserved. That’s because the community largely regards the views held by such people as outside the field of decent values and legitimate debate.

But we do see politicians getting the very highest awards for their part in policies that many of us might find thoroughly objectionable. Tony Abbott received his, in part, for contributions to “border control.” To argue that this is apolitical is just gaslighting. Others, who don’t believe in same-sex marriage, might resile from Malcolm Turnbull’s having got his gong partly for his role in achieving “marriage equality.” Still others, who campaigned long and hard for this cause even when it was unpopular, might resent Turnbull’s wandering in to claim it as his own.

Government House would do well to cease mentioning policies and causes in cases such as these. It should simply state that Abbott and Turnbull received their ACs for their public service as parliamentarians, ministers and prime ministers. That’s enough.

More seriously, the Council has now, by its actions, effectively told the Australian people that it considers the public denigration of LGBTQ people to be within the field of legitimate behaviour by those receiving its very highest honour. There is a price to be paid for this kind of faux “neutrality,” and the Council — as well as the governor-general, who has formal oversight of the process — are now paying it in the form of reduced public confidence and widespread cynicism.

A national system of honours can’t thrive unless it has broad public support. This is a system that needs fixing. And it needs fixing before the next round of decision-making for the Queens’s Birthday list. •

The post The Order of the day appeared first on Inside Story.

Inglis achieved both national and international eminence, and acknowledged that he had lived a privileged professional life. But when the choice was between defending the weak or barracking for the strong, he never had to spend any time pondering which side to take. One of his early books, The Stuart Case, along with his journalism on the same subject, probably helped save the life of an Aboriginal man accused of raping and murdering a child in a society that did not, and could not, give him a fair trial. Inglis thought it more likely than not that the accused man had done it, but that did not hinder his desire for justice to be dispensed fairly.

Rather than passing the middle years of his career enjoying the pleasant life of a professor of history in the nation’s increasingly comfortable capital city — a life to which his talents and achievements had given him entree at a still-young age — he went to Port Moresby to help make a university and a nation. He would eventually serve as vice-chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea, before returning to the Australian National University as a research professor in the mid 1970s.

Inglis’s own scholarship was formidable, ranging over the history of the media — he wrote two major histories of the ABC — religion, national days and celebrations, colonial social life, and the social and cultural history of Australians at war. He was the originator and leader of the massive, multi-volume bicentennial history project, Australians: A Historical Library.

His major interests were less fashionable in their day than they have become, a marker of both his foresight and his influence. It was in the field of war history, especially through his groundbreaking work on memorials, that Inglis acquired an international reputation and perhaps also exercised his most enduring influence on Australian public culture. He was a key figure in Australia’s rediscovery and reinvention of Anzac.

This was all delivered in elegant but unpretentious and accessible prose that served as a constant reminder that Inglis had early aspirations to become a journalist. He was a cautious, modest scholar despite his great gifts, or perhaps because of them. He knew that there was always much more to learn. I may be permitted, I think, to use language that would have been familiar enough to Inglis who, as I did forty years later, grew up in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. He didn’t have tickets on himself.

And so why did he turn to the history of the 2800 men, women and children who came to Australia in September 1940 on the Dunera, from England, and the Queen Mary, from Singapore, as the final historical project of his life?

As his collaborators explain in Dunera Lives: Profiles, Inglis offered several explanations for his decision. This volume and its predecessor reveal how the lives of some of the men of the Dunera intersected with his own at various points in his life. Franz Philipp, the art historian, tutored the young Inglis at the University of Melbourne and, after recognising his ability in an essay on Machiavelli, asked him, “Why not consider following an academic career?” Later, Inglis inevitably had much to do with Henry Mayer, the Sydney University politics professor, not least through their common academic interest in the media. He shared a Canberra suburb with the retired diplomat and academic Klaus Loewald.

A seventeen-year-old Fritz Lowenstein (second from the right in front row) on a school trip to Bucknow, east of Berlin. Courtesy of Monica Lee Lowen and Jocelyn Lowen

Inglis’s collaborators on this project came round to the view that Inglis turned to the Dunera as a subject out of “the desire of a modest man to tell the story of a chapter of his early life without writing about himself.” This looks right, and certainly in character. The stories of the Dunera and Queen Mary also gave Inglis the chance to research and write history of a kind with which he was most comfortable. Both volumes — this one and its lavishly illustrated companion, published in 2018 — are essentially biographical, and Dunera Lives: Profiles uses the stories of eighteen of the internees (as well as of two other remarkable men, Captain Edward Broughton and Julian Layton, closely connected with the episode) to tell the larger story of the Dunera.

In doing so, Inglis tells a story of the twentieth century, the era that he himself lived through and that formed the subject of most of his writing. The history of this century, his collaborators explain, seemed to Inglis “more disturbing and bleaker than it was ennobling or enlightening.” While no doubt a fair summation of Inglis’s views, this book is also about the lives that the remarkable Dunera affair would subsequently make possible. It is no tale of woe.

Inglis was keen to avoid the hagiography to which the Dunera story has sometimes seemed prone, but there is much that is ultimately uplifting about the stories told here. The internees have come down to us in collective memory as “The Dunera Boys” — all somewhat Peter Pan-ish — thanks largely to the power of television and of one of that vast number of historical miniseries that graced our screens in the 1980s. Much mythology clings to them. They were Jewish. They were intellectuals and artists. They transformed Australian life.

There is some truth in each of these impressions. Many of those interned by the British authorities and sent to Australia on the Dunera in the wake of the fall of France and the Low Countries in mid 1940 were indeed Jews, although not all; and many of the Jews did not practise their religion or observe Jewish customs. Some conformed to the model of what Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher called a “non-Jewish Jew.” Few were devout. For a good many, their “Jewishness” was a function of Hitler’s racist lawmaking rather than an identity that was meaningful to them.

Quite a few were intellectuals, but there were about 2000 Dunera internees all up, and most clearly were not. A few internees — such as Leonhard Adam, author of Primitive Art (1940), and the Bauhaus artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack — were already significant figures in their fields when they were arrested and interned. Others would soon achieve eminence: by the late 1940s Hans Buchdahl, the theoretical physicist, was attracting the praise of Albert Einstein for his work in Hobart on general relativity.

The Australian camps in which they spent the early part of the war hosted a vibrant intellectual and artistic life behind the wire. The Collegium Taturense — at Tatura internment camp — offered lectures in a wide array of subjects, an average of 113 per week at one stage, given by twenty-three lecturers to 700 students. There was sufficient expertise within the camps to prepare internees for matriculation to the University of Melbourne.

Did the Dunera internees transform Australian life? Even to ask the question embodies the misconception that they made their life here. Most, in fact, did not: about 1300, or two-thirds, left Australia. But for some who went to live elsewhere, the threads were not entirely severed. Klaus Loewald, a US diplomat posted to Vietnam, became disillusioned with his adopted country and later took up an academic post in the history department at the University of New England in Armidale.

In retrospect, these men look like an advance guard for the massive postwar emigration from Europe, even if, like the convicts who founded white Australia, they were “unwilling emigrants.” They brought European sophistication and style to a country that was still meat, bread and three veg. No doubt that was part of their appeal to young Ken Inglis, the product of an Anglo-Australian lower-middle-class upbringing in Melbourne.

Dunera Lives does not aspire to be representative; indeed, it is clear that the biographies are not. “You hear all about the professors and doctors,” complained Roy Thalheimer, “but not about the taxi drivers.” Thalheimer wasn’t a taxi driver, but he was a forest worker and public servant. All the same, his story was remarkable enough: as the son of a leading communist activist and theorist, he had once sat on the knee of Lenin’s widow — “The only thing in my life worth mentioning,” he said. The concentration on the clever and creative worried Inglis, conscientious historian that he was. Was he selecting internees whose lives were closest to the kind of life he had led as a writer and academic? Yes, surely, and in choosing the stories that most interested him, his collaborators have ensured that this remains, as they wanted it to be, “Ken’s book.”

Taken together, the stories reveal much of the Dunera experience, not least because there were so many common elements. There was the shock of arrest and internment in Britain, given that so many of them — although not all — had fled from the Nazis. Then came the unpleasantness of the journey — the British guards behaved brutally, stealing from them and generally being obnoxious and threatening. The relief of arrival in Australia followed — a place they had neither chosen nor understood to be their destination, “the arse of the globe.” The pleasures of the first decent feed on Australian soil made an impression. Several seem to have recalled that first sandwich, along with the fruit that came with it: luxuries compared with shipboard fare. There were the insensitivities and the kindnesses of those they encountered in Australia. At Hay, one internee was surprised when an Australian soldier wished him “Shabbat shalom.” The soldier had served in Palestine, and would later take a message from the internee to his sister in Melbourne to tell her that he was safe.

There was the longing for freedom as they made the best of their incarceration in Hay, Orange and Tatura; the difficulties of deciding whether to stay in Australia — which often meant joining a labour battalion, the 8th Employment Company — or return to Britain; and the lives they made following internment and war. Many realised they had been lucky on the whole, despite their discomforts. So many of their relatives had perished in Nazi concentration camps, and some in similar circumstances to their own had drowned at sea following an encounter with a German torpedo. Life in Australia, dreary as it might have been, was safer than enduring the bombs and, later, rockets landing on British cities.

The professional lives of the internees who figure here would take in art, science, history, anthropology, economics, business, journalism and psychiatry. Some, if not quite household names among Australians of their day, nevertheless led lives as public figures: economist Fred Gruen, political scientist Henry Mayer, furniture maker Fred Lowen, and the flamboyant, exasperating composer Felix Werder. Others were well known in their particular communities and somewhat beyond them: for instance, Erwin Lamm, businessman, conservative Zionist and Jewish community leader.

Henry Mayer in his study at home, c. 1985. Courtesy of Media International Australia © Elaine Mayer

As Glyn Davis, political scientist, former University of Melbourne vice-chancellor and an Inglis PhD student, said at the online launch of this book, it is an act of love. There is Inglis’s love for the Dunera men, and for telling stories — the passion of his professional life. But there is also the love of his friends and collaborators, Bill Gammage, Seumas Spark, Jay Winter and Carol Bunyan, who have seen his project through to completion. Rae Frances, then dean of arts at Monash University, provided the financial support for this remarkable collaboration.

While Inglis’s research notes were substantial, and he had done some drafting, much of the book remained to be written at the time of his death. These accomplished historians have done a splendid job of seeing the project through in a manner that seems, so authentically, to realise Inglis’s vision. Winter, probably the world’s most eminent historian of the first world war, is a Yale University professor now based in Paris. Gammage, a friend of Inglis for more than fifty years and colleague at the University of Papua New Guinea, is one Australia’s leading social historians; with Inglis, he was a major contributor to the modern reappraisal of Australia’s involvement in the first world war, in his case through his book The Broken Years and role as an adviser on Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli. Spark, a younger historian whose work has been mainly on the second world war, began as Inglis’s research assistant but became a full co-author and close friend. And the Canberra-based Bunyan has built up a formidable knowledge of the Dunera affair over many years of painstaking research, work that continues.

Few of us are capable of inspiring the kind of devotion and loyalty that could bring such a team together. The two volumes of Dunera Lives are a remarkable conclusion to a career and a life. Even this second volume is generously illustrated, following its older sibling of 2018, which interpreted the Dunera experience through the visual record. Both are superbly produced by the excellent Monash University Publishing.

At the heart of the book lies Australia: what we were in 1940, and the very different country we would become in the decades that followed. While some of the men, women and children whose stories are told here did leave the country, the book is slanted towards the lives of those who stayed, or at least returned. Not all of those wanted to recall their connection to the Dunera. Henry Mayer did not, whereas Jules Stocky, the scion of a wealthy and well-connected German Catholic businessman, contemplated calling his daughter Dunera when she was born in 1944.

And there are those such as Heinz Schloesser — he would change his surname to Castles — who left Australia but for whom the ties were never quite cut. He returned to England with his wife and children to resume his job as the warden of a youth hostel. Their two sons, Frank and Stephen, Australian-born, would watch the sun set on their winter walks, saying, “It’s going to Australia” — and blow it a kiss before its departure.

Both sons returned to Australia as adults, to build distinguished careers as academic sociologists — one in welfare policy and the other in immigration studies. Frank’s daughter, the author Belinda Castles, has published a novel based on the experiences of her grandparents and their families. Dunera is a tale that continues to unfold, and there are many stories still to be told.

Ken Inglis would like it that way. •

The post A story of the twentieth century appeared first on Inside Story.

Sandy’s remarks echo those of “Nino Culotta,” the pseudonymous author of John O’Grady’s novel They’re a Weird Mob, which was published at around the time Humphries first performed this sketch. It tells the story of Italian journalist Nino Culotta’s arrival in Sydney and initiation into the Australian way of life. Until a couple of months after the book’s release, Nino was taken by some to be a real migrant. “Italy was a terrible place,” he comments at one point in the story. “Who would want to go back there?’

Sandy and Nino — one very much an “Old” Australian, the other “New” — could agree, as Nino put it, that “there is no better way of life in the world than that of the Australian.” They’re a Weird Mob and its sequels are crude, if sometimes funny, examples of migrant stereotyping and assimilationist propaganda. O’Grady also stacks the cards in favour of Nino’s successful assimilation: apart from making him educated and bourgeois, he has him come from way up north, in Piedmont. Of all Italian regions, Piedmont was the one most readily associated with both political and economic modernity.

By making Nino Piedmontese, O’Grady deliberately confounded his (mainly Anglo-Celtic) readers’ stereotypes of Italians as short, dark and swarthy. “Perhaps it is a matter of opinion,” Nino explains, “and an Australian would lump us all together and call us ‘bloody dagoes,’ but we didn’t like Meridionali [southerners], and they didn’t like us. Up in my country there were a few of them, and mostly they found themselves being officious in the police force. Perhaps subconsciously that is why we did not like them. Nobody likes police forces.”

Published in 1958, the year after O’Grady’s novel, Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend claimed that hostility to the “officiousness and authority” embodied in the police was a distinguishing trait of the typical Australian. Nino was evidently made for us. But O’Grady’s argument works only by creating an “other” against which Nino’s suitability for full acceptance as an Australian can be set: They’re a Weird Mob is unrelenting in its negative portrayal of “Meridionali.”

When Nino finds himself sharing a train carriage with an abusive, racist and drunken “Old” Australian (who naturally assumes that Nino is also an Australian until our hero opens his mouth) and a group of Meridionali, Nino assures the southerners, in Italian, that he will throw the man off the train if he tries to harm them. Interestingly, one of the drunk’s abusive comments towards the southerners is “Knives all bloody over ’em.” How does O’Grady deal with this racist stereotype? By having one of the Meridionali produce a knife. Nino demands the knife and throws it out the window of the train after having “bumped him on the top of his head.”

My family are Meridionali. Although my parents were born in Australia, my four grandparents were from the Aeolian Islands, a group of seven volcanic islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Lipari, my maternal grandparents’ homeland, is the largest; Salina, the original home of my paternal grandparents, is the second largest, and the setting for the film Il Postino (1994), which depicts a stay on the island by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Stromboli is famous for its lively volcano, while Vulcano, which also has a smouldering crater, is admired for its hot springs and mud baths, if not for its overwhelming smell of sulphur.

The Aeolian Islands have for thousands of years been exploited for their volcanic products, including shiny, black obsidian in ancient times and less striking pumice more recently. They also contain orchards, vineyards, market gardens and farms. At the time of my grandparents’ births, around the turn of the twentieth century, other local men fished or worked in the merchant marine. The grape industry was devastated by phylloxera, the marine by the coming of the railway. A history of rapid outward migration — I also have many relatives in the United States — led to drastic depopulation.

Lipari Island, with Vulcano in the background, c. 1900–10. Alamy

For a time, Mussolini’s fascists used these islands as a conveniently out-of-the-way place to exile political prisoners, but today tourism seems to overwhelm all. The local cult is that of the martyr Bartholomew the Apostle, who was flayed alive. Many in my family have his name; in Australia it has often become Bob, but sometimes Bart.

Odysseus was an early visitor. In his travels he once found himself on “the Aiolian island,” “a floating island, the whole enclosed by a rampart of bronze, not to be broken, and the sheer of the cliff [that] runs upward to it.” There, King Aiolos, a favourite of the gods, lived with his wife and twelve children. Conveniently, these were six sons and six daughters, “so he bestowed his daughters on his sons, to be their consorts.”

Aiolos treated Odysseus and his men with hospitality for a month. When they wanted to leave, the king gave Odysseus a bag containing all the winds, and helpfully set it up so that the west wind would take them home. Ten days after they sailed, they came into sight of home, but a “sweet sleep” came across Odysseus. The men, assuming the bag contained gold and silver, opened it to get their share. The ship was blown back to the island, and an angry Aiolos, assuming those on board were hated by the gods, sent them packing.

The Aeolians have been coming to Australia since the nineteenth century. My father’s family were pre–first world war migrants who settled in the Wimmera town of Nhill. I recently found in the National Library of Australia’s Trove database a Nhill Free Press account of my then-teenage great-aunt Katie — I recall her as an elderly woman in Melbourne in the 1970s — singing at public functions during the first world war. Welcoming two local heroes home from Gallipoli, her “Gondola Dreams” was a nice Italian touch; on another occasion, she was raising funds for the French Red Cross.

The impression left by these fragments of reportage from more than a century ago is of a migrant family doing its best to fit in. But this didn’t mean they left their old associations behind. My father used to joke about a relative who would describe himself as “a dinky-di Aussie, proud to be Italian.”

The Melbourne Aeolian Club (Società Mutuo Soccorso Isole Eolie) was established in 1925, inspired by a migrant who had been a member of a Strombolian club in New York, and the name Bongiorno appears in the minutes of its first meeting, as does Santamaria, the most famous Australian name associated with the island group. The staunchly anti-communist Catholic Bob Santamaria’s family migrated in the same wave as my father’s family, and from the same island, Salina.

As Celeste Russo suggests in her 1986 University of Melbourne thesis on the Aeolian Club, although it brought together “Aeolians,” more local identifications probably mattered most to these people. They identified with their family and village, then with their own island and, at a stretch, with the island group. Sicilians and Calabrians were, by comparison, outsiders. “Bloody Calabrese” were words I sometimes recall hearing in my childhood, a neat combination of Australian vernacular and old enmity.

I gave little thought to my Aeolian ancestry until 1996, when the last of my grandparents died. But that year also provided other reasons to reflect on ethnicity, immigration and identity. This was the time of the Pauline Hanson outbreak, and I was living and working in the southeastern Brisbane suburbs, with their large and prosperous Asian population. Even there, the tensions came to the surface. On one occasion, I was standing in a queue at the Griffith University newsagency while a male customer subjected the young Asian-Australian woman behind the counter to a barrage of verbal abuse. She had made a mildly disparaging remark about Pauline Hanson, who was pictured on the cover of the magazine she was selling him.

Hanson’s arguments against Asian immigration and multiculturalism had been heard loudly and often on the political right, especially since the controversy generated by the historian Geoffrey Blainey in 1984 over the pace of Asian immigration to Australia. Australia, Hanson said, was in danger of being “swamped” by Asians. They did not mix with the existing population; they formed ghettos. Europeans did not feature in this argument. Indeed, Hanson’s key adviser and the author of much of her early material was a larger-than-life figure named John Pasquarelli — obviously not an Anglo-Celtic name, though Pasquarelli said he’d been “dewogged.”

I may have been inclined to accept that I, too, had been “dewogged” — but another experience intervened. With my Australian studies students in Brisbane, I was surveying the debates over “suburbia.” We looked at numerous critiques, as well as Hugh Stretton’s famous claim in Ideas for Australian Cities that Australians had adapted the suburb to their own needs, desires and imaginations. I began thinking about the northern Melbourne suburb in which I had grown up, Thornbury, and realised that my own experience of suburbia was different from that described in most social criticism.

I lived in a house with my mother, father and younger sister. To one side of our home lived my mother’s maternal uncle, with his wife. Next door to them lived their own son, with his wife. An opening allowed you to walk between the backyards of those two houses. On the other side of our own home lived my mother’s paternal uncle, with his wife. Behind them lived their daughter and son-in-law, with their young children. Again, a gateway led from the backyard of one home into the other. These arrangements allowed younger people to keep an eye on the ageing Italian-born generation while easily enlisting grandmothers and grandfathers as childminders.

Frank Matisi (left) with an employee outside his shop in High Street, Croxton, c. 1929.

To Hanson, this might have seemed like a ghetto, but those living in it also participated in the wider community. My grandfather’s brother, one of our next-door neighbours, was elected to the Northcote City Council with Labor Party endorsement in 1962, served for more than twenty years and was mayor for three terms. He was active in CO.AS.IT., the Italian welfare organisation, and in Rotary. My mother’s cousin, two doors up from us, was a member of the Aeolian Club, but also active in the Lions Club, as were my parents. The relationship of these Italian Australians to one another and their community could not be captured in the easy clichés of right-wing politicians and conservative professors.

I never imagined that my mother’s family had been able to replicate in Melbourne the “Italy” they had left behind. Yet I also found it implausible that their ethnicity was irrelevant to the world they had made in the Melbourne suburbs, or that — like Nino Culotta and his son — they had slipped quietly into grey suburbia. There had to be an in-between place.

I visited Italy for the first time in 1997; I was in my late twenties. I saw this as a holiday, not a pilgrimage, but I did ensure that the Aeolian Islands were on my itinerary. The day before I left Lipari, I decided to try to find the house where my grandfather had lived. I knew it was in a village above the main port, and I hailed a cab.

At first the driver was incredulous that I wanted to go to this place on a Sunday morning. The village, at the top of a steep hill, seemed deserted, but we eventually spotted a man working in an orange grove. He hadn’t heard of my grandfather but suggested I ask someone over at the church, where mass was being held. I waited outside and when the service was over, the villagers started to emerge. I had little luck finding anyone who could speak English until one man pointed me towards a young woman about my age. “Do you speak English?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied. “I’m from Sydney.”

Once my mission was explained, and with the young woman acting as interpreter, the man to whom I had originally addressed my question quickly took me to the house in which my grandfather had grown up. I recognised it from photos. Very soon, the locals I encountered were able to connect me in their minds with those of my family they knew, either from the islands or in Australia. They knew my great-uncle because, in their eyes, he had become a big man, and because he and his wife had visited from time to time. They gave me coffee, fed me chocolates and presented me with homemade biscuits for the journey to Palermo. But they also insisted on taking me to visit my “family” on the islands.

The mental maps of many of these islanders included bits and pieces of an obscure country on the other side of the world, the Australian suburbs in which they had brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, aunts and uncles and cousins. The great Australian historian of modern Italy, Richard Bosworth, has called this the “Empire of the Italies,” arguing that “for many Italians, the more obvious and decisive frontiers were not located in a printed atlas but wherever their minds or custom advised.”

Nino Culotta’s outsider status when he first arrives in Sydney is based on his inability to comprehend the Australian idiom. His epiphany — which occurs at the blokeyest occasion imaginable, a buck’s party — concerns his ability to think in Australian English. Nino is happy that his own son will be unable to speak Italian, and that he himself will forget how to speak it, and so have trouble conversing with his own parents back in Italy. He brands as “disgraceful” parents he sees in shops “talking to kids in their homeland language, and the kids translating into English.”

I was raised in an English-speaking home by parents who spoke Italian — including the Aeolian dialect — but only used it when dealing with Italians. Yet I do not speak Italian, and neither do the other Italian Australians of my generation in my extended family. This meant we only had outsider status in the Italo-Australian community, and I was always conscious of the cultural differences between myself and the “really” Italian kids (who usually had Italian-born parents) at school.

Other differences came down to whether one’s family was among the relatively small numbers of migrants who had entered Australia before the second world war, or from the mass emigration from the 1950s to the 1970s. Hairstyle, dress, taste in music, whether one liked soccer more than Australian Rules football, accent, whether one spoke Italian: these were all critical markers of identity.

The choices you made, or that your family had made on your behalf, determined the nature of the cultural capital you acquired. Could you plausibly claim the privileges of full membership of the still Anglo-Celtic-dominated community with the cultural power that entailed? Or did you belong to an accepted minority of the kind that had “enriched” Australian life through its spaghetti and soccer? Ghassan Hage has described this process well: it is all about who gets to control the terms on which national space is imagined, entered and experienced.

Assimilationism did influence the life choices of immigrants and their children. Ironically, it may have had a greater impact on the earlier generations than on those who entered under the postwar program and were officially subject to it. Many of the prewar arrivals, a small minority, had suffered persecution in Australia during the second world war, and had every reason to want to blend in after it. Some, including my Uncle Tony, who later became the mayor, were interned as enemy aliens. “Getting on” meant playing by the rules of British Australia. The Aeolian Club in Melbourne had enjoyed a membership of 200 before this war, but only forty-one renewed after it. The club became very dependent on the new postwar waves of immigrants.

The children of migrants had little incentive to ensure that their own children learnt Italian. It was more important to acquire skills that would help you to get on in life. Some likely believed that speaking too much Italian at home would harm their children’s English. My parents avoided giving their children Italian names. I was named after my maternal grandfather, Francesco, but became Francis. My parents would not have seen this as in any way anti-Italian or anti-Aeolian. It was simply about fitting in, adapting to the new.

Many of my own generation of Australian-born Aeolian Australians became quite detached from the cultures of their parents and grandparents, even as they also experienced fragments of these cultures in their daily lives — through food, snatches of the Aeolian dialect and barely articulated habits of mind. And there was the instinctive turn to extended family when you needed or wanted something, and the desire to touch government only with a very long pair of tongs.

Some, like me, entering their twenties, donned backpacks and used the financial rewards from professional jobs of which their grandparents would not have dared dream to visit their ancestral homelands. Now, as we get older, we travel there in more comfort. Relatives on my father’s side of the family assemble on Salina every few years for a family reunion.

Their Australian story has been the familiar one of migrant success, as celebrated in From Volcanoes We Sailed: Connecting Aeolian Generations, an exhibition at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum in 2016. Curated by my cousin, Cristina Neri, the exhibition shows how Aeolian-Australian experience was embodied in business and professional success, cultural continuity and a thriving family life. There was a great deal of nostalgia about food and families, and a sense that modernity and the passing of the migrant generation threaten both. When Russo wrote about the Melbourne Aeolian Club in 1986, she thought its future “precarious,” since the migrant generations were getting old, the community was well integrated and the young seemed little interested in maintaining these connections.

But the club — which sponsored the 2016 exhibition — now seems to be flourishing, and Aeolian identity is being reimagined by migrant descendants, who can happily pick and choose which bits and pieces of culture they embrace. We are free to ignore the patriarchy that consigned many women to inferior educational opportunity and to the home — that belongs to the past, as another country — while celebrating spicchitedda and other delicious treats of the kind made in the well-stocked kitchens ruled by those very same women.

The unrelenting gentrification of Melbourne’s inner suburbs has seen the demolition of the home in which I grew up, replaced in recent years by stylish townhouses. Years ago, newer immigrants — Greeks and Lebanese — moved into other homes on the block that had once been occupied by my family. Soon, most signs of the little world made by this group of Melbourne Aeolians in our street will be gone. But the traces of these islanders have not been so easily obliterated. In an era of globalised identities and easy mobilities, their descendants are reimagining their own “Empire of the Italies” as a reflection of their affluent, progressive and cosmopolitan selves. •

This essay appears in GriffithReview69: The European Exchange, edited by Ashley Hay and Natasha Cica, published in partnership with the Australian National University. Reference can be found there.

The post Island stories appeared first on Inside Story.

It is a lively book, in a jolly-hockey-sticks kind of way, and Pyne doesn’t make too many demands on his reader. There is no deep introspection, no dark night of the soul comparable to Turnbull’s account of his deep depression after he was rejected as party leader in 2009. John Howard kept Pyne on the backbench for somewhat longer than his talents likely warranted, but Christopher seems to have taken it on the chin. We gain few insights into the effects of such disappointments, the emotional demands of politics, or the impact of a public career on one’s family life.

In fact, most of the people he encounters in his political career seemingly become “a friend of mine.” If true, it would suggest that the old line credited to Harry S. Truman — that anyone wanting a friend in Washington needed to buy a dog — doesn’t translate to Canberra.

Like Turnbull, Pyne can write; unlike Turnbull, he doesn’t leave the political scene bitter at the behaviour of a large coterie of enemies. Pyne says he wanted to be prime minister — don’t they all? — but he was never going to fly that high. And unlike all but a few of those who do fly that high, he was able to leave politics in a manner of his own choosing. If he did lose a friend or two along the way — he fell out with Mathias Cormann over the plot against Turnbull — he (metaphorically) kissed and made up.

In the House of Representatives at the age of twenty-five and there for twenty-six years, with only a very brief period as a lawyer, Pyne has had no career outside politics. That makes this book an insight into the modern political class, for which this broad career trajectory is now standard fare. Private school, law degree from sandstone university, student politics, a bit of time as a staffer along the way — he worked for Amanda Vanstone, who provides this book’s foreword — and then a political career before leaving for the richer material rewards of the private sector. This is what a modern professional politician looks like. If you don’t like it, well too bad: that’s how it is.

It has its benefits. Politics might be a profession unlike any other, but it is like all the others in demanding a certain kind of expertise to be done with any success. Pyne clearly has the skills that are needed to practise it effectively. He versed himself in parliamentary procedure and was rewarded when he became leader of the House during the Abbott–Turnbull–Morrison era. He also has the gift of the gab and handles media well. He is among a group of politicians who, in collusion with political journalists such as Annabel Crabb (whose endorsement graces the book’s cover), have turned politics into a minor branch of the entertainment industry.

Pyne is quite frank about the degree of self-interested cooperation that occurs within this mutual admiration society. With some exaggeration no doubt, he informs us that “Crabb has made something of a life’s work of trying to make me look normal in the public eye.” Pyne is, of course, making a little witticism, but it is an accurate enough account of the role of some political journalists in providing free PR for fellow members of the political class. Not that this stops Pyne from whining elsewhere in the book about the leftist bias of the ABC. He also makes it abundantly clear how much he enjoys his minor celebrity by devoting a large portion of the early part of the book to (mainly) favourable reviews of his own media career. The question of whether this kind of thing is good for either politics or show business is beyond the scope of this brief review.

Pyne is said to be outrageously witty, and pants-wettingly funny; but while not exactly dour, this is not an especially humorous book. Sometimes, it is hard to know whether Pyne is being serious or whether he is just having another of his little jokes, as when he tells us: “while it’s hard to imagine now, there were real climate change deniers in the Coalition in [2009], some in very senior positions.” For most of us, this requires no stretch of the imagination at all. “[Peta] Credlin had always described me as being like family to Abbott and to her,” he also reports. Here, I would really like to give Pyne the credit for an especially subtle piece of humour, but I suspect it might be inadvertent. And I suppose there was a sense of humour at work in the appointment of former defence minister David Johnston — you might recall him as the bloke who said he wouldn’t trust the Australian Submarine Corporation to “build a canoe” — as an Australian defence exports advocate. This is chutzpah of a rare kind and it deserves our admiration.

Whenever I looked at or listened to Pyne, I was always reminded of the character in the third of the British House of Cards trilogy, The Final Cut, Geoffrey Booza-Pitt, played by Nickolas Grace. Wikipedia gets him right: “a lesser member of Urquhart’s cabinet… He is something of a ‘character,’ cheerfully upper-class with a slightly eccentric sense of humour, notable for wearing colourful waistcoats and bow ties.” This is not quite Pyne but it will do, and the physical resemblance in Grace’s portrayal is uncanny.

There isn’t much to Booza-Pitt except buffoonery and self-interest. There is rather more to Pyne than that, even if he seems to go out of his way to sound like an upper-class twit. This is no better illustrated than by his repeated references in the book to the fictitious couple of Amanda Vanstone’s invention, “Bob and Nancy Stringbag,” who are supposed to represent everyday Australians. That Pyne can do this without any apparent awareness of how condescending and elitist this looks says a great deal about what a quarter of a century as a professional politician will do to you. Bob and Nancy are essentially (white) noble savages: they have no interest in politics and are completely preoccupied with the everyday:

They enjoy life’s simple pleasures — camping with the kids, buying presents and sweets for their grandchildren, having one too many shandies with their mates and girlfriends but not judging others for the same peccadilloes… They see themselves as fair-minded and take their time to come around to change… They loathe being told what to do or what to think by their self-appointed betters.

And on it goes. It probably hasn’t occurred to Pyne that he looks rather like one of their self-appointed betters — such as when he thinks it worth remarking to Peter Dutton, while visiting Queensland, that quite a lot of the latter’s constituents are wearing ugg boots. The untutored Pyne assumed they were low-income, non-Liberal-voting types (Dutton corrected that impression for him). I suppose he deserves a tick for being willing to expose his own snobbery.

Even allowing that he occupied defence portfolios, Pyne is partial to military metaphors. He quotes a note he made in 2012: the strategy to get rid of the Gillard government is “war on all fronts at all times.” The tactics are “to engage and attack the enemy at every opportunity.” Abbott liked Pyne because he was a “warrior.” Pyne and his fellow Liberals are forever getting into “the trenches.” “I never shy away from a fight.” “I lead my troops towards the sound of battle, not away from it!” His time in Turnbull’s office dealing with the leadership crisis of August 2018 was like being in a tent of the Yorkists or Lancastrians in the War of the Roses. “Thursday morning was like the centre of the battlefield.”

And on and on it goes. Political psychologists would have a field day with this material, coming from a politician who has never been a soldier and never been on a battlefield, and who affected something of a dandified public image. Julia Gillard, it might be recalled, cruelly called him a “mincing poodle.”

“Has anyone ever seen one better?” he asks about Abbott as opposition leader, to which the answer would surely be “yes,” because Abbott’s aggression so poisoned the political well that he was unable to adjust to government and was gone in two years. “Like all good generals, Abbott led from the front,” we learn. In reality, it’s bad generals who lead from the front, because, like Major General Sir William Bridges and Tony Abbott, they tend to get shot down there. Pyne at least realises that Abbott’s was a miserable government, and he barely goes through the motions of trying to show that he was a successful education minister. (He wasn’t.)

Along the way are a few opinions and facts that some future political historians might decide to tuck into a footnote. He thinks that Scott Morrison has clean hands in relation to the falls of both Abbott and Turnbull. (Turnbull, in his own memoirs, suggests otherwise.) He thinks Abbott would have lost an election in 2016 if he had not been tipped out. He claims authorship of the idea of requiring a party-room majority to sign a petition calling for a spill of positions in August 2018. He was also responsible for Australia’s policy of supporting West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state — a blundering formulation, now adopted by Donald Trump, that had its origins in some opportunistic posturing to win the Wentworth by-election in 2018. He says that the party’s marginal seat polling indicated Turnbull would have won the 2019 election.

So what does this career of more than a quarter of a century in Australian federal politics amount to? Pyne assures us that he was responsible for “an entire reinventing of defence in Australia.” He spends a good deal of time telling us of his efforts to flog Australian-made military hardware to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. He claims some influence in securing defence industry investment for his hometown of Adelaide. He says he is the “father” of the Australian Space Agency. He is generously willing to share with Marise Payne credit for the “Pacific step-up.” He claims that he delivered the moderates to Scott Morrison in the leadership contest. (Is he seriously suggesting that without his influence, they would have voted for Dutton?) He finds he is a “hawk rather than a dove” on defence and foreign policy — “I was comfortable taking a stand” — but given that his career has never required him to make a significant stand on anything much, it’s hard to take the claim too seriously.

In the end, The Insider has value as an insight into what a representative specimen of an Australian professional politician looks like in the early twenty-first century. There’s no need to worry much over which party he belongs to. In the world of the Canberra insiders, such differences are superficial. When Labor’s David Feeney had to take his leave from parliament after forgetting to declare some investment property and falling foul of section 44 on citizenship, Pyne wanted to give him a job as a defence exports advocate. After all, he was “a very decent fellow.”

In good time, I’m sure, he would also have become “a friend of mine.” •

The post The thoroughly modern politician appeared first on Inside Story.

At the National Press Club yesterday Scott Morrison announced not only that he would be abandoning his anti-union “ensuring integrity” bill but also that his government would be bringing together unions and businesses to sort out changes to a broken industrial relations system. “It is a system that has, to date, retreated to tribalism, conflict and ideological posturing,” declared one of the country’s chief tribalists, conflict merchants and ideological posturers.

This is no Accord-style proposal, and there is enough half-cooked history out there already without adding more to the pot. The Prices and Incomes Accord was not a meeting between government, business and unions; it was an agreement and partnership between the Labor Party, then still in opposition, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions. It did not include business. It was not based on the idea of a government sitting down with one interest among many and having a pleasant chat about industrial relations law. It assumed that unions — or at least their leading officials — would be brought into the policymaking processes of government. And to some extent, over the years ahead, that is what happened.

The Accord was a trade-off in which unions agreed to wage restraint in return for the legislative benefits sometimes called a “social wage.” One aim was to contain inflation, which the Labor Party and the ACTU could agree was a problem for both workers and the national economy. Another — especially on the union side — was to ensure that its members would benefit from Labor in government. Medicare is one of the Accord’s progeny. Compulsory superannuation would become another.

Nor was the Accord an effort to reform the industrial relations system. On the contrary, it depended on the existence of strong unions, a centralised system of wage determination and an empowered Arbitration Commission — the combination that had underpinned Australia’s industrial relations system since the early years of the century. Once that system was gradually wound down from the late 1980s and replaced by enterprise bargaining, the Accord became increasingly unimportant, even as it moved through to an eventual Mark VII (or Mark VIII, if you count the one never implemented because Labor lost the 1996 election).

It is also fundamentally mistaken to imagine that having an Accord is somehow at the other end of the spectrum from doing what Scott Morrison and the Coalition have spent a great deal of energy and effort trying to do: coerce the unions. The Accord — if I may borrow an evocative phrase used by the late Peter Coleman in quite another context — was a combination of the “open smile” and the “broken bottle.”

It was all smiles if unions behaved themselves. But if they didn’t — if they were like one of the ancestors of the CFMMEU, the Builders Labourers Federation — they could expect to feel the full force of the government’s iron fist. The BLF was deregistered when it refused to play ball — by federal and state Labor governments. The Federation of Air Pilots was treated with no greater tenderness when it demanded wage increases of almost 30 per cent.

Far from representing some personality change, Scott Morrison’s plans for sweetness and light between government, unions and business look more like cover for his necessary decision to abandon a bill that was going nowhere and had become an embarrassment in a political and economic environment transformed by a pandemic. The iron fist won’t be far away: Morrison will not play to Sally McManus in the way Robert Menzies did to her distant predecessor Albert Monk, or Malcolm Fraser did to Bob Hawke, because he doesn’t have to. Monk and Hawke led an ACTU that represented half (or more) of the workforce, in an industrial relations system that did organised labour plenty of favours. McManus, while widely respected, leads a union movement that enjoys none of these advantages.

The Accord had its critics at the time. Even during the 1983 election campaign, a young shadow treasurer, Paul Keating, in one of the more embarrassing of the campaign’s gaffes, admitted that he did not know whether it would work. It was not a good look for a party that was using the Accord to show that it could rebuild a failed economy in partnership with the unions. For the right, the Accord gave unions too much influence over a government led by a former ACTU president. For critics on the left, all the sacrifices seemed to be on the union side. The benefits to workers seemed meagre, especially once the government became increasingly preoccupied with cutting expenditure during the economic crises of the mid 1980s — which Keating warned might otherwise turn Australia into a banana republic.

Observers frequently confuse the Accord with the National Economic Summit of April 1983. Held in the House of Representatives chamber of the old Parliament House, the summit was a rather dramatic statement by a new government about its own priorities. It included business as well as unions, state governments and even the odd representative of the community sector. The whole affair was treated as a great triumph for Hawke — he had supposedly signed up both the unions and business to his economic agenda — but it was in many ways an enlarged and polite version of the blokey world of horsetrading and deal-making in which Hawke had flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the major interests that we would now regard as needing to be represented on such an occasion — First Nations people, women, the unemployed, people with a disability — were absent. It was of its times, a meeting of men in suits.

Those times have changed, but Hawke continues to mesmerise the political class, even on the right, his governing style seemingly the gold standard ever after. He remains the prophet of “consensus” as surely as Menzies is the prophet of “the forgotten people” and John Howard of “the battlers.” “Bringing Australia Together” — a 1983 Labor campaign slogan — is now treated as the only viable alternative to the aggressive and snarling partisanship that seems to have been the default position of Australian politics for a generation. But democracy is about contention as well as consensus.

The Accord envisaged a cooperative but empowered union movement, one that still represented about half the workforce. Its critics on the left today, including political economist Elizabeth Humphrys in an important recent study, argue that it left in its wake a neoliberal economic order and a union movement so bereft of rank-and-file power that it could no longer offer any serious challenge to government or bosses. The kind of sweetheart dealing between unions and employers — often at the expense of members — uncovered by the trade union royal commission was one fruit of its creeping frailty. Another has been the flat wages, wage theft and deteriorating employment conditions — especially for casual workers — that have dogged the economy for years.

If it is far from clear what the unions have to offer Morrison, it’s hardly more so what he can offer the unions. He has placed on the table issues such as “award simplification” (whatever that means); “enterprise agreement making” based on the need to “get back to the basics” (of course we do); casuals and fixed-term employees (about which he offers no views); “compliance and enforcement” (followed by a reference to unions and employers doing “the right thing”); and “greenfields agreements for new enterprises” (at this point, union official breaks out in a cold sweat). There’s not much for unions to get their teeth into here, but plenty that ought to worry them in the hands of a government that has been relentlessly anti-union since the moment it took office.

Is he going to provide unions with greater opportunities to organise than current labour laws allow them? That would go down like a lead balloon among the Coalition’s “base,” business donors and barrackers in the right-wing media. Is he prepared to do anything to encourage union membership, given that he’s recently discovered how terribly helpful unions can be? (After all, unions do have to be paid for, and those who pay their union dues are often underwriting the wages and conditions of the many more who don’t.) What support is he prepared to offer coal workers certain to be restructured out of their jobs in the years ahead? Or are we just going to get continuing reruns of the false hope that workers and communities will have a bright future if only Labor and the Greens can be kept at bay? As ever with this marketing man as prime minister, all that is solid quickly seems to melt into air.

Whatever the outcome of this initiative, let’s not pretend that we are seeing the return of the Prices and Incomes Accord. It had its faults, but it was at least based on the idea of workers getting something in return for stagnant wages. By way of contrast, Morrison offers… what? It’s hard not to see this as an example of the kind of frontrunning and kite-flying Morrison was prone to as treasurer, at least according to Malcolm Turnbull’s recent memoir. •

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History can offer insight, but it can just as easily mislead. So what I do here is refer to three historical analogies — the first world war and Spanish flu epidemic, the Great Depression, and the second world war and postwar reconstruction — and to see where they might take us.

The first is perhaps the most obvious, given that the crisis we have faced has been, at its heart, one of public health. By 1918, the war had killed millions of soldiers and civilians. But when American troops arrived on the Western Front that year they brought with them a virulent strain of influenza that, according to some estimates, would eventually kill as many as one hundred million people.

Its first Australian victims were soldiers far from home. But, as in 2020, Australia was in the fortunate position of having advance warning of what was on the way, and a maritime quarantine was imposed. That probably minimised the damage, though Australia still probably lost somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people to the illness — many more, one hopes, than now seems likely from Covid-19.

Is there anything in this experience that might point to the fate of progressive ideas on the other side of our own pandemic? Not much, I’m afraid. Australia’s gross domestic product had shrunk during the war, and it grew in the wake of the Spanish flu. The flu, with its absenteeism, closure of businesses, and state border and port restrictions, certainly disrupted economic activity, as did industrial conflict during 1919, some of it related to workers’ concerns about the flu. But much of life went on as before. While restrictions were most severe in New South Wales, they were on the whole much less onerous than at present. The Victorian Football League, for instance, predecessor to the Australian Football League, continued its season as usual.

Neither the war nor the flu unleashed any burst of policy creativity among progressives. It’s true that the Labor Party moved leftward, adopting a socialisation objective in 1921, but the lean interwar years saw no great advance in social protection, as distinct from efforts to protect Australian urban and rural industry with tariffs and subsidies. Australian society had been divided by the war and its aftermath, and progressive advance of an enduring kind in this country has generally emerged out of policy consensus, not fierce contestation.

The Great Depression struck just as dramatically. Australia’s unemployment rate peaked at perhaps 25 per cent in the early 1930s, and the economy again shrank. It is hardly surprising that pessimists in the present wonder whether we’re heading into a comparable situation. My answer to that is that while there are likely very tough times ahead, we should be careful about easy comparison.

The macroeconomic capacity of the federal government in 1930 was much weaker than today. The monetary capacity of the central bank of the day, the Commonwealth, was piddling compared with the kind of activity we’ve witnessed just in the last few weeks. Our welfare state has many deficiencies in 2020, but it was rudimentary in 1930, lacking an unemployment benefit, for instance, leaving aside a new and very basic system of insurance in Queensland. Australians in 2020 will demand and receive more protection from their government than those of ninety years ago.

On the other hand, Australia’s economy was very simple in 1930, and ours isn’t. Exports then were dominated by wool and wheat; the crisis for Australia, to a great extent, arose from the plunge in prices for those commodities, with an accompanying retreat of overseas loan funds. The growing manufacturing sector, developing behind a rising tariff wall, was mainly engaged in import replacement. Few married women were in paid work and it’s quite possible that the women who were — often young and single — were generally less affected by the downturn because the industries in which they worked were a little less vulnerable to the bust than male-dominated building and construction, and transport. The household economy usually comprised a man engaged in paid work, and a woman in unpaid labour in the home.

The unfolding economic crisis of the present is obviously different, but no less potentially devastating for that. Initially at least, jobs in the services sector have seemed extremely vulnerable to social-distancing measures, and the women — a much greater proportion of the workforce than in 1930 — who are so well represented in this sector are vulnerable to lay-offs. Our export sector depends on services — education, for instance, and tourism — to an unprecedented degree, and our economy is integrated and interconnected globally, through movements of people, capital and goods, in more complex ways than in 1930. Australia had accepted many immigrants in the 1920s, but it is now arguably more vulnerable to the drying up of immigration, which plays a more complex role in the economy than a century ago.

In the 1930s, Australia’s economic recovery was shaped to a great extent by that of Britain. Today, we tend to look nervously to China, but our fate will also be tied to that of the United States as the world’s largest economy.

The Depression remains Australia’s emblematic historical experience of economic collapse and social distress. But I’m unsure that it offers us too many clues about what the coming crisis will be like. At best, it might act as a reminder that progressive policies don’t usually flourish in times of such distress; that economic crises, in our country’s history, have more often provided a cover for conservative reaction, as they did in the 1930s and the 1970s.

It is with the second world war and postwar reconstruction that the optimists come into their own. Parallels have frequently been drawn between our current circumstances and the reconstruction policies developed from 1942 on, which remain our paradigmatic case of post-crisis reorganisation and renewal. While I don’t want to pour cold water over such hopes, I think it’s well to be cautious. But here are a few things we might take from that experience.

First, it began early, years before the war ended, and was intimately connected to the Allies’ articulation of war aims. In other words, it was connected to wartime propaganda and morale. I’ve seen few indications of our government, or any other, raising the hope and expectations of the population of a new world order afterwards. On the contrary, our own federal government, with its talk of “snapback,” has made it plain that, as far as possible, it will promote a return to business as usual. The hope of progressives is that this will prove impossible, as well it might.

Second, as Stuart Macintyre shows vividly in his brilliant study of postwar reconstruction, Australia’s Boldest Experiment, decisions made long before the end of the war were critical in shaping postwar Australia. If Labor had used the crisis of 1942 to push harder for more powers to be handed to Canberra, for instance, postwar governments would have experienced fewer constraints than they ended up facing.

In the present crisis, our federal government is making a lot of decisions right now that reflect its longstanding ideological preferences. These decisions will not be easily undone. Alongside proposing a massive handout to private schools, it seems to be using the opportunity to shrink the higher education sector even more drastically than is likely to occur anyway. Again, this is a long-term ideological preference, born of the conviction that too many Australians are attending universities and thereby wasting resources. We can expect much more of this kind of thing, some of which may well be nothing more complicated than the usual suspects seeking to loot the Treasury in familiar ways.

Third, unlike during and after the second world war, I see little or no evidence of an emerging policy consensus, which is usually a solid basis for progressive advance. Keynesianism emerged as the basis of government macroeconomic policy in Australia not under the Labor governments of John Curtin or Ben Chifley, but in November 1939, in the first Menzies government’s war budget. More generally, all of the political parties shifted decisively towards a greater emphasis on social protection and the welfare state in the 1940s. Child endowment was introduced by a conservative government, not Labor, in 1941.

Australia’s renovated economic policy and welfare state were forged more in consensus, underpinned by a new economic stability and emerging prosperity, than against a background of serious contention. And these changes were based, in large part, on recognition that the mass suffering of the Depression must be avoided at virtually all costs — that the war had shown that government actually had the instruments to ensure that ordinary people were not blown this way and that by whatever the prevailing economic winds happened to be.

I would like to believe these conditions currently exist. But I see a lot of evidence to the contrary. I see conservative politicians gearing up to use the level of debt we are likely to take out of this crisis as cover for reaction: for business tax cuts, for more assaults on unions, for cuts to the public sector, for a winding back of “red tape” and “green tape.” I see Labor politicians agreeing with them. Malcolm Turnbull’s recent memoir is a good reminder of how business tax cuts are as much an article of faith for Liberals like him as climate change denialism is for those he spends so much of his book excoriating.

There are other parallels with the 1940s that are other than reassuring. Many of the policies of the Labor governments of the 1940s ran into a rhetoric from the new Liberal Party that appealed to people’s desire to restore the status quo ante: a prewar order. This might seem odd given that before the war there had been the Depression, but I’ve read many letters written to Robert Menzies by ordinary constituents in the 1950s, and they are full of this kind of nostalgia. And he knew how to appeal to it.

This was the 1940s and 1950s version of snapback, and it’s a very powerful vision in times of uncertainty, as the global successes of the right-wing populists have already shown us. So when the Liberals complained of socialist regimentation and overregulation in the 1940s, they were appealing to the impulse — the fantasy — that life could be returned to what had been there before. But just because something is a fantasy doesn’t mean that it’s not based in realisty and powerful in its own way.

This is not a counsel of despair. It’s rather a warning that if we want change, if we want a more equal and a fairer society, it’s not going to fall into our laps compliments of coronavirus.

Clearly, some good things have come from the awful tragedy of the present crisis. Some welfare payments, especially for the unemployed, have been drastically increased to an extent that would otherwise have been impossible. Governments have been forced to recognise that the markets of neoliberal imagination are hopeless in responding to adult problems — something that should have been clear after 2008 but that has been muted in this country by our better economic performance compared with most other developed countries over the last decade or so. The federal system has worked more effectively than we might have expected. The unions are being consulted and listened to; the right-wing, climate-denialist commentariat isn’t.

And, perhaps most promisingly for social democrats, some degree of public trust in government has been restored. They need that. Rising public trust in government, in science, in the rational corners of the media: these are all really valuable resources for people who want to engage in evidence-based policymaking. We need to do our best to preserve and nurture these developments, along with the capacities for personal empathy and social solidarity that progressive policies ultimately rest on.

The federal government today has a deep and principled commitment to inequality, and no crisis is going to cure it of that. It is backed by business that would like nothing better than to be offered a few free kicks at a time when many industries will struggle for profitability, and that will be looking for relief from the tax office, the consumer and its own workforce. And Australia’s commercial media has never been better geared for giving conservative government and business what they want. While most kinds of business as usual are still a long way off, the familiar patterns of politics will probably be with us fairly soon. They could well be ugly. And we need to be ready. •

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Turnbull remains one of the great puzzles of Australian public life. This book does only a little, at least consciously, to clear that matter up for us. Unconsciously, it’s rather more revealing: for, as his former business partner Nicholas Whitlam has suggested in the Weekend Australian, it’s a deeply evasive book in places. But its evasions are more meaningful than the “revelations” that have been the subject of many a sensational media article in recent days — and much more so than the sensational text messages, diary entries, WhatsApp conversations and all the rest on which Turnbull draws to provide his insider’s account.

This reader’s sensation was often that of a member of a jury being addressed by a skilled if not entirely scrupulous barrister. But there are also hints of a hard sell. By the end of the book’s almost 700 pages, I felt like someone trying to get away from a pushy salesman determined to press the latest mobile phone on me.

Turnbull, of course, has been on sale since the 1980s, and his particular blend of skills has invariably drawn a good price in the market. Kerry Packer saw his value early, and Malcolm didn’t let him down when, as the “Goanna,” the multimillionaire was subjected to allegations of criminality arising from the Costigan royal commission. Turnbull thinks he discredited Frank Costigan, but he was really just the paid advocate of a bully whose habit of keeping millions stashed in his office safe understandably aroused suspicion. Costigan, after all, had already found Australia’s wealthy elite riddled with clever crooks, many of whom were none too fussy about going into business with waterfront thugs in their efforts to avoid paying tax. But the young and ambitious Turnbull was clever enough to turn his defence of Packer into a civil liberties crusade and his role as Packer’s counsel into hot personal PR.

Turnbull also did much for his public profile in the case against the Thatcher government’s efforts to stop publication of that excruciatingly dull and thoroughly paranoid cold war memoir, Peter Wright’s Spycatcher. Turnbull, tender about Packer’s reputation, seems unworried that the book’s central claim — that MI5 chief Roger Hollis was a Soviet mole — was almost certainly false. But then Hollis was dead and, unlike Packer, didn’t have Turnbull on a retainer. Once again, Turnbull was the great crusader for right against might; in his summing up during the trial, he compared the cause of publishing Wright’s miserable book with the struggles of Australia’s shearing unions in the 1890s, a topic on which his mother, Coral Lansbury, had written.

It’s no surprise to find that there are plenty of actors in the family; Angela Lansbury is a relative. The account of his childhood is a mixture of nostalgia and pain — born before his parents wed, he was the product of a doomed marriage of ill-suited partners. The absence of his beautiful and talented mother, a writer for radio, is at the heart of the early part of the book, even while Turnbull seems to go out of his way to make it otherwise: “I don’t think I could have been any closer to Coral, nor do I think she could have been a better or more attentive mother.” Except that she leaves. And then she arranges for the furniture to follow her to New Zealand, where she had moved with a new husband, her third. Malcolm is told that she was merely studying for another degree over there; his father failed to inform him that his mother wasn’t coming back. “So, her absence crept up on me, like a slow chill around the heart,” he recalls.

But that’s almost the last we hear of Lansbury, who made an academic career in the United States: I suspect that the chill didn’t disappear any time soon, if ever. Turnbull provides an affectionate portrait of the father left behind, who was a bit of a lad, more like an older brother. But Bruce Turnbull scraped together the money to send Malcolm to Sydney Grammar as a boarder, which young Malcolm at first hates, because he is a bedwetter and is bullied. He eventually flourishes under the guidance of inspiring teachers.

Young Malcolm liked history and recalls writing an essay on Cosimo de’ Medici. That might explain a little: Cosimo was a Florentine banker, founding member of the dynasty that effectively ruled Florence, and a patron of the arts, architecture and scholarship. His indictment in 1431 accused him of “having sought to elevate himself higher than others.” Imprisoned for a time, he later made a triumphant return to political rule, becoming the city-state’s grand and visionary statesman. Any of that sound familiar?

When the artist Lewis Miller accepted a commission in the early 1990s to produce portraits of Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull, he decided on a homage to the Renaissance portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino by Piero della Francesca, held in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. An unimpressed Turnbull apparently thought that the resulting painting made him look like a “big, fat, greedy c—t.” (Ray Hughes, the Sydney dealer who arranged the commission, valiantly defended the artist by explaining that Miller was a realist painter.) But it’s hard to shake off the feeling that Turnbull has modelled himself on his image of a Renaissance-era Italian merchant-statesman, right down to the republicanism and the landed estate outside the city walls (actually, in the Upper Hunter).

Still a student at the University of Sydney, Malcolm is already doing political journalism for print radio and television. Like Paul Keating, he sits at the feet of old Jack Lang, and is attracted to “the romance and history” of the labour movement — presumably, in large part, through his mother’s influence — while always feeling like “a natural liberal, drawn to the entrepreneurial and enterprising.” With a good private school education behind him and an abundance of talent, energy and ambition, life now seems like pretty smooth sailing; opportunity just falls into his lap. He attends an Oxford Union debate while on a trip to England and speaks from the floor on the importance of a free press. Sure enough, Harold Evans, the Sunday Times editor, is present and sends him a note asking him to drop by in London. When he does, the next day, Evans immediately offers Turnbull a job, which he declines so he can finish his law degree back in Sydney. But there is a handy connection for the future. Life is sweet.

The run of luck continues. Back in Sydney, Turnbull turns up to write a profile of barrister Tom Hughes; he ends up marrying his daughter, Lucy. Soon, he is working for Packer, travelling the world signing up the West Indies team to World Series Cricket and arranging the Australian licence for Playboy. Then there’s a Rhodes Scholarship — although not on his first application — and a good degree from Oxford, despite his spending much of his time mucking about in journalism in London in the middle of a printers’ strike at The Times. The young man who admires the romance and history of the labour movement now tries to line up a deal that would have Packer come in, take over Times Newspapers, and break the unions. It is already clear enough that the cause dearest to Malcolm’s heart is Malcolm. There is no mention of the shearers’ unions on this occasion.

Tragically Bruce Turnbull, now a wealthy and successful hotel-broker, is killed in a light-plane accident soon after Malcolm returns to Sydney. Malcolm is now married, the owner of a Hunter Valley property inherited from his father, and a member of the bar; but what will Malcolm do with his life? He is not shy of aiming high. His “ambition was to get to the top of the profession and equal, if not excel, Lucy’s father.” It is a revealing way to frame one’s ambitions: to better one’s wife’s father, who was possibly the country’s leading barrister and a former federal attorney-general.

By the time he is forty, Turnbull has achieved his dream of financial independence. When he moves his family into a massive and luxurious waterfront mansion in 1994, he says that he has achieved what his father had always told him would be “the ultimate home”; fittingly, it overlooks the block of flats in which his father raised him. But interpreting such material is a job for Dr Freud and his followers, and not for an old-fashioned historian such as this reviewer.

Malcolm really begins to rake in the millions as a merchant banker in the late 1980s. His speciality is restructuring media companies, which are all over the shop in the wake of new media laws, the recklessness of some of the business figures involved — including Alan Bond, Christopher Skase and (Young) Warwick Fairfax — and the market and financial turmoil of the era. Turnbull falls out with Packer in the battle to control Fairfax, but Packer has already cheated him, so that’s okay. From there, it’s an even bigger fortune as an IT entrepreneur with OzEmail, and various dealings in mining and forestry in out-of-the-way places like Siberia, China and the Solomons, which are all aboveboard and environmentally friendly — nothing to see here.

Next, he closes his investment bank and joins Goldman Sachs, becoming managing director of its Australian operations. Paddy Manning’s biography of Turnbull points out that Turnbull became a partner in the firm just before it listed on the New York Stock Exchange. His new shareholding is likely to have added tens of millions to his wealth: one estimate put it at $70 million at the time Turnbull left the bank in 2001, much more than he made from his OzEmail investment. None of this is mentioned in A Bigger Picture. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that this particular evasion is better for the image Turnbull wishes to present in this book of a far-seeing, cutting-edge IT entrepreneur rather than the remarkably fortunate recipient of an enormous windfall.

Inconveniently — because he is moving, inexorably, towards a political career — Turnbull becomes entangled in one of the greatest corporate disasters in Australian history, the collapse of insurance company HIH. He assures us there is nothing to see here, either. Once again, you’ll end up rather better informed if you go to Manning’s biography.

His public profile increases enormously through his role in the Australian Republican Movement. The chapter on this topic is probably the most passionless of the book. It’s true he’s at the disadvantage of having written books on this subject before. But reading it now, it’s hard to imagine he ever cared enough to put in all those hours and hand over the $5 million he claims he paid to keep ARM going, but a lot of water has passed under the bridge since the defeat of the referendum in 1999. By the time he became prime minister, he couldn’t have made his lack of interest in pursuing the matter more apparent short of knighting Prince Philip. His predecessor already had that covered.

In 2004 he enters parliament via a good old-fashioned branch stack. He’s barely in the door before handing out advice on how to reform the tax system, which upsets the treasurer, Peter Costello. Still, John Howard soon promotes him to ministerial office, and, naturally, he is responsible for “one of the most enduring reforms of the Howard government,” the Water Act. Entering opposition late in 2007, he has to endure Brendan Nelson as leader, though apparently he has absolutely nothing to do with his fall. Nothing to see here.

Then, just four years after entering parliament, he becomes leader of the opposition. Good job. Malcolm tells us that, unlike Tony Abbott, he’s a “builder not a wrecker,” but he nonetheless opposes the Rudd Labor government’s second and larger fiscal stimulus during the global financial crisis because it wasn’t needed. China would have fixed everything anyway. In fact, he concedes almost nothing to the Labor government’s efforts to deal with the GFC. Malcolm always knows best, even in the worst economic crisis for eighty years, when plenty of minds at least as good as his own hadn’t a clue what was going to happen next.

He is deceived by weird and ill Treasury official Godwin Grech, who convinces him with a fake email that he has the dirt on Rudd. Turnbull is ashamed of himself — not, apparently, for accepting leaks from a senior Treasury official, but for allowing himself to be deceived and making that the basis of corruption accusations against Rudd. Turnbull loses the leadership in the midst of a party bust-up over the government’s proposal for a carbon pollution reduction scheme, which Turnbull wishes to support. He is betrayed by colleagues he trusts, and not for the last time. He goes into a deep depression in which he has suicidal thoughts and takes antidepressants. It is the most obviously honest section of the book. “I feel at present like a complete and utter failure,” he writes in his diary.

He decides to leave politics and then decides to stay. When the Abbott government is elected in 2013, he is given the communications portfolio with responsibility for the National Broadband Network, which keeps him busy. He doesn’t put a foot wrong, and the result is an NBN that is one of the best in the world. Nothing to see here, except “the largest single piece of infrastructure in Australia’s history.” Labor’s “smouldering trainwreck” is now “a success story.” Well done, Malcolm.

For Turnbull, there’s really no policy issue that won’t be resolved by turning his gigantic intellect to it — guided by a few corporate mates and old Sydney connections and the occasional academic researcher or clever staffer — and then applying a technical fix of some kind. So, cutting business tax is really just common sense because it will bring in investment and produce “jobs and growth.” There’s no need to ask whether it’s fair or even whether it leads to more investment or jobs, because Malcolm tells us it’s all good. On the other hand, he won’t touch negative gearing because it won’t help housing affordability as police and teachers own investment properties and the problem is really one of supply.

Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin make a hash of running the country. Abbott is “crazy” and “a threat to the nation and its security.” Scott Morrison is duplicitous and plotting, Peter Dutton extreme and plodding. Turnbull takes advantage of the gathering chaos and the well-founded fear that Abbott was leading the Coalition to defeat to move against his leadership. He wins the prime ministership, but Abbott, despite public undertakings of forbearance, undermines him from the very earliest days until Turnbull’s eventual fall. Still, the nimble Turnbull cleverly reforms the Senate voting system and engineers a double dissolution election for mid 2016. As ever, everyone including the media is left floundering and Malcolm is the smartest person in the room, the smartest person on every page.

But then things start to go wrong. Malcolm almost loses that election. It’s not his fault, however; it is Labor’s big lie that the government wanted to privatise Medicare. While recognising that his party has tended to unreliability on Medicare at times, including with Abbott and Joe Hockey’s 2014 budget proposal for a co-payment, not once does he pause to ask if he might have had anything to do with why the “lie” works. Could it be because Malcolm looks, sounds and acts like just the kind of guy who would try to privatise Medicare? Like a grammar school sook complaining of the beastly behaviour of the other boys on the rugby pitch, he makes a sulky, angry and graceless speech on election night that provides the country with a valuable insight into why so many people who have had to work with Turnbull rather dislike him.

Anyway, in the end it’s all okay because Australia by this time has entered a truly golden age of enlightened leadership: economically rational, socially progressive, firm, just and sane in its international dealings even when they involve tyrants like Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Luckily, nimble Malcolm solves the problem of how to deal with the marriage equality issue. Opposed by both hardliners in his own party and a Labor opposition intent on using the issue for political gain, Malcolm finds a way through — the smart technocrat is triumphant again. He claims same-sex marriage as one of his government’s greatest achievements. For good measure, he denigrates the Yes campaigners; let’s not share any of the credit for reform, which is such a rare commodity these days. This chapter, along with his embarrassing special pleading about why he rejected the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, provides an especially vivid illustration of Turnbull’s chutzpah, opportunism and elitist understanding of politics. Cosimo de’ Medici would have understood it all too well.

A Bigger Picture leads us on a lengthy excursion through international meetings, policy triumphs and media conspiracies. Turnbull is proud of achievements, such as the foreign interference laws, energy infrastructure including Snowy 2.0, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (minus the United States). He defends Gonski 2.0 as good policy, but clearly also enjoys the politics of flaunting his old Sydney Grammar School chum in the faces of the Labor Party and teachers’ unions. With this Renaissance prince, Machiavelli’s Cesare Borgia is usually not trailing too far behind Cosimo de’ Medici.

Turnbull thinks he would have won the 2019 election if not for the blow-up of August 2018 triggered by legislation for a National Energy Guarantee. Indeed, he thinks that was why his enemies were determined to be rid of him. They were quite prepared to destroy the government in preference to having him continue as an enlightened and liberal prime minister.

The last part of the book tells the tale of the demise of his leadership. Here, we are treated to the melodrama of Tony Abbott’s vengefulness, Peter Dutton’s mad ambition, Mathias Cormann’s cowardice and treachery, and the quiet duplicity of Scott Morrison — all of it oiled by the remorseless hostility of the Murdoch media and right-wing shock jocks. The right of his own party are “terrorists” determined to blow up the government. Others become persuaded that the only way forward is to give in to the “terrorists.”

I sometimes found this a distasteful book — not as distasteful as, say, The Latham Diaries (2005), but there are enough similarities to notice. Its combination of special pleading, broken confidences and bitter scorn will now become part and parcel of Turnbull’s reputation, and will confirm and harden the opinions of detractors. On the other hand, he is being naive if he imagines that a book so obviously self-serving will be taken at face value by the future political historians whom this historically literate man clearly has in view.

Nor will it alleviate the sense of disappointment that many, quite rightly, feel about Turnbull’s prime ministership. His prime ministership was not without its achievements, but Turnbull never really explains why someone who prides himself on being his own man allowed himself to become a hostage to the right of his own party, and to his Coalition partner, as readily as he did. Perhaps it was just vaulting ambition; once he had the prize in hand, and having been deprived of the leadership before, his main aim was to keep it.

Giving way to the right and the Nationals on issues such as same-sex marriage and climate change might have seemed a reasonable price to pay. But it was a strange course for a man who prides himself on being a canny deal-maker and, before the 2016 election at least, was holding all of the best cards. I don’t think it’s quite true to blame sheer opportunism, because I take seriously Turnbull’s claim that he is a constructive politician for whom power needs a purpose. My best guess is that Turnbull’s famously high estimation of his own intelligence and ability resulted in his overestimating his capacity to manoeuvre around those he regarded as lesser men and women — which was pretty much everyone else.

Turnbull certainly didn’t see coming the problems caused by his near loss in the 2016 election. It crippled his political standing and made his government vulnerable to internal revolt on the floor of parliament. But it would be psychologically impossible for Turnbull to admit that it was Bill Shorten, whom he regards with something of a grand duke’s condescension towards a rag-and-bone man, rather than Abbott, Dutton, Morrison or Cormann, who did the most to bring him undone. Nor could he have anticipated the difficulties in parliament caused by all those section 44 ineligibility cases.

Turnbull is unusual among Australian politicians in being willing to talk publicly of love, and it is clear that there is plenty of it in his own marriage and family life. But I suspect that, despite a bluster that many see as arrogance, he carries a lot more pain from his childhood than he is willing or able to disclose. I gained no sense from this book that religious belief plays a major role in his life, although he has converted to the Catholic faith of his wife’s family, and it might also mean more than he is willing to hint at here. There is certainly driving ambition, backed by the energy, bravado and intellect to achieve things most would find impossible.

Yet it has also been a career marked by big failures in things that have clearly mattered to him. As the history of Australia’s past fifty years is written, Turnbull will feature as a phenomenon more than as a politician or prime minister. In that respect, he will likely acquire a different kind of historical reputation from that of one of his few rivals as a larger-than-life public figure, Bob Hawke. The relatively modest nature of Turnbull’s achievements as prime minister will almost certainly ensure that he is not regarded as anywhere near as significant as Hawke. As with The Hawke Memoirs (1994), however, it seems a pity that this supremely gifted man was unable to produce a more generous and gracious account of an accomplished public life. But in Turnbull’s case, perhaps that is more a mark of what our politics has become than of his own character. •

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Scott Morrison is not a strong leader. I offer this judgement not in a pejorative spirit, but as a simple description of political reality. He is neither a Putin nor a Trump, each of whom likes to project himself as a spectacularly successful version of his adoring followers — an image that wouldn’t work in a culture such as ours with its strong tradition of social egalitarianism. Nor is Morrison a Boris Johnson (who has also been holidaying on an island, in his case in the Caribbean). Yet, while Johnson appeals to the prejudices of the ordinary man and woman as he understands them, this Homer-reciting (in the original Greek) graduate of Eton and Oxford is not in the habit of claiming he is one of them. In their heart of hearts, those northerners who voted Tory know that behind the artifice necessary for electoral purposes, Johnson regards them as “chavs, losers, burglars and drug addicts,” to use his own words of a few years back.

Morrison’s prime ministerial persona was unveiled a year ago this month, and that brilliant exercise in public relations underpinned the strategy he maintained all the way up to election day. Labor, as it admitted in its post-election review, was caught wrong-footed. Political parties and leaders have long used marketing expertise, but we have never had a product of that industry as prime minister. Nor have we ever seen a government go to the voters with most of its ministers and policies in hiding, making the leader’s image something like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.

The unveiling occurred in an article in the Daily Telegraph on 14 January. In due course, that article should become for Morrison what “The Forgotten People” broadcast was for Robert Menzies. Morrison is unlikely to govern for sixteen years, especially in the wake of his abject leadership failures this summer. But that doesn’t mean his prime ministership will be without significance for future historians. Even if its fruits are as barren as they are shaping up to be, he will need to be taken seriously as an emblem of the failing politics that Australia’s people must now endure.

Morrison’s op-ed was purportedly inspired by his family holiday, which was not in Hawaii on that occasion but on the south coast of New South Wales, an area that has now descended into a living hell. There, a year ago, he encountered “no sign of the angry mob on social and in other media, shouting at each other and telling us all what we’re supposed to do, think and say.” Rather, the place was full of people with “a positive outlook” — “Locals, holiday makers staying at caravan parks, small business people from western Sydney, surf lifesavers, fishing and rural fire service members, professionals, kids, mums, retirees, pensioners. It was refreshing.”

“I wasn’t there on any political visit,” Morrison hastened to add, although he quickly turned it into one with his op-ed piece. The place was full of people just like him, holidaying in his case “with Jen and the girls enjoying the flathead and chips like everyone else.” Morrison was gratified by what he had supposedly discovered, this “great reminder that there are quite a lot of us who actually think Australia is a pretty great place and we don’t really have too much time to be angry.”

Morrison contrasted these people, whom he called “quieter Australians,” with the “angry noisy voices” of the people John Howard called elites. Quiet Australians were mainly interested in jobs, the cost of living and other “everyday” issues and wanted policies that would “allow us to get ahead.” (To get ahead of whom or what he did not say, but political language of this kind works via artful evasions.) They believe in welfare for the less fortunate, but resent giving people “a free ride.” They want better services but they also want taxes to be as low as possible. They want to see their kids safe, well-educated and with smiles on their faces.

They also care about the environment, “especially locally.” “Australians can always be counted on to make and keep our commitments,” he assured readers without directly mentioning climate change, “but Australians must always come first.” He was “not going to sign up to destroy our economy because of the extreme views of some.” We’d need to wean ourselves off coal eventually but let’s not do anything that might involve higher taxes or unaffordable subsidies. “Just keep it sensible. We’ll get there,” he assured his readers.

Well, we’re there now. A year later, much of that article looks ridiculous when it doesn’t look like an elaborate (although successful) confidence trick. Of course, Morrison was not describing but prescribing. Throughout the piece, he wrote of “we” as if to dramatise his own sharing of the desirable values he set out, the most desirable of them all being to keep one’s mouth closed about politics. On this matter, quiet Australians were expected to leave the job of running things to professionals like Morrison who, by some unexplained magic, could be ordinary and extraordinary at the same time.

Graham Little would possibly have called this “group leadership,” of which he saw Bob Hawke as an exemplar. Group leaders stress “neighbourliness, translating the experience of life in smaller groups, like the family, into the nation as a whole.” Clearly, a contrast needs to be drawn here: Hawke was a masterly practitioner of this style of leadership while Morrison increasingly looks like a plodder. I am unaware of any Australian prime minister who has managed to burn up political capital as quickly as Morrison has, and for so little return.

For Paul Keating, political capital was finite, and good politics was to burn it up to achieve policy ends that couldn’t happen without it. Keating understood that good policy would always result in the practitioner losing skin along the way. The key was to argue, to educate, to cajole and to hope that luck ran your way when you faced electors — that they would reward good policy even while they sometimes had to pay a price for it.

Whether or not it was the logic with which they set out, many of Hawke and Keating’s reforms of the 1980s worked in this way, as did John Howard and Peter Costello’s creation of a goods and services tax a decade later. Its promise almost lost Howard the 1998 election, and for a time its implementation threatened to cost the Coalition government in 2001. But Howard gambled and won each time, with a mixture of the skill and luck that accompanies any successful political career.

There is nothing here that is recognisable in the Morrison prime ministership so far. Morrison has governed like a political billionaire yet without a recognisable policy agenda because he refrained from taking one to the last election. But his majority is small and he cannot take for granted that the Labor Party will continue to offer the kind of break that the Coalition did so little to deserve at the 2019 election.

Like Tony Abbott’s prime ministership, Morrison’s has been a remarkable exercise in self-indulgence, although mainly of a different kind. Abbott burned capital on rubbish such as a knighthood for Prince Philip, culture wars over the Racial Discrimination Act, and broken election promises that no Senate controlled by such a cross bench was ever going to pass.

Morrison’s self-indulgence has been of a different order. Like Abbott, he has been prepared to waste political capital on the culture wars, with the religious discrimination bill shaping up as this government’s version of the 18C debate on racial vilification. But for the most part, his waste of political capital has been more personal. The photos of the prime minister holidaying in Hawaii before Christmas while eastern Australia burned and firefighters died were deeply damaging to his image as the daggy dad and all-round down-to-earth everyman. Even leaving aside his office’s foolish lying to journalists about his whereabouts, the decision to take a holiday in Hawaii while the drought continued and the country was on fire represented a lack of judgement, a failure of leadership and a carelessness about image that are usually deadly to politicians in a functioning democracy.

In the midst of this controversy, it was revealed that Morrison and his family had received thousands of dollars of upgrades on a family trip to Fiji in the middle of the year, and had occupied a $3000-plus per night villa. There was nothing improper about any of this, and we all love discounts, bargains and freebies. But this kind of lifestyle — while increasingly taken for granted by the political class as their reward for a life of selfless public service — is incomprehensible to most Australians. Importantly, it is a sharp contrast with the image, presented in his January 2019 op-ed piece and in the months that followed, of an ordinary bloke mixing happily in the pub and loving nothing better than a curry with the wife and kids, a cold beer and a Sharks win.

Morrison’s return to the country was worse than the bad publicity generated by his Hawaiian frolic. It was simply fatuous to issue images of his hosting Australian cricketers at Kirribilli House — with its splendid views of Sydney’s fireworks — on the day thousands of frightened people were stranded on beaches trying to escape Australia’s version of Armageddon.

Many of his public statements about the bushfire crisis — that its victims would gain inspiration from the Sydney New Year’s Test, for instance — also seemed to be the work of a political amateur. The video images of his efforts to comfort fire victims (and, not coincidentally, generate some positive media images) were disastrous. He was virtually run out of town by bushfire victims in the Bega Valley village of Cobargo. When a pregnant woman there refused to shake his hand until he guaranteed more money for the Rural Fire Service, he decided to grab it anyway, and then turned his back on her and walked away. A local National Party worthy helpfully blundered in, holding the woman and telling her to “shush” — presumably on the grounds that if quiet Australians will not do their duty, it’s the role of municipal councillors to remind them of it. In another excruciating scene, Morrison tried to shake the hand of a similarly uncooperative firefighter at another venue. The video ends with the man walking away.

Morrison’s political authority has fallen away more quickly than anyone could have imagined even a fortnight ago, and is unlikely ever to be quite the same again. The giant-killer and performer of miracles of May 2019 is no more. Instead, we have a prime minister whose inability to respond to a crisis has resulted in widespread national loathing, international ridicule and sharp questions about his capacity for national leadership.

The background to his political nightmare is the Coalition’s failure over more than six years in office to develop a credible climate change policy to replace the Gillard-era scheme, its enduring marriage to the fossil fuel industry, and its hospitality to climate change denialists and their fellow-travellers in its own ranks. But Morrison’s crisis of leadership is also the result of the hollow nature of his leadership style. Fundamentally, he has never established himself as an adult leader capable of dealing with serious things, a dawning realisation expressed by the Twitter hashtag #scottyfrommarketing. It seems likely to stick.

There were early experiments in “strong leadership” — farcically, over pins in strawberries, and hardly less so when Christmas Island was reopened in the wake of the medevac legislation. After that, Morrison settled into a populist style of leadership well-designed for defeating Bill Shorten and a Labor Party carrying too much policy lead in their saddle-bags but unsuited to dealing with a crisis in which vast numbers of people see their country being destroyed and their lives falling apart.

Still, Morrison remains joined at the hip to the Murdoch and Stokes media, which helped him get re-elected and will be critical to his efforts to rebuild his credibility in the months ahead. We will hear often from the usual suspects what a top bloke he really is and how all the criticism is the work of lefties on Twitter. On climate policy, the basic thrust of the denialist right’s next move is plain for all to see. It will direct blame towards inadequate land clearing as the result of supposed Green influence on local and state governments. From the true believers, there will be an aggressive insistence that the summer’s catastrophes have nothing to do with climate change. From their many hangers-on in the Morrison government, the argument will be that Australia is too small and insignificant to make any difference anyway.

There is, after all, little shame in politics as it is done in this country these days. Morrison has already revealed himself as a remarkably adaptable politician and, given his powerful media allies, it might not be beyond his resources to get his leadership back into some kind of working order. But as we have seen repeatedly in recent years, when you’re on the slide, old friends tend to find new friends without taking too many backward glances. •

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I strongly suspect that Adrian Pabst’s Story of Our Country started life as a banking of the win, with the aim of influencing an incoming Shorten government, but ended up as an attempt to explain what Labor did wrong and what it needs to do right if it’s to win again. In his assessment of the reasons for Labor’s defeat, Pabst — somewhat like the party’s formal review — points to the lack of “an overarching narrative capable of winning back its working-class base while also convincing the middle class.” Labor, he believes, did well in drawing attention to low wages but did too little to deal with the anxieties and aspirations of voters in the suburbs and regions, the party’s “traditional base” (a point to which I’ll return).

Researched before the election and published after it, the book is a strange beast in a number of ways, even leaving aside the cover endorsement from that well-known Labor stalwart Gerard Henderson (alongside shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers and former finance minister Lindsay Tanner). Pabst is a British political scientist and he talks much more about class than usual in Australian political commentary — no bad thing at all, although the analysis is sometimes a bit on the intuitive side. He also thinks that the Labor Party has “so far largely escaped the social-democratic decline” seen globally — a questionable judgement, and one that ignores how Australia’s preferential voting systems and public electoral funding regimes prop up the vote of the major parties, and especially Labor.

The book, published by an imprint of the conservative Connor Court, is a product of a visiting fellowship awarded by the PM Glynn Institute, established by Australian Catholic University “to provide the Catholic community with a standing capacity to analyse public policy issues of concern not only to the Catholic Church and its services, but to the wider Australian community as well.” Its director is a former George Pell staffer, Michael Casey, and its principal policy adviser, Damien Freeman, is the author of Abbott’s Right: The Conservative Tradition from Menzies to Abbott.

Still, the institute is clearly interested in what the Labor Party is up to — and a Catholic preoccupation with such matters is far from unprecedented in Australia, to put it mildly, as Pabst himself reminds us in the book’s historical survey. Indeed, one of his purposes is to persuade the Labor Party that it would do well to return to the traditions associated with Catholic social teaching, with its emphasis on the dignity of the human person, the common good and the rights of labour, the tradition epitomised by Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum of 1891. Looking beyond the Catholics, Pabst hopes that “the social justice tradition of the churches” more generally can be reintegrated into Labor’s way of looking at the world.

More broadly, he argues, Labor needs to recover its ethical purpose, its vision of “the good life.” It can do this best by recognising its own roots in the religious beliefs (or, at least, religious sensibilities) of those who made the party’s history, from the 1890s through to… Well, Kevin Rudd, conspicuously Christian, probably best matches the kind of Labor leader that Pabst would like. Labor, he believes, has become too secular, too technocratic, too managerial, too preoccupied with the “progressive” causes dear to the hearts of cosmopolitan elites, which leave others cold.

In other words, the party needs to get back in touch with ideas from its own history that have become submerged by less wholesome tendencies. Pabst believes that there is a Burkean strain in Labor’s history, with its emphasis on tradition and its desire to conserve as well as to reform, or what Pabst calls its “small c conservatism.” Here, and in his emphasis on “family, friends, work, community, and country,” Pabst draws on the Blue Labour ideas associated with Maurice Glasman in Britain and advocated in Australia most conspicuously by Nick Dyrenfurth of the John Curtin Institute. (I first drew attention to Glasman and Blue Labour in Inside Story in 2011.)

A large part of Labor’s problem, says Pabst, is that it has abandoned its “working-class base of industrial blue-collar and white-collar workers living precarious lives.” These people don’t see their interests or values reflected in Labor’s secular, liberal and cosmopolitan leanings, or in its embrace of globalisation and equating of change with progress. They rather yearn for a sense of connectedness to place and to one another, and are disillusioned with a party — indeed, with a political process — that takes too little account of what they truly value.

Pabst arrives at these conclusions from an unusual perspective: as an outsider who is also writing from within Labor tradition and mythology. The title comes from a remark by Paul Keating: that Labor is “part of the big story, which is also the story of our country.” Pabst accepts Labor luminaries’ estimation of their party’s place in Australian history, quoting speechwriter Graham Freudenberg’s view that “more than any other political party in the world, the Australian Labor Party reflects and represents the character of the nation which produced it” and Keating’s view that “we are the people who make Australian history… our party sets the ethos of Australia.”

It’s all very self-flattering, but this is also a party that has governed for much less than a third of the time since Federation. Still, in a bad year in the old days — such as 1955 — it managed almost 45 per cent of the primary vote. This year it mustered just a third. There are complex reasons for this decline that Pabst never really grapples with, beyond suggesting that Labor has abandoned its traditional base and needs to draw on its best traditions to recover it.

Labor’s fundamental problem is that the class on which its power and prestige rested for generations — and which it, in turn, helped to organise — is now barely recognisable. That class’s collective institutions have been broken by structural transformation, social change and state coercion. The manufacturing industry — almost 30 per cent of the economy at the beginning of the 1960s — is a shadow of its former self. Mining is capital- rather than labour-intensive; far from generating the kind of tight-knit communities that once voted Labor without fail, it is dominated by fly-in fly-out workers, often ununionised. Shearers are mainly found on the walls of art galleries rather than in trade unions.

Indeed, unions represent a sliver of the Australian workforce — predominantly public sector workers — and, as a result of their small numbers and uneven coverage, and some of the most blatantly anti-union laws in the Western world, they exercise little power. The Labor Party itself has been complicit in this decline, through an Accord process in the 1980s that tamed the unions. It then did almost nothing to promote union membership.

The Catholic Church, once a pillar of the party, has also been discredited by continuing revelations of child sexual abuse. More generally, trust in institutions — including trust in politics — has collapsed: a massive problem for social democracy, given that its aspirations inevitably depend on people retaining a modicum of faith in government’s ability to make their lives better.

Pabst does discuss some of these matters, although they are not well integrated into an argument that rests largely on a belief in the power of ideas and a faith that there is a “traditional base” out there waiting for Labor to reconnect. It is a largely cognitive approach to politics: so long as the party can “reintegrate exiled traditions,” and formulate good policy that reflects them, Labor can again become its best self.

I do wish that this were so. But politics is shaped by the structures in which it is embedded and the institutions through which it is practised. Demography, markets, the environment, interest groups, media, party politics and electoral systems all condition its potentialities, imposing restraints and roadblocks, and on occasion offering opportunities to reformers who have the ideas, courage and skill to seize them.

The limitations of focusing on ideas at the expense of structures are revealed in Pabst’s treatment of Edmund Burke. Pabst may well be right that we can identify aspects of the Labor Party’s philosophy that have “an implicit Burkean dimension.” But there has also been a rather explicit anti-Burkean aspect to Labor Party thought and practice, expressed in the party’s approach to democracy and probably first theorised by Vere Gordon Childe in How Labour Governs (1923). Parliamentarians were understood as delegates of a movement, and thereby the representatives of a class. For Labor, a member of parliament was not a trustee whose first duty was to his judgement, as Burke told the electors of Bristol. Rather, the member’s primary responsibility was to the labour movement, through the democratic institutions of a party seen as the authentic expression of the working class and the political wing of the union movement.

Labor’s anti-Burkeanism helps to explain some of the key dynamics of the party’s history since its foundation. It also helps to explain the mess in which Labor finds itself today.

When Pabst turns to what Labor policies might look like, these sometimes have a rather frayed appearance. He suggests a return to a family wage, abolished in 1974 in the context of moving from a male-breadwinner system towards equal pay for men and women; and he would allow couples “to share their tax-free allowances,” recalling the policy of “income-splitting,” long popular among conservatives, which has been criticised by feminists for its impact on gender equity and more generally for undermining the revenue base. Like other Blue Labour–influenced advocates, Pabst admires German co-determination and vocationalism. And consistent with Catholic ideas supporting distributism and subsidiarity, he is keen on the use of cooperatives as an intermediate layer between government and state that would spread economic ownership and power, and temper the dominance of big business and the big state.

His proposal to create a vast scheme with the quixotic title, in an Australian labour movement context, of the National Civic Service — effectively a form of conscription for social rather than military purposes — seems far-fetched. One hopes, for instance, that it would not include sending Australia’s youth into anyone’s roof to install pink batts. Any government that tried to impose it would likely find that the ordinary folk who Pabst believes value community and patriotism over “free choice” and “individualism” are rather more complex in their desires than your average proponent of civic virtue will recognise. Pabst wants “less Mill and more Burke” in the modern Labor Party, but Mill arguably better reflects the country’s political culture and its people’s outlook.

Pabst’s book is a passionate restatement of a particular vision for the Labor Party that has been a presence since the 1890s, if not perhaps quite as powerful a presence as he suggests. He has read widely and intelligently, although not always critically, in Australian politics. I spotted few factual errors.

A couple of generations ago, Pabst’s book would have slotted neatly into the Labor Right box and been summarily dismissed by everyone else. Not so today: across the party, there is a recognition that it needs to come to some kind of terms with people of faith, with workers who feel anxious and insecure, and with voters who value well-policed borders over cosmopolitan openness. And it needs to do all of this without losing the necessary support of secular-minded middle-class “progressives.”

Pabst calls for “a paradoxical politics — at once progressive and conservative, romantic and rational, secular and religious, patriotic and internationalist.” But can all of these strands — and the diverse constituencies that go with them — be knitted into a “credible story about national renewal” of the kind Pabst correctly sees as a precondition for Labor success?

The party’s formal review of the 2019 result worries over this problem: “The Labor Party has been increasingly mobilised to address the political grievances of a vast and disparate constituency.” Labor was traditionally “a proud social democratic party with roots in organised labour” but it has greatly broadened its political constituency, reflecting the gender, sexual and ethnic diversity of society. How can Labor balance these newer constituencies with the old, especially as the old feels increasingly anxious about its future? “The dilemma is not easy to resolve,” the review frankly admits. “It cannot be resolved simply by choosing one constituency over another.”

Pabst hasn’t solved the problem either. But his book is measured, thoughtful, generous and civil. In an age of authoritarian populism, the medium is almost as important as the message. •

The post The continuing story of “our” party appeared first on Inside Story.

In 1976 he had loyally taken the political hit — or at least much of its impact — following prime minister Gough Whitlam’s gross miscalculation in consenting to the pursuit of party funding from Iraq. After resigning as party secretary in 1981, he set up as a “government relations consultant” — or lobbyist — and his next goal was to use his old party contacts to make serious money. Although in this respect a man completely in tune with the times, Combe was sadly hampered by one disabling legacy from the past: he could not let go of 1975.

He remained committed to the theory that the Central Intelligence Agency had played a major role in the demise of the Whitlam government, and carried with him an open hostility to the United States on that score. It was an attitude common enough among the Labor left but increasingly played down by the new pragmatists who had taken control of the party. It was an attitude that would cost Combe his career and reputation.

Combe was not yet forty when he fatefully accepted an invitation to dine with a young Russian diplomat named Valery Ivanov on election eve. One business on whose behalf Combe had been working was Commercial Bureau, which had a unique status as the only Australian trading house accredited in the Soviet Union. The company was run by a mysterious businessman named Laurie Matheson; he seemed very rich, which impressed Combe, had a background in naval intelligence, and in due course it would become all too clear that he was also an informer for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, if not something more sinister.

Matheson’s main business problem was that his former managing director had left to establish a rival organisation that was providing Commercial Bureau with unwelcome competition. In particular, he was having difficulty in New South Wales, and needed to gain a hearing with the Labor government there. Perhaps Combe might help him? Combe, as a member of the Australia–USSR Friendship Society, was about to travel with his wife to the Soviet Union. He undertook to work on Matheson’s behalf while he was in Moscow.

The first secretary in Canberra’s Soviet embassy responsible for liaison with the Friendship Society was Ivanov, who was only thirty-three when he arrived in Australia in 1981. His youth was one factor that aroused ASIO’s suspicion that he might be an intelligence officer; Soviet diplomats of his seniority would normally be at least in their late thirties. The interest in him grew and, with it, the interest in his connection to David Combe. It would later come to light that Ivanov had organised Combe’s invitation to Moscow. By the time Combe arrived back in Canberra from Moscow late in 1982, ASIO was convinced that Ivanov was a member of the KGB.

Under surveillance: an undated ASIO photo of David Combe (centre). ASIO

After his return, Combe provided Matheson with a report, based on his consultations with officials in Moscow, on how he could develop his company’s trade with the Soviet Union. Combe pointed out that political tensions between Australia and the Soviet Union were a barrier to trade and recommended that Commercial Bureau might try to ease these tensions by participating in the Australia–USSR Friendship Society. He also suggested an upgrade of relations between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Australian Labor Party, to be engineered by none other than David Combe, government relations consultant. Combe billed Matheson for $2500; ASIO soon had copies of both the report and the bill.

As ASIO built its case against Ivanov, it considered approaching Combe to warn him of his predicament; perhaps he could be persuaded to report on his new friend, thereby helping ASIO make its case? That approach was never made, and to this extent the self-serving claims later made by the ASIO director-general, Harvey Barnett, that he had saved Combe “from himself” or from the clutches of the KGB, should not be taken too seriously. In the context of the expulsion of KGB spies from other Western countries during this period, as well as local criticism from both right and left concerning ASIO’s capacity, the organisation needed to catch a spy of its own.

On the evening of 4 March 1983, the night before the election that would bring Bob Hawke and his Labor colleagues to power, Combe arrived at the Canberra home of Ivanov, his wife Vera, and their seven-year-old daughter Irina. Combe had already had plenty to drink; by his own account, he “probably would not have run the gauntlet of a random breath-testing unit” if required to do so on the way to the house. By the time he left — after many hours of food, conversation, vodka, beer, red wine, white wine and liqueur — he was “pretty well gone.” Whether Combe had revealed himself on that evening to be a threat to national security would later be debated passionately. That he was a menace to traffic safety is beyond question.

The conversation during the evening was often rambling and, in Combe’s case, increasingly slurred. He did most of the talking and had great hopes for the future — the country’s and his own — under the Labor government that now seemed an inevitability. “I was going to put in my list of requests on… about Thursday or Friday,” he told Ivanov. “I thought I’d ask to be chairman of Qantas for first choice, and then ambassador to Moscow, something like that you know.”

“Being ambassador to Moscow, David, you’ll keep your hand on the pulse,” replied the homesick diplomat wistfully. After a couple of years of money-making as a lobbyist, Combe explained, “then I’ll say, right, ‘I’m entitled to something, I want my job for the boys, ambassadorship, Moscow will suit me very much.’” Ivanov was confused; who were “the boys”? Combe gave an impromptu lesson in Australian English, explaining that he meant patronage. Combe told Ivanov that he — Combe — was one of “the boys,” and payday had now arrived:

I’m putting myself in a situation where, I’ll level with you because you’re a friend, Valery, I’m going to make the next two years, they’re going to be the two most economically fruitful years of my life. I’ve worked a long while for the Labor movement.… I’ve got nothing for it; in financial terms the next two years with a federal government and four state governments, I’m in enormous demand, I mean I’m in a situation where I can say to Esso, you know, IBM, and all these companies, well, you know, I’ll listen to your proposition and I’ll make a decision in due course whether I’m going to work for you… [I]n the next few weeks they’re the decisions I have to make. Whom do I work for and on what basis, and I’m going to charge very big money… [T]he buggers are going to be paying.

Combe went on to discuss with Ivanov the possibility of working for the Soviet Union to find opportunities for trade in Australia. But he was also representing a particular company with interests in the Soviet trade, Commercial Bureau, and he said that Ivanov would need to decide whether Combe could work for both. Combe eventually thanked his hosts and wandered out into the night. The whole conversation had been recorded by ASIO, which had a listening device installed in the ceiling of the Ivanov home.

Harvey Barnett, a career spy and now the director-general of ASIO, had every reason to wish to start off on a sound footing with Hawke and the new government. A Labor government had established ASIO in the late 1940s, but Labor’s relations with the security agencies had often been fraught in the years since.

David Combe and Valery Ivanov presented Barnett with a useful opportunity, and he picked his mark exceedingly well when he sidestepped his own minister, attorney-general Gareth Evans, and went straight to Hawke. Combe was obviously a hostile witness, but it is hard to disagree with his later assessment that, like the good spy he was, Barnett had “studied his target, assessed his strengths and weaknesses, selected which strings to play upon and which drums to beat.”

Barnett would have known that Hawke, despite the support he had received from the left in his bid to become ACTU president in 1969, had strongly pro-American and equally vigorous anti-communist, and especially anti-Soviet, opinions. As a union leader, he had enjoyed friendly — critics on the left thought rather too friendly — relations with US officialdom in Australia. And in 1979 the Soviet authorities had humiliated Hawke in connection with his fruitless effort to negotiate the passage of Jewish “refuseniks” from the country. Hawke felt double-crossed and claims to have contemplated suicide; he was clearly someone who would be receptive to a strongly anti-Soviet message from the director-general of ASIO.

At a meeting late in the afternoon of 20 April, Barnett told Hawke that ASIO had not only identified a KGB agent but had also uncovered an effort, by that same agent, to turn a former national secretary of the Labor Party into an agent of influence. Central to the case was that ASIO had recorded Ivanov suggesting to Combe that the relationship between them should become clandestine. Barnett also told Hawke about Combe’s “jobs for the boys” boasting and his offer to work for the Soviet Union in commercial matters. Combe, Barnett reported, had expressed bitterly anti-American views, was convinced of the CIA’s role in the dismissal of the Whitlam government and had shown sympathy with the goals of the Soviet Union.

The director-general appears to have been in no great hurry to let the government know what his spies had found, and many weeks had passed since the fateful 4 March dinner. Yet on hearing Barnett’s story, Hawke determined that the government needed to move quickly. He and Barnett discussed three possibilities: Combe could be called in for a talk — or, to put it in Hawke’s later words to the royal commission on the affair, “I could call Mr Combe in and carpet him.” Hawke and Barnett saw several problems with this option: Combe, for instance, might talk to Ivanov; or once the news got out, the government might be seen to have compromised Australian security by giving special treatment to one of its own.

A second possibility was that Ivanov could be quietly expelled, and that was quickly dismissed as well. Instead, a public expulsion would occur, an option that Barnett plainly admitted would suit ASIO in view of the favourable publicity it would inevitably generate.

Hawke saw benefits for his government beyond sending out the right message about its commitment to national security: he had just returned from his government’s economic summit with business and the unions, an occasion intended to underline the government’s willingness to deal openly and fairly with anyone committed to solving the nation’s problems. The perception that a former senior party official was working hard behind the scenes, exploiting his connections on behalf of favoured clients, would have inconveniently undermined this central message. Hawke clearly recognised the danger of having Combe on the loose, selling access to the government, or even being seen as capable of doing so.

Cabinet’s national and international security subcommittee was quickly convened that evening, with all but two members present. Barnett briefed members, and made the case against Combe in particular seem damning. Hawke gave his full support to that version of events, and ministers were not permitted to see the transcript of the crucial 4 March dinner. Bill Hayden, now foreign minister, told the royal commission that “we left concluding that something very nasty and sinister and improper had been concluded or was about to be concluded between Combe and Ivanov.” As they left the room, Hayden said to another minister, Mick Young, that he would never have thought Combe capable of spying against his own country. “I was quite distressed,” Hayden recalled, and he thought Young, who as a fellow South Australian was even closer to Combe, “was equally upset.”

But as Hayden later told the royal commission, once ASIO officials started reading selections from the transcripts to ministers the following day, “the whole thing started to fall apart very quickly… the very sinister connotations which had been put to us did not stand up.” He could see nothing in the 4 March conversation other than a lobbyist doing his job or, at worst, a greedy man seeking to enrich himself through a commercial arrangement. Ministers did not like what they saw; but Combe’s actions, so far as they could see, made him neither traitor nor potential traitor.

The security subcommittee, however, decided that Ivanov should be expelled and Combe placed under surveillance. The former Labor national secretary’s phones were tapped. On 22 April Hayden called in the Soviet ambassador and told him Ivanov had a week to leave the country; four days later, a cabinet meeting in Adelaide decided to cut off Combe’s access to ministers in his capacity as a lobbyist. The government had destroyed Combe’s livelihood; the prime minister even went to the trouble of calling two men with whom Combe was about to go into business to warn them off doing so.

With so many messages being sent here and there, Canberra was awash with rumours. On 8 May the Sunday Telegraph carried the journalist Laurie Oakes’s claim that “a member of the prime minister’s own party” who knew Ivanov had, as a result of a recent government decision, been frozen out of contact with ministers. Paul Kelly revealed in the Sydney Morning Herald on 10 May that ASIO had been watching the activities of a “senior Labor man” who was “one of the most important and influential figures in the party over the past two decades.” The security service had told the government he was “a potential security risk”; the Labor man was “determined to clear his name” and intended presenting Hawke with a document setting out his case.

It is a measure of the suspicion ASIO still aroused within the Labor Party that at the caucus meeting held that morning, Tom Uren, a left-wing government minister who had also been a member of the Whitlam government, asked Hawke whether he — Uren — was the figure being referred to in Kelly’s story.

The opposition was also asking questions in parliament that afternoon: three in the space of a few minutes. It was the third question, posed by National Party heavyweight Ian Sinclair, that let the cat out of the bag; he asked whether members of the government had been instructed to dissociate themselves from David Combe, naming him for the first time. That afternoon, in a sensational front-page story headed “Russian Spy: Labor Official Named,” Sydney’s Daily Mirror claimed that a senior Labor official had “been named a Soviet spy by Australia’s security forces.” No one could now fail to associate the gathering rumours with Combe.

When members of the government saw this article, they were unsure whether to laugh or cry. It was an outrageous libel and, at a time when cold war conflict was still central to international affairs, a deeply damaging accusation. Combe was effectively being called a traitor. Yet the article ironically offered a way out for everyone, since if Combe decided to sue he would surely be the recipient of a massive windfall.

The following day, the government issued a ministerial statement declaring that “Combe’s relationship with Ivanov had developed to the point that it gave rise to serious security concern” of a degree that made it inappropriate for the government to deal with him in his capacity as lobbyist. Combe, Hawke reported, “understands and accepts” this decision. (Conversations had been going on behind the scenes with Combe as the government sought to contain the damage.) Combe, Hawke hastened to add, had committed no criminal offence, nor was there any foundation for the allegation that he was “in any sense a Soviet spy.”

Combe could take little consolation from this statement, except that it potentially strengthened his case for a libel suit against the Mirror. But he was out of business, he and his family were besieged by the media, and he would soon be widely portrayed “as some sort of buffoon.” The story of the family’s not inconsiderable suffering is related in an account by Combe’s wife, Meena Blesing, who reported that her husband “was psychologically destroyed and could not face the ruin of his life. The family disintegrated.”

Combe’s sons suffered schoolyard taunts about their father the communist spy, and the media laid siege to their Canberra home. The Combes felt shunned and even betrayed by old friends, while the government’s decision to call a royal commission under Justice Robert Hope, who had inquired into the intelligence services on the initiative of the Whitlam government in the mid 1970s, only prolonged the family’s agony. It was an exercise designed to vindicate the government’s actions in the affair, which it did, ably assisted by a three-day appearance in the witness box by the prime minister himself. Combe, meanwhile, used his many contacts in the party and the media to arouse sympathy for his plight and attract a measure of support.

Eventually there was a rehabilitation of sorts. The government feared the book that Combe was writing about his treatment. The Labor left, increasingly angry over a range of government policies, was also threatening to make an issue of the affair — if necessary, on the floor of the national conference in 1984. Combe himself appeared regularly in the media and at public events to give his side of the story and attack the government.

So the party effectively brought Combe back into the fold. Hawke even spoke at the conference, reiterating that he had acted in defence of the national interest rather than out of any animus, and emphasising that there was now “no blackball against David Combe.” In 1985 Combe would be sent to western Canada as trade commissioner; another government overseas appointment followed in the early 1990s. He would eventually make a successful career in the private sector, as an executive in the wine industry.

Combe had behaved unwisely in many ways, but his desire to build a lucrative career for himself after many years of loyal party service was understandable. His mistake was to boast about it in a manner that rubbed the noses of senior members of the government — indeed, even the nose of the prime minister himself — in the money he was making or about to make on the back of his party connections. Yet in this respect Combe exemplified the spirit of the era that was opening up. There was money to be made, and he wanted to be in on the act. His weakness was that he also remained preoccupied with fighting the battles of the 1960s and 1970s — especially those of 1975 — and underestimated the continuing power of the cold war to generate fear and loathing.

Barnett and ASIO, for their part, held a fanciful and self-serving view of the influence Combe was likely to be able to wield under a Labor government. It is true that Combe was well connected and certainly well placed to work as a lobbyist, but Barnett’s later suggestions concerning his likely clout were comically far-fetched. The case apparently showed the KGB’s ability and taste for targeting “the top echelon of Australian opinion-formers” and its desire for “some degree of rapprochement” between the Labor Party and the Soviet Communist Party — all, according to Barnett, with the aim of “neutering” social democratic parties so that, “when any crunch came,” they would be “quiescent in the face of Soviet power.”

Combe, claimed Barnett, “was within a hair’s breadth of entering the grand gallery of KGB spies, along with Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Fuchs, Blunt… I like to think I saved him from such a fate.” Kim Philby had been a senior MI6 officer while spying for Moscow, yet it is notable that not even the royal commission was able to identify what kind of material a lobbyist such as Combe, even if he had been inclined to do so, would have been able to pass on to the Russians.

The reputation of the intelligence agencies suffered further damage when in late November 1983, ASIS — Australia’s overseas intelligence service — conducted a training exercise that went embarrassingly wrong at the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne. The operation involved a role-play in which a hostage being held in a room by foreign intelligence agents would be rescued by ASIS. Unfortunately, ASIS informed neither the police nor hotel staff beforehand. Not only were the premises damaged when officers used a sledgehammer to break down a door, but the masked rescuers threatened hotel staff with the weapons they carried.

The only aspect of the ASIS operation that revealed a modicum of either common sense or judgement was that the trainees were not presented with live ammunition, although traumatised hotel staff were not to know that when automatic pistols and submachine guns were pointed at them. The busy royal commissioner, about to report on Combe and Ivanov, now had another incident to investigate. •

This is an edited extract from Frank Bongiorno’s The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia, published by Black Inc.

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Whatever that means. The very term reveals that they have still to absorb anything like the full implications of what has happened to them. It is easy to pretend that evocations of “right,” “left” and “centre” provide some clue about where the Labor Party might go next in the making of policy. In truth, they tell us next to nothing.

Labor’s problems in the wake of election defeat run much deeper. Does social democracy have a future in the national politics of this country at all? It’s a nice question that “right,” “left” and “centre” might all chew over together, because if the answer is that it doesn’t then the positioning of the Labor Party on some abstract political spectrum has all the significance of a parlour game.

The election result does raise very real questions about the future of social democracy in this country. Social democratic politics is redistributive politics. It is about making society more equal, and redirecting resources to those who are least well-off. If that isn’t the goal, then you might have liberalism, but not social democracy.

Bill Shorten took to the election on behalf of the Labor Party a mildly social democratic policy. There was some winding back of some tax concessions enjoyed by certain classes of shareholders, investors and superannuants. There were some plans for redistribution of public resources to the less well-off, such as childcare workers and families earning up to $67,000 per year wanting to use their services, and pensioners requiring dental care.

As Peter Whiteford has pointed out, Australia’s tax–transfer system is already very efficient by international standards in channelling spending to those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. But this residual approach — meaning that welfare spending goes to those targeted for assistance through income-testing — also means that there is potentially great political sensitivity if a political party openly proposes to wind back tax advantages for those who don’t use welfare and direct the proceeds to those who do. Some have called it “downward envy.”

We will have to wait for the research from projects such as the ANU’s Australian Election Study about why the Coalition won and Labor lost this election. But it will need to negotiate many of the problems that seem to have dogged the polling companies in coming up with a representative sample of voters.

The anecdotage we have so far suggests that Labor’s policies on superannuation tax concessions, negative gearing and franking credits for those who don’t pay income tax damaged the party’s chances. More generally, the argument is that Labor — like John Hewson with Fightback! in 1993 — provided Scott Morrison with a big target that the Coalition successfully exploited. Shorten stumbled early in the campaign over Labor’s winding back of superannuation tax concessions and made himself look shifty. Negative gearing changes gave rise to the claim that Labor had a “housing tax” that would shred already declining property prices and lead to rent increases for tenants. The Coalition campaign on franking credits turned Labor’s policy into a “retirement tax” and gave rise to the false claim — circulated on social media — that Labor supported death duties.

Morrison tied all of these claims up in a neat package that presented the Labor Party as feckless and wasteful. A Shorten government was coming after “your money,” which it would then squander on the school halls and canteens that seem to have lived on in collective political memory long after the global economic crisis that gave rise to them has been forgotten. Labor was notably unsuccessful in countering this effort to paint it as so many Labor oppositions have been painted in the past: incompetent, extravagant and untrustworthy.

All of this seems clear enough in retrospect. Some of it was clear enough during the campaign itself, but the polls sent most of us off the trail. This may well be the kind of disaster that occurs when you stick a bunch of policy wonks in a room and give them something like free rein. No doubt they cleverly calculated that only this and that piddling percentage of voters would be affected by franking credit changes. The reduction of superannuation concessions to the wealthy would only worry people voting Liberal anyway. The grandfathering clauses of the negative gearing policy and continuation of concessions for new houses would neutralise serious opposition.

They forgot about the politics, about the ways particular policy positions can come to stand in symbolically for larger messages about what a political party is likely to do in office. But the most influential voices in the modern Labor Party don’t have to worry much over politics on the ground because they sit in safe seats or in Senate positions given to them by party machines. Very few have strong roots in the regional towns that, in so many instances, have turned on Labor with the proverbial baseball bats that were supposedly in store for use against a shambolic Coalition government.

There are good reasons why the spectre of 1993 shadowed Labor during this election and haunts it in defeat. John Hewson’s proposal for a goods and services tax — especially when considered alongside his policies to dismantle Medicare’s universalism — was resented not just for itself. Prompted by Paul Keating, voters seem to have treated it as a synecdoche for a Coalition wedded to hardline ideology. In 2019 Labor’s policies on superannuation concessions, negative gearing and franking credits allowed Morrison to do a similar kind of work to Keating’s highly successful doing over of Hewson in that earlier “unlosable election.”

As public policy, as expressions of social democratic values, Labor’s policies were (in my opinion, for what that’s worth) reasonable enough. The rational arguments for the party’s policy positions figured in the campaign and were widely accepted — by people like me who share much of the worldview of those who formulated them. But they appear not to have been accepted as a fair thing by key groups of voters — especially in Queensland and Tasmania — who have turned against Labor in their thousands.

This is not so very surprising when you begin to chew over it. In the cut-and-thrust of an election campaign, how can you convey the complex message that negative gearing changes would not affect existing investments? Or that they would not affect new investment in new properties? How do you persuade voters that their franking credits won’t be affected by the end of refunds to those who do not already pay tax? Did Labor make a convincing case to older Australians that it was not going to take away their Thursday evening pot and parma at the club?

In an age of low political trust, why would you expect voters to believe assurances of any kind? And especially when the Coalition and its allies in the Murdoch press respond with a negative campaign exploiting voters’ fears of having whichever lolly jar matters most to them taken away by a remote and uncaring government led by a bloke you don’t trust anyway.

None of this is particularly palatable to anyone who thinks governments should articulate their values, offer well-designed policies that broadly reflect those values, and do something more than simply occupy the government benches on behalf of the rich and well connected. But taking into account the disintegration of the centre left throughout much of the rest of the world, we may now be witnessing in this country the end of social democracy as a rational and redistributive movement — especially if the Coalition goes ahead with its program of tax cuts for the better-off.

In the 1950s the British socialist theorist and politician Anthony Crosland argued that governments could use progressive taxation and the welfare system to combat inequality. But he assumed that a growing economy would lift living standards generally. Economic redistribution would occur in the context of material abundance, social and economic modernisation, and cultural renewal. That would soften the impact of the changes on anyone who felt disadvantaged by the transition to a more equal society. Quality of life would be better all round.

But as it contemplates another three years in opposition, Labor faces a post–global financial crisis world of low economic growth and, at best, modest increases in productivity. In these straitened circumstances, can those arguing that Labor should move to the right tell us what this might actually mean?

Does it signal a return to a Third Way politics that elevated the market and was comfortable with people getting “filthy rich” — as British Labour politician Peter Mandelson famously put it — provided there are some crumbs available for the rest? That approach was fundamentally dependent on using proceeds from a relatively buoyant capitalism — or rather, in Britain’s case, finance capitalism — to underwrite social policy. It’s not an option post-GFC.

Does it, for Australia, mean an embrace of the coal industry? A softening of commitment to renewables? More “environmental” water for farmers? Income tax cuts for the wealthy? A reduction in business tax rates (to encourage companies to employ more salt-of-the-earth workers wearing the same kinds of high-vis vests beloved of politicians on the campaign trail)? Does it mean a winding back of welfare entitlements? Rejection of the Uluru Statement? Higher university fees? More support for private schools so that the working class can afford to send their kids there?

And if it means any or all of these things, why would anyone vote Labor when the Coalition will always be more full-throated in delivering on them? Is Labor prepared to concede more territory to the Greens, who already manage more than a tenth of the national vote while Labor — competing for government — is struggling to get its to a third.

Inevitably, after an election, there is a good deal of posturing, much of it less about ideas than about who gets to be next boss cocky. Whoever emerges in that role will inherit some unpromising acreage. He or she is likely to be busy clearing scrub for some time to come before producing anything of much value. •

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There is the campaign you see via the mainstream media: on radio news and talkback; on television, still dominated by free-to-air channels; and in “legacy” newspapers, now commonly consulted via the web unless you’re taking a flight and have picked up a freebie. Through this lens, the campaign is a familiar-enough beast: indeed, in outward appearance, it hasn’t changed all that much in recent decades.

The candidates, along with a kind of mobile press gallery, travel here and there on buses and planes. Press conferences are held, high-vis vests are donned, streets are walked, hospitals, schools, pubs and shopping malls are visited. The selfies are a gesture to modern times, but the essential rituals would be recognisable to, say, a party leader from the 1970s. Having come back from a desert island, they might wonder what happened to Kerry Packer and the Bulletin, but the outlines would be more or less recognisable.

The second vantage point intersects with the mainstream media in all kinds of ways, but it also has a more or less independent existence. This is the campaign on social media. I don’t mean the formal campaigning that parties and other groups run via Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. Rather, I mean the more informal exchanges between journalists, politicians and ordinary citizens. I am thinking especially of Twitter.

Twitter is both a democratic and a hierarchical medium of exchange. It is more democratic than old media in its lack of filters. Within the laws of defamation and the rules of Twitter itself, you can say whatever you like. It is a cross between the letters page of a newspaper and a toilet wall, with many features of the latter because no editors are selecting, editing and curating contributions. And sometimes neither the spelling nor the grammar are all that great.

But Twitter is also deeply hierarchical. Those with large numbers of followers have much more clout and status. Celebrity types will chat amiably with one another in public while ignoring the great unwashed. The medium has its “influencers,” those who, through their prestige and reach, are considered capable of shaping the tastes, opinions or behaviour of tens of thousands while the rest of us struggle to influence our kids to put down their mobile devices for a while and read a book.

Journalists themselves have a liminal status in this world. Most of them have much more capacity than the rest of us to attract followers. This is a fascinating and under-recognised way for the legacy media — especially the newspapers — to continue to exercise a wider influence over politics and culture. Here, even journalists of the third or fourth rank can have many thousands of Twitter followers, while those who have achieved a genuine celebrity status might have 100,000 or more.

A few examples will suffice. Leigh Sales, who presents the ABC’s 7.30, has 367,000 followers; 7.30 itself has just 162,000. Laura Tingle, also of 7.30, has 115,000 followers. Barrie Cassidy’s 130,000 is more than double that of the program he hosts, the ABC’s Insiders. Annabel Crabb, another ABC television personality, has a remarkable 480,000 followers; interestingly, her stock-in-trade is presenting the more civil and human side of our politicians. Leading Radio National presenters Fran Kelly (76,000), Patricia Karvelas (51,000) and Phillip Adams (35,000) are also popular Twitter identities.

At the commercials, the picture is pretty similar. Chris Uhlmann, formerly of the ABC and now political editor of Nine News, has 151,000 followers, David Speers at Sky 113,000 and Phillip Coorey at the Australian Financial Review 106,000. Nor do you have to work for a large media company if you have the profile, prestige and respect built up over the decades to help you along. Michelle Grattan (the Conversation) and Paul Bongiorno (the Saturday Paper) have well over 100,000 followers each.

In Murdochland, Chris Kenny of the Australian and Sky, who pops up frequently on Twitter if only to criticise it, is approaching 40,000. Miranda Devine of the tabloid Daily Telegraph has over 60,000 followers, and Sharri Markson, of the same paper, about half that number. But lower-profile journalists for publications such as the Australian, the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age — those who would not normally be recognised in the street — will pick up 8000 to 16,000 followers if they are active on the platform. Old hands, such as Paul Kelly, can afford to stay off it entirely.

What does all of this mean? First, a number of journalists have been able to leverage a celebrity status of sorts in a way available to few others — with the notable exception of the politicians themselves. There was a time when very few journalists achieved anything like this kind of profile: think Alan Reid, Alan Ramsey, Paul Kelly, Michelle Grattan and Laurie Oakes.

Individual journalists have their own brand that is connected with, but also independent of, the media company for which they work. A good illustration of the phenomenon is Mike Carlton, who has not for some time worked for a major media company, and yet has 122,000 followers (and a very active account). When journalists cease to work for a big concern, they take their followers with them. Samantha Maiden, formerly of the Daily Telegraph and Sky, has over 100,000 followers, surely an asset for the smaller online outfit, the New Daily, that now employs her.

This is the upside for your average journalist. You can use the platform to build up individual profile, draw attention to your own stories, disseminate opinion, promote a book, and bond with or abuse other members of your craft. Journalists also sometimes draw on Twitter for material and sources. But there is a downside, too.

Best known is the abuse and trolling. Journalists are not the only targets, of course, but they are vulnerable to it, especially if they are also female. There’s a lot of hate out there in the age of Trump. This abuse can be vicious and frightening.

But Twitter also discomforts journalists in other ways. It allows their readers to provide a running commentary on their performance. And it is easy enough to see why this might be so frustrating.

This is an industry in what now seems to be a permanent state of crisis. It is struggling to evolve a business model that will preserve what’s most important in journalism while also turning a profit. The elite might be well paid and secure, but life is harder for others, some of whom are churning out thousands of words a week while shouty op-ed columnists, who don’t have to chase stories or even get basic facts right, attract the fame and the money.

Journalists were on the receiving end of a Twitter pile-on during the Barnaby Joyce affair of 2018, when many tweeters came round to the view that mainstream reporters had conspired to keep the matter under wraps. Certainly, some aspects of the matter had done the rounds on Twitter and on some small independent news sites well before the Daily Telegraph’s front-page story announced open season. But this pattern was not unusual even before the age of the internet and social media. Britain’s Profumo affair of 1963 — the most famous political sex scandal of them all — came to light in a low-circulation Westminster newsletter before it made its way into the headlines of newspapers around the world.

The present election campaign is generating similar complaints. The recent focus has been on “Watergate,” a controversy about the sale of water to the government by a company registered in the Cayman Islands with which energy minister Angus Taylor has had a previous association. Taylor’s evasive answers to questioning about the matter have not helped his or the government’s case that there is nothing to see here. The frequent complaint on Twitter is that mainstream media have shown insufficient interest in the matter. This is part of a more general complaint that Scott Morrison is getting an easy run from the media than Bill Shorten is, and that the media concerns itself with campaign trivia rather than policy substance.

Such complaints are sometimes misplaced. Individual journalists receive criticism for what is seen as a wider failing of the media as a whole. Critics can have precious little understanding of defamation law, the code of ethics, the need for careful corroboration, or the constraints of time and resources. Journalists on the prime minister’s campaign bus have been condemned for being co-opted, rather as journalists in the press gallery are often seen to be too close to politicians and their staffers — as if it were not the very function of the gallery to facilitate such contact. Patricia Karvelas was even criticised for receiving a text message from Barnaby Joyce while she was on Insiders, as if there was something sinister about a politician having the mobile number of a journalist and vice versa.

All the same, it is absurd for journalists to take the substantial benefits from a platform like Twitter while making too much of the brickbats. There is nothing more ridiculous than a high-profile figure with thousands of followers using Twitter to ridicule Twitter — for instance, as unrepresentative of wider bodies of opinion, or as notably lacking in consistency or self-awareness (failings not unknown in politics and journalism).

I’m not sure, either, why anyone should expect a toning down of partisanship on social media, least of all in an election campaign. We might all like more civility, as well as a greater willingness to see the strengths in one another’s arguments. But we also need to be realistic about how much of this we are going to get. There is already too little civility in public discourse more generally, as well as a declining respect for either evidence or expertise, including among some who call themselves journalists.

Appearances matter. Media defensiveness can come across as condescending and elitist. The ordinary camaraderie among fellow members of a profession can, to an outsider, look masonic. (We academics understand this only too well — journalists have even been known to resort to intemperate abuse of dwellers in the ivory tower.) Ordinary human feeling between journalists, politicians and staffers who share a workplace can look like an exclusive and insular club, especially when accompanied by the use of matey nicknames.

But if you are going to accept the celebrity status, however minor, and the pleasures and benefits that come with it — the show on which many of them appear is called Insiders, for God’s sake — best be aware that you might be seen by those outside the tent as a little too cosily placed within it. And the reality is that some journalists are indeed too cosy in there. A few are essentially players rather than analysts, enjoying their role in factional power plays and making their reputations by publishing the titbits provided by their “contacts” who then deploy their stories as guided missiles in party warfare.

Public suspicion is hardly surprising at a time when research tells us that people’s trust in politics and politicians is at a very low ebb. The state of the media as a whole — quite apart from the actions of any individual journalist — has given ordinary voters good reason to be suspicious. The Nine–Fairfax merger brings a former federal Coalition treasurer to the chairmanship of the board of the combined company. News Corp no longer even feigns fairness or balance and is campaigning aggressively for the Coalition. Stories circulate about the role of media magnates in the overthrow of Malcolm Turnbull. And the ABC has been subjected to a bitter and unrelenting campaign of intimidation by the government, supported by the ever-helpful Murdoch press. Ordinary citizens can be forgiven for thinking that there is now more minding of p’s and q’s than is healthy in a public broadcaster.

Twitter has changed the landscape for political reporting, and this is something that journalists have to suck up, whether they like it or not. That — or stay off the platform entirely, an option very few have so far shown any inclination to take up. If journalists want the profile that Twitter both delivers and measures, they have to deal with the reality that they will not always be showered with empathy or understanding, let alone the bouquets of an adoring public. Democracy has many virtues — including its premium on freedom of expression — but no one has ever claimed that it is always fair. •

The post Brickbats and bouquets appeared first on Inside Story.

The problems with Howard’s position have long been recognised. His confusion of personal with government and national responsibility; his inability to recognise the intimate links between past policy and present circumstances; his inconsistency in embracing pride in the past — such as the achievements of the glorious Anzacs — while denying any shame. Howard is diminished as a public figure by his stubborn refusal to grapple with the nuances of this issue.

Yet, as I listened to him, I realised I was not just hearing the words of a man attending to his legacy. This was the denialism of a generation of Australian conservatives who saw Mabo, Wik and Bringing Them Home as nuisances and impositions rather than landmarks in the history of this country. They were the words of a generation that repeatedly bends over backwards to extend empathy towards the whites who devised and executed policies and practices that caused pain, but stubbornly refuses to extend a parallel empathy to Indigenous people.

The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families would never have come into existence under Howard’s stewardship. Appointed by the Keating Labor government and chaired by Sir Ronald Wilson, the inquiry’s report, Bringing Them Home, would become another of the modern landmarks in the history of race relations in this country.

Child removal had long been part of the Australian Indigenous experience. The term itself — the Stolen Generations — had been coined by historians Peter Read and Jay Arthur in the context of a study carried out in 1981 for the NSW government. The slow and meandering journey of these stories of suffering and trauma to the centre of settler consciousness was a long one, which Bringing Them Home would complete in 1997. In July 1996, however, the newly minted Howard cabinet — assisted by a submission from attorney-general Daryl Williams — faced the dilemma of how to respond to an inquiry already in progress.

Williams’s submission has been heavily redacted. Apart from the several substantial instances in the main body of the submission (all of points six and seven and much of point eight), the entirety of Attachment C — two full pages — is blacked out. The two grounds for exemption are stated in accordance with the requirements of the Archives Act. Under section 33(1)(c), “a record is exempt from public access if it contains information or matter the disclosure of which under this Act would have a substantial adverse effect on the financial or property interests of the Commonwealth or of a Commonwealth institution and would not, on balance, be in the public interest.” Under section 33(2), a record is exempt if it would be subject to legal privilege and, again, “disclosure of the record would be contrary to the public interest.”

All of this can be summed up fairly simply: the federal government still fears releasing material that a member of the Stolen Generations could use in a court to gain compensation. It is not in the “public interest” to provide them with any assistance to do so. The managers and custodians of Commonwealth records in the National Archives, which is part of the attorney-general’s portfolio, play a significant role in protecting past, present and future governments and officials from scrutiny, and litigation, by the Australian public.

The Howard government also took the view that no compensation should be offered, and was concerned that the inquiry might give rise to financial claims. The government’s priorities lay in dealing with “current disadvantage in health, housing, employment and education” and it believed that “special compensation in respect of the issues being addressed in the Inquiry is inappropriate and unacceptable.”

“Inappropriate” and “unacceptable” are classic weasel words, especially when unaccompanied by elaboration. They are indispensable to governments. “Costly” — in both political and financial terms — would be more accurate.

Daryl Williams was opposed to the whole-of-government submission that Wilson had requested, and his submission fails to engage with the complexities of the issues raised by the inquiry. To be fair, though, the government had little reason to anticipate that it would be made to wear Bringing Them Home like a crown of thorns from the moment it arrived on the desks of government ministers until the day Kevin Rudd delivered the National Apology in 2008.

“I understand that Indigenous peoples’ expectations of the Government’s response to the Inquiry are diverse,” Williams told cabinet. “They range from deep scepticism to a more optimistic view that the Inquiry will result in reparation and/or compensation, an apology, Government assistance to individuals in accessing records, guidance on welfare policies for indigenous children and provision of sensitive and appropriate mental health services for affected individuals and families.”

Williams considered that the government could probably avoid raising expectations of a positive response to the inquiry report by saying nothing at all for the time being. “In my view,” he continued, “it is unlikely that any such expectation will arise from the Government’s ‘silence’ in relation to the Inquiry.” After all, the previous government had set up the inquiry, “presumably with a particular policy outcome in mind,” and “the public would not expect a new Government uncritically to accept its recommendations.”

If Williams had been discussing, say, an inquiry into the sale of defence department land in western Sydney, this would have been an astute and reasonable prediction. In the circumstances, it was folly.

The government’s eventual response to the report, summed up in a cabinet document from late 1997, is much better known than the deliberations beforehand. There would be no formal apology, cabinet decided. Rather than compensation, $54 million would be spent over four years on indexing and copying archival records, providing “Link-Up” services to help Indigenous people trace family members and effect reunions, expanding mental health services, and running an oral history project to record the stories of separation.

It was a minimalist response to a report that had clearly left the government unmoved. Aboriginal affairs minister John Herron said the report was “very emotive” and “one-sided,” and “focuses only on one view of the separation process.” The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was scathing about the government’s response, which “will severely disappoint Indigenous people.” The government’s refusal to address most of the report’s recommendations compounded the distress already caused by its announced refusal to countenance either compensation or an apology.

There was no prospect of the government joining with ATSIC in a more considered and comprehensive response. Pauline Hanson was in full flight with her complaints about “reverse racism” in favour of Aboriginal people. In 2000 Herron would make a government submission to a Senate inquiry into the Stolen Generations whose argument was essentially that no such generations existed because only a minority of children were separated from their families — and for a variety of reasons, many of them valid. Government policy on separations had an “essentially benign intent,” it said. There was that empathy again.

But by this stage the government’s friends in the right-wing intelligentsia had decided to make the Stolen Generations their Alamo. And there were now a million One Nation voters — many convinced that Indigenous people had been long coddled by bleeding heart governments — up for political grabs.

In the end, it was these people that the government was mainly concerned with bringing home. •

The post Bringing them home appeared first on Inside Story.

This was the election that announced, once and for all, that the Australian Labor Party under prime minister Bob Hawke was ruled by a hard pragmatism and a determination to do “whatever it takes” to win. Labor had never before won three federal elections in a row. The election was hardly less significant for the Coalition parties: it was the “New Right” election, the contest most affected by the radical conservative revolt of that decade.

The election is most commonly associated with the push by Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Queensland’s National Party premier, to transfer to federal politics and seize the prime ministership. But those ambitions were not only a product of Bjelke-Petersen’s own instability and the eccentricities of Queensland politics; they also reflected how the national New Right had outflanked the federal leader of the Liberal Party, John Howard, and mainstream conservative politics more generally, during 1985–87.

The most significant effect of the New Right’s campaign was to help extend Labor Party rule for almost another decade. It was not until the defeat of Liberal leader John Hewson’s Fightback! campaign in 1993 that the genie was returned to its bottle.

During 1985 Bjelke-Petersen had won a stunning if brutal victory over striking electricity workers in his state, one of several victories across the nation for the industrial relations hardliners associ­ated with the New Right. After his unexpected outright victory at the Queensland state election held in November 1986 — the Nationals having discarded their Liberal partners in 1983 — the National Party was able to govern alone. John Howard, watching Bjelke-Petersen claim victory on television, turned to his wife Janette and declared with unerring accuracy, “We’ll have trouble with this lunatic now.”

He had been rumoured for some time to be pondering a switch to Canberra, a move being encouraged by a group of Gold Coast entrepreneurs known as the white-shoe brigade. These men, of whom the most prominent was the flamboyant former car dealer and property developer, Mike Gore, had a number of preoccupations. They still loathed John Howard for having introduced, as treasurer in the Fraser government, retrospective legislation designed to shut down “bottom of the harbour” tax-avoidance schemes. They also probably nursed an ambition to install the corrupt Gold Coast politician Russ Hinze as Queensland premier.

One other factor might have entered their calculations: they had little to fear from a pro-business Labor government in Canberra, some of whose leading members were openly identified as friends and supporters of such thrusting entrepreneurs.

By Christmas 1986 it was clear that Bjelke-Petersen would soon make a move. At a rally in Wagga the following month, he warned that those who did not support him and his policies would find their seats contested at the next election. The Queensland National Party powerbroker Robert Sparkes, who was quite unable to contain Bjelke-Petersen’s increasingly unhinged behaviour and inflated ambitions, felt he had little choice but to throw the weight of the state branch behind the premier.

In February 1987 a meeting of the Queensland Nationals at Hervey Bay agreed to back the Joh-for-PM campaign. They called on federal National Party leader Ian Sinclair to withdraw from the Coalition and, if he refused, for the Queensland Nationals to go their own way. At a National Party federal council meeting in Canberra in March, Bjelke-Petersen memorably thrust his arms into the air and announced the “good news” that the Coalition was finished.

By this time, he was attracting the support, or at least the praise, of prominent Australians. Geoffrey Blainey, prolific historian and media pundit, considered him “one of the quiet giants in our political history,” a man “like the legendary tortoise racing the hare.” “I think he will be a more serious challenger than most media people are suggesting,” Blainey suggested, a prediction that turned out to be accurate only in the unlikely event that he was referring to the Queensland premier’s capacity to derail his own side of politics.

In announcing the formal break-up of the federal Coalition, in March, Howard again accurately predicted that Bjelke-Petersen “will clearly go down in history as the Coalition wrecker and he has no chance of ever becoming prime minister.”

The Bjelke-Petersen thrust has sometimes been presented simply as the product of the idiosyncrasies of an ageing and corrupt mega­lomaniac, or of the peculiarities of Queensland politics. But even leaving aside the various agendas being pursued by his sup­porters, the Joh-for-PM push was rather more complicated. In fact, it was very much a product of the fluid character of Australian eco­nomics and politics in the mid 1980s.

The style of consensus politics pursued by Bob Hawke after he assumed leadership of the federal Labor Party in early 1983 had stimulated political entre­preneurship of various kinds on the right. Blainey’s campaign against the pace of Asian immigration in 1984, and the mining executive Hugh Morgan’s against Aboriginal land rights in the same year, were followed by New Right agitation in favour of anti-union and anti-arbitration industrial relations reform, lower taxes, government spending cuts, and even lower wage growth than the government had achieved via its Prices and Incomes Accord with the union movement.

At a time of rapidly declining farm incomes, a rural revolt led by the National Farmers’ Federation, with wealthy South Australian grazier and business figure Ian McLachlan at the helm, added potency to the chatter of city-based dining clubs, employer organisations and barristers’ chambers. The views of the New Right appeared frequently in the op-ed columns of the country’s newspa­pers, especially the Australian, and the confidence of these new mili­tants found expression in a series of high-profile industrial disputes, culminating in a lockout of workers at Robe River on the Pilbara iron ore field in Western Australia in 1986.

While former Liberal leader Andrew Peacock had performed creditably at the 1984 federal election, with the Coalition reducing Labor’s majority in an enlarged House of Representatives, his leadership didn’t survive the rivalry with John Howard, who replaced him the following year. Howard had every reason to hope that the intellectual influence being exercised by the New Right outside the parliament would help him to reshape the political agenda. Having rather unfairly borne much of the opprobrium for the perceived failures of the Fraser era, he wished to forge a legacy of his own that would draw to some extent on the kinds of free-market policies being pursued in Britain by Margaret Thatcher and in the United States by Ronald Reagan.

The Liberal Party divided into a “dry” faction, which supported this direction and was influenced by the ideas of the New Right, and a “wet” faction that identified more strongly with a statist tradition that some traced to the early prime minister Alfred Deakin. The latter looked more to Peacock than Howard as favoured leader.

Peacock’s name, however, was also mentioned in connection with the Joh-for-PM push, underlining the role of personal rivalries and animosities beyond whatever ideological differences existed on the conservative side of politics. Howard’s problem was that his leader­ship was being destabilised from within as well as from without, where he was being outflanked by an increasingly adventurous New Right.

Labor had been behind in the polls in late 1986 and early 1987, and party insiders, who revealed after the election that Labor had been trailing by eight percentage points just ten months before, clearly expected defeat. The government had experienced a most difficult year in 1986, when the bottom had fallen out of the dollar and Keating had warned that unless Australia was able to turn itself around it faced a future as “a banana republic.”

A document drafted for the party’s campaign committee in October 1986, based on commissioned market research, reported “seething anger and resent­ment” in middle Australia about the government’s economic man­agement. Labor’s traditional supporters seemed to think the gov­ernment was deriving “a sadistic pleasure out of their hurt,” as if they were receiving “deserved punishment.”

But by May 1987, with the economy showing many signs of improvement and Howard’s lead­ership being destabilised by the Bjelke-Petersen push and continuing “wet” disaffection, Labor was beginning to overtake the opposition in the polls. An economic statement announcing a $4 billion cut in the budget deficit, delivered by treasurer Paul Keating on 13 May, gained a favourable reception in the media and polls. Just two weeks later, Hawke secured a double dissolution election for 11 July.

Keating has claimed much of the credit for the decision to go to an early election, an indication of the significance he attaches to the subsequent victory as the moment when the government’s place in Australian political history would be decided. Hawke, understandably, presents the decision as his own doing, the timing of elections ultimately falling within the prime minister’s prerogative.

Bjelke-Petersen was in the United States when the election was called. This famously shrewd political operator badly underestimated the temptation to an early election that his own erratic behaviour had posed. After returning to Australia and failing in an effort to secure the support of the National Farmers’ Federation, he made himself look even more foolish by announcing that he would not be going to Canberra after all. Howard flew to Brisbane and managed to secure a joint statement with Bjelke-Petersen that they would agree to work together to defeat the government; but Bjelke-Petersen candidates ran in several seats where there were already official opposition can­didates, confusing voters and contributing to a sense of chaos on the conservative side of politics.

As the campaign got under way, the new ruthlessness and professionalism of the Labor Party was nowhere better illustrated than in its decision to replace its previous advertising agency, Forbes MacFie Hansen, with John Singleton Advertising. Singleton, not widely regarded as a friend of the Labor Party, was known for his role in undermining the Whitlam government with an unpleasant campaign in 1974. But the choice, for which Hawke took full credit in his memoirs, was an inspired one, giving rise to a campaign slogan that seemed to capture the feelings of many voters towards the government.

“Let’s stick together” might have been the title of a Bryan Ferry song, but in this case it was followed by an exhortation “Let’s see it through.” Just what “it” was, the jingle didn’t really specify, but the balance of pay­ments crisis and plunge of the dollar during the previous year seemed a fair assumption. Electors received the advice that “nobody ever got anywhere changing horses in midstream” — although Labor had clearly thought otherwise when it hired Singleton.

The other piece of advertising genius that emerged from this cam­paign was “Whingeing Wendy,” as she became known, or Wendy Wood. She was the wife of one of Singleton’s friends and sometimes featured on Singleton’s radio program as a charac­ter named Beryl Timms, a rough but honest working-class everywoman. Wood was a commit­ted Labor supporter and when she looked into the camera and asked in her broad Australian working-class accent where John Howard was going to find the money to pay for his tax cuts, she looked and sounded as though she really meant it.

The Labor campaign didn’t go off without a hitch, but Hawke’s only major error — the promise that “by 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty” — was not one for which he would pay heavily in the short term. The line appeared in the speech by mistake; Hawke was apparently supposed to say that because of the government’s new family allowance supplement, there “would be no financial need for any child to live in poverty.”

Perhaps Hawke was overreacting to the accusation, increasingly heard by 1987, that this was not a real Labor government but one for the wealthy and powerful. The family allowance supplement was the product of collaboration between Hawke, Keating and left-aligned social security minister Brian Howe, and it was shaped by policy advice from the social policy academic Bettina Cass.

As a conspicuous effort to assist low-income earners, it was especially timely. Despite the sacrifices the government was demanding of ordinary voters, the very wealthy seemed to be doing better than ever. That year’s Business Review Weekly Rich List announced Australia’s first two billionaires, Kerry Packer and Robert Holmes à Court, and the stock market was booming. Hawke’s praise during the campaign for business figures such as Packer and Alan Bond, and their apparent endorsement of him, would contribute to a growing chorus of criticism about “rich Labor mates” in the years ahead, criticism that bit especially once the stock market collapsed in October 1987 and many of yesterday’s heroes became today’s shysters.

But for the time being, Labor’s families package and Hawke’s extravagant promise about ending child poverty might have helped convince some wavering voters that the government still had a Labor heart. Laurie Oakes judged that the $300 million family payment “should really be called Labor’s social conscience package,” a measure aimed at getting “rid of the idea that Labor is no different from the Liberal Party in its values.” There had been a flirtation with the idea of providing a payment for all parents with children under six. But in the straitened economic times, the government did not pursue this option, a brave decision in view of the need to keep middle-income voters onside.

The Liberals’ campaign errors, by contrast, were costly. Their campaign was disorganised, with the state branches exercising considerable autonomy tempered by minimal central direction until near the end. They went to the election advocating drastic cuts to income tax, notably a top rate reduced to 38 per cent, in contrast with Labor’s recent decision to cut the rate to 49 per cent. They also promised to reduce company tax rates, abolish the capital gains tax introduced by the Hawke gov­ernment, make employees rather than their bosses responsible for paying the fringe benefits tax, and make business entertain­ment tax deductible.

Bjelke-Petersen, advised by John Stone, a former treasury secretary now sitting as a Queensland National Party senator, advocated a flat income tax of 25 per cent, which might have made the cuts being offered by Howard look moderate if anyone truly believed that Bjelke-Petersen was likely to cut rates so drastically. But Howard was vague about which expenditure he was going to cut to pay for his tax policy, and in any case the plan was to phase in such cuts over several years, thereby raising questions about their feasibility. Financial journalists smelt political opportunism, while voters — encouraged by Labor advertising — had reason to wonder where the money was coming from.

But the Liberals soon faced additional problems. Keating accused them of a major arithmetical error amounting to $1.5 billion, a piece of double counting that meant that funding cuts to the states were likely to be even more severe than those being proposed. Howard and his shadow treasurer, Jim Carlton, admitted the mistake. There were other gaffes in the campaign but this one — perhaps the kind of error likely to be made by a party distracted by the Joh-for-PM crusade — was the most damaging of them all.

By contrast, commentators from both left and right were increasingly in awe of Labor’s political professionalism. NSW planning minister Bob Carr, admittedly a Labor partisan, thought the campaign Labor’s “best-ever peacetime effort.” He went on: “With the panache of a Menzies, Bob Hawke persuaded the swinging voters that the issue in this election was not the record of the government but the performance of the opposition.” Pro-Liberal commentator Gerard Henderson agreed: Hawke won the election “because the ALP is Australia’s only truly professional party.”

The media was also largely on side; where once Labor could count on opposition from the press, at least in editorials, it now benefited in most cases from either support or neutrality. It was the Liberal and National parties that were now more likely to complain of media bias, but journalists could respond that they were not inventing the stories of division and confusion within the ranks; these were plain for all to see.

Issues that had once posed dangers to Labor, such as the perception that it was insufficiently committed to the alliance with the United States, had dissipated. During the 1987 campaign, US ambassador Bill Lane announced “the past year” as “one of the best bilateral relationships in the thirty-six-year history of ANZUS.” As a result of scheduled arrangements, Hawke’s close friend, secretary of state George Shultz, visited Australia with defense secretary Caspar Weinberger during the campaign, provid­ing welcome photo opportunities for Hawke, foreign minister Bill Hayden and defence minister Kim Beazley.

But it was not just that Hawke himself was engaged, focused and indefatigable, performing far better than in 1984 and seemingly gaining new energy from the daily campaign round. It was also the skill of the party machine itself: Bob McMullan, as party secretary in Canberra head office, pollster Rod Cameron, and the advertiser John Singleton were influential members of a formidable campaign team. McMullan and Cameron were also central to the formu­lation and implementation of what former Hawke staffer Stephen Mills has called an incumbency strategy. It was no longer just a matter of such figures becoming active at campaign time. They were also involved in government between elections, helping to develop a plan for winning the next election and remaining in office.

In particular, Labor successfully targeted marginal seats — those it held by a slender margin, such as several in Victoria, and those it hoped to win elsewhere, such as in Queensland — and with considerable success. As journalist Paul Kelly put it, Labor “focused during the campaign on the swinging voter and it got the swing where it mattered.”

McMullan gave a young party organiser, Gary Gray, the respon­sibility for marginal seats. Gray then proceeded to spend a quarter of a million dollars on computers capable of storing the details of voters in each target electorate, and laser printers that would, at the mighty rate of four pages per minute, produce letters for direct mail-outs. These went into eleven of the most marginal seats. The party also installed another newfangled device, the fax machine, in the offices of marginal seat candidates to ensure rapid communication, especially when the prime minister’s travelling circus was visiting the electorate. The research, planning and technological support that underpinned Labor’s 1987 campaign victory was, by Australian standards, unprecedented and prodigious.

Superficially, the outcome might have seemed undramatic, but the numbers told only a small part of the story, especially in the context of modern Australian political history. Labor had shaken off a sense that it was “the party of occasional government.” While leading commentators resisted the idea that the party had become the natural party of government, there was a feeling that a “historical pattern” had “been broken”; that in the not-too-distant past, in such an economic situation, Labor would have faced elec­toral annihilation. Hawke’s “return defied all established nostrums of Australian politics,” according to David O’Reilly in the Bulletin. “He ran on his record, in winter, and promised the electorate almost nothing.”

The Coalition achieved a small swing in the two-party-preferred vote of 1 per cent. But even if that had been uniform, it would have been insufficient to get the opposition parties over the line, since Labor’s buffer was 2.3 per cent. As it happened, the Liberals and Nationals failed to achieve a swing in marginal seats that they needed to win, with the result that Labor picked up four extra seats, increasing its tally from eighty-two to eighty-six.

In New South Wales, the Liberal and National parties gained swings of between 5 per cent and 7 per cent in seven safe Labor and two safe National Party divisions — votes that were of no use whatsoever so far as winning seats was concerned. In these places, where there were seats to be won or lost, Labor’s complicated message — that the country was in economic difficulty and that it was the best party to deal with the problems — appears to have gained sufficient traction to get the government over the line. The chaos unleashed by Bjelke-Petersen in Queensland also appears to have benefited Labor, which picked up four seats in that state, more than making up for losses of a seat each in Victoria and New South Wales.

There was widespread agreement that division within the Coalition ranks had cost them dearly. Michelle Grattan of the Melbourne Age saw Hawke’s victory as a “tribute to the electorate’s common sense, and a vindication of the political adage that division is death.” Some post-election commentators rightly praised John Howard for his courage and grace under pressure, but they were uncompliment­ary about his team. The shadow treasurer, Jim Carlton, was widely blamed for the accounting error, but in reality the Coalition had failed to devote sufficient time to getting its policies right. As the Australian Financial Review put it, there was too much that smacked of “half-baked policy pro­posals, ill-digested responses and just plain garbage.”

The Liberals went to the election with a messy policy of undoing Medicare’s universalism and pushing all but the poorest and the most vulnerable into private health insurance. The proposal to charge families for the first $250 of their medical bills each year contributed to an impression that they could not be trusted on health. The elections of 1990 and 1993 further entrenched this idea, to the enormous electoral cost of the conservative parties.

It has been suggested that perhaps a fifth of voters changed party from 1984, but there was very likely a cancelling out of most votes as defectors from each side switched allegiance. This perhaps reflects the degree of confusion that had come to surround party voting by the mid 1980s as well as the fierceness of competition between the parties. Yet, although it could not be fully realised at the time and would become clearer in 1990, there was a gentle hint here of a future in which the major political parties would become more dependent on fragile, shifting and shrinking coalitions of voters assembled for the purposes of winning each election. And where Hawke’s performance had been widely criticised in 1984, this time there was more agreement that he was an asset to the Labor Party, accounting for 1.4 per cent of the vote that would have gone else­where, according to one estimate. His approval rating was twenty points ahead of Howard’s.

If 1987 might be seen as representing a symbolic break of the Labor Party with the past as it steered its course through increas­ingly adventurous market reforms, the same was even more true of the Liberal Party. For the Liberals, the 1987 election was, in generational terms, arguably the last election of the Fraser era. The divi­sions of the period greatly weakened Ian Sinclair, one of three key Fraser allies in the National–Country Party (the others being Doug Anthony and Peter Nixon), and he would lose the leadership at the same time as John Howard was overthrown in 1989.

There would also be a move after the 1987 election against several Liberal progressives — or “wets” — such as Ian Macphee, who lost preselection, while figures who would figure in the Howard government, including Peter Costello and Kevin Andrews, would enter the parliament at the beginning of the 1990s. Alexander Downer, later to become Australia’s longest-serving foreign minister after a brief and inglorious time as party leader, was the Liberals’ young shadow environment minister in 1987, seeking to sell a policy that wanted to shift responsibility for most matters in his portfolio to the states — and then condemning the very same policy soon after the election.

A major figure from the Fraser era, Andrew Peacock, would be marginalised in the 1987 election, and was widely rumoured to be flirting with the Joh-for-PM campaign; he would live on to fight another day as leader when he pushed Howard out in 1989, but would fail in 1990 as Howard had done in 1987. Joh Bjelke-Petersen would soon lose the premiership of Queensland and, at the hands of the Fitzgerald royal commission, what remained of his reputation as well.

But for the time being, in the immediate aftermath of the election, there were some true believers. Des Keegan, a New Right commentator in the Australian and conspicuous Joh-for-PM supporter, would not let go, declaring that “the Coalition was invited, cordially invited, to join the anti-socialist drive with Sir Joh. Jealous of potent promise, it spurned a winning offer.”

In retrospect, it seems marvel­lous that apparently sensible people offered their warm commendation and support to the Queensland premier’s blatant charlatanism, but it is easy to underestimate the strains of utopianism in the New Right during this era, the extent to which the Hawke government had created confusion among such people, and the enormous capac­ity of some of them for self-delusion and wishful thinking. After the election, however, most commentators thought Bjelke-Petersen’s often unhinged and always self-centred behaviour had deeply damaged the conservative cause. John Howard, for one, devoted the remainder of his long and fruitful career to ensuring that he would never again suffer anything resembling the debacle of 1987.

The issue that had triggered the double dissolution election, the Australia Card, barely figured in the campaign. This was a foolish omission on the part of the opposition parties, because public opinion was turning against it. One post-election commentator remarked that the failure of the Liberal Party to make anything of the issue suggested “the same lack of interest, if not contempt, for civil liberties as the Labor Party.” A more likely explanation is that the Coalition simply failed to register the potential potency of the issue in a climate in which economic matters seemed the most pressing. As it happened, the government abandoned its plans for the Australia Card before the end of the year.

The disarray in conservative politics that the 1987 election both reflected and compounded had powerful implications for Australian political history. This was an election that mattered. Labor’s victory meant that it could press on with policies that, for its critics on the broader left, often amounted to the slaughter of sacred cows. Reform of the university system, including the reintroduction of fees, tariff cuts, privatisation and a move towards more decentralised industrial relations all followed the election.

While the Coalition would have travelled down much the same path — possibly faster and further — if it had won the election, Labor’s victory meant that market-friendly reforms would be tempered by social and welfare spending of a kind to which the Coalition parties remained unrec­onciled throughout the 1980s. For instance, when the Labor govern­ment moved to reform the university sector, it pursued a middle way by introducing a system of income-contingent deferred fees payable through the taxation system, rather than attempting a more vigorous shift towards full fee-paying or even a privatised system — some­thing that the conservative parties may well have attempted if their 1987 policies are any guide.

Labor’s electoral longevity also helped ensure that when the shift away from centralised wage determination occurred in the late 1980s, the unions were able to retain a central place in the system as agents in a collective, or enterprise, bargaining process. Through the Prices and Incomes Accord, they would play a major role in shaping compulsory superannuation. Labor’s success in 1987 — and its further victories in 1990 and 1993 — also preserved another policy that had been part of the Labor Party’s agreement with the unions when it came to office in 1983, the system of health insurance called Medicare.

The final years of the Hawke government, between 1987 and 1991, saw a decisive move towards stronger envi­ronmental protection. While Labor had a good record in this area, stretching back to its success in preventing the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania in 1983, the style of pragmatism that Labor had displayed at the 1987 election was critical in shaping its future actions. Labor courted conservation groups in the lead-up to the election, with right-wing powerbroker Graham Richardson, who would become environment minister after the election, instrumental in this effort. The Coalition’s policy, by contrast, was to return environmental issues largely to state government control.

Commentators puzzled after the 1987 election about whether Labor’s success represented a decisive break with the patterns of twentieth-century electoral competition, which had seen the non-Labor parties dominate. Thirty years on, it is still not entirely clear whether this was the case, since the Coalition has dominated federal politics since the end of the Hawke–Keating era. Increasing party competition, manifest especially in the growing number of marginal seats, ensured that Labor’s ascendancy rested on much shakier foundations than the hegemony of the Menzies government. Labor’s share of the primary vote dropped from 49.5 per cent in 1983 to 47.5 per cent in 1984 and 45.8 per cent in 1987, and it then dipped below 40 per cent in 1990. As a result, the government became increasingly dependent on the prefer­ences of minor parties.

How would modern Australian politics have been different if the Coalition had won the 1987 election? Inevitably, counterfactual history is a dangerous business, but the following scenario seems plausible. John Howard would probably have governed for two terms at least — the normal minimum since the demise of the Scullin Labor government in 1931 — but a Coalition government would then have faced the challenge of guiding Australia out of a recession in the early 1990s.

In the meantime, Howard is likely to have drastically cut expenditure in the effort to pay for his tax promises at the 1987 election and then balance the books in the context of declining eco­nomic activity from around 1990, as Australia entered a recession. With an empowered New Right outside parliament — and, no doubt, increasingly well represented in it — supporting even lower taxes and lower spending, the pressures for dry economic policy and aggressive anti-union measures would have been powerful.

The Liberal Party had decided not to take a consumption tax to the 1987 election, but perhaps it might have found it necessary to do so in 1990 or 1993, in the face of declining tax receipts from other sources. Having already abolished Medicare as a universal health scheme, a Coalition gov­ernment is likely to have sought to reduce health expenditure even further after 1987, and to have pursued a more aggressive policy of inserting market forces into higher education, as well as faster and more far-reaching privatisation of government assets.

All the same, the Coalition would still have faced the barrier of the Australian Democrats in the Senate, a moderating influence, as well as resistance from a union movement that in 1990 represented about 40 per cent of the paid workforce. The Coalition might have lost government either in 1993 or in 1996. Perhaps a more experienced John Hewson, fresh from his ordeals as treasurer in a Howard government, might have emerged as opposition leader against a Labor government led by Kim Beazley. It is hard to imagine Paul Keating having endured many years in opposition after his time as treasurer.

These are mere speculations; and, in truth, given the extent of agreement between the major parties in economic and foreign policy by the 1990s, the differences might not have been great in the end. Perhaps Australia would have had a WorkChoices-style industrial rela­tions policy in the 1990s, but this would have been unlikely without conservative control of the Senate. Possibly a later-1990s Labor gov­ernment might have been able to advance the cause of an Australian republic, but the same divisions as actually occurred in 1999 over the most appropriate model would not have evaporated with the career of John Howard.

Nonetheless, even amid the uncertainties of counterfactual history, it is clear enough that there would have been greater pres­sures on a 1980s Australian social model that sought to balance freer markets and higher profits with a reasonably generous welfare state, environmental protection, and a continuing role for unions in industrial affairs. To that extent, 1987 was an election that mattered, one which ensured that even during a period of rapid global transformation, Australia tended to cleave to a middle way. •

This is an extract from Elections Matter: Ten Federal Elections that Shaped Australia, edited by Benjamin T. Jones, Frank Bongiorno and John Uhr, published by Monash University Publishing.

The post Labor makes it three appeared first on Inside Story.

Joyce has made it clear that he would not be averse to a comeback. The Australian’s Chris Kenny was not wildly exaggerating when he called Joyce “the spiritual head” of the National Party, but that might not be complimentary either to Joyce or to the party. And the path might not be entirely smooth: rural women appear to have remained angry about Joyce’s behaviour — not just the relationship with staffer Vikki Campion that made a wreck of his marriage, but also the alleged sexual harassment that a party inquiry was unable to resolve.

What would a born-again Joyce leadership look like? If this hastily assembled memoir is any indication, the most plausible answer is very unpleasant. Weatherboard and Iron is stuffed full of manufactured resentment against the cosmopolitan urban elites who are apparently responsible for all the ills of the bush, of the nation and — most importantly of all — of Barnaby himself.

The very title of the book is based on the conceit that Australia is socially stratified according to the materials out of which your home is made: “fibro and iron, then weatherboard and iron, tile and weatherboard, brick and iron, then brick and tile.” Joyce apparently sees himself as representing the “poor whites” stuck at stage two of that progression. The racialisation of his constituency is one of the many distasteful features of an often-distasteful book, though it’s probably little more than a Brexit- and Trump-inspired political fishing expedition by a failed leader. We should not give Joyce credit for originality that he doesn’t deserve.

So who are the enemies of these “poor whites” of the Great Australian Bush? They are the guys (not blokes) who wear imported silk ties and designer watches, and the girls who buy clothes with exposed brand names (where has Joyce been since the 1980s?) and hang around coffee shops in their “active wear.” Loitering in an airport bookshop is another sign of urban privilege — as distinct, we must assume, from hanging around the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge. You are among the favoured if you went to school at “St Michael’s” as distinct from “Turdsville State” (though Barnaby boarded at Riverview). The ABC, apparently, “is for those who can see the CBD,” unless you are little Barnaby watching “a hazily displayed form of the ABC” in Danglemah, New England, in the 1970s.

Predictably, Joyce hates environmentalists and animal rights activists (“Veganism and vegetation laws are very handy if we are going to evolve into a higher form of termite”) and any concern about climate change will immediately mark you as one of the pampered, out-of-touch city elites with a weakness for fashionable causes. In what he now calls “dramatic overreach,” Joyce famously opposed Kevin Rudd’s proposal for an emissions trading scheme by claiming that a roast might cost $100; others might call it a bare-faced lie. He still believes saving the Franklin River was a bad idea (“the triumph of the bearded kayaker over the poor, regional Tasmanian town”).

Among his many apparently well-cultivated hatreds, he has a peculiar animus against sociology graduates. Did a sociologist back in the 1980s make life unpleasant at the University of New England? (Yes, our “man of the people” has a university degree.) “A person on $200,000 a year, educated at Macquarie University in political science, sending a report to another on $300,000 a year, a sociology alumnus of Sydney University — both of whom live in Canberra — is not going to solve the problems of lice and ice for the kiddies in these towns.” Here surely is a good advertisement for political science at Macquarie — you might get to earn about the same salary as Joyce after he has suffered catastrophic career failure — and it is a splendid ad for sociology, if unlikely to be based on reliable graduate destinations data.

But never mind: Joyce isn’t much into data, as the disastrous saga of the move of the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, or APVMA, from Canberra to Armidale, in Joyce’s electorate, has shown only too well. Nor is he much into consistency. He rails at the idea that people living in the bush should be expected to move to find work, but the outcry about the APVMA “shows just how soft and entitled Australia has become.” Another interpretation of that outcry might be that many of us are fed up with venal pork-barrelling, but the colossal waste of money and talent involved in this effort to spread government largesse is small beer compared with what Joyce would do if he were ever given a full set of keys to the Treasury — at least if the ideas he outlines in Weatherboard and Iron are any indication.

If taken at his word, Joyce would build hydroelectric dams and coal-fired power stations across rural and regional Australia. He would build a new city in the Kimberley, with Canberra apparently the model. (Even Gough Whitlam attracts a few kind words for his interest in decentralisation.) The planned Inland Rail will apparently “grow Parkes, Narrabri, Wodonga, Moree and Goondiwindi” — though Joyce is rather hazy about how or why all this growth will happen, or by how much — and the miserly plans for a Melbourne-to-Brisbane line should be extended to take in Toowoomba to Gladstone, and Mount Isa to Tennant Creek. More roads should be built across the breadth of the continent because we only have a paltry pair. Tax concessions should be used to develop the land of milk and honey. Joyce doesn’t explain how all of this will be paid for, or why — beyond development for its own sake — it is necessary or desirable.

Joyce’s image of regional Australia is retrograde. His own electorate of New England is dominated by the large and sophisticated towns of Tamworth and Armidale, but you’d hardly know it. Like most of the rest of Australia, a majority of its voters supported marriage equality in the postal survey. Joyce’s nostalgic Country Party vision even takes in the hoary old idea of establishing new states. Indeed, there is barely a half-baked idea from the medical kit of Dr Earle Page (Country Party leader 1921–39) that Joyce is not prepared to dust off, shine up and present to a new audience as bright, shiny and dazzling, presumably in the hope that they know as little of Australian history and basic economics as he does.

Much of it is old-fashioned city-bashing, of course — the kind of politics that complained loudly about building a bridge across Sydney Harbour while calling for one over the Clarence — but it is also firmly in the tradition of anti-political politics. It is the sleight of hand that allows one to complain of “the cold, calculating heart of the politician,” in Joyce’s phrase, while making political hay as long as the sun shines — preferably, in the eyes of the voters.

That is not the only sleight of hand. Joyce has been a man of celebrity, consequence and power — someone who was able, for instance, to threaten to euthanase a Hollywood star’s dogs. He counts among his friends and supporters the country’s richest woman, Gina Rinehart, a mining magnate whose political and ethical antennae detected nothing amiss in handing over a cheque for $40,000 as a “prize” while Joyce was trying to recover the New England seat he’d been forced to vacate temporarily when it turned out he’d inherited New Zealand citizenship from his father. (Joyce eventually turned down the prize.) It is no wonder he thinks “we need twenty Ginas making money and paying their tax in Australia but instead we have this tall poppy syndrome that shuns success.” Elsewhere, he helpfully warns that we “need to be aware of the influence of vested interests and their corporate interwoven nature with politicians.” Amen to that, at least.

None of this prevents Joyce from posing in this book as the eternal outsider, the man who was given admission to a particularly seedy nightclub full of self-serving careerists, didn’t like what he saw, and is now determined to tell the truth to power. He is contemptuous of political staffers — except apparently his own — who “are overwhelmingly furnished by the same capital city clique.” Educated in the better schools, they “believe working in Canberra is some new episode of The West Wing or Game of Thrones or House of Cards.” (Happily, Joyce omits mention of Sex and the City.) In relation to the Nationals, he gives himself the credit for having “changed the culture from the old school, wool tie, picnic race club boys, to something vastly more reflective of the people we actually represent.” There is indeed something in this claim: Joyce’s early independent-mindedness as a senator undoubtedly shook up Coalition politics, injecting a renegade and populist note that had been hard to discern in a succession of well-integrated and well-behaved National Party leaders, determined not to make the kind of trouble that Joh Bjelke-Petersen had fomented back in 1987.

Weatherboard and Iron has not, it seems, sold well. After all the media coverage of Joyce’s private life, people are probably heartily sick of hearing about him. Anyone expecting grand revelations about the scandal in which he starred will be disappointed — and it is in the nature of political memoir today that anything salacious will be revealed in the media anyway, thereby obviating the need to fork out for the book. To be fair, Joyce is also sparing in the amount of dirt he dishes out on enemies such as Malcolm Turnbull, who did so much to bring Joyce undone (when he was not undoing himself). There is perhaps a little too much self-pity in the latter part of the book, amid some discussion of the self-destructive life he made for himself in Canberra. In a book where a great deal seems contrived for political effect, these passages seem the most honest, and they are certainly the rawest. Also notable, earlier in the book, are the somewhat coy references to his parents, who for some reason apparently objected to his marriage to Natalie, refusing even to attend the wedding. There is pain here that Joyce touches on without being willing to explore in any depth.

One last thing needs to be said about Weatherboard and Iron. It is among the worst-written pieces of nonfiction I’ve read for many years. The grammar and punctuation are sometimes dreadful, the author in several instances seems to have little idea of how to construct a paragraph, and the prose almost completely lacks rhythm, style or polish. No doubt such schoolmasterly criticism marks this reviewer as an over-educated idiot. Joyce knows the type: “shelves filled with books that they have probably never read but by gosh they look good. If you have read the review, that’s good enough to stick it on the shelf.” If my criticism seems unfair, it is worth considering that Joyce has the chutzpah to complain elsewhere in the book about the poor educational standards caused by the radical wing of the teachers’ union and fashionable pedagogy.

Joyce is fond of the snakes-and-ladders analogy and — with his paltry backbencher’s salary — apparently sees himself as occupying “a bottom square.” It is clear enough that he doesn’t intend being there long. Indeed, so dire and disorganised is the current state of our politics that only the very bold would rule out the possibility that Joyce, before long, will be making his way up those ladders again. If this book provides any indication of what he intends doing if he gets there, the result is likely to be reactionary, populist and ugly. •

The post Poor white bloke appeared first on Inside Story.

Little wonder that Kerry Packer, Rupert Murdoch and many others looked enviously on Fairfax’s “rivers of gold,” its lucrative classified advertising. But the extensive holdings of the Fairfax family meant that the firm was also seen as impregnable to takeover.

Another widely coveted company was BHP, the nation’s largest, with its extensive mining and manufacturing interests. Robert Holmes à Court, a Perth-based lawyer and brilliant corporate raider, mischievously claimed that his ambition was to turn it into a subsidiary of a firm he controlled, Bell Resources. By the time the 1984 Rich List appeared, Holmes à Court was said to have amassed a personal fortune of at least $165 million. In an era when bankers were falling over one another to offer loans to ambitious entrepreneurs of this kind, public companies — especially cashed-up or undervalued companies — were vulnerable to raiders.

By 1985 the effects of an already impressive bull market were apparent in BRW’s list. With a fortune of $300 million, Holmes à Court was now judged the country’s richest man; in the previous year alone, his wealth had increased by $135 million, or $2.6 million per week. The Murdochs, however, were still the richest family, with $400 million. Large personal profits were being made from media and retailing empires but the fortunes of developers such as George Herscu, Frank Lowy, Ted Lustig and the Grollo brothers — all European migrants — were also growing quickly on the back of a buoyant market in commercial property.

A year later, when the 1986 Rich List was published, the era of the entrepreneur had well and truly arrived, as had “the takeover revolution.” Among the more significant of the mergers at this time was that of the large and venerable Melbourne-based businesses Coles and Myer, the Myer family thereby relinquishing control of a retailing empire that had its origins in an emporium established in Bendigo on the eve of Federation. But there were large compensations: $72 million in cash and forty million shares in Coles Myer, as well as two seats on the new company’s board. BRW estimated the family’s wealth at $330 million.

Another fabulously rich Melbourne clan, the Murdochs, was also flourishing, with an approximate wealth of $700 million on the back of a massive increase in the price of their News Corporation shares. Rupert himself had disappeared from the Rich List, however, to become a citizen of “the richest, most free and happiest country in the world,” as he called the United States. US law prevented foreigners from taking up more than 20 per cent of a broadcasting licence and Murdoch wanted to buy a suite of American television stations. In a ten-minute citizenship ceremony in New York City in September 1985, he “absolutely and entirely” renounced “all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign power, potentate, state or sovereign of whom or which” he had “heretofore been a subject or a citizen.” The foreign power in question was Australia, the sovereign Queen Elizabeth II.

But put this way, Murdoch was surrendering very little: he was in all but name already a potentate in his own right, wrote a New York Times columnist, a “Multinational Man… by choice, a man without a country.” The judge who administered the oath of allegiance told Murdoch and the other 185 aliens in the ceremony that they now had the same rights as every other citizen of the United States; if they had something to say, he added — possibly with tongue in cheek — they could write to the newspapers.

While he had given up his right to cast a ballot at Australian elections, Murdoch’s wants were rarely permitted to slip from the forefront of political consideration. It was his company, and Kerry Packer’s, that Hawke, Keating and their closest allies and advisers in the Labor Party favoured over the two other major media companies, the Herald and Weekly Times, or HWT, and Fairfax. The right wing of NSW Labor, which formed Hawke and Keating’s power base, was now especially close to Packer. His father, Sir Frank, had been a dogmatic opponent of the Labor Party, but this matey Labor fraternity and the macho, sports-mad, knockabout businessman were simpatico. Some right-wing Labor politicians were infatuated with those who had enjoyed material success, and they relished the generous hospitality Packer laid on for them. Packer, for his part, enjoyed exposure to successful politicians who understood the media and would be willing to do him a good turn when the need or opportunity arose.

If Hawke and Keating had a less warm personal relationship with Murdoch than with Packer, they nonetheless hoped that any favours would be returned in kind. Everyone remembered the mess Murdoch had made of Whitlam in 1975, and they were aware of his partisanship in favour of Thatcher and Reagan. Hawke and Keating’s loathing for HWT, which Murdoch had in his sights, was predictable, since it had never been a friend of the Labor Party.

But their hatred of Fairfax had different roots. It too had once been a formidable opponent of the party, but its journalists’ attitude was generally favourable to the key policies of the Hawke government. Hawke and Keating’s antagonism to Fairfax had more to do with recent exposés and investigations, which all too frequently seemed to be concerned with Labor luminaries or businesspeople who would increasingly be dubbed Labor “mates.”

Fairfax had published articles alleging improprieties or worse on the part of Hawke’s close friends Peter Abeles and Kerry Packer, as well as Keating’s friend and fellow antique collector Warren Anderson, a property developer who became caught up in the bottom-of-the-harbour tax controversies of the early 1980s. Its papers had also been responsible for the corruption allegations against former Labor attorney-general Lionel Murphy.

In short, the company had allowed its journalists a long leash, and this was offensive to politicians who saw “the deal” as at the heart of political, as of business, life. In the case of Fairfax, they had no one with whom they could clinch the deal that would ensure their problems went away.

All of these likes and dislikes came powerfully into play when the federal government considered media ownership in the mid 1980s. The issue arose in part out of the manifestly inadequate provision of television services to areas outside the major cities. In the early 1980s, 35 per cent of homes with televisions received only one commercial station and the ABC. The Fraser government’s decision in 1979 to invest in a satellite opened up the possibility of better services in the regions, but with the danger of centralising power over programming and eroding local production.

But the two-station rule adopted by the Menzies government still prevailed as general policy: no one could own more than two television stations, with a limit of one in any metropolitan market. An owner with stations in Orange and Cairns reached the limit at the same point as Kerry Packer, with his Channel Nine studios in Sydney and Melbourne. This traditional structure couldn’t sustain an expansion of services.

But when the federal government considered its options, it was faced with a number of contending interests. The big players in the metropolitan television industry — Packer, Murdoch, Fairfax and HWT — would benefit from being able to establish national networks that could beam programs directly via satellite into the regions. But this would consolidate their dominance. Newer players wanted to be able to expand in ways that the present two-station agreement made impossible. And existing small regional players worried about surrendering their monopoly in a limited market.

Keating would eventually play the decisive role. Late in 1986, after sometimes bitter internal argument arising from a concern that Hawke and Keating were bending over too far to help Packer and Murdoch, the government announced the new arrangements. In future, a single operator could have as many television stations as it wished — although no more than one in any city or region — so long as it didn’t exceed a national audience reach of 75 per cent (a figure whittled down to 60 by the time the legislation was eventually passed). Alternatively, a company could own newspapers — but it could not own both a television station and a newspaper in the same market. Keating memorably warned that you could be “queen of the screen” or “prince of print” but not both.

Yet what the government spun as an even-handed policy aimed at preventing media concentration was really nothing of the kind. Not only would it place control of Australian television in fewer hands, but it was also highly suited to the government’s favourite media moguls. Packer did especially well out of it, for he was primarily in television. His print media interests were concentrated in magazines, which were excluded from the cross-media laws. Murdoch was a little more awkwardly placed, since he retained a 15 per cent share in Network Ten. But he was likely to have to relinquish it in any case, since foreigners were not permitted to own more than 5 per cent of an Australian television station.

The effect of the new laws was not merely to minimise harm to the favoured ones, however. The ability to create a national network greatly increased the likely sale value of Murdoch’s and Packer’s TV assets; it was estimated that the government’s decision had put a billion dollars in their pockets. And it was clear to everyone concerned that Packer and Murdoch had also been informed well in advance about what the government was up to, whereas HWT and Fairfax seemed rather in the dark.

Murdoch, in fact, launched a successful $1.8 million bid for HWT a week after the new media laws were announced, fighting off Holmes à Court and buying out share raider Ron Brierley. When added to his existing holdings centred on the Australian, Murdoch’s new print acquisitions would deliver fully 60 per cent of the audience for daily newspapers in Australia. None of the other great takeovers of the 1980s would have such lasting consequences. ●

This is an edited extract from The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia, by Frank Bongiorno, published by Black Inc.

The post Labor and the moguls appeared first on Inside Story.

“We approached the opportunity offered by the Ramsay Centre in a positive and open spirit,” Schmidt continued, “but it is clear that the autonomy which this university needs to approve and endorse a new program of study is not compatible with a sponsored program of the type sought.” When dealing with funding opportunities, he explained, the university has a policy of “retaining, without compromise, our academic integrity, and autonomy and freedom, and ensuring that any program has academic merit consistent with our status as one of the world’s great universities.”

The positioning of the announcement halfway through a regular blog was deliberately low-key, and everyone involved — including the Ramsay Centre and its CEO, Simon Haines — was thanked for their efforts.

Parts of the media reported this announcement as if it were some kind of bombshell. Even before it was made, Quadrant had engaged in the familiar neo-conservative party trick of googling individual ANU academics — and, in one case, a student — to ridicule their research projects. Commentators in the Australian blamed political correctness, identity politics and cultural Marxism for the breakdown in talks. They launched one of their frequent jihads — it must already be approaching the obligatory 100,000 words — even trawling the university website for any men of Middle Eastern appearance seen giving money to the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies.

Then the education minister, Simon Birmingham, weighed in with a series of homilies implicitly directed at a Nobel Laureate — for that’s what Brian Schmidt is — about how universities should “embrace the study of the values that helped to create them.” Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull wanted an explanation too; a phone conversation was duly had with Schmidt. John Howard, chair of the Ramsay Centre’s board, pretended to be astonished by the university’s decision and insinuated that it had backed out because of a belated interest in the matter on the part of the National Tertiary Education Union. (You would need to be unfamiliar with the way power works in a modern Australian university to imagine that all it takes for a multimillion-dollar proposal to be abandoned is timely intervention by the staff union.)

Schmidt’s announcement was no bombshell. The negotiations between ANU and the Ramsay Centre had been in serious difficulty for months. By the time the university pulled the plug, no one familiar with the lack of progress in the negotiations expected they would go anywhere. But considered in light of how the matter seemed to have been proceeding until April, this was a surprising outcome; most staff I had spoken with assumed, over much of the early part of the year, that a Western civilisation program was inevitable, and that the seemingly lengthy negotiations indicated nothing more than sensible caution on both sides.

How had it come to this? In December 2017 the university’s dean of arts and social sciences, Rae Frances, called a meeting of staff to announce that ANU was in discussions with the Ramsay Centre about the creation of a Bachelor of Western Civilisation. She did not reveal a specific amount of funding, although it was clear that we were not dealing with loose change. She did indicate that twelve additional staff would be appointed across various disciplines and that a generous scholarship program would be available to students undertaking the degree.

The money for all this was to come from the newly established Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, which was funded by a large bequest from the late businessman Paul Ramsay to promote the teaching of Western civilisation. Universities had been invited to express interest, bound by a highly prescriptive non-disclosure agreement that required them to list every person consulted. ANU duly submitted an expression of interest and was the first university to enter discussions with Ramsay.

So far, so good. But it’s probably best not to gauge the temperature of a university a few weeks before Christmas, when most students are away and academics, too, are beginning to leave for the summer break. I recall no sign of dissent at this point; perhaps a few academics expressed concern behind the scenes. But if the cultural Marxists did eventually kill off the Western civilisation proposal, as some allege, at that stage they were spending more time on their Christmas shopping.

On campus, nothing further was heard of the proposal until early March, when Frances arranged a forum largely designed to allow consultation with students and staff. This was a livelier affair than the December meeting. Clearly, some students didn’t like the proposal, but most expressed their views thoughtfully. Not all who spoke were worried or opposed. Some referred to news reports, mainly quoting Haines’s comments spruiking both the centre and its mission. One student pointed out — not unfairly — that my own department, the School of History, did little else but teach about the West. (While politely put, this was not intended as a compliment.) Did we really need more of the same, he wondered.

The forum helped place the proposal on the radar of the university community, but there was no wave of protest. No buildings were occupied. No eggs were thrown. No teach-ins occurred. The statue of Winston Churchill overlooking University House seemed as safe as ever, and certainly safer than that of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford. What student protest there was happened in the modern way, with some students on each side of the debate setting up Facebook sites. A few academics flagged their concerns, although mainly among themselves rather than in any public forum. A meeting was arranged between Haines and student representatives. And that, at least publicly, was it.

Until the April issue of Quadrant appeared, that is. Has any other article in that resilient cold war leftover had the immediate impact of this three-page piece by Australia’s former prime minister and present Ramsay Centre board member, Tony Abbott? Among a series of aggressive remarks that made perfectly plain the ideological agenda of the plan, Abbott explained that the Ramsay Centre’s distinctiveness is that “it’s not merely about Western Civilisation but in favour of it.”

It’s a free country and people are entitled to express views of this kind. But if it was intended as a foundation for academic enquiry, Abbott’s remark was obviously ridiculous. In an academic context, a claim like his has about as much value as the judgement — advanced by some on the left — that Western civilisation is a racist idea and that any program concerned with it would promote white supremacy. The point of the humanities is to seek to understand the world in its complexity, not to express muscular allegiance to one kind of society or system over another. We can probably all agree that there is value in reading Homer or Plato, but most of us would prefer not to issue firm pronouncements on the quality of classical Greek civilisation — and even less of Western civilisation — on the basis of a reading of The Iliad or The Republic.

There is nothing relativist about any of this; the approach reflects the peculiar mixture of disinterestedness, ethics and curiosity necessary to conduct scholarly enquiry of any worth. It takes commitment, patience and long training — for instance, in classical and modern languages, if you really want to study Greece or Rome seriously — and it often demands a cool appraisal that can be difficult and uncomfortable. It sometimes leads to scholars being publicly abused or even threatened because they are assumed to be excusing or defending, and sometimes criticising or condemning, what they are rather seeking to understand and explain.

Another disturbing feature of Abbott’s intervention in Quadrant was his claim, made towards the end of the article, that a management committee which included the Ramsay Centre’s CEO and academic director would be making staffing and curriculum decisions. This contradicted what everyone in the university who had taken an interest in the matter up to this point understood to be the arrangements: that staff would be appointed by ordinary university procedures, and the curriculum would be subject to the same internal committee processes that apply to any other academic program.

That claim, especially when considered alongside Abbott’s hope that the program would begin “an invigorating long march through our institutions,” began ringing the warning bells for many of us who had not directly been involved in the negotiations. It did not help that Abbott also explained to his readers what he called “O’Sullivan’s law” — named after a Quadrant editor — that “every organisation that’s not explicitly right-wing, over time becomes left-wing.”

While the ANU negotiators were already familiar with the Ramsay Centre’s desire for tight control over whatever program was established, it still defied belief that these could really be the assumptions that the centre had brought to the table of its negotiations with a major Australian university. The deliberate introduction of aggressive cultural warfare into an academic institution with a strong international reputation and a proud record of education and research was odious and intolerable. Surely the Ramsay Centre understood as much? Could Abbott’s article have been merely a bargaining ploy? Or was Abbott, for some obscure reason, trying to wreck the negotiations? Was he acting with the knowledge of his CEO and colleagues, such as John Howard, or was he freelancing? Perhaps we could safely ignore him?

The negotiations continued. These had always been based on the idea that there was some middle ground on which the Ramsay Centre’s desire to promote an appreciation of Western civilisation, and ours to promote analysis of it, could meet. But Abbott’s article, and the failure of the Ramsay Centre to repudiate it, had exposed that no such place existed. There was no room for the Ramsay Centre inside an institution committed to enquiry, analysis and critique. It wanted to advocate, celebrate and, if Abbott’s views were any guide, to crusade.

The negotiations fell through because of these differences in purpose and outlook — as exposed by Abbott’s article — not because of a plot by conniving cultural Marxists or purveyors of identity politics, and certainly not because the staff union wrote a letter to the vice-chancellor. The problem was a lack of common ground and, more particularly, the distrust of universities among key members of the Ramsay Centre board, which is nicely captured in “O’Sullivan’s law.” This is, of course, unfortunate because our leading universities presently contain most of the capacity that Ramsay needs to spend its money well.

My own view is that there is nothing to celebrate in the failure of the negotiations. Those of us who supported this proposal did so because we like to see universities teach students well about the Greek and Roman worlds, the Bible, early Christianity, the medieval world, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and Australia’s place in Western culture. We also envisaged opportunities for academically trained classicists, medievalists, historians, philosophers and biblical and literary scholars who would otherwise have no chance of a career in Australia working in a leading university.

In my own school — History — and in other parts of ANU, we already teach many of the things that were to appear in this program — although not all of them. There has been much partisan and ill-informed commentary, a recent example coming from Geoffrey Blainey, who disparages History at ANU — we are twelfth in the world in the most authoritative of the subject rankings — as offering merely “dozens of minor history courses.”

We are accused of shunning the study of Western civilisation. Then, when we point out that the bulk of our courses deal with the history of the West, the reply from our critics goes along the following lines: “Oh yes, but the problem is with how you teach them. We know that you lefty academics have it in for Western civilisation.” Such critics, of course, never explain on what basis they have arrived at their authoritative views about how teaching is conducted at ANU or what any of its academics think about the West, or indeed any other points on the compass.

All the same, I suspect that if the Western civilisation program had gone ahead, our students would have brought their critical and enquiring minds to bear on their reading and discussion, as happens in any university worthy of the name. The University of Sydney has been in discussions with the Ramsay Centre, but the level of contention about the proposal on that campus — a stark contrast with what occurred at ANU despite blatantly false reporting to the contrary — makes a successful program unlikely. For all the right-wing media’s huffing and puffing about ANU, it was almost certainly the Ramsay Centre’s best chance. •

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Clive Hamilton is having none of such fatalism. It will only be a Chinese world if we decide that it should be; to suggest otherwise is capitulation or appeasement. Hamilton, an uncompromising critic, seems to mean this literally. In an essay published online in April last year, he compared high-profile academic Hugh White’s views about China to an imaginary Oxford don arguing in 1938 that Britain’s response to Germany should ignore “the fact that Germany is ruled by a dictatorial, expansionist party bent on European domination.”

Silent Invasion is a call to arms; not literally, but a plea to Australians to resist Chinese interference in their democracy. Hamilton argues that China’s efforts to influence Australian politics, business, media, academia and the Chinese-Australian community shouldn’t be treated as business as usual. They do not resemble past and present efforts by the United States to influence Australian political and cultural life. Australia and the United States share fundamental values, Hamilton suggests, but China is a one-party state whose ideology and practice are inimical to our own. And increasingly, he claims, they are also a threat to our own.

Silent Invasion’s publication has become a news event in itself. It was widely reported last year that Allen & Unwin had withdrawn from publishing the book because it feared vexatious defamation action. Given the state of Australian libel law, one can understand their lawyers’ concerns. Eventually, Hardie Grant — run by Sandy Grant, who published former British spy Peter Wright’s Spycatcher in the face of the Thatcher government’s efforts to suppress it — took on Hamilton’s manuscript and published it with a cover picture of Parliament House flying a Chinese flag.

The book has done well on the back of such publicity, apparently enjoying a second printing within a few days of its release. Two former prime ministers, Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd, have criticised, indeed insulted, Hamilton, Keating calling him a “pedlar of prejudice” and a “nincompoop” and Rudd labelling him a “third-rate academic” who supports the views on China of “a second-rate prime minister,” Malcolm Turnbull. (I would have thought that commenting on the quality of recent prime ministers is dangerous territory for Rudd.) Former Labor senator and Right factional chieftain Graham Richardson sounded a bit like a well-trained party cadre himself when he argued in the national broadsheet that “the good ship Australia should shove Hamilton out the back with the other irritating flotsam and jetsam which pollutes our thinking.”

Hamilton’s reputation will probably survive Richardson’s censure; and his standing will scarcely be harmed by Beijing’s reaction. A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, responding to a shameless Dorothy Dixer from a “journalist,” condemned Silent Invasion as “completely meaningless,” “slander” and “good for nothing.” The ever-reliable Global Times published a picture of the book apparently about to be flushed down a toilet.

Silent Invasion is a challenging book, especially for anyone with an appreciation of the long history of Australian alarmism about Asian and communist threats to Australia. The title itself is disturbing — the trope of Asian invasion stretches from the anti-Chinese agitation of the gold rushes, through invasion fantasy novels and the cartooning of the fin-de-siècle nationalist and labour press, to Geoffrey Blainey’s accusation, made during the rancorous Asian immigration debate in the mid 1980s, that the Hawke government was pursuing “Surrender Australia” policies. The “invasion” theme was implicit in Pauline Hanson’s warning in 1996 that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians.”

Hamilton explains carefully at the outset that his concern is about the Chinese government, not about Chinese. He is right to point out that the accusation of “racism” or “xenophobia” is a useful weapon at the disposal of those who wish to deflect attention from the character of their own connections with Beijing and, more particularly, their receipt of Chinese money. But there is a supplementary accusation: that Hamilton is reviving cold war paranoia; that, in the words of reviewer David Brophy, he has produced a “McCarthyist manifesto.” Certainly, Hamilton’s suggestion that we shouldn’t defend the free speech of those who aim to suppress free speech is a reprise of the kinds of arguments that circulated in favour of banning the Communist Party in Australia in the early years of the cold war.

Nonetheless, Hamilton has not invented the problem to which he draws attention. Much of what he has to say draws on the painstaking investigative reporting of journalists such as Primrose Riordan and Nick McKenzie. Respected Sinologists — such as John Fitzgerald, who provides an endorsement on the book’s cover — have expressed serious concerns about the extent of Chinese government penetration of Australian academic life. The intelligence services and leading public servants have warned against complacency about espionage, to the point that the federal government is moving to strengthen its legal instruments for dealing with foreign political influence. And almost everyone seems to be able to acknowledge that China has entered a new phase in its domestic and global politics, one in which it is more assertive in its foreign policy, more hostile to the basic freedoms valued in the West, more concerned with displaying its rising wealth and military power, and more preoccupied with demonstrating national greatness in compensation for past humiliations.

Still, my unease about aspects of Hamilton’s argument remains. Central to his case about the aggressive “United Front” strategy of the Chinese government is the critical role that it sees for its diaspora — including Chinese students abroad, who are now, in Hamilton’s telling, carefully choreographed by embassies and consulates — in promoting its interests and outlook. This, says Hamilton, extends to “intelligence gathering and technology theft.” “The large and growing number of highly qualified Chinese-Australians now working in science and technology labs around the country provide fertile recruiting grounds,” he tells us.

Is there not a danger that anyone of Chinese ancestry might come to be regarded as untrustworthy, a potential spy, and therefore suffer baseless suspicion, job discrimination and social marginalisation? Especially so given that, based on conversations with Chinese-Australian friends, Hamilton produces some remarkably crude and unsubstantiated guesstimates of the proportions of the Chinese in Australia who are pro-Beijing, anti-Beijing or neutral. Is it really so simple?

There are points in the narrative where the analysis seems to me to go over the top entirely. Hamilton is worried by the sight of “a group of PRC men in suits” wandering around the campus of the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra taking photos. He seems concerned that ADFA’s cleaning contract “is staffed by ethnic Chinese.” He gives us the proportion of CSIRO staff — it is “close to 10 per cent” — who were born in China. “It is fair to assume that the results of every piece of scientific research carried out by the CSIRO become available free of charge in China,” he claims.

We are in danger, he warns, of becoming “a tribute state of the resurgent Middle Kingdom,” which is “a totalitarian regime bent on dominating Australia.” The Chinese leadership has “asked the embassy in Canberra to formulate a strategy to subdue us.” The book is littered with examples of overstatement of this kind. I defy anyone raised on Sunday morning screenings of Point of View not to think of Bob Santamaria when they read that “Beijing has its eye on Australia’s north” and “China plans to dominate the world, and has been using Australia and New Zealand as a testing ground for its tactics to assert its ascendancy in the West.”

This kind of claim can be demonstrated by quotation from this or that official Chinese source, rather as Soviet sources could once be quoted to prove the existence of the desire to expand Soviet power to promote global proletarian revolution in every corner of the globe, not excluding Australia. But this was never really the best way to understand Soviet foreign-policy behaviour. Is it the best way to discern Chinese intentions?

Hamilton brings together much information that should worry Australians who care about the quality of our democracy. The Dastyari affair was not an isolated instance of a politician getting far too close for comfort to a wealthy Chinese donor interested in using his money to advance the Chinese regime’s foreign policy goals, as well as his own prestige and influence in Australia and China. Expatriate Chinese businesspeople are generous donors to Australian politicians and political parties, while a number of ex-politicians seem to have done rather well for themselves as lobbyists, consultants and advisers to Chinese firms. The interval between the end of their time in politics and the beginning of their business careers has often been very short.

But in isolating Chinese influence from the wider problem of influence-peddling in Australian politics, Hamilton falls into the trap of viewing Communist China as uniquely demonic. He is very relaxed about the influence that the United States exercises, and has long exercised, in Australia, seeing in the strengthening of that relationship one antidote to Chinese domination. On this subject, I’m sure I wouldn’t be alone among Hamilton’s readers in thinking, “thanks, but no thanks” — and perhaps simply “no thanks” while we have a dangerous charlatan in the White House. At least up to this point, subservience to the United States and complicity in some of its more egregious foreign-policy decisions have done a great deal more harm to Australia than its relationship with China.

There is an all-or-nothing aspect to this book — for Hamilton, China-watchers either see with perfect clarity the danger to our sovereignty and values, or they are moral relativists. Few sit in between, and there is little respect for honest differences of perspective. For instance, I found myself sometimes unable to recognise Hugh White’s views as they were caricatured by Hamilton. White is a foreign-policy realist who makes no pretence of being otherwise, and his understanding of the implications for Australia of growing Chinese power reflects this perspective. When Hamilton criticises White for failing to give sufficient weight to the ideology of the Communist Party in his assessment of the Australia–China relationship, he is really criticising a particular way of understanding international relations. That’s fine — the realist tradition has long had its critics — but that doesn’t mean White is a “capitulationist,” as Hamilton calls him.

No doubt there are too many commentators in Australia who are too willing to cite China’s economic achievement as if it more than compensates for the tyranny of one-party rule and the absence of basic human rights and freedoms. Australian business, academic and political leaders see China as a vast goldmine and many care little about the undemocratic nature of the Chinese political system. There are Australian scientists, funding bodies, universities and research institutes that have asked too few questions about the end users of their collaborations with Chinese partners, reassuring themselves that work with obviously military applications would also have civilian uses — even if that “civilian” use might be a contribution to more effective mass surveillance of the Chinese population.

Quite apart from the vulnerability of universities (such as my own, the Australian National University) to Chinese government coercion in the context of their dependence on the Chinese student market, some have compromised their ability to stand up for academic freedom. The enterprise university of the post-Dawkins era has been only too eager to accept Chinese money — whether in the form of funding for Confucius Institutes or as donations for academic buildings and research centres from well-connected Chinese businesspeople.

The University of Technology Sydney clearly has some work to do in managing its relationship with Chinese donors in a manner that doesn’t damage confidence in its autonomy. Its Australia–China Relations Institute, or ACRI, is led by former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr, who was appointed at the request of the Chinese-Australian donor, Huang Xiangmo, who in turn was made an adjunct professor of the UTS. All of this would be bad enough, but it’s even worse when you consider the piddling sum, $1.8 million, that Huang donated to establish the institute. That would be just enough to endow a rather junior lectureship, with little change left over. There must be further money coming from somewhere.

Nonetheless, with Carr at the helm, ACRI provides reliably pro-Beijing commentary to the Australian media. As I was preparing this review, I heard Carr on ABC Radio discussing China’s recent constitutional changes, which have removed the ten-year, two-term limit on Chinese presidents, thereby possibly allowing Xi Jinping to rule for the rest of his life. To be fair, Carr didn’t defend the change, describing it as likely to be “disappointing” to many observers. But Xi would surely not have been upset that Carr, in the same interview, raised the spectre of an authoritarianism that until recently was assumed to have died with Chairman Mao. Such a comparison passes for flattery these days.

It is no pleasure to carp about Silent Invasion’s flaws, not least because it is, without question, one of the really important Australian publishing events of recent years and a truly significant contribution to debate about Australia’s future relationship with China. Hamilton is a brave commentator who was always going to incur pain for venturing into this territory. On balance, he and his publisher have done us a service in bringing together a great deal of information about Chinese influence on Australia, as well as guiding us towards the questions that need to be asked in our dealings with the PRC across a range of domains. I find it hard to disagree with Hamilton’s suggestion, made towards the end of the book, that since the 1980s Australians have “set the economy before everything else and put power in the hands of those who tell us we must sacrifice everything to it, including our sovereignty as a free country.”

Or rather — as so often during my reading of this book — I think I can agree with him up to that last clause. I am not sure that our sovereignty and freedom are really in danger at present. But I do agree that in treating for so long a rather ruthless one-party state as, in essence, just another business opening, we have been storing up some serious problems for ourselves as a liberal democracy. The rapid growth of the Chinese economy, China’s rising global power, and its increasingly authoritarian and centralised political turn have magnified the scale and increased the urgency of these problems. Hamilton’s book suggests that, at the very least, China spruikers who tell us there is nothing to see here should have their views subjected to the most careful scrutiny — especially if, as “friends of China,” they have grown rich and powerful on lucrative consultancies, political donations, research grants and business opportunities. •

The post Up to a point, Professor Hamilton appeared first on Inside Story.

Social democratic or socialist parties emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as a political expression of working-class interests, identity and culture. They were influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by Marxism. Many, although not all, were affiliated with the Second International, an organisation of socialist and labour parties founded in 1889. Socialist or social-democratic platforms usually contained a mixture of industrial and political demands. Some parties — such as those in Sweden, Norway, Britain and Australia — had formal trade union affiliates. We usually call these labour parties.

Social democratic parties were divided between revolutionaries — notably the Bolsheviks who formed a wing of the Russian Social Democrats — and those committed to an evolutionary and constitutional road. The differences between these two strategies were especially sharp in the years after the Russian Revolution of 1917. In Germany, struggles between communists and social democrats helped give the Nazis their chance to seize power in 1933. In other Western countries, too, large communist parties competed successfully for working-class support with moderate socialists or social democrats into the 1980s.

Social democracy’s golden age is usually considered the period of the economic boom that followed the second world war. Its promised land was Europe. Social democratic parties didn’t rule for long periods in every instance, but the policies associated with social democracy, such as the mixed economy and the welfare state, came into their own. During these decades — which Eric Hobsbawm calls capitalism’s “golden age” — inequality declined in Western countries and ordinary people could enjoy a level of material comfort, economic stability and personal security that stood in stark contrast to the world of 1914–1945.

The historian Tony Judt reminded us that this achievement was a product of unusual historical circumstances. The genocides, expulsions and migrations of the second world war and the years immediately before and after created a postwar European order in which states were unusually ethnically homogeneous. Social democratic policies, which depend on high levels of trust, have tended to do best in such societies. While we tend to think of social democracy and the welfare state as benign and generous, Judt wondered whether there might be “something inherently selfish” in them: economic and social rights that were happily extended to citizens could seem an imposition when they were claimed by “outsiders.”

This is just one of the issues for social democracy discussed in this timely collection of essays. Mass immigration, more ethnically and religiously diverse communities, and refugee flows are all identified as pressures on social democracy. In reality, of course, these kinds of challenges — along with perhaps the most serious of all, the economic dislocation caused by the global financial crisis — are not a problem only for social democracy. The decline of trust in democracy across the world is undermining established parties of both left and right and, some might add, the stability and legitimacy of democracy itself.

If we are witnessing in phenomena such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump a global retreat from the liberal rationalist politics that have been taken for granted as the standard model for developed countries since the end of the cold war, social democracy was always likely to be the biggest loser. Of all the mainstream Western political traditions, it had the most faith that the state could be used constructively to promote as well as reconcile the demands of economic growth and social justice within a system of popular consent. If voters are losing their faith in the capacity of state institutions to protect and enhance their wellbeing, and are turning to more expressive forms of political engagement — for instance, to what is often now called “populism” — social democracy has very few weapons at its disposal for countering this challenge. It does not “emote” well.

As several chapters in the book suggest, social democrats themselves must bear a large portion of the blame for their recent decline. The adoption of “Third Way” market-driven politics in Europe in the 1990s — and in Australia and New Zealand a decade earlier — was electorally successful in the short term but disastrous in the medium and long term. As Chris Pierson writes in “The End of Revisionism?” the peace that centre-left parties made with finance capital “bought them a ‘one-off’ vote bonanza — and, for a time, an economic increment that they were able to spend on expanding public services — but only at the expense of further long-term decline.” Pierson quotes Harold Macmillan’s comment on the Thatcher governments’ privatisations — he described them as “selling off the family silver,” something you can only do once.

In an Australian context at least, the term “social democracy” isn’t a neutral descriptor: rather, it signifies the accommodations that the Labor Party has made with capitalism. More research on this point would be valuable, but my hunch is that “social democracy” was not a term much favoured in and around Labor before the 1990s. A young Bob Carr was ahead of the pack with his 1977 booklet Social Democracy and Australian Labor, in which he argued that the party should look more closely at the ideas and achievements of European social democrats. Here as elsewhere, the use of the term represented an effort to carve out a space that was neither an old-fashioned labourism that conjured men in blue singlets and smoke-filled union halls, nor a full-blown socialism that still looked to nationalisation of industry. “Social democracy” was a warm, fuzzy term that, as in its European context, could stretch across the class divide, promising a social order at once more equal and more prosperous, in which no one would lose out.

The embrace of the term by British Labour Party breakaways led by David Owen early in the Thatcher era strengthened the idea that it represented a moderate, cerebral alternative to socialism. Subsequently, labour-movement interest in the Scandinavian social and industrial model also legitimised the idea of “social democracy” as a basis for Labor Party ideology in Australia. In a 1982 essay written for the Labor Essays series, Leonie Sandercock distinguished between “social democracy,” a reformism that “poses no threat at all to the fundamental structures of capitalism and all its systemic inequalities,” and “democratic socialism” — her preference — which treated “present reforms as intermediate demands and as a prefiguration of socialism” and rested on economic planning and controls, industrial democracy and an expanding public sector.

The essays in Why the Left Loses draw attention to three themes that help explain the ordeals of social democracy in the recent past: institutions, individuals and ideas. There are chapters dealing with the Anglosphere — Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia — as well as Germany, Sweden, Spain and France. The pattern of the decline of socialist, social-democratic or labour parties is distinctive to each country, and dependent on a range of local factors.

In Britain, argue Rob Manwaring and Matt Beach, the Labour Party and labour movement no longer constitute “a broad church in terms of social values” but “a handful of disputatious political sects.” The nexus on which the party rests — the relationship between leader, union movement, parliamentary party and rank-and-file — seems “at a critical breaking point.” And while Brexit had underlined the lack of any shared vision of Britain’s future among Labour’s core constituency, the party has so far been unable to move beyond the paradox of the New Labour legacy. The paradox is that a relatively coherent and electorally successful formula was unable to survive the global financial crisis, and no subsequent Labour leader has been able to build a viable narrative since. The authors, while suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn’s radicalism has been exaggerated — that he represents a conservative impulse seeking to reassert Labour’s pre-Blairite social-democratic ideals and policies — also seem sceptical that he can find a way through the party’s problems.

In the British case — at least outside Scotland — the challenge to the established centre left has occurred via a struggle for control of the Labour Party that the Corbynites have been winning. Elsewhere, other factors have intervened to ensure that the pressures on social democracy have played out differently. Under Canada’s first-past-the-post voting system, as David McGrane’s essay reveals, the prevalence of competing parties leaning to the left — the Liberals, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois — meant that electors who wanted to get rid of the long-serving Conservative government faced a hard choice. In 2015, the result was a turn to the Liberals and a halt to the promising New Democratic Party advance of recent years. Justin Trudeau’s charisma combined with a Liberal proposal for deficit financing to produce an attractive mix for voters wanting an alternative to the Conservatives.

The combination of voting system, charismatic leadership and rejection of neoliberalism also helped New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern over the line as a minority government in 2017. NZ Labour’s post–Helen Clark ordeals, and their happy ending, are recounted in a chapter by Grant Duncan, whose basic thrust had clearly been determined long before Labour’s surprise victory. The left doesn’t always lose.

The theme in most of the chapters is that an embrace of the market stored up later problems for social democrats, undermining their efforts since the global financial crisis to argue that the state should be used to reduce inequality. Carol Johnson suggests that this is true of Labor’s Hawke–Keating legacy; the failures of Rudd and Gillard become not simply those of leadership but the result of “longer-term ideational and structural dilemmas and problems.” One might add that the pattern at the federal level in Australia has generally been for voters to turn to Labor when institutions have seemed to require radical recalibration — the 1940s and the 1980s being obvious instances, and 2007–13 perhaps a peculiar misfire. When the task has been managing prosperity, Australians have been more comfortable with conservative governments.

At the state level, on the other hand, where macroeconomic management is less significant than service delivery, Labor has generally dominated over the past thirty years, and has performed considerably better there than at the federal level since 1910. Rob Manwaring indicates in his chapter on state Labor governments that the particular responsibilities of the sub-national level in Australia — especially in health and education — play to Labor’s perceived strengths. Yet the hollowing out of state Labor parties and the over-emphasis on the profile and power of the leader might be undermining Labor’s position. Certainly, Labor victories in Victoria and Queensland in the recent past have been narrow compared with the landslides of the Bracks and Beattie eras.

It is in Europe, long social democracy’s happy hunting ground, that electoral decline seems most obvious. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party’s share of the vote at the 2017 election was a little over a fifth, down from an unimpressive quarter in 2013. Its form of “executive pragmatism,” argues Uwe Jun, “offers no coherent, centre-left strategic vision” capable of grappling with challenges such as globalisation, migration and technological change. As in the case of Kevin Rudd in Australia and Gordon Brown in Britain, it received no dividend from voters for its finance minister Peer Steinbrück’s success, as part of the grand coalition, in dealing with the global financial crisis. (As I write, it has just been announced that the SPD will again join a grand coalition, provided its rank-and-file votes in favour. But this will only underline the lack of clear differentiation between it and Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.)

When social democracy is struggling in Sweden, you know the problem is serious, although the party’s vote there of 31 per cent in the 2014 election was still enough to allow the Social Democrats to form a government. As in Germany and France, though, the Social Democrats are losing traditional supporters to both the centre-right and the far-right. Claes Belfrage and Mikko Kuisma stress the difficulties that financialisation poses to social democracy: “debt-led and asset-based consumption,” home remortgaging to support spending, the big-city “housing bubble,” the “speculative ethos,” and the power of “the four big banks.” (Sound familiar?) The authors conclude that this “new Swedish model” sets up “a losing game” for the Social Democratic Party until the model itself is called into more serious question.

In Spain and France, the socialists are in considerably more difficulty. Paul Kennedy reports that the vote of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, which has dominated that country’s post-Franco politics, more than halved between 2008 and 2016. It has been outflanked on the left by a populist party, Podemos, which, like Corbyn Labour, has been successful in attracting the young. In a country with 20 per cent unemployment, their prospects are particularly bleak. In Greece, of course, a radical left-wing party, Syriza, overtook and replaced the notably corrupt Greek Socialist Party entirely. Meanwhile, as Sophie Di Francesco-Mayot points out, in France’s most recent presidential elections, the Parti Socialiste candidate managed a paltry 6.36 per cent. Neither the traditional centre-right nor centre-left candidates made the final run-off, which was won by the independent Emmanuel Macron over the far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen — part of whose success lies in her co-option of both traditional socialist policies and voters.

So, what is to be done? René Cuperus calls for “a return to social democratic values, roots and principles.” But a return by whom? The parties themselves, who in the 1980s and 1990s abandoned the traditional ideals of social democracy for an embrace of market liberalism? Or voters who, when offered the somewhat dubious wares of these battle-weary parties, are finding alternatives elsewhere? There is no easy way around the dilemma discussed by Kennedy and Manwaring in the book’s final chapter: voters have been willing to give populists of both left and right a leeway that they refuse to concede social democrats.

And what of Australia? Bill Shorten and Labor have been mighty fortunate that the Coalition is so hopelessly divided. If Malcolm Turnbull had been able to move his party to the political centre, like Angela Merkel has, and thereby pick up more support from those who ended up voting for Labor or the Greens at the 2016 election, Labor would be in dire trouble. That might well make the seemingly uneventful 2016 federal election one of the more significant in our history, as the moment when the failure of Turnbull to tame the Coalition’s right wing yielded a barely deserved dividend for the left.

Why the Left Loses makes a convincing case for the global character of the crisis of social democracy, as well as placing the current crisis in historical and comparative perspective. While many of the transformations of recent years are unprecedented, social democracy has in the past managed to adapt to major social transformation. Revisionism is in its genes. As one of the leading scholars in this field, Sheri Berman, comments in her foreword, it is how the centre left responds to the challenges, rather than the challenges themselves, that will ultimately decide whether social democracy is headed for oblivion. •

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Most significantly, Australia managed to weather the global financial crisis. Just how much of the credit should go to Rudd — and how much to Wayne Swan, to Treasury, to China and to Peter Costello’s budget surpluses — is for economic historians of the future to argue over. But we can be confident Rudd will claim a large measure of the credit when volume two is published.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Politicians will be politicians. Memoirs are about legacies, and politicians writing memoirs will err on the side of generosity — to themselves.

But Kevin Rudd has a rather large problem in writing about his political career. He needs to explain why, in the end, it was such a disappointment. For there was surely not a single observer of his victory on 24 November 2007, Rudd included, who could have imagined that his prime ministership would be over in less than three years.

Rudd therefore spends much of this massive tome quietly preparing us for what will come in the next. We can be sure that the perfidy of factional bosses will loom large, and no less certain that Julia Gillard will play a starring role, well supported by Wayne Swan. But Rudd hasn’t too many hard words to say about his loyal deputy on this occasion. The betrayal, when it comes, will be unexpected. Indeed, he reminds us of his generosity on election night 2007 in introducing Julia to “a wider Queensland audience” that “didn’t really know her.” There will be plenty of opportunity for repentance.

If the Rudd government had enjoyed anything like the electoral success of its two predecessors — the Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating (1983–96), and the Coalition government of John Howard (1996–2007) — we would recently have marked its first decade in office. Perhaps Rudd would still be there, as Howard was still there after ten years — holding off an increasingly frustrated deputy in Gillard, as Howard did with an ever more exasperated Costello. Or perhaps Rudd might have achieved a feat only managed by one other Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, and passed the reins to Gillard voluntarily. But it is hard to find anything in his career to suggest that he would have been capable of making that most difficult of calls for a political leader: “I am not indispensable and it is time to go.”

Over the course of 600 pages, Not for the Faint-Hearted takes us up to election night 2007. If Menzies had adopted a kind of “weight-for-age” approach to political memoir based on Rudd’s allocations, he would have produced some 3600 pages — presumably delivered, like Manning Clark’s A History of Australia, in six glowing volumes. Rudd might object that, in contrast with his own action-packed prime ministership, nothing much happened during Menzies’s time in office. But then there wasn’t a great deal going on in the Australian embassy in Stockholm when Rudd was third secretary there in the early 1980s.

As is so often the case, the media coverage of these memoirs told us little more than which of his former colleagues the author had taken the opportunity to knife. But this book is more than one-in-the-eye for Wayne Swan, although Rudd doesn’t entirely spare his former colleague. Indeed, Swan performs a critical part in Rudd’s self-presentation: he is the anti-Rudd, the factional mediocrity necessary to bring out, in full living colour, the very best qualities in our hero.

Rudd, for instance, claims that after he had made a “high-minded” reply to Swan’s query about why he wanted to enter politics, Swan “summed up his worldview in a single shattering sentence: ‘Bullshit, it’s just a game, mate — but it’s the best game of all!’” A memoirist less preoccupied with payback might have hesitated before claiming that this was Swan’s “worldview.” Someone more disinterested than Rudd might have wondered whether this was not an Australian male dealing, in a down-to-earth Australian way, with a political neophyte rather too inclined to the high-minded rationalisation of personal ambition.

Elsewhere we encounter Rudd reporting Joel Fitzgibbon’s claim that Mark Latham appointed Swan as Treasury spokesman after the 2004 election defeat “as one giant joke” on the party, designed to bequeath Latham’s successor “a permanent Achilles heel”: “At the time, I thought Joel’s thesis was just too Machiavellian to be believable. Years later, however, it would give me pause to wonder.” As it turned out, Rudd claims, Swan “just wasn’t up to the job.”

Despite wearing his need for revenge on his sleeve, Rudd always has the purest of motives. When he pays the obligatory visit to Rupert Murdoch before the 2007 election, just as Tony Blair had done a decade before him, it is of course “a thoroughly unremarkable dinner.” It was certainly less remarkable than Rudd’s evening in a New York strip club with one of Murdoch’s executives. Rudd, having participated in an unsuccessful effort to save a Vietnamese-Australian drug trafficker from the noose in Singapore, claims to oppose capital punishment “as a matter of personal conscience”; yet his approach to such matters was rather more flexible when it came to the fate of the Bali bombers shortly before the 2007 election.

At around the same time, he engineered the expulsion of union leaders from the Labor Party, in one case apparently for using bad language and getting caught on camera doing so. Yet even by his own account, Rudd was no choirboy. None of this makes him less admirable, or more hypocritical, than any number of other Australian political leaders one might name. But it sits uncomfortably with the smell of sanctimony that suffuses this book when Rudd contrasts his own political motives and actions with those of his enemies.

“Politics is, in the end, a decision to act,” the dust jacket of this book proclaims, and Rudd makes it clear from the outset that his only motive for getting into politics was to make a difference. Progressive politics is about representing the many rather than the few. It’s all about others. It’s about making the world a better place. But to paint such an image of yourself in suitably vivid colour requires a villain, a political “other.” You might imagine that John Howard could fill this role rather well, but in modern Australian politics the bitterest hatred is reserved for your rivals in the party. It is those dubbed “The Roosters” by Mark Latham — Wayne Swan, Stephen Smith and Stephen Conroy — who represent for Rudd all that is wrong with modern politics, and especially with the Labor Party. They are the “machine men… Theirs was not a world of ideas; it was a world of naked political power, at its best as a means to an end, at its worst as an end in itself.”

The cold, heartless and faceless factional (or union) thug is, of course, a familiar trope in media representations of the Labor Party. And Rudd is nothing if not a skilled media performer. He knows which buttons to push to make himself look his best, while rendering the behaviour and motives of others sordid and amoral. Yet even now, for all Rudd’s huffing and puffing about Labor’s factions, and after all he has endured, there is little indication that he understands what he got wrong in his dealings with the party. “The ultimate source of my political authority would in time become the Australian people themselves,” he grandly declares. “My authority never came from the formal power structures of the party itself, least of all the factions.”

This isn’t even formally correct, let alone true in any more abstract sense. Rudd got his shot at the prime ministership because he was elected to parliament as a member of the Australian Labor Party, and then because he was later elected by caucus to lead the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party. Like anyone who wants to go anywhere in the party, he joined a faction and later, as he sought the leadership, he lined up the wider factional support he needed to get rid of Kim Beazley. The factional bosses and a majority of caucus supported him because they doubted Beazley could win and they hoped Rudd could.

Rudd prefers the more satisfying image of “the political mafia of the national right,” which couldn’t stand the thought of his supposed independence from their control, waiting for the “normal wear and tear” of government to take its course so it could then strike. This is no doubt a comforting image for Rudd. It might also be convincing to readers who accept that the contribution of Labor factional chieftains to the sum of human happiness has been, at best, a modest one. The operation of Labor’s factional system is not pretty and, at its worst — and it has often been at its worst since the 1990s — it has helped to make the federal party ungovernable and unelectable.

But none of this makes Rudd’s account of himself any more persuasive, for it rests on a false notion of Australian politics, both in theory and practice. Rudd is wrong in theory because his account confuses a Westminster parliamentary democracy with a presidential system. Even in these days of disillusionment with the major parties, voters mainly cast their ballots for candidates representing the parties competing for government. They do not provide an unmediated source of authority for a prime minister, no matter how many people are wearing Kevin07 t-shirts or how many stellar appearances one puts in on Sunrise. But Rudd is also wrong in practice because he ignores the essential place that party management — including factional management — needs to play in any sustained exercise of prime ministerial power.

This is one of the reasons why Rudd has no idea of what to do in this book with John Howard, who was prime minister for the entire period Rudd was a member of the opposition. While recognising Howard as “the most formidable conservative politician of his generation” and claiming to have observed closely “his strategy, his tactics and his demeanour,” Rudd appears not to have noticed that Howard was remarkably successful in managing his own party — right down to those dinners with backbenchers in the parliamentary dining room. Rudd sees his predecessor’s cunning, ruthlessness and ideological ambition but not the fact that Howard governed for almost twelve years at least partly because he managed people superbly. Rudd did not.

Rudd takes us on a lengthy excursion through his years as a diplomat, afterwards working for the Goss government in Queensland, then his time as a federal Labor backbencher, opposition foreign affairs spokesman and opposition leader. His years in state government taught him about politics and gained him some necessary political contacts, but he seems to regard the eventual demise of the Goss government as none of his business. Rudd’s role in that government has attracted criticism, but you wouldn’t imagine so in reading his account.

After a painful, failed attempt to enter federal parliament at the Howard landslide of 1996, he ran a successful consultancy assisting Australian businesses in China, before winning the Brisbane suburban seat of Griffith in 1998. We then encounter a succession of failed Labor leaders: Kim Beazley, Simon Crean, Mark Latham and Beazley again, before the party turns to Rudd. Unsurprisingly, he is especially scathing about Latham, “at his core… a controversialist, who first and foremost yearns to be at the centre of the public debate as an end in itself.” There are lengthy accounts of the various scandals and failures of the later Howard years, an unhappy period in the history of this country for which we are likely to be paying in one way or another for at least a generation.

Rudd raised his profile massively via the industrial-scale corruption of the Australian Wheat Board scandal, which he pursued relentlessly against the government in general, and Alexander Downer in particular — “the longest-serving, though least significant, foreign minister in Australian history.” Like Howard’s, Rudd’s career profited from the elevation of national security matters in the aftermath of 9/11 but as so often, there was fighting talk in opposition, and an absence of action in government. Rudd complains about the narrow terms of reference of the Cole Royal Commission into the wheat-for-weapons affair, but didn’t himself launch a more wide-ranging enquiry when he came to office. Nor did he establish anything resembling the British Chilcot Inquiry into what he calls “Howard’s Folly,” Australia’s participation in the Iraq war. His excuse for not doing so — that it would be a distraction from his agenda — is embarrassingly thin, although he at least accepts some blame for the failure.

Not for the Faint-Hearted is written sometimes in a rather breezy style, and sometimes rather preachily. There are humorous anecdotes — such as his account of assisting a businessman trying to promote to the Chinese the Maxi-Crapper, a dual-flush dunny. And there are also a few “dad jokes” that fall rather flat. Much of the comedy is of the self-deprecating kind in trivial matters that famous men who’ve reached the top of the tree can afford when writing their memoirs.

The book is possibly at its best — or at least at its most revealing — in its account of Rudd’s upbringing and education. Not only is much of this material unfamiliar, it’s occasionally moving. He recounts, for instance, how his mother bought new carpet and furniture before he first took his future wife, Thérèse Rein, to visit her. His account of these early years provides a powerful confirmation of David Marr’s reading of Rudd in his explosive Quarterly Essay, published in 2010 not long before his fall. Rudd has been deeply wounded by the poverty of his upbringing as well as the cruelties he suffered on its account, and the indignities of being dependent on others’ charity. He remains angry about it all, too. His drive, ambition and idealism are intimately related to this experience.

The early death of his father — after a car accident and hospital infection — was formative, as were the valiant struggles of his mother to make ends meet. The pattern of a distant or absent father and a mother who is doting or idolised are familiar enough in the biographies of political leaders — interestingly, it’s also there in Latham’s background. Rudd’s spiritual yearnings, meanwhile, are a reminder that the study of political leadership ignores religious belief at its peril. By his own account, Rudd’s Christianity was not only critical in his political formation, it has remained central to his sense of public purpose, his “vocation” to act in the world.

It’s hard not to admire the determination with which he learned a difficult language, Mandarin: the same drive and discipline that saw him through that program at the Australian National University have also been present in his public life. Burgmann College at the ANU was also where he met Rein. For Rudd, his wife and family have clearly been an anchor and a refuge. He credits Rein with getting him more in touch with an underdeveloped emotional side of his character, “however incomplete my own transformation might have been.”

Will Rudd return to this matter as he contemplates his prime ministership in volume two? He made his first emotional misstep as prime minister on the night of his election when, in inviting his audience to go home and have a cup of tea and an Iced VoVo, he badly misread the mood of the moment. If Rudd understands how flat that speech left so many people whose hearts had been broken by what Howard had done to the country, people who were looking for a new and inspiring message about where their new prime minister would take them, there is no sign of it here.

It was a bad start to Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership yet also, sadly, a hint of many of the things to come. ●

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In this new book, which completes his trilogy on the life course of several generations of gay men in Australia, he is again in largely uncharted territory. Few scholars have brought together the gay community and the world of work. Early in the book, he recalls how, when he was younger, he wondered what all those young gay men beginning a stretch of London clubbing at 11pm on a Monday night did for a living. Could they really all be hairdressers — he was referring to a common stereotype of gay employment — who had the following day off?

Certainly, the world of work was not terribly conspicuous in the dominant images of the gay community that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Gay liberation forged the notion of a political identity based on homosexuality, but it had little specifically to say about work, beyond the reality that men and women who publicly identified as gay — or were “outed” by the police or the media — rightly feared workplace discrimination or even dismissal. The gay commercial culture that emerged in the 1970s and was flourishing by the time AIDS hit in the early 1980s constructed gay men as consumers, rather than as producers or workers.

Interestingly, one author who did attend to these matters a long time ago, if only in passing, was Humphrey McQueen, who provides the foreword for this latest book. Back in the mid 1970s, in an essay on “Rewriting Textbooks,” McQueen criticised the portrayal of male homosexuality by Australian writers. “What is needed,” he argued, “is the recognition that homosexuality is not confined to the exceptionally gifted or to the biologically half-baked. Instead, we’ll need textbooks that show that the plumbers next door, who play reserve grade soccer, and eat out of cans because they can’t cook cordon bleu,” might be gay. I don’t think Peter Robinson introduces us to any plumbers or reserve grade soccer players in this book; to be fair, cordon bleu chefs don’t feature all that prominently either. But he has certainly taken up the challenge that McQueen issued more than forty years ago.

Here we see gay men earning a crust, to use a saying that might only be instantly recognisable to Robinson’s older and middle cohorts. And we also find them in retirement, as well as planning, or not planning, for life after paid work. Robinson is a brave man: he even asked some millennials whether they had started planning for their retirement. As ever in his books, the answers tell us something about the lives of the men concerned, even when they are young people who can barely yet conceive what life might be like as “an old gay man,” to borrow from the title of a chapter from Robinson’s first book.

The sociologist Ken Plummer uses the term “shrewd” to describe Robinson’s commentary in this book, and that’s the word that often occurred to me, too, as I read through it. What I like most about his work is that he is alive to both the particularities of the gay experience as well as what is shared with others — that is, with all of us who work, and form relationships, and grow old. He locates his work with great skill in a space that can be easy to overlook when working on sexuality. The sexual revolution invited us to think of sexuality as the core of identity; Robinson acknowledges its claims, yet also resists the assumption that once we grasp an individual’s sexuality, we can then go on to understand pretty much everything else we might want to know about them. This is difficult work; a balancing of theory, history and the complexities of experience as captured — however imperfectly — through the interview.

Gay Men’s Working Lives, Retirement and Old Age is not primarily a study of workplace discrimination against gay men, although it deals with that theme. Robinson tells the story of one of his informants — a gay man living and working in New Zealand — that is awful enough in terms of the workplace bullying he experienced in two jobs decades apart. Other interviewees occasionally reported bullying or harassment, too, and one had to leave his job as a teacher in the 1950s because he feared that a policeman was trying to blackmail him after an arrest for loitering with intent.

But what is striking about these stories is that the intersection of gay identity and experience with the world of work has had much more subtle effects than can be captured in a practice such as bullying or blackmail. Gay men’s experience of the world of work is sometimes different from that experienced by heterosexuals; or rather, Robinson shows that it contains a potential for difference that is realised to a different degree in different historical periods and different work situations.

To take just one example: Robinson has been one of our subtlest commentators on “coming out” — something that he shows might occur not once but often repeatedly across a life course. A gay man might have come out to friends but there’s also family and — as he shows here — there’s the workplace; indeed, as men change jobs — and many of his interviewees changed both occupations and jobs many times across their lives — there’s the question of “coming out” each time.

For most of us, work is an opportunity for sociability and relationships, but in many workplaces there is still a widespread assumption of heterosexuality. Work can therefore be socially isolating for gay men; a pressure point rather than an expression of their identity in its fullness. And just as men from the older cohort among Robinson’s informants “could not,” as he puts it, “share the fraternal bonds of heterosexual masculinity,” homophobia continues to affect the lives of gay men in an era of anti-discrimination legislation.

Robinson also turns his attention to life after paid work. Some of those now entering their fifties and sixties and contemplating retirement — if they’re not retired already — spent an earlier part of their life imagining that they would not live until middle age, let alone old age. Until the arrival of anti-retroviral drugs in the mid 1990s, planning for retirement and old age seemed rather pointless for people living with HIV-AIDS; but these men have had to adjust to the reality of a much longer life than they expected. As Robinson points out, this could be a difficult adjustment for men who had reconciled themselves with death. As one of his interviewees told him, “Dealing with mortality was hard but moving from mortality to longevity has been harder.”

For these men and others who are old, or thinking about when they get old, there are genuine and understandable worries about a loss of control over the conditions of one’s own life. Of course, the heterosexual elderly often have similar fears. But gay men face the possibility of landing in a homophobic environment — especially considering the role of churches in providing aged care — in a setting perhaps devoid of congenial male company, one that might even force them to return to the closet for the sake of a peaceful life.

We apparently don’t yet have gay retirement homes, or gay aged-care facilities, in this country. One of Robinson’s informants frankly sets out his objection to living in a home with women, a view that Robinson concedes “might distress gay-friendly women who like to think homosexual men are empathetic, cuddly versions of their husbands.” For all its achievements, he suggests, the gay community has not yet been able to deal adequately with the challenges posed by old age. Again, he is the friendly critic, and his cool appraisal doesn’t falter in considering these difficult matters.

Like the best sociology and the best history of sexuality, this book also tells us a great deal about the wider world in which these men have lived their lives. Peter Robinson traces a story from the time after the war when opportunities for secure work — backed by a decent social safety net — were widespread, through the more precarious world bequeathed by the end of the long boom in the 1970s. He points to a conjuncture that, so far as I’m aware, has not been discussed enough in work on gay men: that the emergence of gay liberation coincided with the coming of more troubled economic times.

Then came HIV-AIDS: many gay men who entered the caring professions did so in work of value to the gay community itself, work that could be seen as effecting social and political change, although the experience was not in every case happy. One man reported bullying while employed on an AIDS project in a workplace staffed by other gay men. The caring professions — defined broadly — remain important to many younger men but they are less likely to work specifically among gays. Of course, for men across all of Robinson’s cohorts, work was also simply work — a way of making a living, of making ends meet. He found this attitude not only among blue-collar workers or those doing low-paid jobs, but also among some of the well-off. But it became less common over time; his younger men place greater stress on the creative aspects of work.

We meet a diverse group of workers, from the rather poor to the very wealthy. There is one man who moved from a London toy shop to the travel industry to teaching travel and tourism in higher education before training as a counsellor and becoming a professional drag queen in New Zealand. He reflected that if he’d been straight, he’d probably have spent his life “with seven kids” — and presumably a wife — “working on a dairy farm.” Yet Robinson also introduces us to an eminent Sydney-based judge, now retired, a man with deep interest in human rights including those of LGBTI people, who has had a partner for more than forty years.

At least in developed countries, there is a growing legal recognition of such relationships. But it remains remarkable that, quite apart from its own ban on same-sex marriages, Australia has also refused to acknowledge valid marriages performed in countries such as Britain, the United States and even New Zealand. Robinson comes to same-sex marriage late in the book, and he has some concerns about it, worrying over its “homogenising” aspects, its “designer-gaydom”, and its ideal of the gay man as a “pseudo-straight.” “Gay marriage,” he suggests, “is a nice easy way to appease homophobes and attract the support of gay-friendly straights” but the reason some gay men hesitate over it — and Robinson here clearly includes himself — “is that it seems like just another example of having to take on the accepted ways of straights-ville instead of the straight world being asked to accept gay men and their ways.”

As always in Robinson’s work, it’s a dance of sameness and difference, and it provokes us to look at the world in new ways, to question easy liberal assumptions about the meaning of progress and the basis of the good society. What more could one ask for in a scholar and intellectual? ●

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The unusual nature of the survey campaign, being voluntary, postal, and led by coalitions who lacked the resources or structures of the major political parties, will also have influenced the nature and reception of the messaging. If you’re starting a long way behind, as the No side did, and are more limited than publicly funded political parties in what you can spend, it might make sense to target a promising group of voters who can be influenced by working through established organisations, networks and leaders. If many of those voters have a limited grasp of English or of the substance of the issues at stake, they might also be more receptive to the drawing of long bows about freedom of religion and the corruption of children that were the stock-in-trade of the No campaigners and their friends at the Australian. Yes campaigners, on the other hand, had good reason not to bother with those likely to be unconvertible, and rather to concentrate on persuading voters likely to say Yes, especially the young, to return their forms.

The political parties themselves seem to have played a negligible role, with even the party leaders rather marginal. Not a few of the well-paid politicians who normally pride themselves on being leaders in their communities look to me like they ran dead, and that applies to both sides of the debate.

But we will need to wait for closer analysis of the campaigns to see how they worked in practice. Political scientists and sociologists will be busy for quite some time yet.

Not surprisingly, the initial media analysis of the No vote has focused on Sydney, but it’s striking that two ethnically diverse Melbourne divisions, Bruce and Calwell, also produced solid No majorities. They have much in common with several of the western Sydney divisions. In Bruce, in Melbourne’s outer southeastern suburbs, the 2016 Census tells us that six out of every ten residents were born overseas and a language other than English was spoken in almost 58 per cent of households.

Calwell, at the other end of town, recorded the state’s lowest Yes vote, at 43.2 per cent. Sitting in the city’s ethnically diverse northwest and named after the architect of Australia’s postwar immigration program, 54.4 per cent of its residents were born in Australia, a much larger proportion than in Bruce, but six out of every ten have two overseas-born parents. Calwell, like Arthur himself, also appears to be very religious, at least if formal affiliation counts: around 57 per cent of its residents identified as Catholic (34 per cent), Muslim (17.7 per cent) or Eastern Orthodox (5.4 per cent).

In nearby Scullin, though, with a higher proportion again of Australian-born residents (57.7 per cent), fewer households speaking a language other than English (about half) and a lower proportion identifying an affiliation with the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Churches or Islam (around 46 per cent), the Yes vote was 53.4 per cent. That’s still well below the national and state average, but a majority nonetheless. Holt and Gorton — both Melbourne outer-suburban electorates with over half the population born overseas — also recorded small or bare Yes majorities. We perhaps find in all this a somewhat paler version of what came to pass in western Sydney.

Gentrified or gentrifying reas of Melbourne’s inner north with a longer history of ethnic diversity — much of the territory south of the Hipster Line (or Bell Street, as it is also known) — were bastions of Yes support. Wills recorded 70 per cent and Batman 71.2 per cent, both well above both national and state averages. Grayndler, an inner-western Sydney seat comparable with these in many respects, delivered almost 80 per cent.

Indeed, the inner metropolitan areas of the major cities voted overwhelmingly Yes, much as expected. More than four out of every five voters in Melbourne and Melbourne Ports, and similar numbers in Sydney and Wentworth, voted Yes, as did almost as many in Brisbane. It mattered nought whether a seat was safe Labor, safe Liberal or, in the case of Melbourne, Greens territory. Affluent Liberal-voting metropolitan seats in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane — even Tony Abbott’s Warringah — returned Yes votes in the seventies. But ethnically diverse Bennelong, with more than a fifth of the population claiming Chinese ancestry, recorded a slight No majority. Less than half the population there is Australian-born.

Hardly less interesting is the regional picture. Now, clearly, there are regionals and there are regionals. Most, these days, contain one or more sizable cities; many, especially on the coastal strip, have experienced drastic demographic change. We should hardly be surprised to find a seat such as Richmond on the north coast of New South Wales, with Byron Bay within its boundaries, producing a Yes vote just shy of 68 per cent, or nearby Page offering up 59.7 per cent. The urban divisions of the Hunter, the Illawarra, the New South Wales central coast, the Victorian goldfields and Geelong were overwhelmingly in favour. Wannon in Victoria’s Western District, a safe Liberal seat, more or less echoed the national average with a 61 per cent Yes.

Elsewhere, the Yes majorities in what are normally called “conservative” rural and regional seats were sometimes in the low to mid 50s: in New South Wales, this includes New England, Parkes, Riverina, Farrer and Lyne — all except Farrer (Sussan Ley, Liberal) being fairly solid National Party seats. The pattern of sometimes low but usually comfortable Yes majorities also occurs in Barker and Grey in South Australia, and O’Connor and Durack in Western Australia.

In compact Victoria, regional seats almost invariably contain one or more large regional cities. In a rare case where the cities and towns are smaller — such as the seat of Mallee (54.3 per cent) — the narrow Yes majority was similar to several ethnically diverse outer-suburban Labor seats of Melbourne. Much the same pattern emerged in Tasmania, where the most rural seats — Lyons and Braddon — recorded the smallest Yes majorities, being outdone by the seats based on Hobart, where the highest Yes vote in Tasmania occurred, and Launceston. Bass, based on Launceston, like Wannon in Victoria, almost precisely matched the national average Yes vote.

A small number of outback and regional Queensland seats rejected same-sex marriage: Maranoa, at 43.9 per cent, partly encompassing Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s old Kingaroy stomping ground; and Groom (49.2 per cent) in the Darling Downs, centred on Toowoomba. Both areas incorporate parts of southeast Queensland well known for the strength of their conservative Christian values — a kind of antipodean Bible belt. The sprawling northern Queensland seat of Kennedy, represented by Bob Katter, an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage, recorded a Yes minority of 46.7 per cent, but Dawson was just over 55 per cent, and Leichhardt, represented by Liberal same-sex marriage advocate Warren Entsch, voted 63.4 per cent in favour.

It’s hard, in the case of Kennedy and Dawson at least, not to wonder about the role of the local member as an opinion-leader, although it is unclear where this would leave George Christensen, a No advocate, whose Dawson recorded that solid Yes. Perhaps some no-nonsense Liberal National Party voters regard his preoccupation with such “moral” issues with tolerant amusement. On this issue at least, his clout seems to have been limited, an experience familiar to several Labor MPs representing western Sydney electorates.

Before we get a sharper picture of what all this means, we will need more thorough analysis correlating survey voting with Census data, party allegiance and the like. It is nonetheless hard not to be impressed by the extent to which acceptance of same-sex marriage is a truly national phenomenon. Remember all that chatter back in the 1990s about a Melbourne-Sydney-Canberra triangle that was supposedly dominated by “elite” and “leftist” concerns remote from the rest of Australia? The patterns of Yes and No voting in the same-sex survey surely suggest something quite different. At the very least, the triangle looks very large and cumbersome, seemingly encompassing dozens of regional towns and cities across Australia.

There are perhaps two ways of looking at this change. A cynical attitude might be that Yes campaigners have been so successful in mainstreaming same-sex marriage — presenting LGBTI people as “pseudo-straight,” as one gay critic of the phenomenon recently put it, divorcing queer politics from its radical roots — that many conservatives are now willing to give it a tick. A more optimistic view might celebrate a significant expansion of our collective sense of what equality might mean in a modern democratic community.

I suspect that both readings are valid — that we are dealing here, as in so much democratic politics, with the eternal dance of sameness and difference. ●

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There was once a time when politicians used to wait until they were retired, or at least had a few decades of solid parliamentary service under their belts, before favouring us with a memoir. The very titles of Sir Robert Menzies’ two volumes — Afternoon Light and The Measure of the Years — exude the kind of mellow detachment that comes only with a post-retirement scotch and dry at 4 o’clock in the afternoon.

Billy Hughes’s Crusts and Crusades might seem more enticing than his Policies and Potentates, but both appeared when he was in his eighties, his long and colourful political life all but over. The Labor MP Gil Duthie’s choice of I Had 50,000 Bosses hinted at a career of busyness, if not harassment, while Les Haylen reflected even more bluntly on Twenty Years’ Hard Labor. Arthur Calwell’s Be Just and Fear Not announced that he would be keeping the faith even in the face of the humiliation delivered by the Whitlam whirlwind.

These days, though, three years in the Senate seems sufficient to get you over the line. Barack Obama might well have something to answer for here. Dreams from My Father came before rather than after the presidency, indeed before his campaign for the Illinois Senate. It was one of the instruments that enabled him to persuade the country that gave the world Jim Crow and Donald Trump that it should elect a black man — the son of a Kenyan immigrant, no less — to the highest office in the land.

But as former vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen might have put it, “Senator Dastyari, you’re no Barry Obama.” To be fair, claiming to be the next Barack Obama seems the very last thing Senator Dastyari is likely to do. As Martin McKenzie Murray recently put it in the Saturday Paper, “he is a master of self-effacement.” Dastyari does share with Obama an unusual family background, as the Iranian-born son of university-educated migrants who had been politically active in Iran and lucky to survive the ordeal.

Dastyari’s family story appears in the early part of the book. The dangers of being involved in Iranian politics in an age of revolution and war might have served as the context for reflection on the kind of politics pursued in Australia by Dastyari. For all its alleged hardness, the latter might well seem like play-acting to anyone — like his parents — who’d had close experience of the Iranian version. But the book is too loosely structured to achieve anything much of this sort, and the author’s taste for extended self-reflection seems rather limited.

Dastyari does understand all too well that modern politics is a form of showmanship: “If you want to achieve cut-through in the public, you have to make it worth watching. That was something that I learnt early.” Here is a man who, to break out of his “inner-city Labor bubble,” turns up in the town of Parkes not on any old weekend, but for its Elvis Festival. And naturally he dresses for the part — as “Halal Elvis.”

But this aptitude for razzamatazz surely works in Dastyari’s favour in this era of 24/7 news, rule by tweet and political cooking shows. Even the dreariest News Corp journalist, political has-been or jaded ex-staffer can now leverage solid C-grade celebrity status off the back of regular appearances on Sky News. In such times, Dastyari’s flamboyant exposure of the venality of corporate tax evasion and the financial advice industry is probably worth the price of whatever it is we’ve been paying him.

The rather elaborate gimmick that structures One Halal of a Story apparently unfolds from Dastyari’s 2016 election-night invitation to Pauline Hanson to join him in a celebratory halal meal. (She impolitely declined.) The book is a paper, ink and codex version of a halal snack pack, its twenty-nine chapters divided into five parts — the box, the base, the cheese, the meat and the sauces — with the inside cover providing appropriate halal certification.

None of this should be taken too seriously, of course. The product on offer is not a halal snack pack. The product is Sam Dastyari.

The reason why he has the leisure to write a book is well known. Sam is cooling his heels on the backbench after allowing a businessman closely connected with the government of China to pay what he describes as “a $1670 office travel expense.” When he was quoted in the Chinese media apparently making sympathetic noises about that country’s territorial claims to the South China Sea, it was a bad look — bad enough for him to resign his recently acquired shadow ministry.

He experienced this scandal as a humiliating blow. Here was a man who had lived and breathed politics since his teenage years, rising to general secretary of the NSW branch of the Labor Party at the ripe old age of twenty-six. Having to resign over a matter as seemingly trivial as the payment of a $1670 travel bill — roughly the price of a long liquid lunch in Chinatown for a group of Labor Party luminaries with something to plot, mourn or celebrate — was no part of the plan.

With his Melbourne University Press contract and, as a senator, no electorate to fuss over, Dastyari was soon churning out a therapeutic 1000 words a day. Fortunately for all concerned, he turned out to be a “fabulous” writer — or so the chief executive of MUP, Louise Adler, assures us — and this book is the happy outcome of their literary association.

Dastyari’s predicament can be seen in at least a couple of ways. The case against him can be made fairly simply: substitute “Russian” for “Chinese” and “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” for “People’s Republic of China,” and then place the story thirty-five years ago. It’s not just Sam’s political career that would have been over. He’d also have struggled to find anyone willing to employ him in one of the usual lucrative jobs pursued by the political class when they’re done with voters. Once the dust had settled, Sam might have been able to look forward to an eventual diplomatic posting to one of the lesser Soviet republics. (Something a bit like this happened in 1983 after David Combe became entangled with a Russian diplomat whom ASIO judged a KGB agent. The ex-Labor official and ruined lobbyist eventually touched down as trade commissioner to Vancouver.)

But a more benign reading is both possible and arguably more sensible. This isn’t 1954, the year of the royal commission into espionage, or even 1983, the year of the Combe–Ivanov affair and Dastyari’s birth. There’s no evidence that Dastyari has a more developed sense of entitlement than the general run of the political class. For if recent history is any guide, some of these humble servants of the people expect the taxpayer to subsidise their family holidays, attendance at interstate birthday parties, trips to football finals, bidding at real estate auctions, and even paid advertisements attacking ABC journalists — to say nothing of the party fundraiser racket.

Dastyari is good at seeming to be frank while telling us very little: “Information is power; details are currency for trade. And so the goal becomes being seen to speak, without giving anything away.” There are plenty of moments in the book — both eloquent utterances and meaningful silences — that exemplify the point. “Coming into parliament, I was quick to realise that I really had no idea what power was, and what it actually meant,” he says. “All my life I had thought that parliament, and political parties, were the ultimate decision makers in Australia. It was a rude shock to see how much influence business and industry wielded in Canberra — incredible!” This from a man who ran the NSW Labor Party, and was responsible for chasing the business donations needed to keep it afloat.

In fact, we learn little from One Halal of a Story about how the Labor Party works. It’s a world that Dastyari must know rather well, to put it mildly. He does tell us that he rings his father-in-law regularly for advice. This might seem odd, except that Dastyari has married into the Labor gentry; his wife is the daughter of Hawke adviser and NSW Right legend Peter Barron. But when he’s being particularly coy, Dastyari conveys an impression of Labor that really makes one wonder whether he wishes to be taken seriously. Here’s how he explains the ballot for general secretary of the NSW branch: “By the time that delegates have been selected, the ballot is sorted. That is the part that makes the difference. The cups of tea at houses, the time spent with delegates before the conference. The vote itself comes at the end of all that.”

No factions, and no factional warlords. No unions. No bloc votes. Just a few cups of tea, a bit of glad-handing, and an exchange of pleasantries. One can understand a young senator whose career depends on the continuing support of the party machine not wishing to foul the nest. But does he consider the rest of us so naive?

Dastyari sheds little light on the meltdown during the final years of the late and unlamented state Labor government. He clearly found it depressing: how could he not? But it’s too easy to describe it as a government that did good things but had “some really bad people occupying positions of responsibility.” The reason we had to suffer Eddie Obeid, Ian Macdonald and the other assorted deadbeats whose dirty linen has been aired by ICAC and the Fairfax press is not that they accidentally slipped into positions for which they were temperamentally unsuited. Rather, the NSW Labor power system provided the villains and deadbeats with such generous and effective protection for so many years.

This has been a story of power, preferment and pragmatism, a story of who you know and, sometimes, what you know about them. “Whatever it takes,” as Dastyari’s mentor, Graham Richardson, put it in the title of his own memoir; it’s surely the unofficial motto of the NSW Labor Right. Obeid, Macdonald and their mates were products of a system that privileged the art of the deal (and the long lunch) over ethical standards most of us would simply take for granted. That same culture — apparently so formidable in its pull on the loyalty of individuals — was utterly ineffective in preventing or even discouraging a few well-connected shysters from breaking the law when it stood in the way of their making a motza from a shonky mining lease or some other fraud.

Dastyari’s disgust with these crims, crooks and charlatans is unquestionably sincere, but he isn’t really interested in helping us see how the culture of the NSW party enabled their misdeeds. His career up to this point has depended on serving his faction faithfully; his future is likely to depend on preserving what is left of the NSW Right’s diminished power and authority.

So, among the final chapters of the book, there is a doting account of an ailing Graham Richardson: “If the Labor Party were Microsoft, Graham would be our Bill Gates… he is both a mate and a father figure.” There is a not terribly revealing sketch of Kevin Rudd that tells us he was rather demanding. (Who’d have thought?) There’s a hymn of praise to the current general secretary of the NSW Labor Party, Kaila Murnain, acclaimed as “The One to Watch.” (It would be peculiar if she were not “One to Watch” considering that the track from general secretary to federal Senate has been travelled by so many of her predecessors, including Dastyari himself.)

And, as befits a man on a mission to rehabilitate his career, he includes a final chapter on “Bill Shorten: The One Who Will Be King.” (One of McKenzie-Murray’s sources told him that Sam was rather less convinced that Shorten would be king late in 2015, and appeared to be sounding out support for Anthony Albanese.)

One Halal of a Story contains a good deal of padding. We learn of the author’s favourite TV shows when growing up, the unskilled car-driving of a friend, the mixed pleasures of group-house living, pets’ names, friends’ weddings and kids’ concerts. Especially in the early part of the book, there’s quite a lot of ethnic comedy of the “those zany Iranians” type, but there are also some thoughtful reflections on growing up as “different” in the western Sydney of the 1990s, at the time when Pauline Hanson first emerged as the raw and authentic voice of Australian bigotry.

You sense in the end, however, that what we have here is “premature autobiography,” to borrow a phrase from the historian Paul Bourke. It’s not that youngish people should avoid the genre at all costs: Alexander the Great and Richard III had lived rather full lives by the time they reached their thirties. But celebrity biography and memoir — and that’s essentially what we’re dealing with here — can be tedious for any reader who is not signed up to the relevant fan club. And while Dastyari is no slouch as a writer and obviously has a big brain, it’s hard to leverage minor political celebrity status into a book with real oomph, not least when it’s so obviously part of a campaign to restart a stalled career. In the end, he understands all too well that he needs to keep his powder dry.

All the signs, in any case, are that Dastyari will be given a second chance. That’s as it should be. He’s clearly a skilled operative, an imaginative politician and a media magnet, even if his judgement has on occasion been poor. The Chinese jokes will continue to follow him around but that’s the way it is in the internet age and they probably won’t do him lasting harm, provided his ambitions don’t run to international or security policy.

All the same, there is a distractedness about this book, as there seems to be about Dastyari’s political style in general; a habit of skating over shiny surfaces and moving on to the next set of colourful lights before the last lot have really been taken in, by him or anyone else. His nickname, “Dasher,” is strikingly apt, as Australian nicknames so often are. Dastyari himself evokes this aspect of the political culture of which he is a lively product — its unrelenting pace — in some of the best passages of this book. As he puts it, “everyone is only ever half-listening to what anyone else has to say.”

And there’s also an evocative chapter on what happens to a good idea — as well as its bearer — once both are subjected to the rigours of the modern political system. As ever, Dastyari adopts the perspective of the insider–outsider that comes with the political setback: he reminds us that, as a party official, he has run the focus groups that have contributed to killing off promising ideas. Such comments, of course, can appear insincere; he has been criticised as hypocritical for advocating a clean-up of business contributions to political parties when his own career has been so devoted to extracting money from such donors.

But perhaps a case might be made that the driver responsible for getting the truck stuck in the bog is best placed to help get it out. Dastyari can’t quite be made to bear that much responsibility, but he has undoubtedly been an influential operative in a powerful political machine for a decade or so. It is discouraging that, despite the privileged vantage point and considerable sway that his access has given him, he seems to have so few bright ideas about what might be done to alleviate the afflictions of our current politics. ●

First published 10 October 2017

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The war on terror might still be with us, but the history wars — which were fought largely over the nature and extent of frontier violence — are over. They ended with a whimper rather than a bang, in exhaustion rather than with a treaty. One sign that they had lost their heat came in 2009, when Keith Windschuttle, arguably their chief protagonist, published the second volume of his trilogy purporting to reveal how the political left had fabricated Aboriginal history. Hardly anyone noticed.

The contrast with the storm caused by his first instalment was stark. Volume One of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History dealt with frontier violence in Tasmania, which Windschuttle claimed had been grossly exaggerated by historians. It attracted massive publicity in Australia and some attention abroad, with Windschuttle’s image of peaceful settlers, Aboriginal thieves and fibbing historians receiving powerful support from conservative politicians and the editors of the Australian and Quadrant.

Windschuttle’s second volume — oddly called Volume Three — attempted to demonstrate that the Stolen Generations were a myth. By this time, John Howard’s Coalition government had been defeated at the polls and Kevin Rudd had made his apology to those generations. The political wheel had turned. Australian neoconservatives were looking for other battles to fight, and they increasingly turned to global warming.

We’re still waiting for Windschuttle’s Volume Two. When one of the Australian’s editors, Nick Cater, published his book The Lucky Culture and the Rise of an Australian Ruling Class in 2013, I counted just five passing references to Australia’s Indigenous people. If Cater’s book was an accurate barometer of the preoccupations of the political right, the threat posed by environmentalists to Australian culture and Western civilisation had now eclipsed the preoccupations of the history wars.

Some commentators have proclaimed the recent debate over colonial monuments a revival of the history wars. But this framing seems to me quite misleading. Australia’s statue wars are not so much over what happened on the frontier as about how that past should be represented in public commemoration, and what kind of recognition, if any, monuments erected by settler society should give to Indigenous perspectives and experiences. It is a fundamental test of our pluralism, of our ability as a society to hold more than one idea in our collective heads at the same time. Being able to do that is arguably a precondition for living civilised and ethical lives in a settler society.

The Australian statue wars follow on from the South African and British Rhodes Must Fall campaigns and are entangled in the Change the Date campaign, but they were more directly triggered by recent violent conflict in the United States over Confederate statues. In this sense, the controversy is a measure of our Americanisation, as well as of the global nature of political contention in the age of social media and instant communication. Just as Australians have followed the events in the United States, overseas friends on Facebook are posting stories about Australian developments.

The debate really took off here after the ABC published a thoughtful and measured article by Stan Grant about how we might deal with the historical inaccuracies etched on a statue of Captain Cook in Sydney. Grant quickly and predictably became a target for the usual coterie of radio shock jocks and social media trolls for being an Indigenous man willing to express an opinion on a controversial matter. Adam Goodes will perhaps have smiled knowingly. Quadrant Online’s reporting of the matter carries the typically tacky headline “Stan Grant given a good tanning.”

Denialism will always be with us — some people still believe the moon landing was faked — but those defending colonial monuments don’t usually contend that Australia had a peaceful past, nor do they accuse historians who have suggested otherwise of telling fibs. That’s where we were fifteen years ago. The debate has moved on, partly because historians did what historians generally do best — carried out conscientious research in the primary sources — and partly because the political right lost interest. As a result, when my daughter learns about colonial history in primary school — or when I and my colleagues teach university students about Australian race relations — the story remains one characterised by violence and dispossession, as well as cooperation, friendship, love and much else that happens when two groups of human beings encounter one another in the real world.

The failure of Windschuttle and the Quadrant school to displace the dominant understandings of Australia’s colonial past helps explain the periodic panic on the right about the left’s supposed domination of the history curriculum in schools. Just last week, Tony Abbott complained that teaching more Indigenous history in schools — unless accompanied by his favourite subjects, British history and Western civilisation — would be “another capitulation to the left.” The Institute of Public Affairs also seems to have put one of its own bloodhounds to work on the matter. A few months ago, she had a go at my own course on Sexuality in Australian History, predictably ignoring those I teach on Anzac, and on political and economic history.

In a sense, historians were on a hiding to nothing in the history wars. Those on the right who wanted to offer a comforting narrative of a benign imperialism and peaceful settlement found it much easier to gain political patronage and media attention. The charge that left-wing historians had fabricated evidence for political reasons, however fabulous, was attractive to journalists and to many casual readers of the Murdoch press, whose prejudices about “the left,” “academics” and “intellectuals” were thereby confirmed.

But what of history as an “objective” truth-telling practice? How has its standing been affected by the transformations since the 1990s? In a perceptive discussion in his book The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft, Tom Griffiths argues that the very nature of the history wars — including their degeneration into a debate over body-counts and footnotes — meant that historians were seen as qualified to engage politically in a way that a novelist such as Kate Grenville, writing about similar things, could not. Historical fiction was not a genre suited to this kind of controversy because of the hyper-empirical — some might say, often pseudo-empirical — nature of the debate.

Yet history, at least as it is understood by most people who practise it in universities, wasn’t terribly well adapted to the nature of the controversy either. As academic historians embraced what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called a “politics of recognition” and discussed the “historical wounds” of marginalised social groups in their writings, they necessarily did so in a state of increasing uncertainty about what constituted “positive historical knowledge.” In the context of the belligerent attacks from the political right, historians’ emphases on contingency, uncertainty and imagination could look like special pleading. To insist on history as a humane political and literary discipline could translate in the public sphere into a confession that it was ideologically driven, left-leaning and essentially made-up.

The result of these changes may well have been a decline in the public standing of history. Here, the critical decade was probably the 1980s, with its ideological disputes over the impending bicentenary of British settlement being a notable early salient. This is a story of cultural battles conducted in ministers’ offices, government departments, and the pages of broadsheet newspapers and right-wing magazines.

But while these controversies unfolded, Australians were also engaging ever more intensively with their past — through genealogy, for example — and a quiet revolution was being made by archaeologists, anthropologists, environmentalists, historians, museologists, legal scholars, writers of historical fiction and travelogues, Aboriginal activists, writers and artists, curators and collectors of art, and the creators of popular music. The results would soon be evident in new ways of thinking about the history of Australia and the emergence of ideas about “deep time” and “big history.” Alongside this, the Mabo High Court decision of 1992 had initiated a revolution in jurisprudence and politics, influenced by the forms of knowledge and culture just mentioned, including history.

A resurgent political right could easily translate historians’ insistence on the uncertainty of historical knowledge and the creativity of their practice into the notion that historians — all left-leaning, of course — were using their history as a propaganda vehicle. The obvious point that historical interpretations change across time as more evidence comes to light and societal values alter — that history is, in a real sense, “rewritten” — came to be conflated in the rhetoric of conservative critics with relativism and postmodernism. They saw these vices as the currency of the fabled left-wing-dominated humanities departments.

In the midst of the latest war came a revealing contribution from Geoffrey Blainey, the man who in 1993 coined the phrase that would become one of the right’s weapons in the emerging history wars, “black armband history.” In view of the overblown rhetoric that has figured in the media over the past couple of weeks about “rewriting history,” left-wing “totalitarianism” and (a special contribution from prime minister Malcolm Turnbull) the equation of graffiti with “Stalinism,” it is notable that the Australian right’s favourite historian is not new to the business of altering monuments.

As Carolyn Holbrook reveals in her book Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography, Blainey was the inspiration behind a strange decision by the Australian War Memorial in 1999 to add a plaque to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier reading “Known unto God.” That decision was peculiar in several respects. The AWM, in line with the views of the figure so influential in its founding, Charles Bean, had long emphasised secular commemoration; the extra plaque was clearly outside that tradition. But there was also something very odd about providing a monument unveiled just six years earlier, yet already well on the way to becoming the nation’s premier site of civic memory and mourning, with a Christian gloss in a multicultural, multi-faith society in which formal Christian observance was on the wane — a trend that has continued ever since.

Blainey’s role in this matter has not discouraged him from weighing into the statue wars. In a long piece in the Australian, he accuses Grant of “enlarging on dubious statements in textbooks and some university lectures” and having “soared into fantasy.” The question of whether an inscription on a statue should be altered seems ultimately to depend on whose story is at stake. •

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“Australia is a nation of immigrants, past and present,” this Irish migrant declared in response to the honour, “and I think that’s why it’s also a meritocracy. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, you have the same opportunity to succeed. People are judged on ability, which is how it should be.”

But Joyce might well be puzzled to hear that when the British sociologist Michael Young coined the term “meritocracy” in his 1958 satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033, he was using it as a pejorative. He wanted to show how awful a truly meritocratic society was likely to be.

As the British political historian Peter Hennessy usefully sums it up in his book Establishment and Meritocracy, Young’s fear was that “the old class system with its inefficiencies, absurdities and injustices would be swept away only to replace an aristocracy of birth with a meritocracy of talent that would, unlike the old ‘ocracy’ it was killing off, be both unreformable and irreversible.” When Young’s book ends in 2034 with rioting and social disturbances, the moral is that “all seemingly triumphant ‘ocracies,’ like all empires, light a fuse beneath themselves.”

The concept of meritocracy has taken a bit of a battering in recent times. But the demonstrable falseness of a claim like Alan Joyce’s — that everyone has the same opportunity to succeed regardless of where he or she comes from — has not been sufficient to kill it off. Context always matters, and Joyce’s comment was published in the Australian Financial Review, a newspaper whose demographic is likely to be receptive to his view. When you’re successful, it’s reassuring to be told you are the architect of your own success. And because you almost certainly are smart, industrious and affluent, it’s all quite plausible, too.

The fact that Joyce is a highly successful migrant is also significant; the immigration myth and the meritocracy myth make a powerful brew. It was in the 1980s that observers increasingly began remarking on the fact that some of the richest business figures in Australia were postwar migrants, many from continental Europe. Some of the names that figured then — Lowy and Grollo, for instance — are still with us, the baton having been handed on to the next generation. (The implications of multigenerational power for the idea of meritocracy are rarely considered.)

When the journalist Ruth Ostrow coined the term “The New Boy Network” in the mid 1980s, it was a powerful affirmation of the idea of meritocracy, one that showed you didn’t have to belong to the Melbourne Club or have inherited a large parcel of BHP shares to make it big. Some entrepreneurs were Holocaust survivors, others had fled from communism. Alan Bond, a British child migrant, couldn’t get into the Royal Perth Yacht Club but he unbolted the America’s Cup from its glass case in the New York Yacht Club. It would be hard to imagine a more powerful demonstration of meritocracy: the cheeky working-class Pommy migrant-turned-larrikin had not only stuck it up the Yanks, he had done what media magnate Frank Packer had failed to do.

A quarter of a century later, the global financial crisis inflicted serious wounds on the meritocratic myth by vividly demonstrating that financial rewards have become radically disconnected from merit or usefulness. It is easy to underestimate the GFC’s significance as a turning point in the modern history of the West. It has wrecked the social compact that emerged from the second world war in a way that no Thatcher or Reagan, however ambitious, ever managed.

Between the 1940s and the 1970s, the compact rested on a regulated free-market system capable of generating economic growth, full employment and rising income alongside rising social welfare and declining inequality. From the 1970s, it was increasingly battered from different directions. Developing countries claimed that they were being screwed by the rules of the game and called for a “new international economic order”; Western economies stagnated and their societies grew more unequal. Yet the welfare state remained largely intact and some opportunities for advancement remained open. The myth of meritocracy survived partly because it was still possible to argue that those who were sufficiently talented and industrious could make their way up the social ladder, despite their class disadvantage.

It was an idea that elided a lot of complications — especially in Britain, with its powerful markers of class difference. “Those of us who absorbed Michael Young’s warning when we were about to scale the first rungs of our own professional ladders were — and remain — riven by the concept of meritocracy,” explains Hennessy. “It was a self-evidently worthy impulse but it carried risks of callousness and disdain towards those who did not rise in terms of high status and well paid jobs.” (Hennessy has good reason to be interested in the idea of meritocracy. He grew up in London council houses and — via a grammar school and Cambridge education — has pursued a distinguished career in journalism, academia and the writing of political history. Today, he is Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield.)

For Lynsey Hanley, raised on a housing estate in the English Midlands, the issues at stake are more visceral. In her part-memoir, part-sociological study Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide, she draws on Richard Sennett’s concept of “the hidden injuries of class” to explore the social and psychological wrench of upward mobility. As she puts it, “the subject of class obsesses me, as it does a lot of people who started life in one class and have ended up in another. Changing class is like emigrating from one side of the world to the other, where you have to rescind your old passport, learn a new language and make gargantuan efforts if you are not to lose touch completely with the people and habits of your old life.”

Meritocracy isn’t much interested in loss of this kind: it celebrates social and material success as ends in themselves, psychologically valuable at the individual level because self-validating, culturally valuable for the collective since they affirm the essential justness of the present order. All the same, I can’t recall any other period in my lifetime when more searching questions have been asked about the essential justness of that order, including its distribution of reward and opportunity.

Today, the only people who truly believe that a banker plays a social role as useful as a nurse or a teacher are bankers themselves. And that has had its effects on how democracies operate, especially in the context of post-GFC austerity. The fact that British professionals who hold down socially useful jobs are living in poverty is increasingly being reported in the media as one of the more offensive aspects of post-GFC austerity in that country. The inability of graduates to get decent jobs — here, as well as in Britain and the United States — is another, and has fed into the broader critique of intergenerational inequity powerfully articulated in Australia by Jennifer Rayner in Generation Less.

Perhaps these complaints contain traces of the meritocratic myth. In much public discourse about how the middle-aged and elderly are screwing over the young, it is specifically the middle-class young, who enjoyed greater security and comfort a generation or two ago, who are seen as especially put upon. The problem of housing affordability is mapped onto the collision of interests between millennials — locked out of the housing market and secure employment, in danger of joining a new kind of working class labelled the “precariat” — and the generation Xers, baby boomers and elderly who benefit from rising housing prices and might even enjoy the pleasures of negative gearing.

Meanwhile, the unrelenting financialisation of Western economies has highlighted the role of sheer luck in a way that a manufacturing economy could not. Industrial success was conventionally seen as the result of ingenuity and invention. The meritocracy concept was a product of this industrial world in its mature 1950s and 1960s phase, one in which the role of the trained technocrat had become central. It was easy, in these circumstances, to play up the part of education, expertise and merit and play down the role of chance.

Not so today. Now, respectable economists are writing books on the role of luck in human affairs. Andrew Leigh, in The Luck of Politics: True Tales of Disaster and Outrageous Fortune, sets out an extraordinary array of political and other events shaped by chance. While this sometimes takes on a Ripley’s Believe It or Not character (did you know that people with uncommon first names are more likely than others to land in prison?), he also has a serious social-democratic intent: recognising luck’s role might lead us “to a gentler view of success and failure.”

Leigh, who argues that his own calling of politics is more poker than chess, is not alone in making such claims. In Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, Robert H. Frank, a professor of management and economics at Cornell University, argues that seemingly minor and random events and variations play an outsized role in our lives.

This might be a matter of being born in one place rather than another — say, a rich country like the United States rather than a poor one like Nepal. (Frank often draws on personal experience; he was a volunteer in the Peace Corps in Nepal.) Luck might be the time of the year you happened to be born — which has been shown to influence your likelihood of being picked up by a professional ice hockey team. (The cut-off date for participation in junior leagues means that being born early in the year tends to give an age advantage. Leigh reports that this kind of rule applies to elite sports more generally.) Look no further than the good fortune of Bill Gates, who found himself in one of the few private schools in the country with computer facilities able to provide rapid feedback on his efforts at computer programming.

According to Frank, in the increasingly winner-take-all markets of modern business, where a success story such as Google or Microsoft will squeeze most competitors out of the market entirely, the role of luck is ever greater. Luck is most influential for the biggest winners because high-stakes contests — such as elite sport or the entertainment industry — attract such a large number of capable and motivated contestants.

Gates has graciously acknowledged his good fortune, but not all who achieve fame, wealth or success do so. An emphasis on this kind of luck can be confronting or even offensive for its beneficiaries. Denying the power of luck might also spur additional effort, making someone more likely to succeed. And if you deny that a failure is the result of bad luck, you’re less likely to be deterred from renewed effort.

All of this has relevance to politics and policy. Conservatives, says Frank, are more likely than liberals or radicals to deny luck’s role in success. This might mean that when they are confronted with failure, they blame it on those who have failed. It might also mean that the successful are hostile to the idea of paying more tax — since they see their earnings and their lifestyle as reward for merit, rather than the fruit of good fortune.

In resisting taxation, though, they are also undermining the environment they share with those less successful and less fortunate. They might get to drive flash cars, but the roads are full of potholes. Frank advocates replacing income tax with a progressive consumption tax to discourage the wasteful spending stimulated by the desire of wealthy and successful (and lucky) people to display their accomplishments, and the impulse of those lower down the ladder to emulate them.

Where does all of this leave meritocracy? Despite assaults from every side, it surely remains a powerful myth. American voters presumably suspect that Donald Trump is where he is partly because he inherited wealth and connections and had a good education, but many also see him as a man who has succeeded on his merits in the unforgiving world of business and entertainment. Indeed, they appear to accept his narrative that he has succeeded despite all sorts of grand conspiracies. The world of celebrity — in which luck looms especially large — seems especially prone to underestimating the role of fortune. Trump wins, it seems, because he is better than the rest of us.

And yet, for all his faults, he has helped reintroduce the unfamiliar language of class back into mainstream American political discourse. One of his messages is that his white working- and middle-class supporters are doing poorly not because they lack either merit or luck, but because the cards have been stacked against them by cheats and crooks (from whom, of course, he excludes himself). The message is that if the deck is rearranged by the Forty-Fifth President of the United States — who is, after all, a casino operator from way back — then luck and merit will once again be allowed to play their proper respective roles in human affairs.

If that sounds like a con, it might be because many of the ideas attached to the concept of meritocracy are a con. •

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If it’s meant to be the equivalent of John Howard’s “Beazley’s black hole” accusation in 1996 or Mark Latham’s aggressive handshake in 2004, or even “the real Julia” moment in 2010, then the Labor leader is surely in some difficulty. As the ABC’s Sabra Lane pointed out during Shorten’s final National Press Club appearance in Canberra today, Turnbull’s statement was an attack on Labor’s backflipping, not an admission of his own intentions.

Does this suggest a measure of desperation? Possibly so, but Shorten’s Press Club speech was otherwise a fairly assured performance. He conceded that the Coalition’s claims about Labor’s plan to run higher deficits might pose some dangers, but minimised the differences between the two parties. His references to Brexit also indicated a fear that Turnbull’s call on electors to vote for the Coalition and stability has been hitting home.

Shorten’s response was to argue that what Brexit actually shows is the danger of leaving people behind in an age of globalisation. The Brexit vote was a protest against inequality and marginalisation by voters who felt they had been forgotten. Shorten called for “inclusive economic growth,” a “fair go all round.” This was a sensible effort to grapple with an unfortunate intrusion of an asteroid-like object into the Australian election campaign, but it seems like the damage has already been done. It mightn’t be 9/11 – fortunately – but it will surely have helped the incumbent round up some waverers at a time when the parties remain close in the opinion polls.

The Press Club speech had a strongly personal note – not to the point of solipsism, but suggesting that Shorten wants to stamp his own interpretation on his term as opposition leader, and on the eight weeks of the campaign itself. Some in the media, he said, had written him off back in September when Turnbull overthrew Tony Abbott. But he had responded by travelling around the country, getting “back to basics,” talking to ordinary voters in town hall meetings and community gatherings. It’s an image of Shorten as a man of the grassroots, a return to the methods of the union organiser, listening and talking – he even got in a reference to the Beaconsfield mine disaster, the moment when he entered the consciousness of many Australians for the first time.

This is an old-fashioned image, quite different from any Labor leader of the recent past; democratic, populist even, the Labor leader as a man there to represent those who can’t ask a question in parliament and don’t have a slot on Sky (to paraphrase Shorten). There is little doubt that this is an authentic self-image, even if it does have a ring about it of a man who knows he’s up against it: one seeking to produce an early draft of history; a draft – perhaps – that he might need in order to persuade his party that he should be kept on after the election (as he should be, as I’ve previously suggested in Inside Story, assuming at least an honourable defeat on Saturday).

Shorten also presented as the can-do man, with an “old-fashioned focus on good public policy” and a desire to restore that “Hawke model of consensus.” He will work with the Senate. He will include the opposition.

All the same, consensus is not to be mistaken for convergence; he’s keen to place more daylight between Labor and the coalition than has been customary in many recent elections, and notably in Labor’s last real victory: 2007. He would introduce a marriage equality bill as the first legislation of a Shorten Labor government, rather than wasting money on a plebiscite. He criticised the Coalition’s proposed $50 billion company tax giveaway. He condemned trickle-down economics as a worthless legacy of the Reagan and Thatcher era. He even raised the spectre of a 15 per cent GST, suggesting that this was really what Turnbull wanted most amid the shambles of his switching between ideas about tax reform a few months back. He continued the “Mediscare” attack on the Coalition, moving away, just a little, from the abstract rhetoric of “privatisation” and pointing to the manner in which government cuts were imposing greater burdens on the ill in a supposedly universal system of insurance.

There were no great surprises in the substance of Shorten’s speech, or in the image he projected: that of the underdog repeatedly written off but refusing to give in. In question time, he was no more or less evasive than one might expect – and some of the questions, in any case, were so complex that it’s hard to imagine anyone outside the parliamentary press gallery engaging with their substance.

It was the vibe of this performance that mattered, not the detail. And Shorten presented as an old-fashioned sort of guy who’d stand up for the ordinary man or woman in the street not quite convinced that this is the most exciting time to be alive. •

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Hawke the parliamentarian didn’t need to tell us his story because he had loomed large on the national scene for years, a media superstar of the 1970s as surely as TV’s Graham Kennedy. Shorten is not so comfortably placed. Australians came to recognise him as the concerned union official during the Beaconsfield mine rescue in 2006, but it’s doubtful whether much else about his career has registered – except, perhaps, his role as the man glued to the mobile phone when Kevin Rudd was being deposed in 2010.

That role in Labor’s federal leadership dramas is among the issues Shorten deals with in For the Common Good. While he plays down his part in the fall of Rudd, he hasn’t changed his mind about the need for a new leader; but he acknowledges that the party failed to explain adequately to voters why it acted. He also recalls his role in the demise of Julia Gillard, arguing that he owed greater loyalty to the Labor Party than to any individual and that Rudd was in a better position to minimise the losses at the 2013 election and preserve some of Labor’s policy legacy. We can easily believe this claim: it’s hard to imagine Shorten (or too many others) having supported Rudd for a second time if they’d imagined he was likely to be around to trouble them for more than a few months.

Neither of these explanations of Shorten’s actions at those pivotal moments is unreasonable. But the impression that he was up to his neck in that era’s leadership machinations is still hard to shake off, not least because it seems accurate enough (at least in connection with Rudd’s downfall in 2010). It’s notable that Shorten didn’t cooperate with Sarah Ferguson’s television documentary of the Rudd and Gillard era, The Killing Season. He is understandably sensitive about being thought of as one of Labor’s “faceless men,” an uncomfortable platform for national leadership.

For the Common Good is Shorten’s effort to explain himself, to tell the story of his formative years and their connections to his career in the labour movement and his leadership of the Australian Labor Party. In places, it can be a defensive document. In the second chapter, “A Labour of Love,” he provides his answer to the royal commission on trade union corruption. His approach to bargaining with employers, he explains, was guided by the belief that he could work “in a meaningful, cooperative way” with both bosses and employees. And his role required him to negotiate agreements “that adapted to new circumstances in the workplace.” It was in the interests of employers that their workers were able to “bargain constructively” in the new industrial relations system of the 1990s, and so they contributed money to the AWU to help them do so.

It’s a feisty defence, and none of it is unreasonable, but Shorten conveniently leaves out the fact that his union’s notably cooperative attitude to employers increased his own power and advanced his career. And there are clearly workers who felt that their interests were not well-served by some of the deals that the union struck. Like Hawke before him, Shorten moved into the social circles of wealthy men like Dick Pratt, who is not mentioned in these pages. In the snake-pit of Victorian factional politics, he became a man whose opinion mattered.

“Excessive factionalism is damaging to political parties,” he tells us – with a straight face or not, it’s impossible to say. It’s especially bad in the youth wings of the parties, he continues, and he “probably indulged in a bit of it in his youth.” (By this time, we might see a wry grin. Read Aaron Patrick’s admirable account of the young Bill in Downfall, which I reviewed for Inside Story, if you’d like a more vivid picture.)

Shorten weaves other aspects of his own story around his plans for the nation. We already know some of the biographical details from Patrick’s book and from other commentators, including David Marr. There’s the often absent father, the hard-drinking seaman and union official who mixed with some of the more colourful characters on the Melbourne wharves (a couple of whom were shot dead during the vicious internecine battles of the Painters and Dockers Union). There’s the very present, strong and self-improving mother, who takes out a string of university degrees and ends up an academic at Monash University.

Shorten emphasises that he was not born to the purple, as Robert Menzies once said of his own humble upbringing as a country shopkeeper’s son; but it’s extraordinary that this family sent Shorten and his twin brother to the most exclusive Catholic private school in Victoria, Xavier College. It was surely not out of religious piety, for Shorten’s mother regularly took the boys to a Catholic mass conducted in Polish, a language that none of the family could understand, because, as she explained, “It’s quick.”

From the Jesuits, Shorten says, he learned the ideal: “To be men for others.” He considered social work but instead studied arts and law at Monash and became an industrial lawyer and then a union organiser. Much of what Shorten professes to believe politically came out of this experience of dealing with ordinary members of his union, but there was also plenty of trade unionism on both sides of his family. His account of growing up in Melbourne has a strong elegiac note: a sense that something worthwhile was lost as the inner-city ports became less busy, factories closed and cherished institutions, such as the South Melbourne Football Club (which he supported), fell apart.

Shorten went to work for a union that was the most famous of them all, the AWU, an organisation whose history is woven into the very fabric of the union movement and is central to Labor’s claims to Australia’s national story. Once a shearers’ union, it evolved into a general union of workers and its Victorian branch, in particular, was in a dire state when Shorten went there in the mid 1990s. He proved a gifted organiser and capable official, but there might also have been a little nostalgia operating in his choice of a career in the legendary union, alongside the budding politician’s eye for the main chance: the AWU, after all, controlled a lot of votes on the floor of Labor conferences, and therefore a lot of preselection votes.

Indeed, a sense of political and industrial “yesteryear” hangs about Shorten’s public persona, despite the number of pages he spends in this book expounding the importance of cutting-edge science to the future of the country. The final pages of this book, for instance, are pure Hawke; it could be 1983 all over again. Shorten even advocates a national summit to promote “a more flexible and consensus-driven politics.”

Shorten’s outline of the priorities Labor would pursue if it were elected to government contains few surprises. Here, the book takes on some of the qualities associated with the manifestos released by British political parties. There are plenty of policy proposals that, if implemented properly, would make for a better country. There are also quite a few, like his proposal to create in the national capital an Australian version of Washington’s Arlington National Cemetery, that I suspect we’ll hear nothing more about. His suggestion of a college of state and territory governors from which the president of a republic might be chosen is plain silly as a way of responding to the objections of direct electionists. He maintains the old Labor line on supporting offshore detention and the newer one on boat turnbacks, while criticising his opponents for keeping asylum seekers for too long. But this is a little rich when we consider that the Manus Island shambles is to a large extent the handiwork of Labor Party policy during the second Rudd prime ministership of 2013.

The words and ideas jump out and hit one with greater force as he discusses disability insurance, something he actually knows about. The prose soars; the sense of empathy with the suffering of others is palpable. Shorten’s role in forging the National Disability Insurance Scheme has also become part of his story, critical in demonstrating that he is more than a run-of-the-mill Labor backroom operator.

Shorten also argues compellingly for a carbon market to deal with global warming, wants much greater investment in renewables, and thinks governments should take advantage of low interest rates to borrow capital for building infrastructure. He likes high-speed rail. Governments need to cast aside the assumptions of Reagan-era trickle-down economics, he says, and work for the more equal society that is a precondition for growth, not its outcome. All of this is good post–global financial crisis Labor stuff, and quite enough to keep a new government well occupied for some years, especially if Shorten is serious about helping state governments fix urban gridlock with investment in public transport.

There’s much on the importance of education in preparing Australians to adapt to a rapidly changing world. But Shorten’s attitude to its purpose, if this book is any indication, is mainly instrumental; it will lead to higher productivity, better wages and a stronger economy. He recognises, in passing, that education also matters for other reasons – that it might involve a sense of fun, excitement and discovery that can improve the quality of people’s lives and, by implication, raise the quality of the society to which they belong. But the thought never gives rise to more than a polite nod; not even in the context of his recognition that we are heading for life expectancies up around a century, and that education is already important to the lives of many people in their sixties and beyond.

There are paeans to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) that make Shorten sound a bit like Harold Wilson on steroids, but he devotes barely a word to the humanities, social sciences, creative industries, heritage, museums or the arts. He plans to give those studying the sciences at university a full fee rebate, an ambitious and (one suspects) foolish piece of educational engineering likely to push many young people into courses and careers for which they have little aptitude. He tells us that the Australian War Memorial is the best museum in the country but given his silence on the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector more generally, we have good reason to be sceptical about his judgement. The less polite reader might be inclined to dismiss it, like the national cemetery proposal and the affirming nod of this former army reservist to the excellence of our defence force, as dutiful Anzackery on the part of a Labor leader desperate to advertise his patriotism and national security credentials.

No one reading this book will confuse Bill Shorten with a great social-democratic visionary. “The paramount ambition of a Labor government has to be creating good jobs, jobs with a future and jobs of the future.” One might have thought that creating such jobs – to the extent that modern governments can actually do so – might rather be a pathway to a satisfying quality of life, the unleashing of talents, and a cohesive and decent society. No doubt Shorten would agree; but it’s telling that in his rhetoric about why jobs and education matter, he seems unable or unwilling to untangle means and ends. It speaks to the way everyday political discourse in this country – the safe stuff that mainly keeps your average political leader out of trouble and the rest of us comatose – will even dominate the efforts of a thoughtful political leader to articulate an enlarged vision of “the good society.”

But that might not, in the world of electoral calculation, be such a terrible thing. This doesn’t seem to be the age for visionaries, even if we might need a few to help us out of the policy quagmire into which we’ve been led by the political class over the last decade or two. Most electors recall where Rudd’s grandiosity ended up, just as they remember and dislike the bitter divisions of the Gillard interlude and the excruciating embarrassment of the Abbott years. Most recently, they’ve witnessed the rapid transition of Malcolm Turnbull from national saviour and inspiration to yet another incredible shrinking prime minister.

Shorten is at pains to emphasise that he won’t be another Kevin Rudd, a feat he manages easily without having to mention the name of that late and unlamented prime minister. “Any government I lead,” he writes, “will operate in a collegial, consultative manner where cabinet decision-making processes and caucus debate are taken seriously.” David Marr thought that if Shorten had taken up the opportunity offered him earlier in his career of entering state politics, he would likely have become “a fine premier of Victoria.” I would add that if he makes it to prime minister, he would probably bring to the job the pragmatic, consensual, low-key, policy-driven approach of some of the best Labor premiers of recent years: Steve Bracks and Jay Weatherill springing readily to mind. Shorten just doesn’t have the type of charisma that recalls a Hawke or a Keating, or even, at the state level, a Neville Wran, Bob Carr or Peter Beattie. As a parliamentary and media performer, he’s dutiful and conscientious; while not without passion, humour or wit, he can’t match Turnbull’s seemingly effortless performance of rhetorical spontaneity.

Yet it somehow became possible, over the past eighteen months or so, for growing numbers of Australians to imagine a “prime minister Shorten.” As federal opposition leader, he’s been level-headed, dogged and hard-working. He’s benefited from a notable party unity, and the new rules for leadership elections adopted in 2013 at Rudd’s instigation have seen him through the times when there have been mutterings or worse about his leadership. Opinion polling now indicates that electors are willing to reward him for his persistence; with a respectable showing, if not necessarily a victory.

But will Labor keep him if he loses the 2016 election, an outcome that remains distinctly possible? That might ultimately depend on the margin, as well as on opinions about his performance in this seemingly never-ending campaign. But my hunch is that whatever happens on election day itself, the federal Labor Party would be foolish to cast him aside lightly. •

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Business organisation was fragmented in the mid 1980s – a disunity skilfully fostered by prime minister Bob Hawke almost from the moment he came to office – and there was nothing even approaching a consensus about the best way of organising industrial relations. The New Right focused attention on the damage wrought by excessive government regulation and tariff protection but most of all by union power and the arbitration system. For eighty years, its proponents said, Australia had been penalising its highly efficient export industries – pastoralism, agriculture and mining – to prop up the manufacturing industry and urban wages.

Two articles in the right-wing magazine Quadrant early in the Hawke years crystallised attitudes. The first was by a middle-ranking public servant in the Department of Employment and Industrial Relations, Gerard Henderson, who had earlier been on the staff of Bob Santamaria’s right-wing Catholic National Civic Council. In his September 1983 article, “The Industrial Relations Club,” Henderson presented Australian industrial relations as fundamentally an exercise in mutual back-scratching. A coterie of Melbourne-based commissioners, union leaders, business representatives, industrial lawyers and public servants operated “in a club-like atmosphere” surrounded by “an ethos of complacency and self-congratulation” in which economic realities took second place to deal-making.

A second contribution to Quadrant, a year later, came from Treasury secretary John Stone. Stone had already announced his intention of resigning from the public service when he delivered “1929 and All That” as the Edward Shann Memorial Lecture at the University of Western Australia. Like Henderson, he had the wages system in his sights – “a crime against society” – but Stone developed a more ambitious argument that “the spirit of enterprise is shackled and weighed down by the dead hands of governments.” He appealed to the spirit of achievement represented by Gallipoli, Kokoda, Douglas Mawson, Charles Kingsford Smith, Howard Florey and Geoffrey Blainey.

Stone and Henderson had one thing in common, apart from their right-wing politics. As civil servants, neither had themselves been much subjected to the rigours of the market. Indeed, it was a feature of the New Right revolt that it tended to bring together aspiring politicians, political staffers, speechwriters, academics, public servants, consultants, lawyers, journalists and industrial relations practitioners. People risking their own money were not only inconspicuous, they were frequently berated as part of the problem on account of their cosy deals with government and unions. Yet it was critical to the New Right’s campaign to reshape Australian public policy that conventional ways of thinking about both the resolution of industrial conflict and the public service needed to be discredited. Industrial arbitration had to be stripped of its remaining judicial dignity, the public service of any residual status it enjoyed as a patriotic calling connected with a nation-building project.

Henderson took to this task with relish, opening a 1986 speech by ridiculing the department that had once employed him for the number of refrigerators it provided its staff. His former colleagues, he indicated, were stupid and self-serving, overwhelmingly concerned with their pleasures and perks. At the lunch held to mark his departure from the Department of Employment and Industrial Relations, he “ruefully reflected” that during his four years in the public service he “had lost more brain cells than any of my senior officers were born with.” This comment, he added, “was not appreciated by some senior officers. Some others, fortunately, could not comprehend it.” By the time he made this speech to a group of like-minded right-wing activists, Henderson was exercising what was left of his brain cells as chief of staff to opposition leader John Howard.

These activists drew on a particular understanding of Australian history, a melodrama of “goodies” and “baddies” in which the “baddies” – Alfred Deakin’s early twentieth-century Liberals and the Labor Party – had triumphed over a few economically literate souls who recognised that the laws of supply and demand could not be lightly brushed aside. They reserved a particular venom for Henry Bournes Higgins, the pioneering Arbitration Court president and architect of the living wage. Higgins, in arguing that industries must either pay their workers a living wage or cease to trade, was responsible for the gross inefficiencies that had sent Australia into inexorable national decline. In short, according to leading New Right figure Ray Evans, Higgins was “a nut… who, to the great detriment of his country, found himself able to give legal form and substance to his fantasies.”

The response of those who wished to deal with “our Higgins problem,” as they called it, was to establish the H.R. Nicholls Society in early 1986. Henry Nicholls had been an English radical, a Chartist who came to Australia during the 1850s gold rush. Many decades later in 1911, in his dotage as the editor of a Tasmanian newspaper, Nicholls found himself charged with contempt of court after writing of Higgins as a “political judge.” Ray Evans, who had himself once been a Labor man but was now an assistant to Western Mining’s Hugh Morgan, was impressed by Nicholls’s defiance when he encountered the story. Along with John Stone, Barrie Purvis, the director of the wool-broking employers’ body, and Peter Costello, a young barrister and Liberal Party activist, Evans wrote to potentially interested parties in January 1986 proposing the formation of a society “to give new impetus for reform of the present labour market and to provide a forum for discussion of alternatives to the present regulation of industrial relations.” The letter suggested that the stakes were high. The outcome of the present debate over industrial relations would have “great significance… for Australia’s future economic growth, political development and ultimately, perhaps, territorial integrity.”

Costello had recently become a figure of some national repute on the back of a legal battle in Victoria. The Dollar Sweets case arose from an industrial campaign run by the Federated Confectioners’ Association. As in other famous industrial cases of the mid 1980s, the situation was peculiar. The union concerned, led by Carlo Frizziero, was militant, hostile to the Hawke government’s Prices and Incomes Accord with the unions, and on the far left of the Victorian Labor Party. In April 1985, just a few weeks before the Dollar Sweets strike, the small group of left-wing unions with whom Frizziero was associated had suffered a major defeat at the Victorian Labor Party’s annual conference, when they failed to prevent the readmission to the party of four conservative unions that had left during the split of 1955 and subsequently been associated with the Democratic Labor Party: the Clerks, Shop Assistants, Ironworkers, and Carpenters and Joiners.

The party conference damaged the far left’s image, and did little to enhance that of the Victorian Labor Party generally. The wild melee that occurred at the Coburg Town Hall recalled the physical combat and bitter passion of the episode to which this Sunday morning was a tragicomic postscript: the Labor split of 1955. It was one thing to issue black armbands to delegates entering the hall, and for the president of the Musicians’ Union to play on his clarinet “a mournful refrain of The Last Post.” It was quite another for left-wing activists to hurl abuse, punch and jostle delegates, and throw overripe tomatoes at their opponents as they tried to enter the hall.

The Dollar Sweets dispute added to the reputational damage incurred by the far left unions. A small family business with twenty-seven employees operating in suburban Glen Iris, Dollar Sweets was well-suited to an anti-union propaganda blitz. Here was another case of “the little man who stood up to trade union bullies and thugs.” The boss, of Austrian descent, was Fred Stauder, and among the firm’s products were Hundreds and Thousands, as seen and admired on fairy bread and birthday cakes at children’s parties. The confectioners’ union, having achieved a reduction of working hours to thirty-six per week in the larger firms, had now moved on to the likes of Dollar Sweets. But Stauder replied that the business could not afford any additional reduction in the working week. In July 1985 the union called a strike and established a picket; fifteen of the company’s employees stopped work. After Stauder told them that they would either have to sign a no-strike agreement or face dismissal, he terminated their employment and replaced them.

The strike was not good-humoured. Telephone wires were cut and locks filled with glue. There was a bomb threat, an arson attempt and a physical altercation between Frizziero and a truck driver delivering sugar to the factory. The union dropped its claim for reduced hours, but demanded that the striking workers be reinstated. Stauder turned to senior business leaders for help. They directed him to Peter Costello, a twenty-eight-year-old barrister, who offered as a long shot the possibility of a successful common-law tort action. With the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce providing the money, Dollar Sweets issued legal proceedings against the union. The following month, a decision of the Supreme Court called the union’s behaviour “stupid and nihilistic” and ordered that the picket be lifted. The parties later settled for a union payment of $175,000 in damages.

A much bigger strike during 1985 also helped place a spring in the step of New Right activists. The dispute occurred over the efforts of the South East Queensland Electricity Board, or SEQEB, to use contract labour. The National Party government had introduced a regime of equalising electricity costs across the state, the effect of which was to impose a large cross-subsidy of rural and provincial consumers at the expense of those living in the major centres. But the result – massively increased electricity prices for city-dwellers – was potentially damaging to the government at a time when Bjelke-Petersen’s decision to sever his coalition with the Liberal Party demanded National Party electoral gains in the more populated areas.

The dispute bubbled on for almost a year before exploding into a full-scale strike in February 1985. Efforts by the State Industrial Commission to settle the dispute were unavailing and on 7 February, with thousands of consumers already in the dark, the Bjelke-Petersen government declared a state of emergency. With the government’s support, SEQEB management subsequently sacked 1000 striking linesmen, replacing them with non-unionists bound by contracts containing no-strike clauses.

Solidarity strikes, pickets and protest marches were ineffective in countering Bjelke-Petersen’s war against the union’s members. Instead, the government introduced a series of laws intended to curb union power in the industry. And in a move that reprised his ban on street marches in the late 1970s, Bjelke-Petersen transformed protest into a threat to law and order by strengthening the powers of police in a manner that outlawed pickets. Anyone now deemed to be interfering with the power supply could be arrested. In August a handful of members of a group that called itself “Concerned Christians” protesting near SEQEB headquarters were arrested under the Electricity (Continuity of Supply) Act.

Most of the striking workers were left without jobs or hope but with a burning resentment of their treatment at the hands of SEQEB, the government, union officials and timid Labor politicians. Many thought they had been sold out by their leaders for the sake of career advancement and political advantage. There was particular bitterness over the abject surrender of the Trades and Labour Council. Meanwhile the strike’s undoubted victor, Bjelke-Petersen, reached his apogee as a hero of the political right.

The growing aggression of a handful of employers in the mid 1980s saw a distinct reaction set in, based on the suspicion that industrial warfare incurred intangible social and economic costs along with the more obvious benefit of being able to pose, like an ancient ruler, with one’s foot firmly planted on the neck of a vanquished foe. The tipping point was Robe River, the last of the fabled New Right industrial disputes of the mid 1980s, and the most ambiguous in its immediate politics and eventual impact. No dispute better illustrates the New Right’s apocalyptic vision of how a period of intense conflict would give way to an industrial utopia in which bosses and workers would deal with one another as autonomous and rational individuals, free from the insidious interference of union or state.

Robe River was in the Pilbara, a remote region in the northwest of Western Australia that was a leading producer of iron ore. It had operated from 1970 as a joint venture under the management of the American firm Cleveland Cliffs, but in 1986 Peko-Wallsend, one of the partners, became the majority shareholder and took over running the company. Its profitability climbed rapidly in the first half of the 1980s. But the Japanese steel industry, which was Peko’s leading customer, entered a more difficult period after 1985, which reduced the scope for exports. Peko’s new chief executive, Charles Copeman, blamed the company’s problems on slack management and “restrictive work practices” – a phrase that entered the political lexicon at this juncture. After sending in a team of executives to investigate, Copeman sacked four senior managers and demoted the managing director, then declared existing industrial agreements null and void. Hypocritically – considering Copeman’s contempt for the arbitration system – the company wanted to place all workers on the site under the federal award system, a move opposed by the state Labor government.

To the extent that restrictive work practices were a problem at Robe River, they were the result not of the compulsory arbitration so hated by New Right ideologues but of the local collective bargaining they wanted to replace it with. Robe River had differed from other Pilbara companies in seeking to exploit the spot – or short-term – market in iron ore rather than use long-term contracts. Spot prices were higher, but with this came an acute sensitivity to industrial disruption, which in turn encouraged a compliant response to union demands. For the new management, it seemed that if local arrangements could be overridden, many of the practices that Peko believed were wrecking the operation could be removed.

Having announced its intention to remove restrictive work practices, the company conducted what many workers saw as a reign of terror. It transferred workers around the operation irrespective of previous arrangements, including a sixty-year-old tea lady who was “reclassified as an ore handler and put out on yard duties.” While the company did its best to present its workers as the beneficiaries of a well-developed system of rorts, there was also sufficient adverse publicity about Peko’s behaviour to prevent Copeman from becoming a popular hero.

Peko’s aggression and vindictiveness disturbed even those convinced that conditions at Robe River were on the soft side. Union representatives complained that management had targeted them for demeaning work in what they called “punishment details,” while the company introduced new tenancy agreements in the company towns of the northwest, providing for a 400 per cent rent increase for workers who went out on strike. Wives feared being evicted from their homes while work contracts now provided that “any or all of the conditions of employment can be changed weekly at the sole discretion of the company.” Most seriously for Peko’s reputation, when the WA Industrial Relations Commission ordered a moratorium on industrial action and investigation of work practices, the company sacked sixty-four employees who had resisted changes in their working arrangements. When the commission ordered their reinstatement, Peko sacked its entire workforce of 1160; it looked like the kind of lawlessness of which H.R. Nicholls Society types had accused unions at Dollar Sweets.

In Pilbara towns such as Pannawonica and Wickham, workers and their families were seething at the company’s behaviour. Some were prepared to acknowledge the “rorts” and conceded that there were practices that could readily be abandoned. “I know there’s got to be changes,” commented one worker. “I think most of us do. But the way the company’s going about it. You know, just splitting the town, making people angry.” Pilbara families especially resented the idea, current in the state’s more closely settled south, that they were “filthy rich” and living a life of luxury and comfort. Food, electricity and petrol prices were high, and holidays expensive because of the region’s remoteness.

Central to Peko’s strategy for dealing with its workforce was to sow divisions between the white- and blue-collar employees, between “staffies” and “wages.” Staffies had to sign contracts agreeing to take the places of striking blue-collar workers or face dismissal. Previously, community clubs and organisations – indeed, the Pilbara towns’ social life – had revolved around easy sociability between the two groups. As blue-collar workers and their families saw it, there was little consciousness of status difference between them: it was “a close-knit community” in which people “got on well.” Hence, for blue-collar unionists, the failure of most clerical staff to support them aroused bitter resentment; they regarded them as “scabs” and shunned them. Those who turned up to take the places of striking workers were greeted at the security gate by a menacing banner that proclaimed: “Scabs. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.” Staff who entered a local hotel “soon left under a barrage of abuse from unionists.”

The lockout ended on 3 September after the Industrial Relations Commission rejected Robe River’s appeal against an order to reinstate sacked workers. But the company’s refusal to enter into conciliation meant that there would be no quick end to the dispute. The commission eventually upheld the company’s right to eliminate restrictive work practices. Union leaders had worked hard to restrain their members, preferring “passive resistance” to a strike. But the company continued to carry out reprisals. In December 1986 a strike finally occurred over harassment of unionists, white-collar workers performing blue-collar labour, and staffing levels. Pickets were established and unionists showered abuse on strike-breakers as they arrived for work each day. Meanwhile, the company took its cue from Dollar Sweets – Peter Costello was advising Copeman – and issued writs against individual union officials and conveners.

In the New Right industrial fable, Peko was a tower of strength. In reality, there were good reasons why it should now seek a compromise. Peko’s Japanese partners had expressed their concerns about the company’s manner of dealing with its employees as early as August, and the WA government was furious with Peko for the dispute’s impact on the state’s reputation as a reliable exporter of iron ore. Bob Hawke, equally unimpressed, had called employer militants of the Copeman type “political troglodytes and economic lunatics.” The ACTU had established a fighting fund and workers from other Pilbara mines had expressed a willingness to shut down the whole region’s iron-ore operations. Even as it issued one legal writ after another, Peko could not be sure of how far the unions would be prepared to go.

Early in 1987 negotiations between ACTU president Simon Crean and Copeman resulted in a peace deal, although not without some resistance from rank-and-file unionists. It was hard to miss the irony: Copeman, the scourge of arbitration and the unions, had relied on one to deal with restrictive work practices, and on the other to extract him from the industrial chaos of his own making.

Peko was soon reporting a happy and productive workforce, which the company and its New Right supporters treated as vindication. Sceptics, however, were unconvinced by claims of an outbreak of happiness, and pointed out that other companies seemed to have managed greater productivity, and probably greater happiness, without prosecuting industrial warfare on a grand scale.

Nor can the federal government’s move away from allowing price inflation to determine the level of the basic wage (a system called “indexation”) late in 1986 be seen as a direct outcome of the New Right revolt. Hawke had been playing with the idea of linking wage levels to considerations of efficiency and productivity, in addition to price increases, for many years, and the government remained committed to an entrenchment of the award system and the role of unions within it. And it is by no means self-evident that it became easier as a result of Robe River, at least in the short term, to imagine large workplaces across the nation full of employees on individual contracts, for the dispute was also an illustration of the costs of open industrial warfare.

Robe River also brought the H.R. Nicholls Society to national attention as a mysterious and possibly dangerous cabal, contributing to New Right stridency – and a backlash against it that would soon have disastrous political consequences for opponents of the Hawke government. The Prices and Incomes Accord was based on a fusion of politics and industrial relations that eventually helped keep the Labor Party in office for longer than any previous national Labor government. But the political right’s attempt at creating its own fusion would help keep the Coalition out of power for another decade. •

This is an edited extract from The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia, by Frank Bongiorno, published this month by Black Inc.

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Abbott’s prime ministership was in such a state of decay that any change was going to have a significant impact. No one suggests that Bill Shorten’s leadership of the Labor Party has created any electoral momentum of its own; so far, he and Labor have largely benefited from the Coalition’s hopeless performance and the deservedly deep unpopularity of Abbott. The prospect of an early election will rise as the Coalition’s numbers improve, not least because after two wasted years of economic policy (and much else), the government won’t be looking forward to delivering an election-year budget full of handouts the country can ill afford.  

But that assumes Turnbull’s prime ministership proves to be more successful, and popular, than his previous term as party leader. He faces obstacles at least as formidable as the deceptions of Godwin Grech, not least a Coalition riven by the personal animosities, ideological conflicts and policy divisions that are among the Abbott prime ministership’s main legacies. At least for the time being, the government will carry the bad odour that often lingers once its perpetrator has walked out of the room.

But Abbott hasn’t actually walked out of the room, of course – not completely, not yet. And his supporters on the right, some of whom believe that even Abbott wasn’t really conservative enough, certainly haven’t left. All of this could make for a difficult time for Turnbull this side of an election, and an interesting one afterwards.

Even among people not inclined to vote for his party, though, considerable optimism has been invested in Turnbull’s prime ministership. This is understandable. Since John Howard’s fall in 2007, a series of prime ministers have proved incapable of doing the job to the satisfaction of either their party or the electorate.

Each of them was able to do part of the job. Rudd, despite being a policy wonk, proved good at arousing the support and even affection of many ordinary voters – a skill that mystified and frustrated people in Canberra who had to endure the real man up close and personal. Gillard had many of the personal qualities, negotiating skills and policy interests essential in a good prime minister, but she was destroyed by the circumstances of her accession to the leadership, a series of poor decisions, a wooden public persona and an unrelenting campaign of misogynist abuse.

Abbott was the odd one out. He came to the prime ministership offering little of substance, and delivered even less. Of the three, his prime ministership was the worst, and comparisons with Billy McMahon have already become hackneyed.

Will Turnbull become the latest in this line of prime ministerial disappointments? Among the post-Howard leaders, he brings by far the most diverse background and experience. His mother was Coral Lansbury, a figure known to people like me as a talented historian who wrote a good book on images of Australia in the colonial era. Lansbury departed from the family home when Malcolm was a boy, leaving his father to raise him; after living in New Zealand and remarrying, she went on to a successful academic career in the United States.

Following a Rhodes scholarship, Turnbull became moderately rich and famous in the 1980s, and predictions began circulating that he was a prime minister in the making. His fame came from his role as counsel to Kerry Packer, especially after a leak to the National Times suggested that the Costigan royal commission was investigating allegations that the media magnate – thinly disguised as “Goanna” in the paper’s report – had been involved in a series of lurid activities, including drug-running and importing pornography. None of this proved true, and Turnbull played a critical role in Packer’s successful defence of his reputation. But, as Paul Barry has shown, Packer’s efforts to shield his elaborate tax affairs – “well-organised” is the usual euphemism – were hardly likely to allay the suspicions of a royal commission that had already found corruption and criminality in so many dark corners of Australian life.

Turnbull went on to defend former British intelligence agent Peter Wright – then living in Tasmania – against the Thatcher government’s efforts to prevent him from publishing his (ghost-written) memoirs, Spycatcher. Having won a most difficult case, he produced a book about the experience that many thought was a better read than Wright’s.

Turnbull’s rising wealth came from shrewd deal-making at the merchant bank he had formed with Labor-aligned figures Nicholas Whitlam and Neville Wran. Early work included helping a new regime at the Fairfax media group, led by the twenty-six-year-old Warwick, locate emergency finance during its ill-fated takeover of the family company. (You might recall the joke: How do you create a small business in Australia? Give a big business to Warwick Fairfax.) In many ways, the wreckage Turnbull confronts in the federal Coalition bears a resemblance to the failing media companies – the Ten Network was another, owned for a time by Frank Lowy’s Westfield – that were his opportunity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Whether this kind of deal-making is good training for the prime ministership, it is hard to say. But like the activities of his opponent Shorten as a union leader, they will have left a rich trail for future enquiry by investigative journalists and unauthorised biographers – although probably not, in Turnbull’s case, royal commissions.

All of this means that Turnbull has been working in very public roles for a long time, something that has become increasingly rare among arrivals in the prime ministerial office. Most electors knew precious little about either Rudd or Gillard when they assumed the top job because neither had been in the public eye – or even in parliament – for very long. We thought we knew Abbott better since we’d had more of a chance to see him in action, but his personal flaws proved so great that they more than counterbalanced whatever reassurance familiarity might have bred.

In reality, though, to know Abbott was never to love him, for most voters anyway. He came to office with few positive ideas and a bag of silly rhetorical tricks that were so obviously part of his conservative political he-man persona. His only real theme was that Labor had wrecked the country. Those with memories of the anti-Whitlam rhetoric of the 1970s know exactly where this stuff was coming from. Abbott’s problem is that, in contrast with attitudes to the Whitlam government at the time (as opposed to rosy memories decades later), few people really believe that the Labor governments led by Rudd or Gillard were truly the most incompetent ever.

Abbott’s own government, meanwhile, looked increasingly like a dysfunctional university student union taken over by an alliance of the rugby team and the Beer Appreciation Society. In Canberra, Abbott had a reputation for courtesy in his dealings with public servants and staffers. Apart from that, one of the few things likely to be recalled in his favour is that he showed sufficient forbearance not to award himself a knighthood as his last act in office.

Abbott fell for his own rhetoric and imagined that he could do what he liked because no one could stand the thought of having Labor back. In reality, many people voted for him through gritted teeth in 2013, and once they had their wish – the removal of Labor – the string of Coalition failures meant that many of them were soon looking for an alternative, either within the Liberal Party or outside it.

Voters clearly like Turnbull more. He is a good advocate, he looks and sounds like a grown-up, and he seems to realise that voters don’t relish being treated as imbeciles – increasingly the default position in recent years, and especially so under Abbott. He also has a very high opinion of himself, which he likes to paint over with calculated self-deprecatory remarks at media conferences and on Q&A. Many of his quips have a clear message: I’m not really a politician as much as a businessman engaged in politics; the day-to-day gossip and trivia of political life is beneath your contempt and mine; I’m really smarter than you and everyone else here but for the sake of appearances let’s pretend you’re my equal; I’m the last man standing with a sense of proportion.

The media love this kind of thing because they largely share his combination of progressive social values and market economics. So far, they have managed to persuade themselves that this former journalist and media lawyer is in some manner one of them – despite his huge ego, immense wealth and vaulting ambition. Their gratitude while he was helping them produce amusing stories and colourful copy was understandable. But the danger is that it will wear thin now he is in charge, which means he will need to find another way of communicating what he is about.

In this, he has made a good start: the ministerial reshuffle has moved things decisively back to the centre, his clean-out of Howard-era ministers and influx of women and younger members giving the government a much fresher look than most commentators would have imagined possible a few days ago. •

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The old Australia is so often recalled as a place of rough egalitarianism and easy informality, in which old-world rules, conventions and customs dissolved in drinks and mateyness. But it was also a place with a fairly rigid moral code, one heavily indebted to Victorian and Edwardian ideas of respectability. The sexual double standard and the ascendancy of the male breadwinner meant that the burden was greater for women, but the demands on men were also heavy in a society that rewarded respectability, discretion and restraint – and punished their absence. Historians have expended much energy trying to recover some of the complexity of the social codes and rules that prevailed – and none with more distinction or success than John Rickard.

The Melbourne-born Rickard came to academic life rather late, at Monash University, after a career as an actor and singer, the early years of which figure in this fine memoir. His first book – published in 1976 and based on his doctoral thesis – was a groundbreaking study of class in Australian politics in the formative period around Federation. His interest in both class and era remained, and he followed up in 1984 with an outstanding biography of the politician, social reformer and arbitration court judge H.B. Higgins. Later, in 1996, he would publish a fascinating experimental study of the Deakin family. In between, in the year of Australia’s bicentenary, came a lively and widely admired cultural history of Australia.

In all of this work, Rickard reveals an interest in the intimacies of personal life and their entanglement with public careers, images and ideologies. He also engages with the possibilities of applying psychoanalytic insights to past lives, an approach made explicit when he borrowed from Freud the title of his book about the Deakins, A Family Romance. But it is easy to overlook – or at least, as a reader, to put aside – the psychoanalytic inspiration in Rickard’s work because he eschews jargon, avoids theoretical scaffolding, and has always treated the writing of history and biography as a fundamentally literary endeavour.

These virtues are apparent again in his new book, An Imperial Affair, in which Rickard turns to the story of his own family – or, more precisely, that of his parents Philip and Pearl (who would later prefer the name Mildred). Both were from downwardly mobile middle-class families; and their story, to some extent, is about the effort to recover economic prosperity and social status. Philip had a career in the Royal Australian Air Force: he was a qualified pilot, but it was in finance and administration that he made his mark. Both were musical: Philip as a church organist, Pearl in the choir. Early in the book there is a charming account of Philip wooing Pearl with nectarines; but it was music that brought them together and one gets the feeling it might also have made a modest contribution towards keeping them together when other forces were pulling them apart.

The possibility of writing a book such as this arrived in the form of a shoebox of letters Rickard received from his sister Barbara Fisher, a poet whose work also figures in this memoir. Among these letters Philip wrote to Pearl during the second world war, inside a piece of folded paper, Rickard found a photograph of a woman with a child. On the paper, in Pearl’s handwriting, the woman is identified as “Mrs Clare Moillet” and her London address is given.

Clare was a name Rickard had heard in his childhood, along with the word “divorce,” as he lay in his bed in Dubbo listening to his parents argue. His father, posted in London during the war, had formed a relationship with Clare, a married woman, which led his parents to be briefly estranged. Rather than divorcing, though, they remade their lives together, and not entirely unhappily: the close-knit Rickard family lived a comfortable, cultured, interesting life in Sydney from the mid 1940s through to the early 1960s.

John’s parents’ realisation at the beginning of the 1960s that their son was homosexual seems barely to have caused a ripple, although you sense, from Rickard’s moving passage on the uncomfortable encounter with his parents, that there was rather more turbulence going on beneath the surface. It eventually emerges that Philip had kept in touch with Clare during these years, and when Mildred died in 1962, he went so far as to attempt, unsuccessfully, to persuade her to marry him; she had also been widowed by this time. Philip remarried happily and died in 1977.

The bare bones of this story don’t mark the family as especially unusual. A husband strays from the marriage bed. A long wartime absence causes strains in a marriage that the couple patch up as best they can. A family settles into a comfortable middle-class life in Menzies’s Australia, marked by the satisfactions of home, family and friendship.

But there is more to the story. The Rickards had also spent a critical three years of their lives in England during the 1930s, when Philip was posted there by the RAAF. Pearl was presented at court. (And you can see from the cover of this book why people thought she resembled Wallis Simpson. The handsome Philip is there in court dress, including ceremonial sword.)

This sojourn provided the Rickards with an experience of being imperial and Australian that most Australians of their era couldn’t enjoy. They were in Britain as members of the imperial family, yet they also recognised difference and sometimes found English ways frustrating. The highest compliment Philip appears to have been able to bestow while he was among the English was to remark that someone didn’t put on any “side”; the Rickards were aware of finding themselves in a society where class mattered a great deal. As respectable middle-class Australians of their generation, they worked with its grain, yet were still able to observe the class system as outsiders.

They were in London at the time of the abdication crisis and the Munich crisis, leaving in early 1939 and “bringing their own England back with them” to Australia. Philip, of course, would not be home long; the war soon took him back to England via the United States, which he tended to measure against what he’d seen in all those Hollywood films. But just before he left Australia, there had been an affair with “the woman in the red coat”; her existence, but not her name, is known to Rickard through references in a couple of letters Philip wrote to Pearl.

Philip was handsome, flirty, highly sexed; the glimpses we gain of this man’s life add valuable texture to our very incomplete understanding of Australian middle-class masculinity. You gain a sense of a man who had to work hard at the restraint demanded by bourgeois respectability. He had a taste for some mildly disreputable forms of entertainment, and his absences from wife and family – especially during the war – unsurprisingly seem to have brought out this side of his taste and character.

When I interviewed Rickard about An Imperial Affair at the National Library, I asked him what he imagines his parents might have thought of the book. I don’t think he found answering this question difficult. His parents’ generation valued its privacy; they would surely not have welcomed the exposure of their lives to public view.

Yet they have also been fortunate in their son, the social historian and memoirist. He brings to his task love and honesty in dealing with the complexities of family relationships; the literary, imaginative and scholarly qualities needed to combine memoir and social history; and a sensitivity and humour in weighing the respective claims of conventional historical sources, family lore and individual memory.

The result is a moving and important account of the middle-class family in twentieth-century Australia, as well as of empire itself as a way of life: that is to say, as something more than political entity, system of economic exploitation or mass of red on a map. Empire was also a web of culture, sexuality and intimacy, a world at once public and private – and one in which the private occasionally teetered on the dangerous edge of becoming public and scandalous. •

An Imperial Affair: Portrait of an Australian Marriage
By John Rickard | Monash University Publishing | $24.95

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For the men like this, Gillard’s political demise is insufficient. She must be humiliated and criminalised. Only then, perhaps, will they be able to put behind them the dreadful, castrating experience of being governed by a female Labor prime minister.

News Limited is also clearly enjoying the royal commission, relishing the Abbott government’s willingness to put taxpayer dollars to work in a public-spirited quest to clean up the union movement by investigating a twenty-year-old scandal. Needless to say, no one at News, despite years of digging and many sensational headlines, has yet presented a scrap of evidence that points to criminality on Gillard’s part. Glenn Milne, a senior journalist at the Australian, managed only to trash his own reputation when he published a false claim that Gillard was living in a residence supposedly paid for by the embezzled gains of her then boyfriend. But according to Hedley Thomas, also of the Australian, and still in pursuit of Gillard, “the ABC and many in the Canberra press gallery chose to run a protection racket of the PM when these matters were in plain view.”

The sittings of the royal commission and the hysterical — as well as hopeful — response they have elicited from some journalists are a timely reminder of one of the salient features of recent Australian politics: the intense personal hatred that Gillard’s government and prime ministership evoked. The vivid, even pornographic, nature of many things said, written and published about Gillard since 2010 — some by men sufficiently well-placed in the media or politics to reach a large audience — means that more balanced and reasoned analysis of her government has so far been difficult to discern. This context affects the defence of Gillard, as well as attacks on her, for even sympathetic commentators have so far found it difficult to move beyond gender, personality and the rivalry with Kevin Rudd to explore more elusive matters of policy, administration and statecraft.

And so The Gillard Governments is to be welcomed as an early effort to provide a balanced assessment. It is about the Gillard governments — plural — because there were indeed two of them; one that extended over a few weeks in the middle of 2010, in the lead-up to an election in which Labor lost its majority; the other a more drawn-out business that ended with Kevin Rudd’s displacement of Gillard as prime minister in June 2013. The book also deals with the second Rudd government, whose lifespan was of similarly short duration to that of the first Gillard administration.

Largely (although not exclusively) the product of academics based at, or associated with, the University of Canberra, the book is the latest in a long-running series on Australian Commonwealth administration stretching back to the early 1980s. It’s more an essay collection than a coherent or comprehensive study; there are areas of government, such as health, Indigenous affairs and the arts, that are ignored or dealt with only in passing. In a chapter on the economy, Anne Garnett and Phil Lewis devote just one page to industrial relations and do little more than repeat the complaints of the Murdoch press and business lobby about lack of labour flexibility. Jenny Chesters’s account of the Gonski reforms reads at times a little like an extended government press release, yet she does make the telling point at the end that the Gillard government failed to present its National Plan for School Improvement in a way to persuade electors that fairer funding would help close the gap in student performance associated with socioeconomic status. The idea of education as a “race” in which Australia was falling behind, she suggests, was also unattractive to voters.

The Gillard government’s inability to present its policies as part of a “narrative” about where it was trying to take the country is a recurrent theme of the book. It figures in the chapter on climate change in which the authors, Andrew Macintosh and Richard Denniss, suggest that the government didn’t ever succeed in conveying to voters what it was trying to achieve. Did it want to reduce carbon emissions at the least cost possible? Or was it aiming to effect a rapid transition away from carbon-based energy generation towards clean energy? Some authors point to the continuities with previous governments, such as in rural and regional policy, with Linda Courtenay Botterill and Geoff Cockfield emphasising the resilient force of the agrarian myth — the special place of farming in the national psyche — alongside the seemingly inexorable shift to market liberalism and self-reliance. The themes of continuity and inheritance are also present in the chapter on the economy, where Garnett and Lewis show clearly enough that bad taxation policy under both Howard and Rudd has produced a major structural problem for governments on the revenue side; they’re simply not collecting enough tax to do the things voters expect them to do.

The Gillard government’s “chapter” in the sorry tale of Australian refugee policy is recounted by Mary Walsh, who reminds us that the Coalition couldn’t bring itself to support the Malaysian solution because it was “a cruel deal for boat people,” as Tony Abbott put it — thereby demonstrating, once and for all, that there is no shame in politics. At every moment in the tortured twists and turns over asylum-seeker policy during the Gillard years, the opposition’s actions were based on the quest to squeeze as much political advantage as possible from an issue that has always been a winner for it. It insisted on a Nauru-centred “Pacific Solution,” for instance, because that would have represented a symbolic capitulation by Labor to the offshore processing policy of the Howard era. The Coalition’s pretence of concern about drowning asylum seekers stands exposed as a complete sham by its unwillingness to countenance the Malaysian scheme when it had an opportunity to provide the government with bipartisan support. But the very last thing that the opposition wanted under a Labor government was a refugee policy that worked.

The aggression of the Abbott-led opposition towards the Gillard government lingers like a bad smell in virtually every chapter in the book. Yet Abbott’s style was poorly adapted to the challenges of dealing with the independents — Andrew Wilkie, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott — whose support he needed to form government. His efforts were probably doomed from the start because even if he had been able to form such a government, he would have been sorely tempted to call an early election in the hope of turning a minority into a majority. The independents, having the balance of power, recognised this possibility, and wanted none of it.

Gillard’s interpersonal skills, moreover, were on display in her successful negotiations with the independents during those eventful seventeen days in 2010. Abbott’s inept handling of the same task might help explain why there is a persistent lack of confidence in his political judgement in Coalition ranks even after the 2013 election victory. He seems to have carried considerable bitterness out of this failure, which found expression in a political vocabulary that represented the Gillard government as illegitimate. It was not simply that its policies were wrong-headed, or that their implementation was incompetent; the government, Abbott implied, had no right to exist. Gillard’s integrity was impugned at every turn, an effort reinforced by the blatant anti-government campaigning of a large section of the media, Rudd’s strenuous efforts to undermine her leadership, and an undercurrent of sexism that eventually exploded into the bitter misogyny of the talkback radio airwaves and the blogosphere.

The gender issue — and especially its handling in the media — is explored by Sally Young and Matthew Ricketson. They place Gillard’s treatment in the context of the international literature on media sexism. In this telling, Gillard’s treatment was both “shocking” — because “it was frequently obscene and belittling” — and “predictable,” since it largely conformed to an international pattern in the media’s treatment of female political leaders.

It is a virtue of this book that its authors don’t allow themselves to become distracted by the immense noise that surrounded the government. Some 561 pieces of legislation were passed during Gillard’s prime ministership, many more than under the previous Rudd government, and even a few more than the last Howard government managed — and it had enjoyed a Senate majority. All of this occurred during a period in which Gillard was dependent on the support of the independents to get the government’s bills through the lower house, and on the Greens to pass the Senate.

The achievement is magnified by Abbott’s adversarialism, which saw half of all bills that went before the House of Representatives contested by the opposition. There is a valuable chapter in the book by Gwynneth Singleton exploring the government’s impressive legislative record, and another by Brenton Prosser and John Warhurst casting a cool eye over the contribution of the independents. It is suggested that they exercised only a moderate influence in shaping public policy and reforming the political process, and certainly far less than suggested by some of the loftier rhetoric and aspirations in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 election.

There are other favourable judgements in the book, such as Andrew Carr’s that “the Gillard government was less ambitious, more pragmatic and more successful than the Rudd government” in foreign and defence policies. The “Asian Century” initiative, he suggests, while never quite working as the narrative the government desperately needed, did help to draw together its policies across a range of areas. Carr finds more coherence, as well as “competent and professional administration,” in Gillard’s foreign policy, a field in which she had no great expertise, and for which she professed no particular passion at the time she came to office. In a chapter on the public service, meanwhile, Bill Burmester and John Halligan detect a welcome retreat from the policy-on-the-run of the Rudd government, and a more orderly approach to the public service and policy formulation. Yet the regular chopping and changing of departments and portfolios continued under Gillard. During the last year or so of the government, your average public servant couldn’t quite be sure who her minister would be when she arrived at work in the morning, any more than she could predict what her department might be called next week. The acronyms became increasingly comical, an alphabet soup of government fickleness.

The broad impression I gained from the efforts of these scholars to evaluate the performance of the government and its prime minister was of a mediocre outfit that scored some limited policy successes but which invariably failed to capitalise politically on its modest achievements. Its economic management was uninspiring, and especially so its foolish promise of a budget surplus it was unlikely ever to be able to deliver. Here, it admittedly inherited a large deficit from the global financial crisis and the Rudd government’s efforts to deal with it through stimulus spending.

Some of its other initiatives, such as the mining and carbon taxes, were poorly designed and unable to achieve their goals. Gillard, of course, suffered politically from the perception that she had promised not to introduce a carbon tax and had then gone ahead and done so under pressure from the Greens. But political failure and policy failure went hand in hand; poorly designed taxes could not deliver revenue that the government needed for its spending initiatives and to bring the budget back to surplus. The government was again, in these areas, to some extent a captive of the gross political and administrative failures of its predecessor (of which Gillard was, of course, a leading member), yet the Gillard government’s efforts to deal with the fall-out of the Rudd government were hampered by the new and difficult political circumstances following the 2010 election.

Above all, the government seemed unable to persuade enough people that it was doing a good job, even when it was, in fact, doing a pretty good job. Perhaps the fairest judgement is delivered in the book’s final chapter by Mark Evans and Brendan McCaffrie: “governments can be more competent than they appear.” It is in this insight that some of the origins of the present government’s problems lie. Just as Tony Abbott sought to assail the Gillard government’s competence through smart-aleck comparisons with the Whitlam government (“I used to think it was the worst government since Whitlam, but that is very unfair to Gough Whitlam”), the wheel is already turning as Abbott’s government plunges in the polls and lurches from one political disaster barely in time to mismanage the next.

But the issue of competence is the least of it. Having implied through his unrelenting condemnation of Gillard that a Coalition government would uphold the very highest standards, in the aftermath of the 2014 budget he now finds himself accused of brazen dishonesty and low cynicism. And once negative impressions of this kind take hold, they have a tendency to cling to you like a limpet to a rock. Just ask Julia Gillard. •

The post Labor’s persuasion problem appeared first on Inside Story.

FOR BOTH sides of Australian politics, the 1980s has assumed the status of a heroic age. Among Labor figures, this is hardly surprising, since the era was marked by a string of election victories, significant policy innovation and economic transformation, led by two charismatic personalities – Bob Hawke and Paul Keating – and supported by many talented ministers. For the Liberals and Nationals, it is harder to see why the period should be celebrated, except as a magnanimous tribute to the past achievements of their opponents, which they can then, not so magnanimously, contrast with Labor’s recent performance.

But not so, for the conservatives have come to regard the 1980s as the happy era in which they waged war on the “Industrial Relations Club.” The term is Gerard Henderson’s, from a 1983 essay in Quadrant in which he claimed that employer groups, unions, the federal industrial relations department and the Arbitration Commission formed a largely Melbourne-based club that controlled Australian industrial relations. The individuals running these organisations, he wrote, had a “vested interest” in an IR system based on pragmatic deal-making between contending parties. They acted without regard for the economic effects of their decisions, or for the national interest more generally.

In a recent speech to the Sydney Institute, employment minister Eric Abetz compared Henderson (who now presides over that very institute) to Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg five centuries ago. Abetz claimed that Henderson, like Luther, caused reverberations that led to a “Thirty Years War.” (The real Thirty Years War actually broke out a century after Luther’s famous protest, but things presumably moved at a slower pace in those days.)

Henderson’s argument in 1983 would have been recognisable to any “public choice” theorist among economists and political scientists; his IR Club was a group whose self-interest dictated behaviour that undermined the public interest. At the time, he was working in Melbourne for the federal Department of Employment and Industrial Relations. He recalled a few years later that it “caused some disquiet” among the departmental heavies in Canberra. “It is as if the Will of Allah had been queried in a mosque.” Today, any public servant who published such an article in the policy area in which he or she happened to be employed would surely be subject to disciplinary action if not dismissal.

In the years ahead, during which he became a Liberal staffer and then the director of a right-wing think tank, Henderson was among a group of lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and business leaders who attacked Australia’s centralised system of wage determination and the union power which they believed it underwrote. Some of them belonged to the H.R. Nicholls Society, an organisation named after a former English Chartist and Australian gold miner who, in his dotage in 1911, said some hard things about the new Arbitration Court and its president, H.B. Higgins, thereby earning a contempt of court charge.

The H.R. Nicholls Society is central to the right’s 1980s heroic age myth. Initially treated as “malcontents and eccentrics” (to borrow from one of its contemporary critics), the Society took on union tyranny and – according to myth – won. The story has its martyrs: brave employers and their supporters who risked everything by confronting union power and intimidation.

Good publicity goes a long way; these IR revolutionaries gave the impression that the most serious problem facing Australia was the lack of employer power, an ill rivalled only by excessive government regulation. This hostility to regulation was also common among eighties entrepreneurs, for whom it nonetheless posed no serious barrier to the rapid acquisition of massive wealth. The “New Right” (as it was called, to distinguish itself from old-style conservatives less interested in rocking boats) didn’t spend much time worrying over the likes of Alan Bond and Christopher Skase.

The mid 1980s saw a string of employer victories in disputes whose names still carry resonance for anyone who lived through those times and read the papers: SEQEB, Robe River, Dollar Sweets, Mudginberri. In each case, the New Right claimed victory. Their collective endeavour, according to the myth, contributed to an intellectual ascendancy which meant that, by the mid 1990s, the Industrial Relations Club had been disrupted and the power of unions drastically reduced.

LIKE most myths, this one is as much an exercise in forgetting as remembering. Speaking to the H.R. Nicholls Society’s inaugural meeting in 1986, Henderson paid tribute to various employer victories of recent years – Mudginberri, Dollar Sweets and “the enormous success of the Queensland government in the 1985 power dispute.” But it’s unlikely that Henderson was celebrating a year or so later when, emboldened by many victories of just this type, the Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen launched a crazed bid to become prime minister of Australia and thereby destroyed any chance that Henderson’s former employer, John Howard, could win the 1987 election.

This is one of the forgotten dimensions of the activities of the New Right enthusiasts for an IR revolution. Their ideas contributed to disruption and disunity among the conservative parties during the 1980s and early 1990s and helped Labor occupy what is now called “the sensible centre” (even as the whole political culture moved rightward). IR reform was a helpful launching pad for the political career of Peter Costello, an H.R. Nicholls Society member who was an enthusiast for the use of the common law against unions. Costello made a name for himself as a barrister in the 1985 Dollar Sweets case, when a small Melbourne manufacturer of “hundreds and thousands” took on and defeated the Federated Confectioners’ Association, which was campaigning for shorter hours. But it was all too easy to paint the H.R Nicholls Society as a cabal of extremists with seriously wacky ideas, plotting to down the workers and destroy their unions.

For the Coalition parties over the last thirty years, industrial relations reform has been a bit like a quest for the lost lollipop. Visions of charming swirls of colour and the anticipated delights of sugar hitting the palate have usually given way to sour disappointment. It took twenty years for the delusions nurtured in the mid 1980s – the idea that employers would be able to appeal directly to their workers over the heads of union bosses and so bypass the unions entirely – to exact their full price in the WorkChoices fiasco of 2005–07. By then, Peter Costello, the ambitious young barrister of the mid eighties, was federal treasurer.

The Coalition, it is true, has learned from WorkChoices. But elements in the business community and at News Limited have been clamouring for a return to the fray. Recently, Henderson’s notion of an Industrial Relations Club has been implausibly revived in order to allow the Coalition to craft a language of IR reform that avoids the implication that it is anti-worker or even anti-union.

In the first place, as Laura Tingle pointed out in the Australian Financial Review, this move involves the notion that an important part of the problem lies not with workers or unions, but with bosses who too readily give way to union demands. Such people, it seems, need to be saved from themselves. Or, at least, the public interest needs to be protected in the face of their lack of fortitude. In the wake of recent manufacturing closures, especially in the car industry, this story now includes the assertion that the very companies that gave the union bosses overly generous deals then ran off to the hard-pressed taxpayer for financial support.

As for the unions, the government focus here is on corrupt, greedy and militant officials, rather than on unions themselves. This approach allows the government to give the impression that its actions will actually work in favour of “good” unions and the “honest” workers who support them. It side-steps, or at least obfuscates, the possibility that the government’s intention is to attack wages and conditions. The proposed revival of the Australian Building and Construction Commission would, in this story, do no more than clean up union corruption and allow a large and important industry to do its proper work for an ailing economy. It will not threaten the rights of honest employees any more than it will result in a loss of life or limb among building workers because their unions are unable to enforce proper safety standards. Or so the government and its allies want us to believe.

Recent allegations that some building union officials have been taking bribes have inflated into a royal commission the government’s election undertaking to hold a judicial inquiry into unions. Anyone surprised that bribery could happen in the construction industry might also do well to study the 1980s, when Builders Labourers’ Federation boss Norm Gallagher went to prison for accepting secret commissions (amounting to over $133,000) from developers such as George Herscu, Maurice Alter, and Rino and Bruno Grollo.

The truism that every bribe received by a union official must necessarily have been paid by someone else – most likely an employer – has presumably induced a degree of caution in those Coalition government members who might otherwise see a royal commission as a free kick for their team. Also encouraging watchfulness will be that textbook case of the royal commission that goes wrong (for those who set it up, anyway), the one called by the Fraser government into the violent and corrupt Painters and Dockers’ Union. The Costigan Royal Commission famously found that the union was being used by businesses to avoid tax via the so-called bottom-of-the harbour schemes. The perception that wealthy Australians were getting out of paying their dues was particularly damaging to a conservative government preaching austerity as the country entered the early-1980s recession. It helped bring Labor back to power in 1983.

THERE is another reason the government should be careful. Up until now, high-profile cases of misbehaviour by union officials have been Labor’s problem. Just four years ago, for instance, Michael Williamson was not only a crooked boss of the Health Services Union but also national president of the Australian Labor Party. The government no doubt hopes that its royal commission will generate more stories that will damage the Labor Party politically.

Critics of the royal commission in the labour movement and Labor Party are of course correct that it is politically motivated, and they are right to point out that few union officials are corrupt and most unions do the good job their members expect of them. Yet if a royal commission were to prompt improvement in union governance where it is needed, I can certainly think of quite a few rank-and-file Labor Party members who would not be unhappy. The idea that the party’s links with the union movement have become a liability is now far from uncommon within the Labor Party, even if it’s not an opinion you’ll hear from those whose jobs depend on union patronage.

So the question has to be asked – and it’s one that might even have occurred to the prime minister. Is Tony Abbott doing the Labor Party’s necessary dirty work for it? •

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To see the Whitlam government as a product of the 1960s is so conventional, so obvious and so banal it hardly seems worth saying. The government was elected in 1972; how could it not come out of the decade that preceded it? But those who see Gough Whitlam and his government in this light mean something more. Whitlam becomes a symbol of the Australian 1960s, his government an expression of the “time of hope” between Robert Menzies’s retirement in 1966 and Whitlam’s triumph in 1972.

This reading of the Whitlam government’s place in history is a first cousin of the criticism that it tried doing too much, too quickly. The government’s tragedy is supposedly that, while exuding 1960s optimism, it was forced after the oil crisis of 1973 to become a 1970s administration, one more concerned with crisis management than implementing social democracy. Australia’s 1960s are then seen to have officially ended in 1975, with the dismissal.

These orthodoxies are not completely false as history but they capture only part of the Whitlam government’s relationship to the 1960s. In his memoirs, Whitlam saw his own government in a longer timeframe – a product of the policy development of the late 1960s and early 1970s certainly, but also the result of a much longer engagement between the Labor Party, the voters and the Constitution. And this tale has also sometimes been recounted as a personal odyssey, in which a young second world war airman becomes actively involved in politics by advocating enlarged powers for the federal government at the 1944 Powers Referendum, and a rising lawyer and politician becomes aware, during the 1950s and 1960s, of the limitations and possibilities inherent in the constitution for the achievement of a social-democratic Australia.

Jenny Hocking has traced this story in the first volume of her fine biography of Whitlam: she stresses the continuities between the Curtin and Chifley era and the vision articulated with increasing clarity and impact by Whitlam during the two decades that preceded 2 December 1972. This emphasis on continuity rather than rupture, however, raises awkward questions for those who assume a seamless transition between 1960s protest and Whitlamite social democracy.

There are other reasons to question this link. The remembered 1960s are usually the late 1960s, especially in Australia, where there was no “dream hero” like John F. Kennedy to epitomise the spirit of a new decade. Arthur Calwell, while still respected for his role as postwar immigration minister, was hardly fit for purpose. It is the turbulence and protest of the Vietnam era, the later 1960s, that are recalled: a time of demonstration and revolt. But it is rather difficult to find a place for Whitlam here. Unlike Jim Cairns, later his deputy prime minister, and Tom Uren, his urban and regional development minister, Whitlam was not prominent in street protest.

Indeed, Hocking suggests he was rather unsettled by it, for “as a determined believer in the institution of parliament and the practice of parliamentary democracy, he would not condone any suggestion that the will of the people expressed through the ballot box should be usurped by the will of the people expressed through mass protest.” The more expressive, less institutionalised politics of the later 1960s and early 1970s had little appeal for him, whereas for Cairns it increasingly weighed like a nightmare – or a daydream – on the brain of the living, offering a utopian alternative to Max Weber’s “strong and slow boring of hard boards.”

What was true of Whitlam himself was also true of most of his ministers. The only sense in which these men might be considered 1960s radicals is that quite a few of them were “radicals” (of sorts) in their sixties. Clyde Cameron, just a few weeks from this personal landmark when he was sworn in as labour minister, was an ex-shearer who cut his political teeth in Adelaide’s Botanic Park advocating a tax on the unimproved value of land for the Henry George League. Here were roots in the political culture of early Labor – the single tax had been a significant influence on the party in the 1890s but it is hardly an idea usually associated with 1960s radicalism! The youngest member of the first full ministry was Bill Hayden, who was not quite forty. The oldest, Rex Connor, at almost sixty-six was the only Edwardian in cabinet, but the majority of the first Whitlam Ministry was born before, during or immediately after the Great War.

Like David Meredith in My Brother Jack, many of these men – there were no women in caucus, let alone in cabinet – would have experienced the first world war as a shadow over their early childhoods. So, to some extent, might the dozen ministers born in the 1920s. But it is the Great Depression, the second world war and the Labor Split of 1955 that are likely to have exercised the most direct influence over their political formation. The affluence of the era following the mid 1950s must have been as politically unsettling as it was personally gratifying for a generation bred on austerity and self-denial.

The experiences of this generation – all but two of them born between 1910 and 1930 – might be usefully contrasted with those whose idealism this government is so often seen to represent: the baby-boomers most commonly associated with 1960s radicalism and revolt. A young man born in, say, 1947 will have qualified to vote for the first time in a federal election in 1969 (the voting age was then twenty-one). He would have no recollection of the Labor governments of the 1940s; rather, his childhood will have coincided with Robert Menzies’s long reign, in which the prime minister will have seemed not so much a father as a grandfather figure.

But even while our hypothetical male baby-boomer has had the good fortune not to face economic depression or global war, he will have been liable to a call-up for service in Vietnam. If he were one of the still small but rapidly growing minority attending university, he will have done so between about 1964 and 1968, an era of rising campus radicalism coinciding with the escalation of that war. He will typically have married in his mid-twenties. With a substantial mortgage, he’ll want job security and as high a wage as possible. With a home in the suburbs, he’ll be interested in how long it takes to get to and from work, and how good the sporting facilities are in his rather sparse outer suburb.

Women, on average, married at twenty-two in the early 1970s; more than for men, full adulthood coincided with both marriage and their first vote. A woman born in, say, 1950 will have been much more likely than her mother to have received an extended high school or even some tertiary education. She will most likely have experienced the world of work both before and after her wedding day. She might even, before her marriage, have taken advantage of reliable contraceptives such as the pill, which was increasingly available to single women. She will almost certainly have used contraception after her marriage, possibly to extend her time in the paid workforce and so save for the deposit on a house.

Our hypothetical female baby-boomer has every reason to support the Labor Party policy of equal pay for equal work not just as a matter of principle, but because it will help allow her acquire her own home and start a family. She might have begun thinking about where they will go to school, and whether she’ll be able to face consigning her children to the miserable demountables she spotted being erected the other day. Yet, having read a book called The Female Eunuch on her last holiday, and meeting some women’s libbers from the university, she might now be in two minds about whether a rapid plunge into marriage and motherhood is such a good idea. But perhaps affordable childcare will allow her to continue working after the children come along? It would be great if someone would connect the sewage. Her first vote will be at the 1972 election.

The idea of a “generation” can be misleading because it overlooks distinctions of class, ethnicity and region and can both exaggerate and stereotype the differences between people who belong to different age-groups. Returned servicemen and their families – indeed, even relatively well-off families such as that of young Gough and Margaret Whitlam – experienced many of the same kinds of challenges and difficulties I have identified with our two baby-boomers. But men and women who started families between 1945 and 1972 had something in common that distinguished them from older Australians – they enjoyed full employment and a material affluence virtually unimaginable to their parents and grandparents.

Whitlam’s achievement was to speak so eloquently to this experience, and to devise policies appropriate to it. He did not bemoan affluence, nor did he accept the view – one that rattled around “informed” commentary of the 1960s – that better economic times and declining class consciousness had rendered Labor redundant.

Whitlam, of course, was not unique in challenging this idea, either in Australia or internationally. While much of the commentary on he and his government is characterised by a kind of national self-containment, there is much to be said for viewing Labor Party transformation of the 1960s in a transnational context. The Whitlam government is related to the Australian sixties in similar kinds of ways as the Pearson and (especially) Trudeau governments to the Canadian 1960s and the Wilson government to Britain’s 1960s. The larger historical frame was set by the Kennedy era in the United States and the noble, thwarted ambitions of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

The 1960s in the English-speaking world saw two phenomena that can seem to pull in different directions. On the one hand, there was renewed stress on the value of the local and regional; on the other, a demand that the local and the regional be made to conform to appropriate national and international standards. The paradox of this simultaneously enhanced and reduced status for the regional is to be explained by a radical reconceptualisation that took place in understandings of the relationship of the local and regional to the national and international.

The Whitlam government emphasised the value of regionalism, famously in relation to the idea of Albury-Wodonga as a growth area, but more generally in its policies on cities and northern development. The Australian Assistance Plan, itself consciously modelled on Canadian precedent, sought the delivery of a range of social services at the regional level, through a partnership of the federal government with newly minted regional councils and locally based voluntary groups. Yet Whitlam was equally insistent that one’s location, no more than one’s class, ethnicity or gender, should determine the level of access a citizen enjoyed to government services. Social-democratic modernity was understood as allowing for diversity within a broad set of norms defined and enforced by a federal government guided by qualified experts and engaged citizens. But the government needed to be clothed with the authority and the revenue to enforce such standards because no other authority in Australia was capable of doing so.

This attitude to the role of the national government was “fully in tune with the spirit of the age” – to use Whitlam’s own words. In Australia, as elsewhere in the west, parochial attitudes and justifications for behaviour repeatedly found themselves confronted with national and international standards. The trend is especially evident in the area of race, where from the early 1960s the White Australia Policy and policies concerning Aboriginal people came under domestic criticism – usually from well-educated middle-class people – partly on the grounds that Australia would become an international pariah like South Africa unless it mended its ways. Whitlam identified wholeheartedly with this line of argument in his policy speech of 13 November 1972 when he memorably declared that “[m]ore than any foreign aid program, more than any international obligation which we meet or forfeit, more than any part we may play in any treaty or agreement or alliance, Australia’s treatment of her Aboriginal people will be the thing upon which the rest of the world will judge Australia and Australians.”

The desire to overcome parochialism was evident in a range of fields. Yet, again paradoxically, a celebration of the urbane, the cosmopolitan and the international was accompanied by a more assertive post-imperial nationalism. In this respect, the Whitlam government took some inspiration from Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau in Canada – even allowing for the very different problems they faced in light of Quebec and US domination. But the battle against the parochial was not confined to politics of national identity; there was hardly an area of policy that could not be rationalised in terms of its ability to drag Australia into the modern world, or to overcome its backwardness.

Interestingly, this language was not confined to former settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada; a similar language was being used in Britain itself by modernisers of one kind or another, including social democrats working in a similar spirit to Whitlam. Anthony Crosland, for instance, complained of British conservatism, complacency, parochialism and backwardness. He looked forward to a modernisation that would make his country more like the United States and Sweden.

Here, the Whitlam project intersects with broader developments in social-democratic thinking. In the 1950s, British socialists such as Crosland argued that the declining power of business, growing equality, full employment, the welfare state, rapid growth and rising working-class affluence had rendered much previous socialist thinking redundant. Ownership of capital now mattered less than who managed it. In these circumstances, the old preoccupation with nationalisation made little sense. Even greater equality could be achieved through progressive taxation and the education system, while socialists needed to turn their attention to what he called “deficiencies in social capital… ugly towns, mean streets, slum houses, overcrowded schools, inadequate hospitals, understaffed mental institutions, too few homes for the aged, indeed a general, and often squalid lack of social amenities.” In an age of abundance, socialists would also necessarily give attention to what would become known as quality of life issues: the environment, culture and civil liberties, “personal freedom, happiness, and cultural endeavour: the cultivation of leisure, beauty, grace, gaiety, excitement.”

Crosland met Whitlam when he visited Australia in 1963. “I’d be careful about that chap Whitlam,” the British visitor whispered to a young John Button during a function in Melbourne, “He could be dangerous.” “Why do you think that?” Button asked. “Well, I suspect he’s highly intelligent,” was Crosland’s reply in an Oxford drawl that even his Australian admirers found irritating. When, many years later, Whitlam was asked what effect Crosland had on him, his reply was “bugger all.” Yet the similarities between Whitlam’s version of social democracy and the ideas being developed by British revisionists in the 1950s and 1960s seem all too obvious. Whitlam’s speechwriter, Graham Freudenberg, recounts in his memoir that his own thinking was influenced by contemporary debates in British socialism.

All the same, it is true that revisionism had a limited impact in Australia of the 1950s – that it was in many respects a casualty of both the 1955 Labor split and the party’s notorious anti-intellectualism. In these circumstances, any criticism of Labor orthodoxy was seen through the prism of bitter political rivalry. Heinz Arndt, a Canberra academic economist and Labor Party member, provoked a storm and even threats of expulsion when, in his 1956 Chifley Memorial Lecture in Melbourne, he advocated a mixture of Keynesian and “revisionist” ideas, notably that Labor should abandon support for “nationalisation as a panacea for all our ills” and instead concentrate on promoting economic growth and greater equality through “public finance, progressive taxation and government expenditure.”

In the 1960s these kinds of ideas gradually became Whitlamite orthodoxy. Whitlam himself increasingly argued that Labor needed to cease using the Australian constitution as an “alibi” for failure to implement its policies. He advocated constitutional reform but he also pointed out that existing arrangements would allow the party to fulfil its fundamental goals. Much like Crosland, Whitlam argued that it was the role of government to create the social goods that people could not create for themselves. And he also incorporated a new progressivism that emphasised similar issues to those flagged by Crosland. More generous educational provision, for instance, was central to Whitlam’s thinking, as was a national health service, something enjoyed in Britain since the late 1940s.

Whitlam also emphasised the need to overcome race and sex inequality, and to achieve better environmental protection and town planning, a more generous and rational system of welfare provision, and the promotion of the arts, literature and national identity. He advocated a more independent, Asia-centred foreign policy and an overdue independence for Papua and New Guinea. All were Australian responses to Australian problems. But the proposed solutions drew on relevant overseas experience and expertise, for most of these issues were also local manifestations of policy challenges with which progressives, socialists and “liberals” (in the North American sense of the term) were grappling in other places.

In the Australian context, Fabianism needs to be given its due in the emergence of this new progressive politics. Arndt, whom we have already noticed, was an active Fabian in both Sydney and Canberra in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a period that also saw the emergence of Fabian societies elsewhere. These gained their inspiration from the famous society founded in Britain in the 1880s. The Victorian Fabian Society has been the most successful – with a continuous existence since 1947 – but it was almost moribund in 1960 when revived by a young speech therapist, Race Mathews. Closely aligned with the Melbourne University ALP Club, the society flourished and soon boasted several hundred members.

Mathews met Whitlam in 1961 at a Victorian Fabian Society meeting and there would be regular contact between the Victorian Fabians and Whitlam throughout the decade. Whitlam used the Fabian Society as a forum in which to set out his ideas for Labor Party modernisation, and the Fabians formed part of the network on which he depended for policy advice, links to the universities and professions, and even personal staff: all three of Whitlam’s private secretaries of the 1960s and early 1970s – John Menadue, Race Mathews and Jim Spigelman – had been involved in Fabian organisations in their respective cities of Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney.

One reputedly important policy intervention by Victorian Fabian intellectuals was the contribution of Mathews and David Bennett, an educationist and grandson of John Monash, to Labor’s schools policy. They drafted the proposal for a Schools Commission circulated at the party’s 1966 national conference, and which later formed the basis for the party’s needs-based approach to funding. Their ideas were further developed in a later Fabian pamphlet.

Hocking’s account of Whitlam’s office in the 1960s and early 1970s gives the impression of a cross between a university department and a Fabian-style think tank. As Mathews himself put it, “Whitlam attached overriding importance to research, and insisted that policies should be justified in depth with facts.” Yet Whitlam’s Fabian emphasis on research as the basis of policy has had surprisingly little impact on the impression that his government failed because it acted with undue haste. Whitlam “instinctively and unceasingly sought expert advice” and, besides his informal networks, the development of policy committees within the party itself had provided opportunities for “experts” to contribute to policy formulation.

The Victorian Fabian Society became entangled in the factional politics of the Victorian Labor Party. From 1965 there was an overlap of personnel and ideas between the Fabians and the Participants, a group of moderate Victorian Labor members which became the centre of organised support for Whitlam and opposition to the hard-left dominated Victorian Central Executive, or VCE. John Button, later a federal senator and Labor minister, was active in both and Mathews, although not a Participant, was by the mid-1960s an opponent of the executive.

The extent of the connections between Whitlam and prominent Fabians only underlined the sense of the Fabian Society, in its growing emphasis on issues such as racial injustice, education and the environment, representing a rival vision of socialism to the Victorian old guard. In 1970 David Bennett, who had been a supporter of the VCE (and was believed by an ASIO case officer in the early 1960s to be “an active member” of the Communist Party), gave his support to federal intervention against the VCE and, in his capacity as Victorian Fabian Society president, ventured the opinion that a majority of Victorian Fabians would endorse his position.

The combination of rationalism and idealism that underpinned both Whitlam’s program and Fabian mobilisation was closer to the temper and preoccupations of early 1960s progressivism than the later, more spectacular expressive politics associated with the New Left and the social movements. The implications of this point for how we remember the Whitlam government today are profound.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a tendency to dismiss Whitlamism as a failed venture beside the much more professional, pragmatic and considered reformism of Hawke and Keating. By way of contrast, in recent years, the arduous trials of the Rudd and Gillard governments have provoked some nostalgia and a measured admiration for a reformist government that practised conviction politics and left a significant and enduring legacy.

Both of these understandings, however, are historically unsatisfying because each tears the Whitlam phenomenon from its essential 1960s context. The Whitlam government had the “wind of change” in its sails. But the cyclones of the late 1960s and early 1970s did not matter quite as much as the gentler breezes that had begun blowing in the 1950s and early 1960s. The rock on which it was wrecked was the less expansive possibilities of the 1970s. •

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THERE is a powerful myth about Australian history that contrasts the conformist and inward-looking Australia of the 1950s with the supposedly cosmopolitan, competitive and outward-looking nation we now live in. Although this seems to me a simplistic account of what has happened to Australian society over the last half century or so, it is true to say that the rest of the world — and especially Asia — seems rather closer to us than it once did. Just a few days ago, my own university, the Australian National University, sent around an email explaining that for some reason, staff using the internet had been locked out of key Chinese websites. The matter was reported as something that would be of serious concern to staff, much as the residents of a suburb might be inconvenienced by an electricity blackout or if the gas were cut off.

All of this seems a far cry from the Australia of William Macmahon Ball, the pioneering Australian political scientist and foundation chair in the discipline at the University of Melbourne, who is the subject of an admirable biography by Ai Kobayashi. As the director of broadcasting activities in Australia’s Department of Information during the second world war, Ball received an instruction that his shortwave division “should begin broadcasts to Thailand,” then under Japanese occupation. There was just one problem; he couldn’t find anyone in Australia with sufficient knowledge of Thai history, geography, language and culture to help him. So he sought out a former student who needed a job, and gave him ten days “to become the Australian expert on Thailand…and he did.”

Australia now has its fair share of Thai experts, and for that and much else we owe Ball a considerable debt. He became Australia’s foremost advocate of what we now call Asia-literacy, a commitment forged partly through his own role as a diplomat in Asia in the 1940s — notably as the British Commonwealth representative on the Allied Council for Japan. It was not a role in which he flourished, for he was frustrated by the Americans’ unwillingness to cooperate as the cold war descended, as well as by the erratic — and, as Ball eventually saw it, disloyal — behaviour of Australia’s external affairs minister, Herbert Vere Evatt. Nonetheless, Ball’s postwar experiences in occupied Japan, as well as his work in wartime broadcasting and some other 1940s diplomatic encounters with Asia, helped instil in him a lifelong belief in the importance of Australians’ having a better understanding their own neighbourhood.

Ball wrote books about Australia and Asia but he was not what we would consider an academic specialist in the field. He did not have an Asian language, nor did he show any interest in acquiring one. But he promoted Melbourne University’s politics department, of which he was effectively the founder, as a centre for the study of Asia. And he used his gifts as a communicator and advocate to increase public awareness of Asia, and to promote a better understanding of the region.

Ball had won a reputation in the 1930s as a broadcaster and newspaper commentator on world affairs. Kobayashi presents him as a generalist in an age of increasing specialisation, a public educator at a time when there was growing (if not yet compelling) pressure on academics to write more and more about less and less, and to publish their work not in widely circulated newspapers and magazines but in academic journals. They were increasingly expected to spend their time in the seminar room rather than on the public platform or in the studio. According to Kobayashi, “as an educator and publicist for political studies,” Ball “demonstrated the role of an intelligent man rather than a scholar in the field.”

By the time he retired in the late 1960s — having built up a major department at Melbourne — Ball seemed a bit of an academic anachronism, but new spaces had begun opening up in the media for academics in the humanities and social sciences to play their part as public intellectuals once again. Today, we can surely see a continuation of the Ball tradition in the work of international relations scholars such as Hugh White and Michael Wesley — academics who move with apparent confidence across a range of specialties as well as between universities, the public service, think tanks (Ball himself almost accepted an invitation to New York to work for the Institute of Pacific Relations) and the media. They write and speak for an intelligent general audience and for policy-makers, rather than primarily for academic specialists. Perhaps more than those students of Ball, such as Jamie Mackie, who became the Asian area specialists of the next generation, it is figures like these who are his spiritual heirs and successors.

AT THE very time that Ball was beginning to think seriously about Australia’s relationship with Asia, one of his compatriots was making a more direct mark on the politics of the region. The name of Mark Bracegirdle is no better known in Australia today than that of William Macmahon Ball. Alan Fewster’s intriguing The Bracegirdle Incident might only make the man a little more familiar, although it is hard to disagree with Humphrey McQueen, in his foreword, that the story is ripe for television dramatisation.

Born in London in 1912 to a mother who was an artist, suffragette and Labour political activist, and a father who worked in business, for a couple of years in the 1930s Mark Bracegirdle became Australia’s face in Ceylonese politics. I recall seeing Mark’s younger half-brother Simon at a conference on Marxism in Brisbane in the mid 1990s. Simon, we learn from Fewster, had been conceived from an affair between the boys’ mother, Ina, and one Colonel Agar. Ina and her husband separated, perhaps as a result of this adultery, and the mother with her two boys migrated to Australia in the mid 1920s. Simon was later active in the New Theatre and the Communist Party. Mark, too, joined the Communist Party of Australia, but in 1936 he went to Ceylon to work as a “creeper,” an apprentice tea planter.

He didn’t last long in this occupation. Having been sacked for fraternising with his workers, Bracegirdle made a notorious speech on 4 April 1937 in front of a crowd of 2000 locals. Speaking through an interpreter, he is supposed to have said, “Do you see those hills? Do you see those bungalows? There the whites live in luxury! They suck your blood!… They are parasites… Come on, I will help you; I will lay down my life for you. Rise! Rise and win your freedom and gain your rights!” Bracegirdle was never called on to lay down his life, but the colonial government did serve him with an order for his deportation. In the eyes of the authorities and the planting community, Bracegirdle committed the most unpardonable of sins; he had “gone native” and used his prestige as a white man against his own people.

For local nationalists and radicals such as those in the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samajist Party, Bracegirdle was a godsend, and they sought to milk the controversy for all it was worth. They helped their new friend go into hiding, and at one stage he spent a week alone in a cave with just “a few tins of food, some tea and a billy can” while he cut notches on a stick to note the passing of each day. The Australian was eventually arrested, but he would not be long in custody because his lawyers successfully petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus. Later in 1937 he left Colombo for London, where he would eventually settle. But the Bracegirdle affair dragged on, having become a major controversy in local politics and a notably contentious issue between British colonial administrators and leading local politicians. The matter made it all the way to the British cabinet.

As fascinating as the episode is, Fewster’s account of the manner in which it became entangled in Ceylonese politics might contain a little more detail than readers will feel they need. And I would have liked to know more about Bracegirdle’s life after leaving Sri Lanka (he died in London in 1999), but Fewster has seemingly been unable to turn up much information. Bracegirdle apparently spent time in Berlin just before the war “and became a smuggler of refugees.” He was also a lifelong left-wing activist, participating in the Aldermaston marches against nuclear weapons. His Guardian obituary intriguingly remarks that “Bracegirdle knew about fungi, the history of Chinese script, Darwinism, the history of science, Marxism, Roman glass, ornithology, farming, art, design, aviation, beekeeping, Aboriginal history — and cookery.”

ALAN Fewster doesn’t discount the possibility that Mark Bracegirdle was an agent of the Third Communist International (Comintern). One man who we can be more certain worked as a Comintern agent was Alexander Zuzenko. On 25 August 1938, Zuzenko was shot in the head by an executioner from the NKVD, the Soviet secret police under Stalin. This brought to an end a most unusual life, which had taken the man across the world, including to Queensland, where he was a member of the pre–first world war Russian community. Kevin Windle’s Undesirable: Captain Zuzenko and the Workers of Australia and the World is a most engaging tale of a man fired by the ideals of 1917 who, like millions of his comrades, would eventually fall victim to its grotesque turn under Stalin’s dictatorship.

Hailing from Riga in Latvia and already a confirmed revolutionary by the time he arrived in Australia (probably late in 1911), Zuzenko was active in the Brisbane Russian community. As a result of the work of a number of scholars, including Windle — and of the assiduous efforts of our own nascent intelligence service, which did its best to document their supposedly subversive activities — we now know a good deal about the Russians of Queensland in the early years of the twentieth century. They are probably best recalled as the victims of the returned soldier violence in 1919, when their hall was attacked by a riotous mob. Zuzenko, seen as a ringleader among the Russian socialists, was arrested and deported. He and his Russian wife and family would eventually find themselves in the new workers’ republic, but not before some dangerous moments during the civil war, since Zuzenko had landed in Odessa when it was still controlled by anti-Bolshevik forces.

Windle does a superb job of tracing Zuzenko’s subsequent — and rather chequered — career as a minor Bolshevik apparatchik, Comintern agent and sea captain through a wide range of very scattered sources. He appears as a thinly veiled character in a number of fictional works by Russian authors, not least because he managed to find himself moving among some illustrious cultural identities: he knew both Mikhail Bulgakov and Alexei Tolstoy.

Despite the fact that he had formally renounced his early allegiance to anarchism to become a Bolshevik, there is good reason to think he never quite left behind his earlier faith — and the powerful streak of independence that went with it. Nonetheless, almost until the very end of his life, Zuzenko seems to have been an unswerving defender of an increasingly brutal regime, perfectly content to engage in violent public abuse of its traducers. Having managed to persuade the Party that he was just the man to spread the revolutionary message among the Australian comrades, he was appointed Comintern agent to Australia. But he found himself stuck first in Britain and then in the United States, unable to get the paperwork needed to continue his journey. What should have taken six months took well over two years.

After slipping back into Australia, Zuzenko found some rather quarrelsome comrades. There were rival Communist Parties in Sydney, each claiming to be the bearer of Moscow’s imprimatur, and he exercised some influence in ensuring that the group centred on Trades Hall in Sussex Street prevailed as the officially recognised party. He was not long in Australia, for the authorities soon arrested him. But their apparent efficiency did not prevent Zuzenko from reporting to his political masters, when he arrived back in Moscow, that he was “firmly convinced that the first of all the Anglo-Saxon countries to declare itself a true Workers’ Republic will be AUSTRALIA.” This was, of course, in large part an assertion of his own significance as the Bolsheviks’ Australian man.

“Our children, if they don’t grow up to be complete idiots, will envy us,” Zuzenko reflected upon witnessing Lenin lying in state after his death in January 1924. “We’ve penetrated into the very heart of history.” He might have been tragically deluded, but all three of these books, in their different ways, do place Australian history at the heart of modern world history. In Macmahon Ball, witness an Australian who sought to understand what the rapid, massive changes in the world order would mean for a British country being dragged, much against its will, into having to fend for itself in international affairs. The Bracegirdle incident places an Australian Communist briefly at the epicentre of the anti-colonial struggle in South Asia. And Windle’s story of Alexander Zuzenko reminds us that Australia, too, was swept up in the optimism and the tragedy of the era Eric Hobsbawm so aptly called “The Age of Extremes.”

All the same, it is useful to be reminded that on 7 November 1917, the day the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, Zuzenko appeared in a court in Ingham and was fined 10 shillings plus costs under the War Precautions Act. He had lost his registration certificate “through a hole in his pocket.” •

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THE failure of the Labor Party to tear itself apart after its defeat last month provides a stunning contrast with the acrimony that followed its last such disappointment in 2004. Indeed, there has been more sweetness and light over the past few weeks than after the 2010 election, when the party managed to hang onto power. Julia Gillard can claim some of the credit. Her dignified silence during the campaign provided a stark contrast with the barely concealed fury of Kevin Rudd during the 2010 campaign. And the highly damaging leaks that helped wreck Gillard’s chances of scraping together a majority in 2010 had no equivalent this time round.

But Rudd also deserves some credit. The civility that has so far followed the 2013 election defeat has much to do with what might turn out to be the only decision of any lasting significance to emerge from his brief return to the prime ministership: the decision to permit Labor Party members a vote in the election for federal leader.

The reform has not been without its internal critics. The requirement that a leadership ballot can only be triggered if 75 per cent of caucus members withdraw their support from a serving leader struck some observers as excessive, providing any but the most incompetent or unpopular leader with a virtual guarantee of tenure between elections. Unkind critics attributed the provision to Rudd’s own desire for self-preservation second time round; those more inclined to psychoanalytical explanation suggested that Rudd, by setting the bar so high, was telling the world (and especially his party) precisely what he thought of his treatment at its hands in June 2010.

When it met in Balmain for a special meeting in July, caucus adopted a lower threshold for when it is out of government – only 60 per cent would be required to vote out a Labor opposition leader – but even then removal would be well nigh impossible. In view of the leadership churn of recent years, however, there are perhaps arguments for erring on the side of stability.

A few critics wondered why, unlike in Labour Party leadership elections in Britain, members of affiliated unions would not be permitted to vote. But unions not being the flavour of the month these days – especially in connection with the affairs of the Labor Party – no one but a few disgruntled union officials ran with that objection.

The haste with which the matter was pushed through caucus before the election inevitably resulted in quite a bit of fuzziness at the edges, not least about the matter of who would be footing the bill for the contest. Caucus might have adopted the proposal, but it would be the party organisation, which had been given no say in the matter, that would be expected to pay for it. So, when Labor Party members received their ballot paper asking them to vote in the election, they were also invited to contribute to defraying its cost.

These loose threads might have tempted some people to agree with Senator Stephen Conroy’s claim that the new rules were a “farce,” except for the fact that his record as a notorious factional warlord should automatically disqualify him from offering any opinion on efforts to reduce the power of notorious factional warlords. Not that he need worry too much; while unions continue to control half the votes at party conferences, the factions’ control of the party will remain secure. All the same, it is easy enough to sympathise with Labor Party oligarchs who find a bit of democracy, and its attendant uncertainty, a little unsettling.

Whatever else it has or hasn’t achieved, the contest between Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese has been successful in discouraging factional strife. The unusually large number of seats that came up for grabs after the resignations from the Gillard–Rudd government in the final year of its life set off predictable factional brawling, even if the party managed to keep a lid on dissent while Kevin Rudd spent a few weeks pretending that he was going to lead his party to an unexpected victory. What was less predictable was that the leadership contest has not only resulted in politeness between Left and Right factions, but also seemed to heal – at least for the time being – the often even more bitter divisions within the factions.

The Right has, more or less, united behind Shorten, the Left behind Albanese. But best of all for those who believe in a democratic Labor Party, this situation does not make the result predictable. Caucus is seen as likely to vote for Shorten, while a majority of the party membership – less certainly – is expected to swing behind Albanese. But no one really knows: since this is the first time the 44,000 members of the Labor Party have been asked for their opinion on such a matter, the result is far from foregone.

The contest itself has surely been one of the more positive happenings in Australian politics in the last generation, and the contestants themselves can take some credit for the apparent success of the venture. Both Shorten and Albanese have been sensible in not attempting to turn the affair into a major contest over policy. Neither is in a position to commit the party to a particular agenda over the next three years and, since they are also committed to caucus election of ministers, they cannot even say who will serve with them as frontbenchers (although each is clear that he wants the other to serve with him, whatever the outcome).

There has been cynical and even hostile commentary from the media about the lack of real policy differences between the two. But what did they expect? When policy differences between the parties are often hard to discern, why should one expect to see a chasm between two contenders for the leadership of the same party? That they come from different factions doesn’t affect this question. It’s a long time since Labor’s factions represented coherent ideological positions.

Because the contest is over who is best suited to lead the party, much comes down to personal style and track record. Albanese presents himself as a classic Australian everyman, made more interesting by his Italian background – he gave an impressive lesson to Tony Jones on Q&A in how to pronounce his name properly – and his having been raised in public housing by a single mother on a disability pension. Shorten’s backstory is perhaps a bit less interesting and less obviously “Labor,” but he makes much of his mother’s successes as a mature-age university graduate, teacher and academic. Fathers are either inconspicuous or absent from these stories, although Shorten has connected his support for immigration to his father’s status as an English migrant.

Shorten – the ex–Australian Workers’ Union leader – presents himself as modest, quietly spoken and statesmanlike, and talks of empowering “the powerless.” Albanese’s style is more effusive and less prime ministerial: he presents as a scrapper, someone who will be able to take the fight up to Abbott as opposition leader. Shorten offers himself not as a candidate for leader of the opposition but as an alternative prime minister. Albanese points to his exemplary record, as leader of the house in the Gillard government, of getting Labor bills through a House of Representatives the party didn’t control. Shorten says he can turn “minorities into majorities,” referring especially to his role in establishing the National Disability Insurance Scheme, but also with an obvious eye to Labor “minority” at the 2013 election, which will need to be turned into a “majority” by 2016 if it is to govern again.

Whatever the result of the contest, there will be plenty of media commentary on what a disaster it has all been for Labor. An outcome that sees the election of a leader favoured by the rank and file but not a majority of caucus will particularly delight the conservative – meaning Murdoch – press, just as its British arm was delighted to label Ed Miliband in Britain as “Red Ed” when he came to the Labour leadership with the strong support of unions but lacking a majority of the parliamentary party. But Australian Labor’s adoption of leadership elections necessarily conceded the possibility of this kind of outcome, at which – if it comes to pass – party power-brokers can shrug and blame “the people.”

Or, if they think the Labor Party membership insufficiently representative to be considered “the people,” they can blame themselves for allowing the party below to so wither away that its opinion on who should lead the country might be dismissed as anomalous. •

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In reality, Labor’s crisis hadn’t gone away just because Rudd was travelling better than Gillard had in the polls. But neither Bowen nor Carr was likely to see party reform as  quite so urgent now that each was back helping to run the farm. Indeed, on the very day that the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption’s adverse findings against former state politicians Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald were all over the media, Carr told an audience at the Australian National University that what really mattered was who led the party, not its structures and rules. This was perhaps a reasonable attitude to take a few days after a change of leadership has propelled you back into a much-loved ministerial portfolio, but Carr’s views were otherwise utter nonsense. As Patrick’s book shows only too well, his claim might be challenged by Nathan Rees, the former premier of New South Wales, who became “former” after managing to get a rule change that allowed him to eject from his cabinet some of the least savoury characters he had inherited from his predecessors.

Carr, of course, is an old Victorian factional warrior himself, and it would be surprising in the circumstances if he were to recommend root-and-branch changes to the Labor Party. And he doesn’t. In his discussion of the party’s relationship with the unions, Carr preaches about the importance of embracing change without making a single specific proposal about how the relationship might be reformed. This at a time when Labor-affiliated unions represent perhaps 10 per cent of the workforce while their officials control 50 per cent of the votes at conference, effectively “owning” the party apparatus lock, stock and barrel. And Bowen’s book is hardly any better on this point; he, too, is a beneficiary of an unreformed Labor Party.

Patrick’s book shows vividly how Labor seats are treated as union property. As a result, the disgraceful behaviour of Health Services Union officials is a matter not simply for the union, its long-suffering members and law enforcement officials, but also for the Labor Party itself. Whatever Craig Thomson — or the wily enemies he accuses of having framed him — did with his union’s credit cards became a matter capable of destabilising a minority Labor government. Michael Williamson is not only the discredited former HSU boss but also a former Labor Party president — and presumably a discredited one on account of his behaviour in the union. Julia Gillard’s legal work for the Australian Workers’ Union almost a generation ago — and her personal relationship with a dodgy AWU official — came back to bite the government she led and, in the minds of some observers, dovetailed all too neatly with more recent stories of union corruption.

Patrick describes how these scandals unfolded and successfully evokes the culture that produced them. He doesn’t analyse the underlying structures that allow union leaders and factional bosses to wield power like feudal barons, and nor does he much puzzle over what makes his characters tick; we are usually left to draw our own conclusions on the basis of the behaviour he describes. Some, such as Bill Shorten — who Patrick seems to regard, for all his faults, as a key to Labor’s future — clearly love power, and the game of politics. Perhaps they also love doing good, but Patrick has less to say about this side of Labor politics than about the colourful clash of personalities and the less worthy impulses.

The desire for personal profit would appear a significant motivation for many of the players. On this subject, there is no need for me to recapitulate here ICAC’s findings on Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald, but Patrick tells the story of that scandal well and traces its damage to the ailing Labor governments of New South Wales and Australia. Family values are also clearly alive and well in the modern labour movement; Kathy Jackson — on $286,976 a year as an HSU official — arranged for the union to hire the two teenage sons of her partner, Michael Lawler, who was a deputy president of Fair Work Australia, the body charged with the duty of investigating the union. Williamson, of the same union, ran what amounted to a highly lucrative family employment-creation scheme.

In general, the culture Patrick describes would be incomprehensible without an understanding of who shares a bed with whom in the Australian labour movement. And I am not writing metaphorically here. The modern labour movement — as depicted in this book — has more than a passing resemblance to a scandalous medieval court.

WHERE does all of this leave Bowen and Carr? Bowen is from the NSW Labor right. “Some people turn on the TV and see Eddie Obeid as the personification of the NSW right,” he says. “I see Young Labor activists with a passion for moderate but vital reforms. I see people of the passion and talent of NSW general secretary Sam Dastyari… I see very hardworking MPs who instinctively understand the aspirations of the areas they represent.” But one of the party’s problems is that key figures on the NSW right saw quite a lot of Obeid well before the rest of us and apparently did nothing about him, just as most left-wingers failed to do anything much to stop Macdonald before he did immense harm to himself and his party.

Both Bowen and Carr seek to navigate a course for the Labor Party. Bowen, by far the younger of the two men, is much more likely to be a central player in that future. Unfortunately, there is very little in his book to warrant any enthusiasm about this prospect. When he is not telling us what a beaut job he did of reforming superannuation, he is trying to persuade us that Labor is a truer “liberal” party than the Liberal Party, a rhetorical device which is as old as the Labor Party itself. In fact, much of what Bowen proposes — including his tedious calls for “growth” — could well have come from a real member of the Liberal Party. Like Tony Abbott, he reckons Labor must govern alone or not at all, and especially not with those dastardly “anti-growth” Greens — a position that would not survive for thirty seconds if Labor once again needed to do a deal so that the likes of Bowen could keep their backsides on the government benches.

His guiding philosophy is, in fact, neo-liberalism, with a bit of state intervention thrown in here and there to assist individuals on their way up what Mark Latham called “the ladder of opportunity.” Like several other ambitious NSW right-wingers past and present, Bowen nurtures the neo-Blairite ambition of ditching the party’s socialist objective in favour of something more modern and relevant. He even wants the Labor Party to debate this pressing matter; God knows who he thinks will want to debate it with him. And when the likes of Bowen propose their alternative to the socialisation objective, as they cannot forbear from doing, they come up with ideas so dull and prose so banal that it produces a nostalgia for Marx and Engels even in the least socialistically inclined reader. Bowen’s “vision” for Labor is what you get when a party of the centre-left abandons a moral critique of capitalism as well as any sense that it has a role in promoting social solidarity. All that’s left for Labor to do is to provide the conditions under which individuals can do well out of the system.

One has good reason for expecting better of Carr. Where Bowen belongs to a conservative Sydney Labor tradition, Carr is a Melbourne man, and in many ways a product of that city’s optimistic left tradition: more keen on state intervention; more inclined to celebrate collectivism; and more interested in the finer points of ideological distinction, although the grown-up politician has mainly put away childish things of this kind. But he at least recognises that a Labor commitment needs to be about the heart rather than the head. Bowen’s book is called Hearts & Minds, but it seems to have little prospect of appealing to either; his subtitle, which includes the term “blueprint,” is a clearer indication of what’s in store for readers. Carr frames his account — albeit very loosely — as a letter to a younger generation possibly cynical about formal parliamentary politics and the Labor Party, explaining why they should support the party or even join it. There is more “heart” in Carr’s account than in Bowen’s, and an infectious enthusiasm about manufacturing and science, the latter broadly defined to include the humanities, social sciences and creative arts. Carr sees the possibilities for Australia offered by high achievement in these fields, and is an eloquent defender in print, as he has been in office, of government support for car manufacturing.

No less than Bowen, he believes in growth and markets and seems to despise the Greens. But he has a more expansive sense of what governments can and should do, arguing that intervention by a strong state is needed in order to make capitalism work in the interests of society — or, in the context of continuing global financial instability, perhaps work at all. In this emphasis, and in Carr’s insistence on a rich “communal life” as an end in itself, we do gain the flavour of something more distinctively “Labor” than Bowen is capable of evoking. There is plenty of exaggeration in Carr’s book — is the public really being “constantly told that its hard-earned taxes are being squandered on the poor”? — but all in the cause of motivating his readers to change the world by getting involved in the Labor Party.

MOVING from these recent Australian Labor contributions to former British Labour Party deputy leader Roy Hattersley and politics academic Kevin Hickson’s collection The Socialist Way is a bit like stepping up from a plasticine session in kindergarten to a doctoral seminar. If this sounds like a case of the cultural cringe, I’m perfectly happy to be considered a cringer. The collection brings together an impressive cast of academics and past and present Labour politicians, and they often say things about modern social democracy that the Australian debates about the future of the Labor Party don’t approach in sophistication or richness.

This probably has something to do with the much stronger culture of left-leaning think tanks in Britain, a bigger university sector with many more scholars working at the junction of political theory and party politics, and a range of quality newspapers and magazines which still manage to rise above a lowest common denominator. It’s not just that the Labour left in Britain is still prepared to talk about socialism and equality and seem like they mean it. Many of these authors are asking more fundamental questions about the direction of Labour thinking than are found anywhere in the ALP. There is a clear movement away from a politics of redistribution towards a reappraisal of political economy itself — a reaction, no doubt, to the mess the banks have made of the country as well as declining public support for aspects of the welfare state.

As with Carr in Australia, there is also a commitment to a British future in which people actually make things (other than financial products). The contributors to The Socialist Way, moreover, relate their ideas to Britain’s progressive tradition. In Australian debate, you could sometimes be forgiven for thinking that Labor achieved nothing of note before the Whitlam government came to power. Meanwhile, the growing obsession with the glorious Hawke government is doing more harm than good to a party that needs to grapple with quite different policy, philosophical and electoral problems from those it faced in the 1980s.

There are other reasons why Australian debate about the future of Labor is so impoverished. In Britain, there must be very few cities of any size whose high street does not bring home to even a casual observer the depth of inequality and deprivation. These problems, moreover, have worsened since the global financial crisis, and even more so since the Cameron–Clegg outfit began its deep cuts in spending. Australia has had a much easier run, although you certainly wouldn’t know it from the whining that is now such a salient feature of our political discourse.

More desperate circumstances in Britain have generated more adventurous ideas. Proponents of Blue Labour, which I have previously discussed in Inside Story, and Purple Labour, a tendency associated with Blairism, are hostile to statist and centralist solutions to Britain’s manifold economic and social problems. Their insistence on localism and voluntarism has inevitably provoked a forthright defence, as in this collection, of a more traditional social democracy that relies to a large extent on strong action by a reformed central state.

But there is also plenty of common ground among the different schools of thought in the British Labour Party, whatever their colour. Most would in practice support the “measured statism” that Andrew Vincent presents in his contribution to the collection as characteristic of social democracy. Several of the authors evidently accept that the centralisation characteristic of social policy in the Blair years was often counterproductive, an opinion associated with both Blue and Purple Labour. And there is a celebration of a Labour patriotism by John Denham, a member of the House of Commons, with which Maurice Glasman of Blue Labour would be unlikely to quarrel. Following a speech by Labour leader Ed Miliband in 2012, the party now packages many of its policy ideas with the label “One Nation Labour,” a term unlikely to catch on in Australia (although it was used by Paul Keating before Pauline Hanson).

Kim Carr’s book is closest in spirit and substance to much of this British social-democratic discussion. All the same, there is an optimism at the heart of his vision that is much harder for his British counterparts to capture. It is not just that they are out of government while he — at least for the time being — remains in harness. There is also a less-qualified faith among Australian thinkers in the power of the state to do good, and much less interest in local and voluntary solutions associated with cooperatives and mutuals. But the political scene that politicians like Carr and Bowen, and the rest of us, encounter after 7 September may well stimulate harder thinking and greater creativity than found so far in the lengthening procession of books on the Australian Labor Party. •

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ON THE ABC’s coverage of the showdown between Gillard and Rudd on Wednesday night, we were frequently and predictably told how “historic” the night’s events were. In fact, they constituted nothing more than the most recent instance of leadership churn; the Labor Party – and if the events of 2007–09 are any indication, the Liberals too – discard leaders with the same alacrity that Billy Hughes went through secretaries. When the Canadian authors of a recent book on the selection of leaders in Anglo parliamentary democracies came to write a section called “Machiavellian tactics,” most of their examples came from Australia.

There is nothing surprising about the trend. The sovereignty of the parliamentary party in each case ensures that bad polling inevitably produces leadership speculation. When that polling is persistently bad, the average backbencher will naturally come to fear for his or her seat, and will act out of self-preservation. In Australia, we take this situation for granted as if, by right, members of a parliamentary party should be allowed to discard leaders in order to save their own skins. In reality, it represents a gross conflict of interest in which the parliamentarian’s career is foremost and the interests of party and nation merely dragged along, as if they always coincided with an essentially individual interest.

William P. Cross and André Blais, the authors of Politics at the Centre: The Selection and Removal of Party Leaders in the Anglo Parliamentary Democracies (2012) show that Australia and New Zealand are unusual in having major parties that allow their rank-and-file members no say at all in the selection of party leaders. The Canadian Liberal Party, by way of contrast, shifted the authority for such decisions to its party convention just after the first world war. This trend towards using a vote of the party membership itself – a trend bucked in Australia outside the minor parties – is of more recent vintage, gaining momentum from the mid 1960s. The British parties moved to give members a vote in leadership selection from the mid 1970s, beginning with the Liberal Party but later extending to Labour and even, in a limited form, to the Tories. I reported on the 2010 British Labour Party leadership contest in Inside Story in August of that year.

The events that we have seen in recent days – which in many ways reprise those of June 2010 but with a simple reversal of victim and victor – are likely to be repeated for as long as we have a potent combination of continuous opinion polling, a twenty-four-hour news cycle, sovereign parliamentary parties and easy removal of leaders by a simple majority of MPs. It is not clear that Labor is more vulnerable to this trend than the Liberals, although its operations have clearly been more disfigured in the recent past. But if anyone imagined that an Abbott PM, facing a ten percentage point deficit in the polls not long before an election, would not be vulnerable to a successful challenge, they would – as one of The Castle’s Kerrigan family would have said – “be dreaming.”

As for the importance of last night’s change of leadership, it might be no more significant for the result of the coming election than the brawl over the Liberal leadership in September 2007. That was largely over the question of who would be the losing leader at an election which, the polls showed all too clearly, Labor was a certainty to win. The idea that Peter Costello could have retrieved this situation was pure fantasy. Given the performance of federal Labor in opinion polling for all of the period since the 2010 election, one would need to be a fairly optimistic supporter to imagine that we’re about to witness a reversal of fortunes. Of course, Labor has been doing so badly that caucus members will have calculated that they could hardly do worse at an election under Rudd, than the massacre they faced under Gillard. To this extent, their actions were wise.

But in another sense, the vote only underlines the fact that the Labor Party – as a critical organisation responsible for mediating between ordinary voters and the institutions of parliament and government in Australia – is more or less broken. Even if Labor were to win the 2013 election – surely still a most unlikely outcome – it is far from clear that its machinery or personnel are actually capable of performing anything like their proper democratic function. As Rodney Cavalier has argued, the collapse of the party as a democratic organisation means that decisions about something as significant as who will occupy the office of prime minister are made by tiny numbers of people who are more or less disconnected from the mainstream of Australian life. There are few checks and balances within the party itself; with whom do these caucus members actually consult before deciding whom they’ll support in a leadership ballot? A few faction bosses, perhaps a union official here and there; but let’s not confuse such methods with democracy.

As for Rudd, one would need a highly developed faith in the capacity of people to learn from the past to imagine that he is a changed man. There is nothing in what we know of his character, nothing in anything he’s said on the public record, nothing in his frequently appalling behaviour over the last several years, to indicate that he is capable of doing better now than he did last time. He is loathed within the party, including by many of the fifty-seven caucus members who voted for him out of an instinct of self-preservation.

There are many reasons why Rudd is hated, but I can give no better illustration than the speech he delivered late last night after the caucus delivered him a majority. In its opening lines, he talked of resuming where he left off before being so rudely interrupted in 2010. There was not a word of acknowledgement that he might have made mistakes the first time round from which he had learned. Worst of all, he feigned gratitude to Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan, not by saying anything complimentary about what they had done in the last three years – such as legislating national disability insurance or the Gonski educational reforms – but by praising their achievements while they had served under him as prime minister. In other words, he was really praising himself. That such a man will bring unity to the nation, let alone a deeply divided party still scarred from his first prime ministership, is a ludicrous proposition.

Just where he will take that party is anyone’s guess because this was a purely personal struggle in which policy considerations were, for him, merely weapons in the struggle for power. On the deeply divisive issue of refugees, foreign minister Bob Carr has been hinting for some weeks at a harder line. On Lateline, following the vote for Rudd, he had the temerity, in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, to tell Tony Jones that people seeking asylum in Australia were economic refugees. Here is a reminder that Carr has an atrocious record as premier of playing to Sydney shock-jocks and tabloid editors, and it will be a test of Rudd’s integrity to see whether he is capable of marking out a position on this issue that retains some shred of the decency that used to be identified with the Labor Party – or whether he follows the cue of a superannuated NSW premier trying to reprise his glory days. On the other issues that have leeched Gillard of political authority, such as the carbon and mining taxes, what Rudd will do is anyone’s guess. But we are most unlikely to hear anything, let alone climate change, described as “the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time.” Or perhaps we will; because the man is shameless.

Gillard spoke with greater dignity than Rudd, and it was hard not to sympathise with her. Up to a point, anyway. Many of her wounds have been self-inflicted. She was badly injured by the circumstances of her rise to the prime ministership, and she did and said things from the outset – like the absurdity of the “real Julia” comment – that made matters worse. Other hurts have been inflicted by others, including Rudd and his supporters, but also a large coterie of vile misogynists in the popular media and blogosphere who will now be satisfied. She lost me when she knocked over a sitting Labor senator in the Northern Territory in order to elevate a former sports star and Indigenous woman whose commitment to the Labor Party was so deep that she didn’t even hold a membership ticket – and then called it “a captain’s pick,” in a grotesque thumbing of the nose at both the discarded senator and anyone who complained about such outrageous behaviour. The proverb about living and dying by the sword is relevant here. Nonetheless, she has a legislative legacy of which she should be proud, and a reputation for personal decency that is perhaps becoming rarer amid the vitriol of national political life.

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The mystery, of course, was soon solved. Cater’s “ruling class” was the same crowd that John Howard called “elites” and others, following the Yugoslav communist Milovan Đilas, called “the new class.” The average reader of Inside Story is a member of Cater’s “ruling class.” So is its editor, Peter Browne, and probably all of the contributors. But Nick Cater, oddly, isn’t – despite his tertiary education, cultural power and (I presume) hefty salary; and nor, apparently, is his multi-billionaire employer, Rupert Murdoch, although it’s difficult to tell because he only receives five entries in the index of this 300-page book. Gina Rinehart is mentioned once.

Cater’s “ruling class” is a self-serving, tertiary-educated middle class that believes itself superior in every way to ordinary Australians. Australia is a naturally virtuous and egalitarian country whose culture is being wrecked by this cosmopolitan clique. Cater occasionally pretends that his argument is not about left and right – that his elite crosses political boundaries. The pose should not be taken too seriously, for Cater is a right-wing author, and much of his book is given over to intemperate attacks on the usual targets of such authors in this country: “progressives,” environmentalists, refugees, the ABC, universities, the Human Rights Commission, the National Museum, the external affairs power and the Labor Party. Other people – notably “progressives” – have ideology; Cater and the ordinary Australians for whom he professes boundless admiration have common sense.

Readers with even a passing knowledge of Australian letters will immediately recognise in the title of Cater’s book a homage to Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964), but the title of Cater’s book will not enter the Australian lexicon in the way Horne’s has done. Nor, I strongly suspect, will anyone still be talking about The Lucky Culture half a century hence, except as an indication of the intellectual poverty of the Australian right in the early twenty-first century. Or perhaps it will stand as evidence of its Americanisation; for while Cater’s book displays an embarrassingly superficial knowledge of Australian history and culture, no one could doubt that he is thoroughly acquainted with all those big American books of the “how left-wing intellectuals are destroying Western civilisation” variety, the kind that help you get on in News Limited. He also has a taste for elderly sociological texts, presumably found yellowing and dusty in the back of his wardrobe since his days at the University of Exeter. Peter Berger, in particular, has provided real bang for bucks.

There are other differences between Horne’s and Cater’s books. Horne, like Cater, was an opinionated author but he never sounded like a pompous alderman delivering an over-rehearsed Australia Day speech. “Australia is an exceptional country,” Cater tells us, “populated by exceptional people skilled at making their own luck. When fortune smiles, it is not by chance or benevolence; it is the dividend of an investment of human ingenuity, enterprise and energy.” And on and on he goes: “Australians have been forging their own destiny for over 200 years,” while “the egalitarian optimism, drawn from the infinitely renewable resource of human ingenuity… has provided the civilising influence on the nation, and the opulence enjoyed by its people since settlement.”

Cater wants you to believe that “there are no institutional barriers to success” in Australia, that “the only restraints are personal deficits of imagination, energy and courage.” The first of many unconsciously funny passages in this book occurs on the very opening page when, in order to illustrate his point about Australia’s boundless opportunities, Cater tells of how, within a fortnight of having hopped off the plane from Britain, he found himself in Piers Akerman’s office at the Advertiser, “with an introduction from a mutual friend.” It’s easy enough to preach Smilesian self-help — especially once you’ve done well for yourself — but a little help from your friends is also a fine thing.

The author is addicted to other archaisms that have been thin on the ground in Australian public discourse for several generations. So we hear about “taming a continent,” “a blank slate,” “civilisation of the south” and “the spirit of progress,” all followed up by some material on the Ridley stripper and the stump-jump plough that will be fascinating to anyone absent from the Grade Four social studies class on the day these topics were taught in primary school. But if you would actually like to know why Australia was, and remains, a wealthy country, you’d be better advised to consult Ian McLean’s truly groundbreaking Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth (2012) and give Cater a wide berth.

Cater’s Whiggish celebration of Australia as a child of what he imagines to be the Enlightenment is really just a prelude to his book’s most significant theme: the role of environmentalists in wrecking the country (and Western civilisation). Cater’s intense loathing of environmentalism and environmentalists is, in many respects, the thread that holds his book together. They are his “ruling class” par excellence, although their real significance lies less in the threat they pose to Australia’s egalitarianism than in the threat they pose to the ideal of scientific and industrial progress on which he claims Australia was founded. Yet the confused and essentially ideological nature of Cater’s argument is no more evident than in his treatment of this topic. Like the media empire of which he is a loyal hoplite, Cater evinces little admiration for climate science: Robert Manne has convincingly documented the Australian’s efforts to undermine public confidence in the scientific research demonstrating the reality of anthropogenic global warming. In these circumstances, the question of just who has rejected reason and who has embraced voodoo becomes a little more complicated than Cater would like us to believe.

The Lucky Culture contains some striking omissions. With just half a dozen references, all in passing, Indigenous people barely feature. This neglect is in keeping with Cater’s broad purpose. To introduce Aboriginal people into a paean to Australian decency, fairness and egalitarianism would spoil the effect. Omitting Aboriginal people from his argument that a Racial Discrimination Act isn’t needed by such a decent and fair-minded community reflects a failure to understand how that legislation helped to foil the Queensland government’s bid to extinguish the property rights of Murray Islanders in 1985 and so destroy Eddie Mabo’s legal case for the recognition of native title. More generally, how convincing would the following judgement look if Cater had not “disappeared” Australia’s Aboriginal people from his text? “The obligation to respect human dignity,” he says, “was not something that had to be put in writing; it was hard-wired into the nation’s institutions and its people.”

The absence of Aboriginal people from The Lucky Culture is also an indication that the Australian, and the political right more generally, have largely moved on from the so-called Windschuttle debate of the early noughties. It is global warming that now forms its ideological battleground, not the nature and extent of frontier violence or the existence of the Stolen Generations. In this respect, Cater’s book has genuine value as a barometer of the current obsessions of the coterie of ideologues for whom he speaks. Other absences, however, are harder to account for. I am surprised, for instance, that he has not presented us with the benefit of his wisdom on the place of Anzac in contemporary culture, which I’m sure could have lent itself well to his thesis concerning the overwhelming gulf between the real Australians of the suburbs and regions, and the effete intellectuals of the inner city – who would, of course, inevitably hold the spirit of Anzac in contempt.

Cater has a poor understanding of Australian history and historiography. Being unfamiliar with the half-dozen or more significant books on early colonial history that have appeared in pretty much every year since the 1970s, he thinks that “in recent decades the only acceptable way to tell the story of early settlement is as a narrative of dispossession, magnifying hard luck and glossing over achievement to sketch an abject tale of dejected natives, exiled convicts and scorched earth.” The quality of his understanding of Australian historiography is further suggested by his view that Manning Clark, who was no more a Marxist than Cater, “trussed colonial history in a Marxist straitjacket.” Yet there are sentences in this book that recall some of the purpler – and least plausible – passages in Clark, such as when we are told that “the parched nature strips of twenty-first century Brisbane reflected an arid intellectual climate in which mankind was no longer master of its destiny.” This is apparently Cater’s way of saying that if greenies had not prevented the building of more dams in Queensland, the city’s nature strips would have looked nicer.

He is a great believer in a golden age, although he’s not quite sure when it occurred. A British migrant who settled in 1989, he sometimes claims that the rot set in after that. There was apparently no sneering in Australia when he arrived in 1989, and nor did Australia – or Adelaide, at least – have a ruling class. The unkind might suggest he wasn’t looking very hard; that when someone in Adelaide asks if you “know a Downer,” they are not testing your familiarity with the local drug scene. Moreover, there was no snobbery in Australia until it was invented by “progressives”; “for the first time,” with the emergence of the Knowledge Class, “there were people who did not simply feel better off but better than their fellow Australians.” Most of these claims can be subjected to a fairly straightforward commonsense test; you don’t actually need a first-year undergraduate knowledge of Australian history to find them wanting. Alternatively, you can look elsewhere in The Lucky Culture for contradictory evidence, such as his quotation in chapter 4 from Henry Handel Richardson’s novel The Getting of Wisdom which, if it is to be treated as a source of social history (as Cater does), makes the existence of snobbery in Edwardian Australia plain enough. Cater is not skilful in his use of evidence.

LIKE many of Cater’s claims, his observation about the egalitarianism of old Australia has an element of truth in it which, if you have the wit (and lack of ideological motivation) not to push matters too far, is an important thing to understand about this country. Donald Horne did this well in The Lucky Country, not least because of the ideologically unsettled and politically indeterminate nature of his book. Horne was on the political right at the time he wrote The Lucky Country – he was a co-editor of Quadrant at the time of publication – but the modernising thrust of the text gives him the appearance of a kind of radical, or at least a clearer-away of political rubbish. When the British socialist Anthony Crosland visited Australia in 1963, he described Horne in his private notes as “v. nice, bright, now Lib but?? moving Left.”

Crosland was an astute judge of Horne’s political journey; its direction, and The Lucky Country’s status as a landmark in it, means that we don’t now read the book in order to find out what a committed anti-communist thought in 1964 – or, still less, how Horne’s erstwhile employer Sir Frank Packer saw the world. On the other hand, it would be hard to identify a single sentence in Cater’s The Lucky Culture with which Rupert Murdoch would seriously quibble, and the text seems a fairly faithful representation of the outlook that Murdoch promotes throughout the world. Sure enough, Cater’s website reports that his boss has indeed much enjoyed the book, and recommended it to his good friend John Howard while the latter was visiting New York. Howard has reported: “It’s very well written and it’s a very easy read and when you agree with most of what is said in many chapters of the book it makes the read even easier.”

The Lucky Culture is not uniformly bad. In the chapter on the ABC, Cater does his best to be fair; writing about universities, he makes some telling points about the problems posed by unplanned and politically driven expansion. Still, it is hard to imagine another country in the Western world where a book as insubstantial as The Lucky Culture, and one whose intellectual agenda is so driven by the author’s manifold and well-cultivated hatreds, would be inflated into one of the great publishing events of the year. But the reasons for this are not hard to find. In the first place, the book is being shamelessly boosted by Cater’s mates at the Australian, which has also been publishing extracts. Conservatives are falling over one another to tell the world what a beaut book Nick has written, although Tony Abbott, perhaps worried about unleashing a new round of the culture wars in an election at which he would dearly love to occupy as much of the middle ground as possible, kept his distance from Cater’s argument in his Spectator Australia review of the book. Ruddite former Labor frontbencher Chris Bowen, who launched the book in Sydney, is also an apparently qualified admirer, but given that the book seems to have been “launched” every other day since its release, this is less of an honour than it might seem. I suspect that Bowen, desperate to keep his name before the public (and with his own book about Labor on the way) and jockeying for a leadership role in the post-election, post-Gillard federal Labor Party, would be willing to launch a feint-ruled exercise book if he thought it would help him along.

I often think of the sage advice of Mr Chips to his schoolboys when their Latin lesson at Brookfield School during the first world war was disrupted by a German air-raid: don’t judge the importance of something by the noise it makes. Whether Cater’s book presages a renewal of the kind of culture wars that disfigured Australia during the Howard era is unclear. Cater might be up for it, but Abbott may well turn out a more reluctant warrior than the neo-cons at the Australian would like. Perpetual warfare with a third or so of the population no doubt looks more attractive from News offices in Wapping and Surry Hills than from inside the political bunker, especially to a potential prime minister desperate, for sensible electoral reasons, to moderate his image as the hard man of Australian politics. •

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In an age when the instruments for measuring populations and testing policies are more sophisticated and sensitive than ever, alarmingly few people seem open to rational, evidence-based argument. That’s one reason why Tim Rowse’s Rethinking Social Justice: From “Peoples” to “Populations” is so welcome. Rowse isn’t shouty. Indeed, the more ideologically charged participants in debates about Indigenous policy may well find frustrating his apparent lack of commitment to an entrenched position and his reluctance to provide clear-cut answers to complex problems. But these habits might just as easily be treated as a source of strength. This is a scholar who, in adjudicating the dispute between Keith Windschuttle and Peter Read over the size of the Stolen Generations, can write: “Until we see an informed rebuttal of Windschuttle, then I suggest that we cease citing Read’s estimates for New South Wales and use Windschuttle’s estimate for New South Wales: 2600 ‘in care.’ Given Windschuttle’s tendency to methodological and emotional parsimony, I suggest that we treat his figure as a minimum.”

This advice sits in a detailed chapter on the ambiguities and difficulties of the term “Stolen Generations,” which make calculating numbers a fraught, if not impossible, task. As Rowse explains, the term “is becoming metonymic: what happened to certain people signifies what happened to many more. The Stolen Generations have become an allegory of colonisation itself, evoking many different experiences of colonising authority.” To recognise as much, however, is not to deny injustice, and Rowse concludes that we know enough to be certain “that the state’s interference in Indigenous family life was so widespread, persistent and negative in its effects” as to warrant the apology of 2008.

Rowse’s chapter on “The Politics of Enumerating the Stolen Generations” in many ways captures his method, purpose and basic thrust as well as any other. He might articulate a dispassionate argument based on the evidence, but his approach is not therefore passionless. Rather, Rowse’s close attention to a small fragment of the Australian population quietly registers the overwhelming moral importance of its experience to Australia’s identity and standing as a settler nation.

Rowse’s distinction between “peoples” and “populations” is the thread that ties together the book’s eleven chapters. In Australian public thought and language today, he suggests, Aboriginal people comprise both a “people” and a “population.” But it is analytically possible and necessary to distinguish between these two senses. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people comprise a self-conscious collectivity with its own “legal and governmental heritage,” a “people” able to claim certain rights. Yet they are also a “population” whose members’ experiences can be measured by a state increasingly adept at producing statistical data on health, life expectancy, employment, educational attainment and so on. This distinction helps us to see what is missing in prescriptions such as John Howard’s “practical reconciliation” or even in calls to “close the gap.”

While the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous experience in terms of, say, employment or life expectancy might seem amenable to purely objective statistical measures, Rowse insists that all theory is value-laden. So when policymakers talk of “closing the gap” on “economic participation” they are faced with the problem that Community Development Employment Projects, which run exclusively in remote communities, don’t generate non-Indigenous rates of participation. There, the notion of “closing the gap” makes little sense, just as it fails to deal adequately with regional variation within states and territories when it relies on averages across a jurisdiction.

Most fundamentally, “closing the gap” has nothing to tell us about governance: what, Rowse asks, is “the quality of political engagement between Australian governments and Indigenous people?” It is at this point that the distinction between “peoples” and “populations” becomes clearest, for to talk of Aboriginal governance is to talk about a “people” assumed to have a right to a say in their own future through political forms they have some role in devising. The status that “closing the gap” has achieved in national political discourse about Aboriginal social justice, says Rowse, has sidelined this political dimension.

RETHINKING Social Justice contains a number of chapters devoted to individual commentators on Aboriginal affairs. Rowse’s refusal to engage in personal abuse of those with whom he disagrees is most evident here, especially when it is clear that he is unable to accept the argument being advanced, and possibly even more so when he feels that an author’s rhetorical framing obscures the weaknesses in his or her case. His treatment of the anthropologist Peter Sutton’s The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus (2009) is especially notable in this regard.

For Sutton, the “liberal consensus” is the set of ideas and policies that came to dominate Aboriginal affairs between 1968 and 2000 — in other words, the set of policies that John Howard’s government eventually rejected. Rowse accepts that his own views have been formed partly by this “consensus,” and concedes that he has tended to overestimate the Indigenous capacity for “self-determination” and to see Aboriginal failure in this respect as marginal or as a legacy of colonialism destined eventually to fade away. For Sutton, by contrast, the lack of progress reflects enduring and unhelpful characteristics of traditional Aboriginal culture — such as poor child-rearing — combined with policies that were tolerant or even welcoming of such practices.

Rowse is clearly unsatisfied with Sutton’s argument. Just how important, he asks, are cultural practices compared with the other factors that contribute to problems in remote communities? He also argues that Sutton underplays two critical aspects of “the liberal consensus”: the way its confrontation with racial discrimination was actually the culmination of the assimilation policies promoted by a Liberal minister in the Menzies government, Paul Hasluck; and the way it accepted the need for government funding to overcome disadvantage, which made Aboriginal policy vulnerable to claims that money was being wasted on people who did not deserve special assistance. Here, Rowse suggests, Aboriginal policy was, on the one hand, more continuous with the pre-1968 past than implied by Sutton and, on the other, vulnerable at the point of its alleged ascendancy. Its strategy of handing over public resources in order to assist vulnerable people was, moreover, open to objection at a time when there was growing hostility to state welfare in general.

Rowse also has broader concerns about Sutton’s argument. He was surprised, he says, that Sutton presents the “liberal consensus” as “a stupid structure of perception and feeling” in “so many scornfully worded pages.” Given the passions unleashed by the Intervention, though, and the shouty nature of discussion of Indigenous policy in this country, I’m not sure Rowse’s surprise is really warranted. He doesn’t suggest that it is illegitimate for Sutton to depend on his own witness (and grief) in order to lend his book reliability, but in his exposure of this aspect of Sutton’s method and rhetoric I sensed Rowse’s uneasiness about the extent to which the anthropologist’s argument rests on anecdotes derived from his own extensive experience among Aboriginal people.

Rowse insists on the diversity of Indigenous circumstance and experience, and on this basis he criticises what he calls “Noel Pearson’s economic history.” Pearson, Rowse shows, has frequently written about the experience of his own people on Cape York and is highly conscious of their particularity. Yet in order to function as a player in a national political context, he has had to construct a more generalised account of Aboriginal peoplehood and populations. Rowse sees problems here: to what extent is Pearson’s account applicable to Aboriginal people in the southern states, with their very different history of settlement?

Rowse also points to important differences between Pearson’s and Sutton’s approaches. Sutton sees the persistence of certain traditional cultural patterns as disabling, producing young Aboriginal people unable to function in either Aboriginal or mainstream communities. In this sense, the problem is the continuing influence and authority of adult Aborigines. Pearson, on the other hand, laments older people’s diminishing authority in the face of challenges from the young. He believes that Aboriginal law and custom exist irrespective of whether they have been acknowledged by settler society, yet they are liable to disappear if Aboriginal people themselves do not act to preserve them. But changes in Indigenous policy since the late 1960s have created a welfare dependency that has undermined custom and law, the authority of elders, and Indigenous psychological resilience and personal discipline. While such policy has appeased the white liberal conscience, says Pearson, it has been deeply damaging to Aboriginal people.

In arguments about the legacy of the policies of the 1960s to 1990s, the figure of H.C. “Nugget” Coombs is never far away. Rowse is Coombs’s biographer, and here he provides a very powerful defence of the distinguished public servant’s approach to Aboriginal policy. Coombs’s critics hold against him the idea that he was engaged in an “experiment,” but for Rowse all policy is fundamentally experimental, and Coombs’s willingness to recognise as much, and to allow himself to be persuaded to change his mind, was a mark of his humility. Coombs saw that the Aboriginal people of the 1960s and 1970s had to adapt themselves to an unfamiliar order. He hoped that through a measure of self-government, and a process of trial and error, they could draw on their traditional culture to negotiate their way through treacherous waters. But he was not dogmatically committed to the policies so often attributed to him. Absurdly, he is sometimes even credited with moving Aboriginal people to remote homelands as part of a romantic socialist agenda.

Despite Rowse’s tolerance of those with whom he strongly disagrees, the economist Helen Hughes surely tries his patience. On the one hand, she advocates an Indigenous policy that would replace collective with individual land title and concentrate remote Aboriginal people in larger towns and settlements to promote Indigenous economic development. On the other, when she’s confronted with an actually existing Aboriginal middle class, she dismisses its members as “Big Men” fattening on the proceeds of their exploitation of other Aborigines and the goodwill of taxpayers. Rowse’s chapter on Hughes’s writings is about as comprehensive a demolition of a shoddy argument as it would be possible to conceive, a project lent even greater weight by his willingness to concede the occasional point, such as her argument about the need for great financial accountability by Aboriginal organisations.

ROWSE explores ideas largely through the individuals who have developed them — Hasluck, Ted Strehlow, A.P. Elkin, Coombs, Don Dunstan, Read,Windschuttle, Hughes, Pearson and Sutton. As in his earliest work on Australian liberalism, this is a study of ideas through careful interpretation of the writings of their bearers. He pursues the manifold meanings of social justice, and explores intellectuals’ sometimes troubled efforts to grapple with the challenges of accommodating both the difference suggested by peoplehood and the sameness associated with citizenship. He is not the type to construct policy blueprints and, to the extent that he makes recommendations at all, they are modest and tentative. He is rightly sceptical about Hughes’s schemes of social engineering because of her apparent unwillingness to grapple with the consequences of her proposals. Where and how will these more concentrated populations be created? What kinds of responses would such a policy evoke in those places? How would such problems be managed?

Rowse’s modesty in relation to policy is not just a personal trait. It is also a considered position, outlined most eloquently in his chapter on “The Coombs Experiment.” I think that Rowse, like Coombs, would see himself as operating on the basis of “limited knowledge” and “frail conjecture.” His engagement with each author and text recognises that evidence- based argument has the potential to be enabling, placing anyone engaged in Indigenous affairs in 2013 in an advantageous position compared with a Hasluck or a Coombs. This will strike some as a strangely old-fashioned faith. But among the writings about Australian history and society that I’ve encountered, I can recall no more eloquent case than this one for the progressive potential of rational, evidence-based argument in the social sciences. •

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IT WAS rather overshadowed by her announcement of the election date, but when Julia Gillard addressed the National Press Club last week she also pointed out that the time it takes Australians to travel to work has been increasing over the last ten years. The average time spent in this unrewarding enterprise has climbed by an hour and a half per week, said the prime minister, and “as many as one in six workers spend more than an hour every day getting to and from their job.”

So was Gillard about to announce a major initiative to assist cash-strapped state governments improve public transport? No she wasn’t. It’s an indication of how far “Labor values and purpose” (to use Gillard’s own phrase from the same speech) have changed in recent decades, that what would once have seemed simple common sense – that long commuting times needed government initiative in the field of urban transport – is unlikely even to have crossed the mind of the prime minister and her advisers.

The remark about commuting times was part of the opening of Gillard’s speech, one of several facts and figures intended to provide a profile of the nation at the beginning of 2013 as a prelude to an account of where she intended taking it. Gillard’s theme was that life is becoming more stressful and uncertain for many Australians, and that she and her government understood their concern and were committed to helping relieve their anxiety. Yet, as SBS chief political correspondent Karen Middleton astutely remarked when the prime minister took questions, the speech also pointed to Australians’ continuing good fortune. Despite the global financial crisis, we remain affluent by international standards, and we enjoy a high level of personal safety, being far less likely than Americans to become the victim of a homicide. Was Gillard suggesting that Australians’ anxieties were not warranted by reality? And, asked Middleton, were there some things that government simply couldn’t fix?

Apart from longer commuter times, Gillard seemed to be suggesting that Australians’ anxieties arose from higher power bills, pressures on their living standards, declining superannuation returns and stagnating house prices. As in the Monty Python song “I’m So Worried,” in which even the baggage retrieval system at Heathrow is a cause for concern, there’s apparently very little about modern life that does not disturb the peace of mind of the average Australian. The challenges of combining parenting with caring for ageing parents, the fear of crime, and concerns about social cohesion, the war in Afghanistan, climate change and the “struggle to make ends meet”: all of this means that “life can be very stressed and pressurised,” according to the prime minister.

So how will Julia Gillard’s government fix it all? Well, the message is that it can’t, but it will do its best to use the power of the state to make people’s lives a bit less insecure and uncertain. As political scientist Carol Johnson has suggested, one effect of Labor’s embrace of neo-liberal economics since the 1980s has been that it can no longer claim convincingly that it will increase voters’ feeling of security, an important part of the party’s rhetorical appeal in earlier times. Now, under Gillard, the talk is of Labor “sharing” the management of risk with ordinary Australians through initiatives such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme. In the context of a rising dollar and declining tax revenue – other Gillard themes in the National Press Club speech – governments have hard choices to make. Nonetheless, by bearing some of the risk that is the inevitable accompaniment of life in the modern world, they have a responsibility to do their best to reduce Australians’ anxiety.

As a historian, I always find such arguments about the awful uncertainty of modern life amusing. The overwhelming majority of Australians today experience nothing like the risks that their forebears faced at any time before the emergence of a modern welfare state in the 1940s. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, the main risk for an ordinary male worker, besides being maimed for life or killed on the job, was that he would live for too long beyond the time when he was capable of work, with a virtual guarantee of an impoverished old age. Of course, a life of hard work, poor healthcare, bad eating and, for many, too much drink and tobacco ensured that longevity was a lower risk than one might imagine. The male worker’s wife would share in this poverty if she, too, lived too long.

Nonetheless, the idea of government as risk manager has been seeping into the thinking and rhetoric of some of the more thoughtful members of the government for a while. Andrew Leigh, an academic economist before he became the Labor member for one of Canberra’s federal seats, suggests that this is a useful way of thinking about much, although not all, of what governments actually do. Political and philosophical arguments about the role of government then become debates over which kinds of risk should be covered by citizens, and which by their governments. Such considerations might also be used to rethink some of the more outrageous examples of middle-class welfare left over from the Howard era. “I am yet to meet anyone who can persuade me that the proper role for government includes providing the Baby Bonus to a millionaire,” declared Leigh recently. Answering questions after her Press Club speech, however, Gillard refused to be drawn on whether handouts of this kind would be means-tested in order to free up money for spending more in line with Labor goals and values.

Given her commitment to finding “structural savings” in the May budget to fund Labor’s priorities in education and disability insurance, however, and her restrained message that the household and government profligacy of the Howard era was over, the further winding back of poorly targeted spending seems assured. Yet Gillard’s treatment of these matters in her speech was rather less than full-throated.

Yes, she said, Australian households had spent as much as they earned and then some during the Howard years, taking advantage of easy credit and borrowing against rising house prices. Those days are over now – and you sense that this disciplined and high-achieving daughter of 1960s Welsh migrants is rather more comfortable in a world where people are supported rather than coddled by governments.

But neither did Gillard fully confront the culture of middle-class entitlement and expectation that was stoked so furiously, and with such excellent electoral returns, by John Howard. The government deserves credit for its efforts in winding back Howard-era handouts, but you also sense that it really doesn’t want too much credit for what it’s already done, or too great an expectation about what it might do, for fear of punishment at the hands of voters who still rather like goodies and giveaways.

IT’s one of the characteristics of Australian politics – and perhaps politics in modern Western democracy in general – that in a competition between pyrotechnics and policy, the former will win every time. It was inevitable that the unprecedented announcement of an election date eight months out would overshadow everything else that the prime minister said in her Press Club speech. It was probably also inevitable that more attention would be paid to Gillard’s new glasses than to the substance of her speech.

What perhaps couldn’t be so easily predicted was that these first couple of weeks of the new year’s return to the ordinary business of national politics would be so extraordinary and so disastrous for the government. These disasters were beyond the prime minister’s direct control, yet also the symptoms of a political party afflicted by illnesses she refuses to treat despite repeated dire diagnoses from others. Craig Thomson was once again on the front page of the papers, now charged with 150 offences arising from his alleged misuse of his union’s credit card. And on a rather grander scale, there’s the Obeids’ ordeal before the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, centred on the claim that they used inside knowledge and connections arising from Eddie’s undoubted power as a factional boss in the NSW government to make the odd $30 million through coal exploration licences.

Each scandal seems almost perfectly designed to assist “stressed and pressurised” voters, especially those in marginal NSW electorates, to make up their minds about who to support in September. On top of that, the release of the latest Newspoll shows federal Labor once again a long way behind the Coalition in two-party-preferred support, at 56 to 44. Labor’s primary vote has collapsed to the low thirties.

When the prime minister recently intervened in the affairs of the Northern Territory Labor Party branch to knock off Senator Trish Crossin in favour of the Aboriginal former sports star Nova Peris, she called it a “captain’s pick.” No doubt the words were redolent of the Adelaide schoolyard of the 1970s, and some would suggest that they might best have been left there. But modern political leaders are supposed to benefit electorally by looking and sounding decisive, even when their metaphor of choice is juvenile. Without repeating the term itself, Gillard made it clear during question time after her Press Club speech that the decision to go to an election on 14 September and to announce it in January was another captain’s pick. Yes, she’d spoken to her deputy Wayne Swan and yes, she’d informed the independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott – but it was her decision.

Gillard remains cornered by difficulties that will not be resolved by any captain’s pick – the most important of which is the resilient unpopularity of her government. The May budget will be the last opportunity for a captain’s pick, but the captain will face some very hard choices and, above all, will not have the luxury of being able to distribute largesse in the manner favoured by Australian federal governments in the third year of their term. Yet a failure to achieve an immediate and substantial bounce in the polls in May will spell the end of her government – as surely as a similar failure by Howard and Costello in May 2007 signalled their demise. •

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Coleman took his cue from a recently published set of lectures, An Australian Perspective (1960), by Max Crawford, professor of history at Melbourne University. In a brief but perceptive account of the late 1930s, Crawford had noticed “a new level of maturity and professional skill in Australian life.” Coleman saw in such recognition evidence of a “counter-revolution in Australian historiography,” an antidote to the radical tradition. Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend had appeared in 1958, a powerful restatement of that tradition by a former communist and present socialist, which also managed to maintain a high standard of scholarship. (It had begun life as a doctoral thesis on popular ballads.) The time seemed ripe for a counter-attack.

The star turn of Australian Civilization was not Crawford, however, but his most famous student, Manning Clark. Coleman believed Clark had “been of the greatest importance” in recasting understandings of Australian history. He had delivered an influential lecture about a decade before in which he had criticised radical-nationalist history and argued that left-wing historians systematically underestimated the power of bourgeois civilisation in Australia. So the fact that Coleman sought to enlist Clark to his cause of contesting radical-nationalist understandings of the past was not as absurd as it might now seem given Clark’s continuing status as Australian conservatism’s least-favourite intellectual.

In the still-small Australian historical profession of 1962, Clark was also the man of the moment; the long-awaited first volume of A History of Australia appeared in the same year as Australian Civilization. Although it attracted condemnation from some critics, including the fanatical anti-communist Malcolm Ellis, its vision of Australian history as a clash of Catholic, Protestant and Enlightenment beliefs rather than of class or material interests was congenial to Coleman’s purposes. Clark contributed to Australian Civilization a chapter on “Faith” that laid out an influential account of the differences between Sydney and Melbourne intellectual traditions.

Coleman, later leader of the Liberal Party in New South Wales and later still a member of federal parliament, was associate editor of the Bulletin at the time. In its glory years of the 1880s and 1890s, the Bulletin had epitomised the Australian radical-nationalist tradition now condemned by Coleman as “anti-civilised.” By the 1950s, it had settled into the dull conservatism that its most famous editor, J.F. Archibald, had predicted would befall such a lively youth. But under Donald Horne’s vigorous leadership in the early 1960s, the magazine had been shorn of its more embarrassing associations, including its support for the White Australia Policy, and it seemed young once again.

The Bulletin’s rebirth as a sophisticated magazine was part of a broader renewal of Australian intellectual culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There were many other signs of life; Horne had edited the Observer, a quality fortnightly launched in 1958, before taking over at the Bulletin. On the left, the ructions caused by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of the same year condemning Stalin, had opened up new possibilities. So had the emergence of a new progressivism that, in its Australian manifestation, looked beyond such cherished Labor policies as a White Australia, high tariffs and the male living wage to issues that turned on what would soon be called “national identity” and “quality of life.” New journals popped up — Nation, Outlook, Prospect, Dissent — while slightly more experienced players such as Meanjin, Quadrant and Overland found themselves in a climate of ideas that was more open, competitive and lively than before. This climate had already begun to extend to the mainstream press, most obviously at Rupert Murdoch’s Adelaide News (especially under the editorship of Rohan Rivett), and at the Australian Financial Review. It would soon be felt in the country’s first national daily, Murdoch’s Australian, and at the Age under legendary editor Graham Perkin.

But much of this was still to come when Australian Civilization appeared. In a brilliant chapter on the daily newspapers, the historian Ken Inglis concluded that “it is hard to imagine anybody launching a national daily paper unless Melbourne or Sydney or Canberra comes more nearly to dominate the thoughts and tastes of the nation.” How rapidly things were changing in the early 1960s: such a paper would come into existence just two years later. Inglis’s instincts were sound, however, in an important respect; the Australian could not have been launched and then survived without Murdoch’s willingness to lose money on it. Inglis had not so much misread the Australian newspaper business as underestimated the boundless ambitions of young Rupert.

Yet Australian Civilization, for all of its admirable qualities, sometimes reads like a book based on an understandable series of misapprehensions about the world opening up in the 1960s. Its editor and star-studded cast of authors were able to shine light in this or that dark corner, often with great flair. But the situation at home and abroad was too fluid, too uncertain, to generate the kinds of insights into the direction of Australian society that would survive the earthquakes of the later 1960s and 70s. Australian Civilization is, rather, a product of the almost-forgotten early 1960s — the rational, liberal and measured idealism stimulated by John F. Kennedy’s Camelot, Martin Luther King’s dream of fellowship between the children of slaves and slave-owners, and Harold Macmillan’s “wind of change” blowing through Africa. In Australia, where the political world was dominated by the likes of Bob Menzies and Arthur Calwell, both well into their sixties when Australian Civilization appeared, cultural and political renewal seemed to some critics especially urgent — a point that would be driven home with great force in the period’s most famous piece of extended social commentary, Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964). Britain had turned its face decisively towards Europe, having applied in 1961 to join the Common Market. Its way would be blocked by France in 1963 but for old British Australia, the writing was on the wall.

The world of Australian Civilization remained, of course, a Cold War world. The Cuban missile crisis was the international emergency of the year. Coleman, along with some of the other contributors, was a member of the organisation that published Quadrant, the Australian Association of Cultural Freedom, or AACF. This product of international Cold War cultural politics has had a bad rap since it was revealed in 1967 that it had long been receiving CIA funding via its affiliation with the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom. But the AACF was a significant player more broadly in the Australian cultural politics of the 1950s and 60s. Nor was Quadrant the only Australian publication funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Dissent, a left-leaning journal, also received assistance from this source after some helpful intervention from the British socialist Anthony Crosland, who’d visited Australia as a guest of the AACF in mid 1963.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom was particularly concerned with encouraging the anti-communist left, so it was very much in keeping with its aims that a left-leaning journal such as Dissent should get help. Similarly, the cast of authors in Australian Civilization were by no means figures one would have identified, then or now, with the political right. Inglis, as a public intellectual, had made his name writing for the left-liberal Nation; and A.A. Phillips, best known for his essay “The Cultural Cringe” and senior English master at Melbourne’s exclusive Wesley College, had a notably close relationship with the radical-nationalist tradition identified by Coleman as the book’s principal target.

Australian Civilization does work as a genuine “symposium” in that its contributions include criticism of other contributors. The staunch anti-communist James McAuley, for instance, made clear his distaste for “the so-called Australian Tradition” that Phillips had welcomed in his 1958 book of that title. And where McAuley rather idiosyncratically described sculptor Tom Bass as “in the wasteland of sculpture… the deepest and richest artistic talent, the most significant personality at work in Australian art today,” Robert Hughes paid Bass a more backhanded compliment: “The slickest Australian sculptor at present is Tom Bass: his work is almost totally uninventive, yet, at the same time, its quasi-monumental personality seems ideally suited to the plans of civic developers and church architects.” In 1964, the editors of Oz — another new magazine of this period, but one which prefigured the arrival of a rather different 1960s, that of the counter-culture — would be prosecuted for their “critique” of Bass’s work, after they published a photo of his P&O Wall Fountain in Sydney being used as a urinal.

In the cultural politics of our own times, it is the political left that is accused of hating Australia, of elitism, and of cultural pessimism. It is the left-wing historians who supposedly wear black armbands and see Australia’s past as an unrelieved tale of gloom marked by racism, sexism, violence and environmental destruction. But the dominant note in Australian Civilization, conceived by Coleman as an antidote to shallow and sloppy leftist thinking, is one of pessimism; there was apparently little in the Australian past, and not all that much more in the Australian present, to cause a believer in civilised values to celebrate.

If any readers took seriously University of Sydney philosopher Douglas McCallum’s diagnosis of “The State of Liberty” in Australia, for instance, they might have been inclined to follow Henry Lawson’s advice to Australian writers and “Go to London or Timbuctoo, or shoot themselves.” For McCallum, Australians were “comfortable, materially and spiritually, both respectability and vulgarity are rampant, and liberty is not therefore a subject that impels them to incertitudes, ferocity or derision.” Australia was “a puritanical, insular, monotonous country… made beautiful by God but committed to increasing uglification by man.” He derided Australians as smug, apathetic, authoritarian and conformist. No “Howard-hater” could have put the case more eloquently, circa 2005; but McCallum was contributing to a symposium contesting the left’s supposed hold over cultural politics! He even condemned “the annual Anzac Day reign of terror by returned soldiers,” in similar terms to those that might be used to condemn the debauchery of Schoolies Week from an outer-suburban Brisbane pulpit.

None of the other contributors produce quite so depressing a picture as McCallum, but then none strike a truly optimistic note. For bookseller and author Max Harris, Australian society was “bleakly uniform.” For Robin Boyd, whose influential book The Australian Ugliness had appeared in 1960, “the look of modern man-made Australia is inclined to be either crashingly dull or calamitously over-interesting.” Australia, he said, was still “pioneer-minded” and “colonial” because in matters of design it continued to favour the judgement of the amateur over the professional. But Boyd also saw some hopeful signs: Australia now had professionals who well understood international standards. What was needed was not a pale imitation of Madison Avenue but rather an injection of local creativity.

Postwar affluence, for some authors, had actually made worse various traits, such as suburban complacency, long evident in Australian society. Australians, it seemed, were becoming less proletarian and more middle-class — a jolly good thing — but would they become the right kind of middle class? Vincent Buckley, Melbourne poet and literary critic and Catholic liberal, saw much to condemn in Australian intellectual life: academics, for instance, were “job-conscious,” “suburban,” “ideologically unsophisticated” and “very little concerned with the more intense manifestations of our culture.” “Because so many of our intellectuals speak out so seldom,” said Buckley, “it is hard to characterise the climate of opinion.” Yet, like Boyd, Buckley also saw hopeful signs of internationalisation. Postwar European migrants were beginning to enliven intellectual life, while “with surprising rapidity, the environment into which the majority of Australians wake every morning is being jazzed up and internationalised.”

Like most collections of essays, Australian Civilization has its disappointments. Donald Horne’s contribution on “Businessmen” and Hugo Wolfsohn’s on “Foreign Policy” were both insubstantial. The latter took sixteen pages to conclude that “in the circumstances there seems to be no alternative to the foreign policy of the Menzies government,” thereby unwittingly providing solid evidence for Buckley’s claims about the complacency of Australian academics. The book is also notable for what it doesn’t say. Racism is identified as an undesirable feature of “the Australianist legend,” and no doubt most or all of the contributors would have liked to have seen a liberalisation of the White Australia Policy. But there is something less than an energetic critique here, Aboriginal people barely rate a mention, and postwar non-British European migrants receive only passing, if respectful, notice.

All contributors were men, and only McCallum and Harris seem to have thought Australian women worthy of separate attention. Even then, what they said was brief. While McCallum clearly saw that something was awry — many women clearly felt “unfree” — he thought it had more to do with the oppressions imposed by other women than those instituted by a male-dominated society. Harris thought Australian men notably respectful to women, and that “if the Australian comes home boozed from the pub and stoushes with the missus, it is the stoush of human equals.” (He failed to provide any statistics about how many men, as opposed to women, were likely to emerge from such a “stoush” with a black eye.)

In his book In a Critical Condition: Reading Australian Literature (1984), the literary historian John Docker pointed to the irony that Australian Civilization’s cultural pessimism and anti-radical nationalism provided almost a blueprint for the kind of critique developed by left-wing historians in the 1970s, beginning with Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia. It was in this sense that Australian Civilization failed as cultural politics; its Cold War calculations were largely undone by the very different version of the 1960s that emerged with the Vietnam War, the new social movements and identity politics. Coleman, for one, came to believe that sixties radicals had exploited for their own revolutionary purposes the hard-fought reforms — in areas such as censorship — begun by progressives in the earlier period.

Meanwhile, some of those Coleman identified as cadres of his “counter-revolution” found their hero in Gough Whitlam. Coleman might not have agreed, but for them Whitlam was decidedly the right kind of middle class. •

Australian Civilization: A Symposium
Edited by Peter Coleman | Published in 1962 by F.W. Cheshire

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Whitlam, who had entered parliament shortly after Menzies commenced his second, sixteen-year period in office, claimed to have found inspiration in the Liberal prime minister’s un-rivalled electoral achievement. Soon after his election in December 1972 – the point at which this volume takes over the story from Hocking’s Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History (2008) – he responded to a generous congratulatory letter from Menzies: “You would, I think, be surprised to know how much I feel indebted to your example, despite the great differences in our philosophies. In particular, your remarkable achievement in rebuilding your own party and bringing it so triumphantly to power within six years has been an abiding inspiration to me.”

The mood would not last. “I hate him,” Menzies later told Bulletin journalist David McNicoll. Menzies might well have been angry that Whitlam had fallen into the habit of quoting him in support of his argument that the Senate should pass supply bills if a government retained majority support in the lower house. When Whitlam’s opponents, led by the new opposition leader Malcolm Fraser, voted in the Senate to defer the 1975 budget, Menzies argued that the upper house had a perfect right to do so; in his view, the “unconstitutionality” and “misconduct” of the Whitlam government made such a course a necessity.

If Menzies had set the postwar standard for what an Australian prime minister should look and sound like, it isn’t surprising that Whitlam should be the first prime minister since Menzies to seem truly capable of exploiting the office of prime minister to its fullest potential. Both men were physically huge, both university-educated lawyers, both fine orators. While Menzies was more inclined than Whitlam to mouth the platitudes of federalism, each favoured a strong central government, based in Canberra, fully able to play a national role.

Whitlam also shared common ground with the other two-volume prime ministers. Like Hughes, he was a divisive figure who aroused hatred and provoked accusations of tyranny – not only among opponents but also among colleagues. Hocking reveals that in 1974, at a time of great turmoil within the government, Menzies helped spread the rumour that Whitlam might “do a Hughes” and make a deal with the opposition to assume its leadership. That Whitlam was a man supposedly driven by self-interest and opportunism rather than ideology or principle was a view long and widely held among his Liberal Party opponents, although it is unclear how much this perception owed to the fact that Whitlam, most unusually for a Labor Party leader, came from a middle-class family.

Alfred Deakin didn’t serve as prime minister for much longer than Whitlam and, except for less than a year in 1909–10, never with a secure majority in the lower house. Yet he not only founded a political tradition – Deakinite liberalism – he also built much that would remain at the centre of Australian politics for the next eighty years: tariff protection, industrial arbitration, means-tested pensions and the White Australia Policy. Similarly, many of the Whitlam government’s achievements – in foreign policy, immigration, racial equality, electoral reform, school education, health, women’s rights, the environment, family law, Aboriginal policy – endured well beyond the government’s demise. Whitlam’s reformism outlived his government just as Deakinite liberalism outlived both Deakin and his Protectionist Party. The sheer difficulty that national governments – and particularly the Rudd and Gillard governments – have experienced over the past two decades in achieving major reform has engendered a new respect for what Whitlam managed to deliver in less than three years in the face of a deteriorating international and local economic environment, while also burdened by a divided and turbulent party and significant obstruction both within and outside federal parliament.

A polarising figure as Labor Party leader and prime minister, Whitlam has long had both fervent admirers and strong detractors, with neither prepared to concede much to the others’ arguments. Whitlam was either a hero and a martyr, or he and his government wrecked the country. But Hocking’s biography is the product of an era in which those passions no longer dominate. Aged ninety-six, recently widowed and living in a nursing home, Whitlam has come to be recognised as one of the giants of twentieth-century Australian history, even by many out of sympathy with his politics. In an age of political unbelief, he serves as a reminder that politics was once fought between men – and they were almost exclusively men – who carried with them ambitious visions for their country and the daring to risk everything in order to realise them. Compare Whitlam’s decision to go to a double dissolution election in 1974, in response to a threat to supply and the blocking of key aspects of his program, with the vacillation and eventual retreat of the Rudd government over its emissions trading scheme in 2010.

Hocking’s account of the Whitlam government’s efforts to implement its 1972 program emphasises the obstruction the government experienced at the hands of senior public servants, the intelligence services, vested interests, state governments, a conservative opposition that refused to concede its legitimacy and a Senate Labor didn’t control. She recognises that the government was both a victim of circumstances – the international economic downturn arising from the 1973 oil crisis and emergence of stagflation – as well as the author of many of its own difficulties. Whitlam, the son of a senior public servant, had too much trust in the willingness of the public service to serve loyally whichever government happened to be in office. The government adopted an unwieldy cabinet structure, and Whitlam himself often showed poor judgement. And although he was prone to petulant outbursts, Whitlam also found it difficult to “be the bastard” on occasions when it would have been in his government’s interests to confront a particular individual. There were bitter internal divisions within a party protective of the prerogatives of caucus and intolerant of high and mighty individuals who sought to trump its democratic structures, processes and ethos. When the leader happened to be a man of Whitlam’s background and temperament, it was always going to be stormy weather.

NO DOUBT prompted by her publisher, much of the media attention on Hocking’s book has focused on the considerable detail she adds to our knowledge of the role of the “third man,” High Court judge Anthony Mason, in the dismissal of the government in late 1975. Although it has been known since 1994 that Mason (as well as the chief justice, Garfield Barwick) provided advice to governor-general Sir John Kerr, Hocking discovered in the National Archives of Australia Kerr’s own testimony concerning Mason’s full role in Whitlam’s downfall. While Mason refused to cooperate with Hocking while she was researching her book – “I owe history nothing,” he declared – the former chief justice appears to have changed his mind and produced a few thousand words of his recollections for the media after the book was published. Here, he made much of having advised Kerr to warn Whitlam that he would be forced to terminate his commission if he was unable to secure supply.

We only have Mason’s almost forty-year-old recollections on this point. Nor will they convince critics that his and Barwick’s role in the affair was other than improper, not least in light of the possibility that matters on which they had advised Kerr would come before the courts. In his recent statement Mason also emphasised Kerr’s fears that if he had warned Whitlam, then the prime minister might have advised the Queen to remove him from office.

It is difficult to know how seriously we should take Kerr’s concern that Whitlam would get in first and arrange his sacking. As an excuse for acting secretively, it is too convenient to be treated at face-value, especially coming from a man whose post-1975 career was devoted to justifying his dismissal of the government.

Hocking provides some telling evidence that Kerr knew he had little to fear in this respect. He took the extraordinary opportunity offered when he crossed paths with Prince Charles in Papua New Guinea at the independence celebrations in 1975 to enquire about how Buckingham Palace would handle this matter. “But surely Sir John,” responded Charles, “the Queen should not have to accept advice that you should be recalled at the very time, should this happen when you were considering having to dismiss the government.” And if this comment had been insufficient to reassure this irresolute and fearful man, the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, followed up by telling Kerr that in such a “contingency” the Queen would “try to delay things,” although she would ultimately have to take her Australian prime minister’s advice.

Hocking provides a fresh account of many of the events leading to the dismissal. She shows that the Whitlam government was ultimately the victim of a conspiracy involving at least the chief justice of the High Court, some of Barwick’s former colleagues in the conservative parties and the governor-general. The Queen’s leading courtier played a minor role but provided Kerr with the critically important assurance that only the Palace could give. And what of CIA involvement, rumoured at the time? Without committing herself, Hocking provides enough hints, clues and extraordinary coincidences to suggest that she smells a rat.

It is sometimes said that the Whitlam government, whatever its failings, was unlucky that its time in office coincided with the end of the postwar economic boom. Even allowing for his poor judgement in having appointed Kerr as governor-general – admittedly his fifth choice to replace Paul Hasluck – Whitlam was also unlucky to find himself vulnerable to the manoeuvrings of a chief justice as partisan as Garfield Barwick, a governor-general as deceitful as John Kerr, and a political opponent as ruthless as Malcolm Fraser. Whitlam had his faults but he was incapable of matching any of these men in the dark arts they practised to bring down his government.

ALTHOUGH Hocking’s is a sympathetic biography, it is also alive to Whitlam’s faults as a man and public figure. She shows that the splendid Margaret played a critical part in helping her husband maintain some equanimity in the face of the most intense pressure and provocation, and the final chapters of the biography reveal the couple’s success in carving out new lives for themselves after the triumphs and disappointments of the 1970s. Hocking sheds new light on Whitlam’s successful posting as Australia’s ambassador to UNESCO during a period of crisis in its affairs, and his subsequent contributions to that organisation.

Hocking’s lengthy treatment of the dismissal and its aftermath is problematic in the context of the overall biography. Although a fascinating and important account in its own right, and a tour de force as a piece of history, it necessarily places Kerr and Fraser rather than Whitlam in the foreground. In this telling, it is Kerr’s character – or rather his lack of it – that was fundamental to the unfolding crisis. His dishonesty, vanity, lack of self-assurance, resort to the bottle and effort to persuade others to share with him the responsibility – and the odium – for actions that were ultimately his and his alone, feed into the narrative a sense of personal tragedy. Malcolm Fraser’s single-minded pursuit of power, while an essential ingredient in this story, would ultimately have failed if Kerr had not been so easily manipulated for conservative gain.

Whitlam’s dogmatic faith in the authority of a democratically elected lower house and his tendency to misread the character and intentions of other players contributed to the drama but did not apparently chart its course. Hocking’s revelation of the extent of the plotting against Whitlam means that, as the tale of his government’s downfall unfolds, he seems less and less to be master of his and its fate.

Yet despite many disappointments along the way, Whitlam was ultimately carried along by his measured idealism and resilient optimism. While embittered by what Kerr had done and initially unable to leave the matter alone, Whitlam has not spent the rest of his long life – as Kerr did – obsessively seeking vindication for his role in the events of the spring of 1975. Rather, what Whitlam ultimately wanted others to concede was the worth of a career devoted to using constitutional and parliamentary methods, through the Australian Labor Party, the House of Representatives and the United Nations, to achieve the betterment of society. •

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PROVIDED that you weren’t a Labor MP heading for political oblivion, the television coverage of federal election night in 2010 was not without its lighter moments. For me, the greatest amusement came when the two men who would ultimately decide which party would govern the country for the next three years, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, were interviewed by telephone. The likelihood of a hung parliament had been widely touted for weeks, yet in neither case was a camera on the spot for a live interview. Were Tamworth and Port Macquarie too far off the beaten track to get the full treatment?

A year and a half later, readers of the Armidale Express learned that Richard Torbay, the independent member for the NSW state seat of Northern Tablelands (and one-time Labor Party member), was almost certain to seek National Party endorsement to run against Tony Windsor in New England at the next federal election. It was only after the paper had run several articles about Torbay’s likely decision to abandon independent status in favour of party endorsement that the matter became a national news story.

But if you were a reader of the academic literature on Dr Torbay – for, yes, he is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the tertiary institution over which he presides as chancellor, the University of New England – you might have had an even earlier inkling that he could jump ship when the moment was ripe. Here is what one commentator, yours truly, had to say about Torbay’s likely career trajectory back in 2006 in a book called The Worldly Art of Politics (and they don’t come more “worldly” than Richard). “Torbay likes to see himself as revisiting the tradition of the Progressive Party – out of which the Country Party emerged,” I wrote. “Like Torbay, the progressives initially sat on the cross benches and, in his view, were able to act as true representatives of the country. The rot started to set in when they moved into coalition with a city-dominated party.”

As I observed, Torbay’s analysis was a little unfair to the party we now call the Nationals. The Country Party achieved quite a lot for its people – especially in the Northern Tablelands – in coalition with the Liberals. And, I added, “a key reason it decided to pursue a coalition strategy in the 1920s was because of the limited influence it was able to exercise from the cross benches. Torbay may yet eventually find himself facing a similar dilemma to that with which the Progressives had to grapple eighty years ago.”

Well, he did indeed, but I wonder now whether it was the Labor Party or the National Party that I had in mind as Torbay’s eventual home when I wrote that final sentence. Perhaps it was both. When I interviewed him for the book, Torbay claimed that although he was a Labor Party member when he was considering a tilt at the National Party seat of Northern Tablelands in the late 1990s, he had also attended a Liberal Party meeting – the implication being that he was willing to consider carrying the label of that party if it would have got him the seat. “The difference between Labor and Liberal today in my parliament is often the letterhead,” he told me, in what seemed like a well-rehearsed verdict. He ran as an independent rather than as a Labor candidate in the belief, he said, that Labor could not take the seat – although the party had held it as recently as 1987 – and had largely given up that goal. I failed to see any great significance in the latter comment at the time of the interview and commented carefully in my essay: “It is unclear precisely what role the state Labor Party organisation played in these developments, but we can be fairly certain that it encouraged them.”

I really needn’t have been so cautious. In a recent essay on rural politics in New South Wales since the mid 1990s, historian Bradley Bowden points out that there were allegations flying about in 1999 that the “senior Labor powerbroker” Eddie Obeid “oversaw” Torbay’s campaign. I was also present at a small gathering in Armidale some time before the 2007 state election at which premier Morris Iemma made it clear that Torbay had run as an independent in 1999 with the informal consent of Sussex Street – NSW Labor Party headquarters – and that Torbay was regarded there as essentially a Labor bloke in spite of his independent label. Iemma was in town to tell the local Labor Party branch officials to lay off the local member – they had recently been quoted in the local press criticising Sussex Street’s apparently tender dealings with him – and his friendly advice needs to be seen in this context.

Yet Iemma’s remarks also had a ring of truth to them – even if he must have suspected that Torbay would shake off the Labor Party in a flash if he believed it advantageous to do so, just as he has recently abandoned the independents for the National Party. Surely Iemma wouldn’t have bothered meeting with members of the local branch unless he was worried that in the event of a hung parliament in New South Wales after the 2007 election, Torbay would be capable of supporting a Coalition government if it offered him sufficient inducement – as he certainly would have been. And the fact that he was increasingly regarded as an informal leader of the other independents in the Legislative Assembly made his future attitude even more consequential.

IF ALL of this makes Richard Torbay seem like an arch-opportunist, that isn’t my intention. His decision to seek preselection for the Nationals has been met by predictable reminders that even that infamous political “rat,” Billy Hughes, joked he would draw the line at joining the Country Party. But is it more opportunistic to switch from the independents to the Nationals than from, say, the Labor Party to the Packer gambling empire – a course followed by no fewer than two recent general secretaries of the NSW Labor Party? If, like Torbay, you believe that the ideological difference between the parties is small, as well as being largely irrelevant to voters in a vast and thinly populated electorate constantly in danger of losing government services, the decision to attach a National Party label to your move onwards and upwards is hardly earth-shattering.

Torbay told me years ago that he would like to move into federal politics at some stage if the opportunity arose, and his parliamentary career has already been highly creative in securing upward political mobility in spite of a lack of formal party endorsement. He was deeply interested in the South Australian Labor government’s experiments in recruiting ministers from outside the ranks of the party when it needed extra numbers to form a government, and he evidently hoped that a hung NSW parliament at the 2007 election would produce such a result for him.

Instead, he was offered – and accepted – the speakership of the state’s Legislative Assembly: a nice plum, but not terribly useful in exercising genuine power. He combined this role, however, with that of chancellor of the University of New England, after a major and highly embarrassing public spat between the previous chancellor, businessman John Cassidy, and vice-chancellor Alan Pettigrew, helped ensure that Cassidy would serve only a single term. It is unclear whether it is beyond Torbay’s chutzpah to attempt to combine the role of federal MP in a coalition government with that of chancellor of a university largely funded by the same government; only time will tell.

In 2009, as the state Labor government disintegrated in the wake of Iemma’s defeat on the floor of the party conference over electricity privatisation and his subsequent resignation, Torbay was approached by a group of Labor parliamentarians trying to induce him to join the party as part of an attempt to get rid of Nathan Rees as premier. When Torbay announced his intention of running for the Nationals in New England, the NSW Labor Party general secretary, Sam Dastyari, recounted an incident during which, he said, Torbay tried to deal himself into the premiership.

Torbay supposedly pulled $200 from his pocket – Labor membership dues had presumably increased since he left the party in 1998 – and, according to Dastyari, “pledged to immediately rejoin the party if I could guarantee he would have the numbers to become premier the next day.” Torbay, while acknowledging the approach by Labor powerbrokers, denies that he sought party membership or the premiership – and the matter predictably petered out in an exchange of positions of interest only to the participants. All the same, there is nothing in Torbay’s career so far to suggest that he would have declined the Labor premiership if he had been offered something more attractive than the train wreck the state Labor government had become by 2009.

The reasons behind Torbay’s decision to run for the Nationals in the next federal election are not mysterious. Once close to Tony Windsor, he now complains that the independent brand has been damaged by the support Oakeshott and Windsor have given the Gillard government. It is hard to know what Torbay would have done if he’d been faced with the same circumstances that confronted these two men, but he is certainly not on record as having suggested at the time that they had erred in signing an agreement with Labor. His current position therefore smacks of opportunism, even without the controversy over the NSW premiership. Windsor has been able to exercise an influence that Torbay greatly envies: the capacity to use a hung parliament to screw concessions out of a minority government.

Torbay might have added that the independent brand hasn’t been much helped by his apparently friendly relations with the thoroughly discredited NSW Labor government; the fact that Labor powerbrokers approached him at all speaks eloquently of a cosy relationship stretching back to the 1990s. In any event, all of the country independents except Torbay were defeated at the 2011 state election, and the swing against him and in favour of the National Party after the distribution of preferences in Northern Tablelands was over 10 per cent. It is true that he held the seat easily, but the Nationals, which gained five seats at the 2011 election and increased its vote both at that election and in 2007, has shown that it is a resilient political force. Meanwhile, where just a few years ago the future of rural politics seemed likely to belong to country independents, they now seem unlikely to play a significant role again for many years to come. Had Torbay ever been tempted to run against Windsor as an independent, he would have been strongly discouraged by the knowledge that he would probably have played a marginal role in federal politics even if he had won the seat. Minority federal governments, like lightning, don’t strike in the same place twice – not in 2010 and 2013 anyway.

Just as Torbay understood the fragility of the Nationals’ hold on Northern Tablelands in 1999, so he recognises the vulnerability of Tony Windsor in 2012. A poll conducted in June suggested that Torbay would easily defeat Windsor at an election. And these matters are of more than merely local interest; they have significance far beyond the addition of a single vote to the Coalition side of politics at a future federal election.

Torbay might not immediately get a ministry in a Coalition government but he’s most unlikely to spend very long hanging around on the backbench. He’s a professional politician of outstanding ability who rose from teenage kitchen-hand in the University of New England Union to become chancellor, from thirty-year-old Armidale councillor to mayor, state member and speaker. He is also a supremely effective networker and communicator. As a local member, he has been strikingly successful in presenting every dollar spent in his electorate as due to his own exertions for the people of the Northern Tablelands.

I’d be surprised if I were his only constituent to have found himself doling out funding to a local organisation while serving as a member of a state government committee, only to learn on reading the papers back in Armidale that the government’s generosity towards the local worthy was really yet another Richard Torbay triumph. •

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WALTER Balls-Headley, a Cambridge-educated physician and lecturer at the University of Melbourne on midwifery and women’s diseases, thought that something was very wrong with modern civilisation in Australia. In The Evolution of the Diseases of Women, published in 1894, he condemned late marriage, which he attributed to men’s love of pleasure, comfort, socialism and strike action, and women’s taste for tight-lacing and education. There was no reason, he said, “why the satisfaction of the sexual instinct and the act of propagation should be deferred to such a late age of life.” Neither animals nor natives delayed marriage and childbearing so unnaturally; nor did they wear tight-fitting dresses. For Balls-Headley, women existed to bear children; men’s role was to provide for them. Accordingly, educated women posed a racial problem:

[H]igh mental culture is antagonistic to healthy sexual development and childbearing… These women, who are apt to be highly attractive by their refinement of feeling and appearance, are frequently devoid of sexual appetite of any kind…

Balls-Headley was a distinguished professional with the status and privileges that such men enjoyed even in the dangerously over-civilised Antipodes. William James Chidley, by way of contrast, was a poor man who ultimately paid for his conviction that the sexual life of the people was unnatural by suffering public condemnation, criminal prosecution and confinement in an insane asylum.

Chidley was born in Melbourne around 1860, the son of a toymaker who was involved in a “free love” sect devoted to the teachings of the Swedish philosopher and seer Emanuel Swedenborg. Living mainly around Melbourne and Adelaide, the younger Chidley supported himself by producing drawings for medical texts of the very kind in which Balls-Headley reflected on the problems of modern humanity.

From his wide reading and an active but guilt-ridden sex life, Chidley developed the theory that there was something profoundly wrong with the way in which modern people had sex. The introduction of an erect penis into a vagina, he said, was unnatural and produced shocks to both men and women that led to their physical and mental deterioration. As he explained in his 1911 pamphlet, The Answer, “the crowbar has no place in physiology.” Sex, claimed Chidley, should only occur in the spring, when the vagina would act as a vacuum and so draw the flaccid penis inside. Like Balls-Headley, Chidley based his views on observations of the animal kingdom; he was particularly impressed by the lessons offered by the sex life of horses.

Although Chidley gained a following and found people willing to defend him from state persecution, he was also widely regarded as a crank. Yet he and Balls-Headley occupied some common intellectual territory; notably, a conviction that over-civilisation was producing racial degeneration. Where, however, the medical man saw a falling birthrate and women’s improved social status as its clearest manifestation, Chidley blamed a social order based on an aggressive male sexuality. Balls-Headley’s theories were largely consistent with a belief in a woman’s role as a breeding machine, and were bolstered by his professional standing. Chidley’s ideas challenged the patriarchal social order that Balls-Headley defended and were the work of a self-educated radical and freethinker.

BALLS-HEADLEY and Chidley were each intervening in a public debate that revealed a society preoccupied with sex and reproduction and increasingly convinced that the future of humanity depended on how it organised them. It is not that a Victorian reticence was cast aside in favour of openness. Rather, participants in public debate now developed new ways of talking about sex. In doing so they drew on the emerging field of sexology, but it is far too simple to argue that science was displacing religion or morality. Modern understandings of sexuality in fact often developed out of an intense spirituality that refused to reduce erotic drives to biology. Sexual behaviour was now less likely to be seen as a response to environmental conditions, or some momentary stimulus or impulse. Sex was becoming central to the meaning of self-hood; it was at the core of character.

Two phenomena stand out as having done most to shape the sexual history of the period. One was the dramatic decline in the birthrate in the period after about 1870, which worried Balls-Headley. This trend caused a panic about the prospect of “race suicide,” but also contributed to a crisis in the middle class. Respectable women’s adherence to a certain code of sexual behaviour became a critical marker of identity, thereby distinguishing them from the “depraved” lower orders. But the widespread practice of birth control among apparently otherwise good and decent women from the better-off classes underlined for some middle-class men a sense of conventional morality’s fragility. It suggested that new and insidious forms of sexual depravity were infesting the very people – “respectable” women – who really ought to be the strictest guardians of propriety.

The judgements of such men about the drop in moral standards were confirmed by the connection they saw between the image of the “New Woman” associated with the feminist movement, and the decline in the birthrate. Feminists discussed the “sex question”; they advocated smaller families; they preached the evils of modern marriage; they argued in favour of improved educational opportunities for women; a few were even known to advocate contraception – it did not take much for a hostile judge to put all of this evidence together and hang the defendant. Feminists who blamed declining birthrates on the prevalence of VD among men seemed unconvincing in the face of such an overwhelming case for the prosecution.

The growing preference for small families would have been bad enough for the pronatalists but because it was accompanied by indications that some women were achieving this end through contraception rather than abstinence, the phenomenon raised profound questions about female sexuality. If sex was not essentially for reproduction, marriage seemed to become “a mere sexual compact” and sex just a “pleasant amusement.” Moralists worried that women were having sex for pleasure, rather than out of a sense of duty to society or their overwhelming desire for motherhood. Moreover, if women could have sex without the natural consequence – pregnancy – their chastity would be sorely tested. T.P. Lucas, a doctor, addressed the Young Men’s Christian Association to this effect in Melbourne in 1885. “Nature is one,” he declared,

and laws apply generally to the whole animal kingdom. In accordance with this law woman at stated periods would be prepared for generation. And so she is. If, however, the fact were made known to her intelligence as it is to the lower animals, no woman could be virtuous; and humanity would sink into animalism, and collapse socially; and so the law is added to, and woman is specially defended when she is weakest.

This explanation portrayed female sexual morality as a very fragile thing indeed, suggesting that women had a sexual appetite that could not be reduced to the status of cover for maternal instinct. If the fear of pregnancy and its corollary, female “modesty and a fear of shame,” constituted a “special safeguard” designed by God to defend womanly virtue, contraception posed particular dangers to the moral order. Henry Varley, a fiery Protestant clergyman and social purity campaigner, believed that the “disgusting doctrines” (regarding birth control) found in popular texts led to sexual excess, a danger to the morality and health of married couples. The panic over Australia’s declining birthrate was about the contested meaning of female sexuality. And it was about the fundamental purpose of sex.

The other major development of the period was the campaign to reform male sexuality. The historian Marilyn Lake has claimed that, in the 1890s, there was a struggle for control of the national culture between men and women – a sex war – and that male sexual behaviour was an issue at the heart of this conflict. Writers in the famous Sydney Bulletin, she suggests, celebrated the wandering bushman in his freedom from domestic constraints, and so produced a political position she calls “masculinism.” It upheld the right of men to enjoy various pleasures and freedoms without the interference of female busybodies, nosy parsons or a nanny state. Feminists, on the other hand, condemned the Bulletin’s idealisation of the nomadic bushman, and favoured a domesticated masculinity in which men assumed the responsibilities of a breadwinner while treating their wives with gentleness and respect.

But what was the outcome of this sex war? Did it have a clear winner? Lake believes so, suggesting that it was not the vision of male freedom from domesticity but rather the feminist movement’s ideal of a more self-controlled and chivalrous masculinity that emerged triumphant. The victory of the domestic ideal, Lake argues, was manifested in Justice H.B. Higgins’s Harvester judgement of 1907 and the concept of the family wage that it enshrined. In his famous Arbitration Court ruling, Higgins assumed a male breadwinner who would provide for his family through wage labour; not one who would waste his family’s income on prostitution, extra-marital sexual conquests or drinking and gambling. The family wage concept also registered the declining size of Australian families. Higgins allowed for three children; a basic wage founded on this assumption before the 1890s could hardly have been taken seriously.

JUST as conventional morality demanded sexual ignorance of women and children, so the state established public rituals whereby it communicated an authorised version of public decency. These were publicly justified as an effort to protect the working classes – especially women and children – from the threat of depravity or corruption. Yet considered as public policy they sit oddly beside the vast number of column inches in the popular press devoted to salacious divorce cases, French goods and abortion remedies, which authorities left mainly untouched. For instance, on 3 June 1906 in Melbourne, T.G. Taylor and P.L. Harkin were arrested and charged with having distributed some sex advice literature written by Taylor’s wife, Dr Rosamond Benham. Benham advocated Karezza, or practical continence: a form of sex in which through the power of thought a couple could supposedly avoid “the final orgasm” in favour of an “exchange of magnetism.” Taylor was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, while Harkin received one. Their convictions were later overturned by the Supreme Court, but the episode showed that the authorities were prepared to make an example of sex radicals who sought to bring unorthodox ideas before a working-class audience.

William Chidley’s persecution is better known. Chidley’s enemies detected in his ideas the ravings of a dangerous lunatic. But they also worried that the ignorant and impressionable might take them seriously. In Melbourne in 1911, booksellers distributing his recently published pamphlet, The Answer, as well as Chidley himself, were prosecuted on the grounds that there were sections of the book “which would tend to deprave and corrupt the morals of any person reading it.” The court ordered the destruction of copies seized by police. In the following year the bearded and earnest-looking man, now dressed in a simple Grecian-style tunic and sandals, took his message to Sydney for the most famous phase of his career. Although regularly arrested and prosecuted – sometimes simply for wearing his unconventional tunic – the willingness of friends and supporters to pay his fines meant that police were unable to prevent the determined sex reformer from continuing his agitation. After a number of public lectures, police threatened to prosecute any owner of a hall who leased him their premises.

Yet Chidley still wandered the streets, carrying a bundle of his pamphlets, which he offered to passers-by for a small fee. And he continued his lectures, now usually delivered in the Domain or the Botanic Gardens. In August 1912, having been further provoked by Chidley’s plan for a lecture to “Ladies Only,” the authorities assembled a conga line of obliging doctors and arranged for him to be certified as insane and compulsorily detained in the Callan Park Hospital for the Insane. Popular agitation against this blatant abuse of the law soon led to his release but leading doctors continued to campaign for Chidley’s incarceration, arguing that he was suffering from “paranoia.” Late in 1912, the courts also imposed fines on several booksellers who stocked The Answer, although full suppression only came with a Supreme Court decision in 1914.

As authorities in Melbourne and Sydney acted against Chidley, a popular campaign in his defence gathered momentum. Socialists and radicals especially insisted on his right to free speech, although not all Chidley’s supporters were of the left. Archibald Strong, whose politics leaned towards the conservative end of Melbourne’s cultural liberalism, believed that treating either Chidley or his book as “obscene” was “a perfect absurdity.” Strong appeared in court to testify in Chidley’s favour in 1911. But support for Chidley’s right to be heard did not, in most cases, amount to endorsement of his theories. While his condemnation of a thrusting male sexuality was appealing to some feminists, much pro-Chidley agitation was about defending the public discussion of sex, as well as opposing the use of the lunacy laws to silence a sincere enquirer after truth.

By the time of the first world war, William Chidley’s campaign for sex reform was reaching its final, tragic stage. Patrick White, then a very young child in Sydney, recalled Chidley “dressed in his white tunic” and looking “jaunty enough as he passed along the street followed by a laughing, jeering mob.” But arbiters of public morality had long ago judged his opinions unfit for public consideration. Society, they believed, should not hear his crackpot theory that the answer to its ills was sex in the spring between a woman and a man whose flaccid penis would be drawn inside her during their divine union.

Yet the NSW Labor government did not know what to do with its Chidley problem, for he was now a figure attracting considerable public sympathy. While its inclination was to keep him in an insane asylum, his supporters remained vocal in condemnation of coercion. In August 1916 Chidley had been released on certain conditions, these being that he “not address persons, and particularly women, by circular asking them to grant him interviews, in order that he might explain his theory to them.” He was also banned from holding meetings in public parks, nor could he sell his little book on the streets. But Chidley was soon addressing crowds in the Domain and, according to the Chief Secretary, George Black:

there was no feature of sexual intercourse on which he did not expatiate in order to prove that his theory was the only one that should be followed by the human race. He stated that if that theory had been adopted there would have been no war, the conclusion which I drew from that remark being that there would have been no Germans.

So Chidley found himself back in an asylum. In October 1916, as the country tore itself apart over conscription, some of his supporters came up with an apparently ingenious solution. Would the government pay for a passage to either the United States or Canada? The chief secretary’s department ran the idea by the premier, William Holman, but when the US consul was consulted, he replied that his government would regard any such initiative as “an unneighbourly act.” The government let an otherwise attractive proposal drop but not before giving serious consideration to the Canadian alternative. Even the governor was brought in to consider this most important matter of state. But they need not have worried, for Chidley was nearing the end. In September 1916 he had doused himself with kerosene and set himself alight while at Darlinghurst Gaol. The fire was extinguished, but so too now was his fighting spirit. He died on 21 December 1916 of heart disease. The government medical officer added that he believed “the diseased blood vessels were due to syphilis,” a claim subsequently denied by Chidley supporters, including some dissident members of the medical profession.

For all his excesses, Chidley must be considered seriously in any account of the coming of sexual modernity to Australia. Havelock Ellis – to whom Chidley had written in 1899 asking him to “write to me and be my friend” – believed him to be “one of the most original and remarkable figures that has ever appeared in Australia.” Edward Carpenter, the British sex reformer and socialist, was also willing to engage with Chidley’s theories, although he thought his Australian correspondent tended to “ride the sex question to death.” Chidley’s belief that his scheme would some day save the world “from all its misery, disease, crime, and ugliness” implied a sexual determinism that even sexologists such as Carpenter and Ellis could not accept.

But Chidley is important for reasons other than his ability to attract the notice and even respect of famous men. There was his stress on sexual equality between men and women, on women’s capacity for initiative and desire, and on their right to joy in intercourse. As Chidley told Ellis in 1899, “The womb and vagina of a beautiful and healthy woman, believe me, is a living, vital, moving organ, sensitive to a look, a word, a thought, or a hand on the waist: but as we have coition now, a woman and her womb might as well be dead.”

In the current unnatural mode of coition, he added, “some people – especially women… always suffer: their married lives are one long suffering.” In his attention to women’s rights to sexual pleasure, Chidley was a true feminist and radical whose views look forward to Marie Stopes, Germaine Greer and women’s liberation. His notion of the cyclicity of female sexual desire and emphasis on the necessity of a divinely ordained affinity between men and women in sexual relations resemble the famous British sexologist Marie Stopes’s position in her 1918 sex manual Married Love. And like Stopes, he was not writing for an audience of “experts,” even if he desperately sought – and, when he achieved it, flaunted – their approval. Instead, he placed his ideas before common people. Much hostility to Chidley among doctors and the judiciary arose from his status as a layman addressing a popular audience on matters that the medical profession regarded as its prerogative, and which they saw as dangerous if unleashed on the “mob.”

Chidley placed sex at the centre of life. It was for him the principal source of individual misery and social degeneration but also the way to human happiness. A few hardy followers would carry the substance of his teachings into the 1920s, but his main significance lies in the status he gave to sexual joy as the key to the gates of heaven on earth. In this respect, Chidley and The Answer still speak to our own times. •

The post William Chidley’s answer to the sex problem appeared first on Inside Story.

If you imagined that Andrew Bolt’s notorious Herald Sun articles in 2009 attacking “white” Aboriginals appeared out of nowhere, you might have been inclined to accept Bernard Keane’s argument in Crikey that “Bolt deserves the support of free speech advocates, regardless of how much they may disagree with his bilious outpourings.” But Bolt’s “bilious outpourings” – later found by the Federal Court to be in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act – were not idiosyncratic personal abuse: they were part of a much longer white Australian obsession with skin colour and its connection to character.

The erasure of darkness – part of what historian Patrick Wolfe calls “the logic of elimination” – long preoccupied the colonisers. So much so that by the 1930s, bureaucrats in Western Australia and the Northern Territory were devising means by which mixed-race populations could be absorbed into a white Australia as if Aborigines had never existed. The controlled mating of “crossbreeds” with whites and the removal of mixed-race children from their Aboriginal families were to be their favoured means of achieving this goal.

The Bolt case and its continuing reverberations recalled for me Arthur Upfield’s first detective story, The Barrakee Mystery, published in 1929. Although he is an almost forgotten figure today, the English-born Upfield became one of Australia’s most successful popular authors, selling vast numbers of his books around the world. If he is recalled at all, it is for his twenty-nine “Bony” novels – crime stories featuring the “half-caste” detective, Napoleon Bonaparte. The Bony books were translated into eleven languages at a time when few Australian writers had achieved any international recognition, let alone the spectacular success enjoyed by Upfield.

Upfield knew how to spin a good yarn. The Barrakee might have been mysterious but the reasons for its author’s popularity are not, for the stories themselves are absorbing. Although The Barrakee Mystery was Bony’s debut, the reader’s attention is initially drawn to another character, dashing young Ralph Thornton, the adopted son of John and Ann Thornton of Barrakee Station in western New South Wales. “As a collegiate product he was perfect,” writes Upfield. “His speech and manners were without reproach. There was, however, inherent in him a grace of movement which no school or university could have given him... His dark, almost beautiful face was animated by a keen and receptive mind; the fervid enthusiasm of the mystic rather than the unveiled frankness of the practically minded man was reflected from his eyes.”

Ralph has just finished his studies and seems destined to take over the family property and marry Kate Flinders, the Thorntons’ beautiful orphan niece. Yet the young man can’t stop his thoughts turning to a young Aboriginal woman, the evocatively named Nellie Wanting. He receives no encouragement in this direction from Bony, who has arrived to investigate a murder. As a “half-caste,” Bony believes that he can honour neither his white father nor black mother as “they did not honour me… They were below the animals. A fox does not mate with a dingo, or a cat with a rabbit. They disobeyed the law of the wild.” Ralph soon asks Kate to marry him, a proposal she readily accepts.

The journey to the altar, it soon appears, will follow a treacherous bush track. At the engagement party, Kate realises that she really loves Frank Dugdale, the Thorntons’ sub-overseer who, in turn, has long been in love with her. Soon after, Ralph’s foot becomes caught in a snag while he is pursuing fish in a waterhole. Just as he is about to drown, he is saved by Nellie. Out of danger beside the pool, a grateful Ralph “saw quite suddenly how beautiful she was, how beautiful the outlines of her body where the damp cheap blouse clung to it.” Seeing the happy tears in Nellie's eyes, he touches her affectionately on the cheek; Nellie then kisses him on the mouth. “Electric fire rushed through his body and surged about his brain… it was the very first moment of real life.” Once he realises that she loves him, Ralph returns her kiss “with man’s awakened passion.” Bony worries that Ralph is headed for “utter social damnation” and persuades Nellie to clear out. For Ralph, however, true love must run its course.

What initially looks like a case of forbidden sexual love across racial boundaries is soon revealed as something both more complicated, and less so. Ralph himself turns out to have been a “half-caste,” the identity of whose father has been obscured by the maternal but foolish Ann Thornton. Even her own husband knows only that Mary Sinclair, the Thorntons’ cook, was the biological mother. Nineteen years earlier, Ann’s own baby had died; Mary had given birth to a boy at the same time. On her deathbed, Mary admitted to Ann that the father was King Henry, an Aboriginal man. Mary died – “because of my sin,” she says – and Mrs Thornton adopted the baby as her own.

For his part, Bony turns out to be a racial theorist of no mean ingenuity. For many years, he says, Ralph’s upbringing and education had held the “black strain in his blood” in check, but with Ralph’s return from college to “the native bush of his father” his “reversion to ancestral blackness was accelerated.” “In no case,” says Bony, “does a half-caste rise to the status of his superior parent.” He observes Ralph’s transformation – for example, his “growing love of colour in his clothes” – when at last comes the “fatal yet inevitable surrender. ... He was betrothed to a beautiful white girl, he was heir to a great estate, yet he fell in love with a gin.” As Bony explains to the understandably bewildered Kate, “Crimson lips and black velvet cheeks were a greater magnet than your lily complexion and azure eyes.” In a remarkable piece of do-it-yourself physical anthropology, Bony even claims to have observed Ralph’s skin “slowly darkening” as he reverted to his ancestral origins.

A few years after the publication of The Barrakee Mystery the “problem” of “half-castes” passing as whites was raised when the Western Australian parliament debated a bill in 1936 to prohibit sex between white men and Aboriginal women. J.J. Holmes, a pastoralist, pointed to the problem that some “half-caste” women were “absolutely white” while some white women who spent their time lying about on beaches with few clothes on were “doing their best to make themselves like half-castes.” Would a young man charged with having had sex with a “coloured girl” be able to defend himself by declaring that he thought she was white?

ANDREW Bolt largely turned this kind of thinking on its head. The “problem” now, it seemed, was that “whites” were attempting to pass as Aborigines. They were doing so, Bolt suggested, in order to advance their careers and claim special benefits. If these benefits didn’t exist, he implied, they would identify as white or European Australians and abandon any pretence of Aboriginality.

Yet the recent attacks by New Limited journalists on Anita Heiss, one of the litigants in the Bolt case, in the wake of the publication of her memoir, Am I Black Enough for You?, confirm that there is really something other than tenderness about taxpayer dollars involved in their running commentary on Aboriginality. The Australian’s Caroline Overington, peeved that Heiss refused to grant her an interview on the grounds that she worked for News Limited like Bolt, spent much of a long article in April complaining about the rebuff, about Heiss, and about well-off Aborigines who gain “benefits” they don’t really need – and she did this all under the cover of a faux live-and-let-live shrug of the shoulders. Sure, Heiss wouldn’t talk to her, but it’s a democracy after all, says Overington. Sure, Heiss’s grandfather might not have been Aboriginal, as Heiss claimed, but it really doesn’t matter anyway because “Aboriginality isn’t about the number of Aboriginal ancestors you have” – and so on. All of this sweetness and light might have been a little more convincing if the article hadn’t been accompanied by a silhouette of a woman – obviously Heiss in profile – entirely black except for the bright rouge lips and expensive-looking jewellery around her neck.

Heiss’s book is a lively, good-humoured and spirited answer to Bolt and his supporters. I should declare a personal interest of sorts. Although we are not close friends, I know, like and respect Heiss, having sat on a state government literature and history committee with her in the early noughties. We also share an admiration for TV’s singing cowboy, Gene Autry. Since our first acquaintance, she’s become a successful author of what she and her friends light-heartedly call “chock-lit,” a chick-lit sub-genre that features the lives, loves and losses of successful Aboriginal women. Heiss has also written children’s books, poetry and a doctoral thesis in the field of Aboriginal writing and publishing.

Her career is a remarkable success story, not least because her literary achievements have been accompanied by a lot of hard work promoting reading and writing, especially in Indigenous communities. Heiss has a life coach and her book underlines why she might need one, hinting as it does at the kind of well-meaning requests to which a successful Aboriginal woman is subjected. There is an expectation that educated Aboriginal people will be experts on everything Aboriginal, a demand no one thinks to make of a white Australian. A “concrete Koori” she might be, according to her own description, and it’s hard not to envy the travel to New York and Paris she discusses in her book. She makes much of her attachment to city comforts and dislike of roughing it. But she also seems to spend quite a bit of time in out of the way places in the Australian bush, working with children who are unlikely otherwise to encounter a real live author, and whose chances of encountering an Aboriginal one seem even more remote.

Am I Black Enough for You? appears to have been conceived before the Bolt business; while the court case figures, it doesn’t dominate her narrative. Indeed, the book is at its best when Heiss talks about the intimate world of her own family. Her account of the courtship between her Australian immigrant father, a cabinetmaker, and her devoutly Catholic Aboriginal mother is deeply moving. That Heiss’s life has been lived as part of the Aboriginal community could not be clearer. Her message is that there are many ways of being Aboriginal and her own – that of a middle-class, educated and professionally successful woman who lives in Sydney, loves shopping and drives a nice car – is as legitimate as any other. Aboriginal authenticity does not come from the darkness of one’s skin, or from a desert lifestyle.

Some Aboriginal memoirs are survival stories – the performer Noel Tovey’s Little Black Bastard (2004) being a wonderfully vivid example. Others, in their quest to solve puzzles and uncover secrets, take on some features of the detective novel: Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) is the best-known of these (her family put it about that they were Indian). But the historian Lynette Russell’s A Little Bird Told Me (2002) is in many ways the more challenging.

Russell does not regard herself as Aboriginal but as having an Aboriginal heritage, one wiped from the family history by her grandmother. As a result, Russell lacks the “social experience and shared history” that might have produced a sense of Aboriginal belonging. In her thoughtful memoir, she doesn’t present her discovery of this heritage as a quest for her own “true” Aboriginality. Instead, she recognises that our identities are influenced by decisions made by others, such as family members, who came before us. Russell’s effort to uncover her hidden family story is a reminder that in the past Indigenous people have recognised the penalties they would suffer for identifying themselves as Aboriginal. Some have understandably sought to avoid those penalties by passing as white.

Heiss has not produced a survival story, nor a book of the “search for secrets” type. Russell might regard her as fortunate in being the inheritor of a strong sense of Aboriginal identity, one encouraged by her Austrian father. But Heiss had suffered for her Aboriginality long before Bolt published his article attacking her. When she was five, a group of boys would taunt her: “Coco pop, chocolate drop, abo, boong and coon.” She wasn’t apparently regarded as a “white” passing herself off as “black” on those occasions.

Soon after her book was released, Bolt complained on his blog that Heiss’s publisher, Random House, and the ABC were censoring comments about Heiss and her book on their websites. Bolt helpfully provided his own readers with a link to an Amazon site in the United States, where they would be able to breathe in the much freer atmosphere of the great republic. The site was soon inundated with condemnation of Heiss by Australians, much of it predictably nasty.

It’s perhaps fortunate that Heiss, like many Indigenous people, has long experience in dealing with bullies. •

The post Getting under their skin appeared first on Inside Story.

The writer Craig McGregor suggested that Australians liked to think of their country “as comparatively classless because they didn’t like the idea of class.” There are certainly differences in how inequalities of wealth, status and power have played out in the everyday life of Australia compared with other Western nations. In his recent book about Rupert Murdoch, David McKnight recounts the story of Phillip Knightley, as a young journalist, being assigned to help Sir Keith Murdoch and finding himself outside his employer’s hotel. “I watched a procession of government limousines and the occasional Bentley come up the driveway,” Knightley recalled. “Would Murdoch have a Bentley or a Rolls?” Murdoch, it turned out, had a dirty old ute, which was being driven by his down-to-earth son Rupert; Knightley squeezed in. “Such a scene, between a very junior cadet journalist and a knight of the realm and managing director with his son, would have been unthinkable in Britain,” McKnight concludes.

The historian John Hirst calls this an egalitarianism of manners and believes it has been a major force – for good – in Australian history. But Hirst adds that distinctions were nevertheless maintained in colonial Australia by social rules about who was entitled to call himself a gentleman, the clothes a man wore, and the imperial honours system. Others have extended the argument to colonial women – they, too, signified by their language, bearing and behaviour just where they belonged in the hierarchy. Were they truly genteel, merely respectable or sadly fallen? Here, marriage and sexuality seemed to loom rather more prominently. But for both men and women, occupation (or a husband’s occupation), wealth and income were like Banquo’s ghost. Few were prepared to equate them openly with either moral worth or social standing; yet how one made a living, and how much one earned in doing so, were the building blocks of class in Australia just as they were in the old world.

They remain so today, even while we have devised new and increasingly elaborate ways of disguising the fact. In Australia, we have the “bogan”; in Britain, there is the “chav”; the Americans talk of “trailer trash.” All amount to class labelling, although there are differences between them that become fully apparent only on closer examination. Federal Labor MP Kelvin Thomson would have had British journalists scratching their heads and reaching for their dictionaries when, in the context of an attack on the Melbourne Grand Prix’s $50 million cost a couple of weeks ago, he called the daughter of the British Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone a “billionaire bogan.” Bogan, reported the London Daily Telegraph, is “an Australian term denoting a person of limited education or class.” Kevin Rudd is reputed to have referred to The Lodge as “Boganville” after Julia Gillard and Tim Mathieson moved in.

That one might apparently be filthy rich and politically powerful and yet still a bogan says much about the extraordinary versatility of a label more commonly applied to less exalted personages than the star of reality TV show Billion $$ Girl or the prime minister of Australia. My enquiry with the Australian National Dictionary Centre yielded the information that its earliest recorded mention of “bogan” occurred in an Australian surfing magazine in 1985. During 1988, on the hit TV series The Comedy Company, the schoolgirl character Kylie Mole (played by Mary-Anne Fahey) would do more than anyone to popularise the term. On the same show, pop singer Brian Mannix appeared as a model in Bogue magazine (a spoof on Vogue), complete with ciggies stored neatly under the short sleeve of his tightly fitting t-shirt. His accessories included a bogan key-ring (a brick) and a bogan pen-set (a can of spray paint).

There is now a burgeoning genre of faux sociology – well, two books from Hachette Australia, at any rate – which will tell you about Things Bogans Like and Boganomics. According to the former, the bogan defies “income strata, class, race, creed, gender, religion and logic. The bogan is defined by what it does, what it says and, most importantly, what it buys.” Yet even a cursory examination of the contents of these books suggests they are thinly disguised exercises in class prejudice. How many middle-class professionals do you know with a Southern Cross tattoo or a hotted-up Holden? How many are prone to glassing their enemies in pubs? How many make a habit of “purchasing a Buddhism-themed figurine, statue or water feature from the garden section of K-Mart”? The bogan, we also learn, lacks “the required self-discipline and rigour to achieve genuine success” – presumably, of the kind that comes with writing books about bogans – so “it resorts to trying to convince itself that it is a part of elite society by ‘suiting up’ once in a while for a major event such as the Melbourne Cup, a wedding or its little sister’s deb.”

The bogan – as well as “its” British cousin, the chav – has also begun to attract the attention of more serious authors. Two books published in the last year allow us to compare these near or distant relations: Owen Jones’s Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class and David Nichols’s The Bogan Delusion. The differences between these books’ treatment of their respective subjects are as revealing as their similarities. Where Jones provides a powerful critique of this most recent manifestation of the iniquitous British class system – the war on chavs and chavettes – Nichols seems uncertain about what to do with his bogans, or whether they in fact even exist. Sometimes he writes as if they do and feels he needs to defend them, their lifestyles and their communities against traducers. At other times he suggests they are an invention. At the end of his rambling book, I still wasn’t entirely sure what “the bogan delusion” actually was, but elicited that it had something to do with the disparaging attitudes of culturally sophisticated, cosmopolitan inner-city types to those who like listening to Cold Chisel and watching cop shows and action flicks on the home entertainment system.

No one could accuse Jones of “writing around” his subject in this way. His argument is that the term “chav” is the modern weapon of choice used by Britain’s version of the comfortable classes to foster hatred of the working class. Where other forms of prejudice, such as those based on gender, race or sexuality, have been widely discredited (if still also widely practised) “chav-bashing” is openly conducted in the media and politics, on university campuses, at middle-class dinner parties and in the blogosphere. Princes even dress up as chavs to amuse their friends.

“Chav” appears to be of even more recent coinage than “bogan.” The electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary in my university library has 1998 as the earliest recorded reference, although there is a suggestion that the term might be derived from an older Anglo-Romani term for a male child (chavvy). Jones’s book is full of vivid quotations from the war on chavs, many of them deeply disturbing. One London gym actually went so far as to advertise classes for its wealthy clientele that would teach them how to give the chavs “a kicking,” and thereby turn their “grunt into a whine.” Jones’s book was written before the riots of last summer.

FOR JONES, chav-hatred is in one sense simply the latest instalment in the long history of demonisation of the working class. Yet he also makes much of the changes wrought since the 1970s, especially under Margaret Thatcher. Deindustrialisation and the decline of union power have devastated the working class, destroying jobs and communities. As Britain moved away from a mining and manufacturing economy to one based on services, it became possible to view working-class people as mere “detritus” left over from an earlier phase of history. Meanwhile, the cult of individual success, meritocracy and social mobility celebrated by both Thatcherism and Blairism undermined the legitimacy of working-class identity and culture. Even while inequality grew, the myth developed that everyone was now middle-class. Anyone who remained otherwise therefore had to be deficient in intellect, aspiration or morals. As Michael Young predicted in the 1950s, meritocracy raised unfortunate implications for those who failed to flourish. In short, they were “feckless,” a word that on the face of it seems to stand in about the same relationship to modern English usage as crinoline to women’s fashion. But as Jones shows, this epithet redolent of the Victorian era is trotted out repeatedly to explain what’s wrong with chavs.

Jones is clear that chav-hatred is class warfare, an effort by the conservative middle class to explain its own affluence and success as well as rationalise vast inequalities of wealth and opportunity – what Jones rightly calls “a rigged society.” Chav-bashing is also indulged in by the polenta-appreciating progressive middle class, as a way of avoiding the implication that social deprivation might be connected with economic inequality. “Liberal” chav-haters talk up the racism and ignorance of the “white” working class.

Here is a point at which there is considerable overlap of the discourses that whirl around their chavs and our bogans. I went to an academic event last year attended by a number of young postgraduate students. Several used the “b” word during discussion without apparent embarrassment. All, if challenged, would probably have been shocked by the suggestion that they were exhibiting class prejudice. For them, the bogan is defined not by class or wealth, but by (bad) values and behaviour.

The particular impulse they most associated with the bogan was a boorish nationalism. The bogan was not for them a “feckless” member of an underclass so much as an ignorant and bigoted person of any class. Hence the common image of the cashed-up, conservative, refugee-hating bogan in a McMansion full of shiny electrical goods. The bogans’ reputed material affluence, when combined with their reputed prejudice and bad taste, is seen to justify censure and ridicule of them. As Things Bogans Like puts it, they’re the kind of people who put “Fuck off, we’re full” stickers on their cars but wouldn’t join a racist group because that would be moving too far from the “mainstream.” Oh, and the white supremacists’ meetings clash with Two and a Half Men.

The term “chav” does seem to me to have a nastier edge than the talk about bogans, a point that may well reflect the greater social deprivation and class consciousness in Britain. Unlike Jones, who makes plain that chav-bashing is class warfare, Nichols seems not quite to know what to do with class. While his sympathies appear to be broadly with the left, he sometimes lapses into language about progressive inner-city elites that bears a striking resemblance to neo-conservative discourse. Nichols himself is a repentant former member of the inner-city elite who now lives in the Melbourne suburb of Broadmeadows – an area sometimes dismissed as a bogan haven – and he provides a robust defence of the suburb and of others similarly stigmatised. With his academic expertise in urban studies, he is at his best in talking about housing and suburbs, and he appears to recognise that it is the sites of post–second world war industrialisation that have mainly come to be dismissed as bogan places.

Yet Nichols is vague about much that happened in Australia in both the recent and more distant past, so that the reasons for the emergence of the term “bogan,” with its particular cultural associations, are inadequately explained. There is an obvious affinity between the bogan and the Sydney westie, and it may well be that the former term gained popularity in view of the geographical limitations of the latter when translated into national media. Moreover, many attributes of the bogan seem very similar to those once attached to the ocker, something that Nichols half-recognises in passing. But the ocker was a decidedly post-imperial and anti-feminist figure, one associated with the emergence of the new nationalism in the 1970s and especially its influence on the advertising industry through figures such as Paul Hogan and John Singleton. For the first time, one could hear decidedly working-class Australian accents urging us to buy “Meadow Lea, the good taste in spread” and advising, “Anyhow, have a Winfield.” And although there was occasional talk of female ockers – “ockerinas” – the ocker was basically a bloke; a white Anglo-Celtic Australian male chauvinist who looked and sounded working-class. But the bogan, like the chav, seems more post-industrial than post-imperial, can be either female or male and, like later manifestations of the westie, may apparently even be “ethnic.”

For Jones, the British class system is like “an invisible prison”; the genius of the chav stereotype is that it both denies the existence of the prison and helps keep the prisoners securely locked up. While his book ends on a hopeful note, it is a bleak picture of a society divided rigidly according to class, and kept that way by a cruel but effective stigmatisation of working people as the “scum of the earth.” Nichols’s bogan is an altogether fluffier creature, and the Australia he paints is one marked more by confusion and prejudice – mainly on the part of educated inner-suburban elites – than fear or hatred.

The chav has a central place in British Tory complaints about “Broken Britain.” Chavs, it is said, are the products and makers of dysfunctional communities riddled with violence, crime, welfare dependence and teenage pregnancy. They are, said the Daily Mail, a “feral underclass.” It is true there have been instances in Australia of this kind of talk, but the keynote has been snide ridicule more than outright moral condemnation, as in the sensationalist media coverage of the tragic death of toddler Jaidyn Leskie in the Latrobe Valley town of Moe in 1997.

Yet even a moment’s contemplation of the unlikely phrase “Broken Australia” highlights the fact that a much more optimistic society gave birth to the bogan. •

The post What we talk about when we talk about bogans appeared first on Inside Story.

The message has been hammered home repeatedly. No supporter of public education or the National Health Service has anything to fear from the Conservative Party. Tories now believe in fairness, equality of opportunity, fighting poverty and protecting the environment. The “nasty party” is a thing of the past, having made way for “progressive conservatism.” Don’t be deceived by appearances, such as the Eton and Oxbridge types still in charge: the ever-so-modern Tories have been reborn with a heart of green and gold.

In reality, the Thatcher legacy was never really going to be dealt with so peremptorily, least of all once the boom turned to bust, as it did during 2008. Cameron suddenly faced the problem of explaining how a party that believed in light-touch regulation would deal with the most comprehensive market failure since the 1930s. He also had to explain how his progressive conservatism would fare in an age of austerity. Since there’s almost no limit to the linguistic gymnastics of modern politicians, or to the cheek of an ambitious opposition leader with the sniff of an election triumph in his nostrils, he has made a fair fist of it. Among other things, he claimed that the Tories, as the party of “law and order,” would now bring “law and order” to the financial markets.

If this sounds a little forced, there are also signs of a more general fraying at the edges; so much so that this week’s Observer is announcing the results of an Ipsos MORI poll that shows Conservative support at 37 per cent, just six points ahead of Labour’s 31 per cent. On these figures, an election held this week would produce a hung parliament, with the Liberal Democrats in a position to dictate terms. Labour even won a by-election in Glasgow this month, in contrast with repeated electoral humiliations at by-elections and local government elections over the past couple of years. And while Brown’s personal approval rating remains awful enough, with 34 per cent satisfied and 59 per cent dissatisfied, Cameron has hardly received ringing endorsement: 48 per cent are happy with him, compared with a dissatisfaction rate of 35 per cent. It’s no wonder that political commentators point to the vast gulf between the enthusiasm generated by Tony Blair and New Labour in 1997 and the present circumstances.

There’s no shortage of speculation about why Labour’s fortunes appear to have turned around to the extent that it’s at least back in the hunt. The economy and consumer confidence are showing signs of recovery in the lead-up to Christmas. Unemployment is bad but has not reached the proportions predicted a year ago. A modest revival in the property market and on the stock exchange seems to be under way. And after a disruptive postal strike the mail is moving again, at least for the time being.

There’s also renewed sympathy for Brown after a particularly brutal and ill-judged campaign against him by the Sun newspaper. Having recently announced a switch of allegiance from Labour to Tory, it has been running the implausible line that Brown is disrespectful of the military. Exhibit A for the prosecution was a personal note Brown wrote to a woman who lost her son in Afghanistan. Brown’s handwriting is admittedly poor – possibly the result of blindness in one eye – but the accusation that his note was full of spelling errors held little water and was widely seen as unscrupulous media exploitation of a mother’s grief, as well as grossly unfair to a busy man who had the decency to write a personal note of condolence.

But the continuing uncertainty about next year’s election outcome inevitably returns us to Cameron, the Tories and Thatcher. The Conservatives have already promised a wage freeze of a year for all except the lowest-paid public sector workers. On top of this, Cameron has been delivering speeches on the evils of public debt and “big government.” Labour, he says, has suppressed its “good” radical liberal tradition in favour of its “bad” Fabian one. And he has also drawn parallels between Labour’s record of economic management over the past decade and the crisis of 1976, when the Labour chancellor, Denis Healey, was forced to seek the assistance of the International Monetary Fund to prop up the pound. The implication is presumably that, just as electors turned to Thatcher and the Tories to get them out of that crisis, a Conservative government will be needed to extricate the country from Brown’s mess.

In an emphasis that recalls the 1980s Thatcherite talk of “Victorian values,” Cameron has also spoken of the superiority of voluntary over government action and the virtues of personal and public “thrift.” In other words, it’s really Labour’s over-regulation, profligacy and excessive borrowing that are responsible for the recession; not, it seems, the let-it-rip financial system delivered by the government of you-know-who a quarter of a century ago. Where Cameron does see inadequate regulation, the blame is placed squarely at the feet of Labour, and especially Brown as chancellor. Cameron will fix it all – so he says – by restoring the governor of the Bank of England’s former (proverbial) ability to bring the rest of the financial sector into line with a twitch of the eyebrow. (It presumably helps things along if both twitcher and twitchee went to Eton or Balliol.)

UNSURPRISINGLY, the Labour Party has not allowed Cameron free rein with this kind of nonsense. Ed Miliband, the secretary of state for energy and climate change, has presented the “big government” guff as a reversion to Tory type. Margaret Thatcher, he recalls, used to ask of anyone nominated to admission to her circle: “Is he one of us?” Cameron, said Miliband, has shown “that he would have passed Thatcher’s test” and, in blaming government for poverty and inequality, was trying “to build a reactionary consensus” that would justify massive spending cuts in “a return to the 1980s by the back door.”

So is Cameron reverting to Thatcherite type? Much depends on what one considers “Thatcherite.” In his recent book, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era, Richard Vinen of my own university has undermined the common belief about Thatcher being an ideologically driven destroyer of a postwar consensus. Although committed to the free market, she was also a pragmatic operator and sufficiently flexible in her tactics to distinguish between fights worth having and those to be avoided. She did not come to office with fully developed plans for winding down the economic and social policies of the Keynesian welfare state. Indeed, Vinen suggests that in many respects she was a defender of the postwar consensus against some of the more radical tendencies of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Although the first Thatcher government made severe budgetary cuts, social spending remained high during the 1980s and there were no drastic changes to education or health policy. And in seeking to reverse Britain’s decline as a major power by strengthening the alliance with the United States and developing an independent nuclear deterrent, Thatcher was in line with both the Labour and the Tory governments of the 1940s to the 1970s. Many of the positions associated with Thatcher, such as a willingness to take on Argentina in the Falklands, confront the coal miners, privatise state enterprise and take a sceptical attitude towards Europe, evolved gradually, and were responses to particular historical circumstances and contingencies. Often, says Vinen, her position was shared with those occupying a very different place on the political spectrum.

Cameron himself is cautious in dealing with the Thatcherite legacy, at least if his recent speeches are any indication. At times, usually without alluding directly to Thatcher or the 1980s, he is at pains to emphasise that although his government will be forced to make “incredibly difficult decisions,” it will do so in an un-Thatcherite way. In a speech last January, he said that there’s one way of making tough decisions, “which is brisk, businesslike and no doubt effective – but it can all too easily give rise to anger, hurt and social division.” But there is another way: “It takes a bit more patience, a bit more thought, and a lot of hard work.” On another occasion, he reiterated that his government was not “going to behave like flint-faced turbo charged accountants, slashing and spending without regard to the social consequences.” (Accountants seem to be Tory whipping boys. In the 1970s, Douglas Hurd complained about “stiff-collared accountants” who were rising in the Tory Party.)

“She” does sometimes make a fleeting appearance in Cameron’s speeches. Speaking to a Davos forum earlier this year, he directly endorsed a more palatable aspect of the 1980s legacy – “the ownership revolution led by Margaret Thatcher” – and called for a return to “popular capitalism,” a term borrowed directly from the Thatcherite handbook. This is an evocation of policies promoting the purchase of council houses by their tenants and “mum-and-dad” share ownership in newly privatised industries: that is, “nice” capitalism.

Unfortunately for Cameron, capitalism’s rather more ugly face has often been on show over the last couple of years. Although there has been Tory talk about restraining City bonuses and the like, no one takes any of it too seriously now that the cash and champagne are flowing once again. Cameron and the Tories are caught up in a rather similar contradiction to that which marked Thatcherism from the mid 1980s, after reforms to the financial sector saw the City, long a cosy gentlemen’s club, make a rapid transition from snuff to cocaine, whiskey to tequila sunrise. In the 1980s, there was nothing terribly Victorian about the new breed of merchant bankers and stockbrokers, except possibly its taste in antiques and real estate. And while, like the Thatcherites, he preaches Smilesian thrift and restraint, Cameron has produced no convincing vision of a British economic future except one based heavily on the massive private and public debt that have been a key feature of capitalism since the rise of Thatcher and Reagan.

The talk of thrift, however, sits comfortably enough alongside various other kinds of populist appeal within Cameron’s speeches, such as his complaints about Labour’s Orwellian surveillance society; his promise to devolve power so that local communities can make their own decisions, instead of being bossed by central government; and a recently announced policy, in the wake of the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, to return to Britain control over various matters previously ceded to the European Union. It’s normal for people to feel alienated by bureaucracy, so it’s hardly surprising that Cameron should seek to weave a rhetoric around these kinds of themes when faced with a long-serving centre-left government. The EU policy is also a sop to the Eurosceptics in his party who have rather warmer feelings towards the Thatcherite legacy – or at least the anti-European part of it – than Cameron. The danger for him will be if electors begin to ask whether, in making such concessions to the right, and by targeting “big government,” the Conservatives mean that they are going to sack public employees and make deep and divisive cuts in social spending.

You know. Like “She” did. •

The post Who’s afraid of Margaret Thatcher? appeared first on Inside Story.

IT IS probably unfair to judge a Labor Party prime minister’s address to national conference by its most incoherent passage: “This is the Labor way. This is the Australian way. We follow it simply because we are us.” But it sounded too much like the rejected first draft of a 1980s airline advertisement for journalists to let it through to the keeper. And with a dash of Arthur Calwell added for good measure. As the 1960s Labor leader used to say, “We are Labor because we are Australian and we are Australian because we are Labor.” Or was it the other way around?

While even friendly critics have criticised her speech as flat and uninspiring, the prime minister, on the whole, had a pretty good conference, capping off a year’s end that turned out brighter than she had any reason to believe would be the case even three months ago. Labor’s polling is still in the doldrums, but her own approval rating is improving. Her opponent’s, Tony Abbott, will be of continuing concern to the Coalition, as it ponders what to do with 2012.

Since Labor’s near defeat at the 2010 election, the prime minister has shown utter indifference to the cause of party reform and the specific proposals contained a review carried out by John Faulkner, Bob Carr and Steve Bracks. It may be that it’s hard to see the fundamental problems in a party when it has delivered you a highly successful career in politics and, eventually, the prime ministership. As Graham Richardson correctly pointed out in the Australian, Gillard may well have had a less easy run at this conference if a large part of it had been elected directly by party members. The kind of rhetoric heard from Doug Cameron might have been backed by numbers. The conference, for its part, rejected, postponed or watered down most of the review committee’s already released proposals. The rest of the report, the so-called sealed section, is being leaked selectively as part of the ongoing battle between the Gillard and Rudd camps. “This is the Labor way... We follow it simply because we are us.”

For most Australians, the idea that the national conference of a democratic political party should be constituted by the votes of its membership would be a relatively uncontroversial proposition. When they contemplate the creation of an Australian republic, for instance, most people favour direct election of the head of state. But from the point of view of the close oligarchy that runs the Australian Labor Party, the idea of direct election of national conference is poisonous. Oligarchies do not normally give up their power voluntarily. Wise heads, with long experience of the party and “the Labor way,” predicted very accurately what kind of reception the Faulkner-Carr-Bracks proposals would receive from the national conference.

Even direct election of part of the conference, which is all that has any prospect of making it through in my lifetime or yours, would upset the present cosy duopoly between the right and the left, underwritten as it is by a coterie of union officials who can at best claim to speak on behalf of less than 10 per cent of the workforce. Every up-and-comer with their eye on a parliamentary seat – and there were quite a few of those at national conference – would fear that their years of hard work cultivating this union boss and that factional operative would lead into a career dead-end called party democracy. Every present member would find their tenure just that little bit less secure, at a time when the polls suggest that, short of the most extraordinary turnaround in Australian political history, many of them will in any case be looking for alternative employment after the next election.

It is at this time of the year that the minute proportion of Australians who remain in the Labor Party are asked to renew their membership. In this respect, the timing of the national conference was possibly unfortunate. It endorsed a modest, but probably unattainable, recruitment target of 8000 new members. Many who already belong must be asking themselves whether they wish to remain any longer in what amounts to an abusive relationship. Apart from the warm inner glow of supporting a “great movement,” they receive very little in return for their annual fee. The “great movement,” for its part, has little need for their money and none at all for their participation in monthly branch meetings. The “great movement” to which Prime Minister Gillard referred in her speech is unable these days even to sustain an official newsletter or bulletin. There was a time when it owned daily papers and radio stations, and local branches fielded cricket teams.

THE conference has been predictably excoriated in the Australian for its endorsement of gay marriage. The journalists and experts concerned, of course, do not bother engaging with the issue itself but instead express their amazement that the party should be bothering with such a divisive and trivial matter when there are really more important things to worry about. Having tired of the clubs’ campaign against gambling reform, the Australian is now sooling church leaders onto what remains of the party. Grudging praise for conference's endorsement of uranium sales to India is accompanied by astonishment that the same party would then cancel out such wisdom by pandering to the interests of cosmopolitan elites on the other controversial policy issue that conference considered.

It is true that most Australians probably don’t lie awake at night worrying about gay marriage rights. But on this reasoning, Vincent Lingiari would still be waiting for Gough Whitlam to pour into his hands the soil of Gurindji country, as he did in that memorable gesture in 1975. Most Australians, I’d suggest, didn’t lie awake worrying about Gurindji land rights in 1975. Most Australians don’t lose sleep worrying about the disabled either, but the party conference endorsed a scheme of disability insurance on the grounds that it is good policy that will improve vulnerable people’s lives.

The Australian’s analysis of the conference decision on gay and lesbian marriage has been concerned largely with its effects on the Labor vote. That a very clear majority of Australians support same-sex marriage has not deterred the experts. They are certain that this is a big vote-loser out in the suburbs. It is unclear, however, why they believe this to be so. Their assumption seems derived from the notion that the kind of voter found in the mortgage belt has “traditional” values, and is moved only by “material” issues. Gay marriage is seen as part of a quality of life agenda and therefore outside their field of concern. A party seen to champion such an agenda is simply showing that it has been captured by an inner-city elite is out of touch with ordinary Australians.

This whole line of reasoning – to give it a flattering name – seems to me wrong-headed. Even at the crudest level of analysis, most heterosexual suburbanites are probably sensible enough to realise that the quality of life in their community, and probably their property prices as well, will go up rather than down once gays and lesbians move into their neighbourhood. Robert Reynolds pointed out in his book What Happened to Gay Life? (2007) that the old idea of a gay community centred on a particular inner-city precinct such as Oxford Street in Sydney was losing its meaning, as inner-city property prices went up and housing in such areas fell well outside what most gays could afford. Gays and lesbians, of course, have long lived in places other than the inner suburbs, but they are probably now a more visible presence in a greater variety of communities than ever before. To apply the “inner-city elites versus suburban battlers” cliché to this matter flies in the face of lived reality.

What is most striking to me about gay and lesbian marriage is how radically and completely an issue that was barely on the agenda even for most gays and lesbians a few years back has now moved to national centre-stage. As a historian, and a historian of Australian sexuality, this is for me the really big story. And it’s not simply a story about the influence exercised by highly motivated activists, although they have clearly played a role.

As Rodney Croome recently argued in the radical magazine Overland, the issue can be seen as part of the long history of marginalised Australians, including convicts and Aborigines, claiming the freedom to marry. It is also a critical step in the history of Australian homosexuality. Opponents of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the 1970s sometimes argued that it would lead to claims that gays should be enabled to marry. Their allegations were false at the time and primarily intended to scare off people who were cautiously sympathetic to homosexual men, since those advocating decriminalisation were not then claiming marriage rights. During that period of radicalism and libertarianism, many gays and lesbians saw marriage as an intrinsically oppressive institution, and they had little interest in creating a homosexual version of it.

In another sense, however, the opponents of decriminalisation were right: the claim that gays and lesbians should be able to live a “normal” life, that their relationships should be treated with the same seriousness and respect as those between men and women, had more far-reaching implications than many law reformers were able to recognise. Decriminalisation opened the way to a claim for the right to marry because marriage remains the most powerful institution in our society for registering the essential dignity of a relationship between two human beings. The logic of moving beyond mere grudging tolerance for homosexuality and homosexuals, and instead recognising the basic worth and integrity of homosexual relationships, was to change the marriage law to allow for a complete equality.

In permitting Labor parliamentarians a conscience vote on this issue, national conference effected an oily compromise. As has been pointed out by proponents of same-sex marriage, Labor would not allow a conscience vote on a matter of racial or gender discrimination. But unless the Coalition allows its MPs a conscience vote as well, the measure will certainly be defeated. It might be defeated even if they do. The prime minister is an opponent of gay marriage but her failure so far to articulate a reasoned case against it, either at conference or in any other forum, raises serious questions about her political sincerity on this issue, and her capacity to provide leadership on any complex moral or social issue.

Power over marriage falls squarely within the competence of the national parliament. It’s all there in Section 51 of the Australian Constitution. This isn’t an issue that politicians can avoid. We pay Commonwealth parliamentarians to represent us on the full range of matters outlined in that document, not just those they choose to regard as worthy of their attention.

Gillard’s failure to articulate a coherent position on same-sex marriage is a sign of the times; a measure of the rapid sea-change in attitudes. There is no better indication of a fundamental shift of opinion than when those who claim to be opponents of a measure can no longer summon secular arguments that will float in mainstream public discourse. (One can find religious arguments to support or oppose just about anything.) That is fundamentally why all the talk has been about the electoral disaster that supposedly awaits the Labor Party on account of this question.

And that’s also why the Murdoch press will open its columns to every cardinal, bishop, rabbi, mullah or Shoppies union official with something to say about it in the weeks, months and probably years ahead. •

The post The Labor way appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet Troy Bramston believes that Labor’s emerging crisis was perceptible even in the hour of victory. Early in his lively new book, Looking for the Light on the Hill: Modern Labor’s Challenges, he gives an account of the disappointment felt by many of the true believers at Kevin Rudd’s execrable election night victory speech in 2007. As Bramston adds pointedly, “it would be a sign of things to come.” Labor’s share of first-preference votes at that election, at around 43 per cent, was the second-lowest the party had ever attracted while still winning. For Bramston, this decline reflects the failures of “Labor’s lost decade” from 1996 until 2007, when it distanced itself from the successful Hawke and Keating legacy while neglecting party renewal. Labor’s crisis today, he says, is primarily one of identity and leadership. A once proud and well-led party animated by a clear sense of purpose has given way to a fearful and poorly led crew.

Bramston’s views should be taken seriously. A Labor insider, he was employed as Rudd’s speechwriter during 2007 – although he was not the author of that election night speech – and he has also worked for many years as a staffer for other Labor MPs in both opposition and government. But unlike many of those who make careers in the offices of Labor politicians, Bramston also has a deep knowledge of party history. In this sense, he is a commentator in the best traditions of the NSW Labor Party, which has long seemed to take its history and traditions more seriously than state branches have elsewhere. Looking for the Light on the Hill is crammed with references to the party and leaders of yesteryear; in comparison, the modern party is often found to be wanting. This gives the book a slightly nostalgic quality, but one mitigated by Bramston’s conviction that party renewal means taking inspiration from the past rather than reliving it.

Bramston’s method is to extract from Labor history what he sees as the essential and continuing goals, and then to argue for a reconstruction of the party’s mission around them. On the whole, a party that allowed itself to be guided by the renovated objective that Bramston outlines in his book would do Australia much good. It includes economic and social justice, environmental sustainability, equality of opportunity, nation-building, “creative and innovative diplomacy,” and the promotion of rights and liberties. And when he begins to explain how these broad goals might translate into specific policies, his commitment to a just and humane politics could not be clearer.

All the same, there is too little sense here of the historical contingency of most definitions of what the Labor Party stands for. Bramston quotes Susan Ryan, the former Hawke government minister: “Why does Labor exist? It has only been in recent years that we have needed to ask the question. A generation ago, and right back to our founding at the end of the nineteenth century, we knew the meaning and purpose of Labor. Labor is a social-democratic party.” But there were remarkably few true believers who would have thought to call Labor a “social-democratic party” before the 1970s. In the Australian context, “social democracy” seems to have emerged around then or a little later as a way of distinguishing the ambitious program of the Whitlam government – its gestures towards universalism in welfare provision and its embrace of the concerns of the new social movements, for instance – from old-style Labor’s supposedly narrower concern with how many “bob” a man got in his pay packet.

Similarly, most Labor people would not until recently have called themselves “centre-left.” I can’t remember hearing this term until the last few years and presume it is of fairly recent – and probably British or North American – coinage. Even “progressive,” another word Bramston favours, was probably insignificant until recently. It was used by the Victorian Labor Party, which called itself the “Progressive Political League” for a couple of years in the 1890s, but Victorian Labor was at that stage essentially a wing of the Liberal Party. Western Australian Labor also used it briefly, but it might not have been widely applied to the Labor Party again until it was picked up by Australian admirers of Tony Blair and the Third Way in the late 1990s.

IN ITS British context, the term was intended to present New Labour as the heir to the best traditions of English liberalism, with Blair as a latter-day Gladstone. In Australia, “progressive” has more often functioned as a means by which the Labor right, especially in New South Wales, could identify itself as something more noble than a machine for dispensing jobs and favours or a pathway into the lucrative world of private sector employment. “Part of the problem with Labor,” former NSW and national party secretary Karl Bitar told Bramston, “is that by the time many of our politicians and officials reach senior positions of power, they are no longer driven by the core policy values which brought them to be involved in politics in the first place.” Bitar is now employed as a lobbyist for James Packer’s gambling empire.

For at least a decade, Bramston has been a persistent critic of Labor’s socialisation objective – that is, of its formal commitment to “the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields.” He believes that the socialist objective should be dropped largely for two reasons. In the first place, socialism is a discredited ideal, and the socialisation objective no longer reflects the actual goals of party members. It is therefore a barrier to the kind of rethinking of its mission in which the party needs to engage. This position is defensible, although I also have sympathy with John Faulkner’s comment, quoted by Bramston: “It is a very long time since the socialist objective has won or lost Labor a vote in an election.” Most electors would not even know of the objective’s existence. As Bramston shows, Labor has quite a lot of problems at the moment; is it wise to alert the ignorant to something most see as an irrelevance?

Bramston’s analogy with Tony Blair’s successful effort to remove the British Labour Party’s famous Clause IV seems to me off the mark. Adopted in 1918, not long before its Australian counterpart took on its socialisation objective, Clause IV committed the British Labour Party to the “common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” The context of Blair’s 1994 assault on this goal was totally different from the situation faced by the Australian Labor Party today. The Conservatives had been in office for fifteen years, the Labour Party had moved well to the left, especially under Michael Foot, and there were concerns about radical groups within the party, such as the Militant Tendency, which had recently been active in the anti–poll tax campaign. It would be an exaggeration to call Blair’s success in persuading the party to discard Clause IV as a tragedy. But the attempt to repeat it in Australia in 2011 might well be a farce.

Bramston also believes that the objective should be dropped because Labor is not and has never been a socialist party. But socialists have clearly been a presence in the Labor Party from the jump, and socialism made its mark on Labor’s way of viewing the world. Bramston is right to point out that there has always been much confusion about the meaning of socialism. But much the same might be said of “social liberalism,” “social democracy” and “labourism,” which he believes to form an amalgam that has constituted Labor philosophy over the last 120 years.

Whatever else they have disagreed about, socialists have usually believed in a more equal society. It is striking that when Bramston discusses “equality” in this book he seems to be referring primarily to equality of opportunity, a goal that Tories in both Britain and Australia usually find themselves able to endorse. Yet until the 1980s, one of the guiding principles of the Labor Party was surely that a more equal society was better than a less equal one. Here was part of socialism’s legacy for Labor, whose goal of greater equality was more ambitious than mere meritocracy. But the idea of equality began to break down in the 1950s and 1960s as mass consumerism offered ever wider circles of people easier access to a large range of desirable goods. By the early 1970s, in the context of continuing affluence, Whitlam was defining equality as equal access to government services – a noble goal, but one that evaded the problem of inequalities that did not have their basis in unequal access to public goods. By the 1980s, Labor leaders such as Hawke and Keating were no longer at all interested in arguments about how the economic cake was divided up, so long as it was sufficiently large to ensure that enough crumbs fell the way of the disadvantaged, either “naturally” or with a little help from government.

THAT was not the only “break” that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. Labor’s strong support for White Australia gave way to non-discrimination and Asian engagement. Labor’s hard nationalism was replaced by a softer version closely aligned with multiculturalism. The party’s traditional support for the patriarchal family sustained by a male breadwinner’s wage gave way to acceptance and then an embrace of double-income families and gender equality. The traditional Labor preference for public ownership of major utilities and enterprises was superseded by a mania for privatisation. Support for high levels of spending gave way to austerity and balanced budgets. A powerful strain of sexual puritanism and moral conservatism decayed in the face of a rights agenda that may well soon extend to gay couples wishing to marry.

Like Bramston, I welcome many if not all of these changes. But my point is that if we are to find an answer to why a prime minister with the intellect of Kevin Rudd quickly found himself all over the shop, or why a politician as accomplished as Julia Gillard cannot find a register in which to address the nation, or why the Labor Party for the last generation has been unable to build up a coherent narrative about where it wishes to take the country, we might well need to look beyond the failures of the post-1996 Labor Party. We need to look harder at those dramatic changes in the very era of Labor achievement that Bramston celebrates. They have combined with deindustrialisation and globalisation to detach Labor from those 40 per cent of voters who used to stick by it hail, rain or shine.

Bramston nonetheless offers an astute diagnosis of the ills afflicting the modern Labor Party, as well as some ways in which the party might set about trying to resolve its problems. On some matters, such as his advocacy of a parliamentary leader elected by rank-and-file members (along the lines of arrangements in the British Labour Party I discussed in Inside Story in August 2010), he moves well beyond the recommendations of the review carried out after the last federal election by John Faulkner, Bob Carr and Steve Bracks. He opposes a close relationship with the Greens; the compact the Gillard government signed with them is for him both a symptom and a cause of the identity crisis.

On the relationship of the party to the union movement, he is more cautious than Rodney Cavalier, who wants a massive reduction in union power so as to end union control of Labor. Bramston argues for retaining affiliated unions and even expanding union involvement in the party by providing, for example, more opportunities for unaffiliated bodies to participate. He does recognise that any significant effort to empower ordinary party members will come up against the obstruction of powerful vested interests, such as union bosses, faction leaders, sitting MPs and those who eventually wish to take their places. But he doesn’t really offer a way around this problem. Perhaps his failure to do so is consistent with his position that internal party reform matters less than sorting out the serious deficits in leadership and identity.

In this, Bramston is perhaps a creature of his culture and our time. Labor was founded as a radical democratic party; so much so that the first NSW Labor caucus didn’t even choose a leader, preferring a committee of management. The Labor Party has venerated its leaders but also been highly suspicious of them. Yet Bramston looks to the party leadership, not to the rank and file, for a solution to the problem of identity.

This is all quite understandable, for the rank and file is almost gone. But it might be that a party that needs to look to its leaders – professional politicians – for a sense of who it is, what it wants, and where it’s going, has already lost the battle. •

The post Why does Labor exist? appeared first on Inside Story.

THE six-to-one High Court verdict was devastating to the government. At a time of global economic and political instability, a relatively new but unpopular prime minister – one widely criticised for breaking election promises – had taken yet another blow. How could the government fulfil its responsibility to protect national security if the country’s leading judges wouldn’t allow it to do so?

If this scenario seems familiar, it should – and doubly so. It is a fair summary of the Australian scene in March 1951, when Robert Menzies’s Coalition government learned that the High Court of Australia had struck down its Communist Party Dissolution Act. And of course it also bears more than a passing resemblance to the problems of Julia Gillard’s government, right down to its recent High Court reverse over the Malaysian solution.

But even leaving aside Marx’s famous dictum that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, it is doubtful whether federal Labor can take much heart from the similarities.

During 1951, as it tried to deal with a rate of inflation of over 20 per cent and what it believed to be a looming third world war, the Menzies government seemed like a short-term proposition. But for several reasons, including divisions among its opponents and the emergence of greater affluence and economic stability in the mid-1950s, Menzies was able to retire as prime minister fifteen years later without having suffered an election defeat. The Liberal–Country Party government itself managed to hang on until December 1972. Only the wildest optimist among its supporters would suggest that the Gillard government might look forward to such a run of good fortune.

One issue that helped Menzies and the conservatives immensely in these years was communism. At a time when the world was riven by cold war conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies and satellites, Menzies and his political colleagues harvested the communist issue with ruthless efficiency. Fed by sensational stories from abroad and hysteria among politicians and the press, the public had every reason to believe that the country was riddled with spies, informers and traitors awaiting their opportunity to overthrow democracy.

In reality, the activities of a group of real informants, run by the local Communist official Wally Clayton for the benefit of his Soviet masters, had come to an end by the early 1950s as the result of an effective counter-espionage effort by western intelligence. The Communist Party of Australia itself, moreover, was small and electorally unpopular – its membership had declined from a wartime high of 23,000 to perhaps a little over a fifth of that number by 1951. All the same, some of its members maintained responsible positions in leading trade unions. As such, the party was a convenient scapegoat for a government that had unrealistically raised consumer expectations in order to win the 1949 election.

The Liberal and Country parties had gone into that election promising to ban the Communist Party. Menzies himself came round to this view only gradually: as a lawyer, he understood how principles of British justice would be breached by a peacetime ban of this kind; as a politician, he worried that a ban might simply prompt the Communist Party to continue its operations underground. The Country Party had supported a ban for many years, though, and there were people in the newly formed Liberal Party – especially in New South Wales – who favoured a hard line. The Coalition’s policy solidified in 1948 and, once the election was won, the matter called for action.

The Communist Party Dissolution Bill was introduced into parliament in 1950 as one of the first legislative acts of the new government. It banned the Communist Party and other bodies found to be substantially communist, provided for the seizure of their assets, and prohibited communists from holding office in trade unions or working as Commonwealth public servants. Anyone who sought to continue the operation of a banned organisation would receive five years’ imprisonment. Notoriously, the legislation reversed the onus of proof: unless a “declared” individual was willing to take the stand and testify under oath, that person would need to disprove the accusation of being a communist.

Under ailing leader Ben Chifley, the Labor Party opposed the legislation. The party’s deputy leader, Herbert Vere Evatt, a former attorney-general and a brilliant constitutional lawyer, fought tenaciously and with some success to have some of the most onerous provisions removed. When the bill went to the Labor-controlled Senate, there were further amendments, which the government refused to accept. Chifley wanted to continue the fight, but he was overruled by Labor’s national executive and forced to allow the bill to pass. An immediate challenge occurred in the High Court and, sensationally, Evatt accepted a brief to appear for the Communist-led Waterside Workers Federation. The court, in a six–one decision, struck down the legislation in March, primarily on the grounds that it attempted to usurp the court’s own role of judicial review.

Menzies accepted the judgment rather more graciously than another lawyer and prime minister, Julia Gillard, took her recent reverse over the Malaysian solution. Nonetheless, the government decided to seek a constitutional amendment. By this time, Chifley had died and Evatt had assumed the party leadership. The referendum battle became one between two fine legal minds and bitter political rivals – Menzies and Evatt.

Evatt’s “No” campaign is widely regarded as his finest moment and a landmark in the history of Australian democracy. In the months before the referendum – which was held sixty years ago, on 22 September 1951 – opinion polling suggested that voters would approve the ban. In July, for instance, 80 per cent said they would vote “Yes.” A poll published a month before the vote had the figure at 73 per cent. A large part of the historical drama of the “No” campaign arises from a sense that in the course of a remarkably gritty campaign Evatt was able to turn the situation around. By the eve of the real poll on 22 September, the government had every reason to be worried. A million voters were said to have switched sides in just six weeks.

WHILE he is frequently maligned as mad, bad or both – mentally unstable, soft on communism, obnoxious towards subordinates, disloyal to party and country – Evatt’s many defenders point to his role as Australian external affairs minister during the 1940s in the making of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But his main theme in 1951 was the un-British character of the proposed ban – its attempt to punish individuals for their beliefs and associations rather than their breach of the law, its effort to prevent the courts from reviewing the actions of the executive, and its setting aside of common law principles such as the presumption of innocence. For Evatt, the autonomy and freedom of the individual would be undermined by the very existence of the arbitrary powers demanded by the government; they would not need to be exercised on any particular occasion to turn citizens into slaves. As he put it in one speech, “Few will dare lift their voices to defend the underdog or defy the bully if by so doing the perjurer, the pimp or the informer can whisper into the ear of the Security Police.”

In an Australia that still regarded itself as British, the appeal of these debating points is easy to understand. And with an Anglophile such as Menzies as his major opponent, a political tactician with any nous would have noticed the prime minister’s vulnerability on this score. Travelling to meetings all over the country, often delivering several speeches and broadcasts in a single day, Evatt made a powerful case that the powers sought by the government should not be granted in a “British” community.

The matter was contentious, not only between the parties but also within them. A group of right-wing Catholic Laborites centred on Victoria all but advocated a “Yes” vote. And among the Liberal Party rank and file, there were members prepared to speak out about the danger to civil liberties that a “Yes” vote posed. Uncertainty and confusion, claim and counter-claim, were hardly calculated to help Menzies; party disagreement has always been fatal to referendum proposals.

The changes themselves seemed almost calculated to panic voters. The government not only asked for the authority to enact the amended Communist Party Dissolution Act, it also asked for the right to be able to amend it. The term “communist” was defined in vague terms to mean anyone “who supports or advocates the objectives, policies, teachings, principles or practices of communism, as expounded by Marx and Lenin.” Menzies’s own accidental but notorious inclusion of non-Communists on a list of supposed Communists he read out in the House of Representatives in 1950 would have served to underline the dangers of so empowering the government. Meanwhile, the prime minister’s behaviour at his unruly meetings – such as his disparaging remarks to and about interjectors, and his references to Communist “scum” and “rats” – made him look like the dictator in the making that Evatt implied he was.

Menzies had other problems, too, such as runaway inflation partly stimulated by the outbreak of the Korean War in mid-1950. “What about the price of onions?” one interjector called out at a Menzies meeting in Adelaide. “You will put us on the dole again,” called out another in Hobart. “Where’s your Jap flag?” an interjector asked as a street-corner meeting in Sydney. The Japanese Peace Treaty had only just been signed, and one of Evatt’s themes was that “communist” might be defined to include people critical of the government’s “attitude to Japanese rearmament.” The recent announcement that thousands of Commonwealth public servants would be dismissed, a financial crisis in Victoria, and the likelihood of a horror federal budget straight after the referendum provided the perfect circumstances for a large protest vote.

Nonetheless, at a time when Australian forces were fighting communists in Korea, cold war anti-communism had wide and deep appeal. Evatt needed to make a case that would persuade the confused or suspicious – hostile though they were to “totalitarianism” – that they should vote “No.” Evatt’s triumph was to turn the rhetoric of cold war anti-communism back on his opponents. His technique was to associate the government’s proposed methods with “the revolutionary procedures of totalitarianism and Fascism” and argue against attacking “communism by the methods of the jackboot, the spy system and the concentration camp.”

In one of the propaganda victories of the campaign, Evatt released a press statement that made potent and dramatic reference to the second world war and especially the triumph of Nazism. “First the Reds, then the Jews, then the Trade Unions, then the Social Democratic Parties, then the Catholic Centre Party and then the Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches,” he wrote. “It is the old totalitarian road; the road that led to the horrors of Belsen; the way that cost millions of lives in the Second World War and the untold sacrifices of our peoples in the world struggle against Hitler, Mussolini and Japan.”

Evatt was adapting a famous quotation from Martin Niemöller, the anti-Nazi theologian. References to both the Nazis and the Holocaust in everyday political debate were less hackneyed in 1951 than they have become since, and probably more meaningful for a generation that had sacrificed much in the defence of freedom during the war.

About 50.5 per cent of Australians voted “No” on 22 September – a very narrow victory for Evatt and his supporters. The proposal was also rejected by a majority of voters in half the states: New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. Under the terms of the constitution, which required the approval of a majority of voters and a “Yes” vote in four of the six states, the referendum had failed. In radical mythology, the result sits alongside the defeat of conscription in 1916–17 as a victory for democracy and freedom.

BUT the lessons of 1951 for today’s politicians are perhaps less straightforward than they might seem. Evatt was not an entirely consistent defender of individual liberties throughout his career. Not a few of his claims during the campaign seem wildly exaggerated, even allowing for the passions of the moment and his overwhelming desire to defeat a measure he rightly regarded as obnoxious. He appealed to people’s fears as much as to their reason or attachment to fair play. And he cashed in on the government’s unpopularity over barely related issues, such as the Japanese Peace Treaty, increasing taxes, and spending cuts.

In today’s politics, with its 24/7 news cycle and constant polling, the pressure on a political leader to bow to the will of public opinion at any particular moment is much tougher than anything Evatt faced in 1951. The Labor leader had an ordinary politician’s instinct for self-preservation but it is hard to imagine him, or his predecessor Chifley, allowing his actions to be driven by the findings of focus groups. Politics was about taking risks, about backing your own judgment when something was worth fighting for, even in the face of overwhelming media and public opposition. Of Australia’s major newspapers in 1951, only one – the Melbourne Argus – opposed the ban.

Evatt had many personal and political faults, but in August and September 1951 he conducted a brave campaign, and one that helped save Australians from the worst excesses of the cold war. He defended the rights of a deeply unpopular minority at a time when few Australians had any sympathy for them. And, at least for the moment, he refused to place advantage above principle.

Sixty years on, there might be lessons in that for a government whose leader, after the last election, called for a renewed “sense of purpose” in place of an obsession with each evening’s six o’clock news. •

The post Amid the panic, a sense of purpose appeared first on Inside Story.

ALMOST four years of living in Britain probably doesn’t quite qualify me for the title “returning expat.” In any case, I visited Australia fairly often during those years and as someone teaching Australian studies in London – I think the historian Tom Griffiths once referred to the role as “professional Australian” – I couldn’t really afford to cut myself off from the Antipodean scene even if I had wanted to.

Still, in terms of Australian politics, my departure from Antipodean shores in September 2007 seems more like forty years ago than four. The big story just before I left was the Liberal Party’s leadership crisis, rivalled only by the Chaser gang’s Osama bin Laden stunt at the Sydney APEC meeting. Kevin Rudd’s rise and rise seemed inexorable, and the opinion polls had Labor winning the forthcoming election in a landslide. If the idea of a political cycle has any meaning at all, the spring of 2007 was surely a turning point – the end of a long period of conservative dominance in federal politics, the arrival of a new political agenda, perhaps even a moment of generational change. The myth of John Howard’s invincibility was shattered.

Less than three years later, I was in the audience of a conference on Patrick White in London. Why was the Sydney Morning Herald’s David Marr, White’s distinguished biographer, repeatedly looking at his mobile phone and ducking out of the room? Was he checking the sales figures for his recently published Quarterly Essay? In the sensational Power Trip, he had presented Rudd as a man twisted with anger, a startlingly different article from what had been packaged so professionally for unwary voters’ consumption at the November 2007 election. But Marr had also ruled out any suggestion that Rudd would be thrown overboard in favour of another leader before the next election. Now he was doing his best, at a distance of 17,000 kilometres, to follow the biggest political news story for years. For back in Canberra, it was that evening: the one on which Kevin Rudd’s political world fell apart. Within a few hours, Julia Gillard would be prime minister. Within weeks, she would call an early election.

Even in August 2010, as the parties fought one of the least inspiring election campaigns almost anyone could recall, the modest hopes raised by Labor’s victory in 2007 seemed a little embarrassing. Labor had come to power in 2007 promising to deal with climate change but it had already effectively abandoned a stalled effort to introduce a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. It had foreshadowed more humane treatment of asylum seekers but that issue was back on the political agenda, with Labor tacking ever more closely to the hard line associated with the Howard government. And before calling the election, Gillard had made terms with mining companies opposed to the government’s proposal for a super profits tax.

The decks were being cleared of anything likely to make the government a target of vested interests, radio shock-jocks or the Murdoch press. In the process, Labor also largely abandoned any pretence that it provided a distinct alternative to the right-wing populism of the Abbott-led coalition. Most seriously of all for a party historically more vulnerable than the Liberals to the charge that it represented a section rather than the community, the government symbolically ceded to the mining industry its claim to custodianship of the national interest. This surrender was a historic defeat for the Labor Party, probably of greater long-term significance than the actual results of the 2010 election – as bad as they were. And in the year since that election, Gillard has laboured in vain to overcome the problem of political legitimacy caused by the failure to implement the carbon scheme, the overthrow of Rudd and the formation of a minority government held together by the votes of rural independents representing conservative electorates instinctively hostile to Labor.

I HAPPENED to be in Australia at the time of the 2010 election, which came just months after a general election in Britain that saw the ejection of a long-serving Labour government. That election had also yielded an indecisive result, followed by post-election haggling. Yet in each case – Britain and Australia – the government that resulted has been more stable than anyone had a right to expect in the circumstances.

Stability has not, however, translated into popularity. In the British case, the reasons for the dire public opinion polls seem only too clear. The Conservative–Liberal Democrat government has announced swingeing spending cuts – £81 billion over four years combined with £30 billion of tax increases – that will affect virtually every aspect of national life. It has done so in the belief that Britain’s high level of government debt was a standing menace to the economy, an argument either discounted or only half-believed by a majority of voters.

By contrast, Australia’s public debt is far lower than Britain’s. So is its unemployment rate. And the Australian economy is also growing faster. The Confederation of British Industry has predicted a 2011 growth rate of a miserly 1.3 per cent, some way behind the modest official projection of 1.7 per cent. Even before the recent rioting in London drew sensational attention to the bleak prospects faced by Britain’s urban poor, many commentators believed that the economic policy of the Cameron government was failing as miserably as its plans for civic renewal. In Australia, there are concerns about recent economic contraction, declining consumer confidence and the weak performance of much of the economy in comparison with the resources sector. But things hardly seem in such a state of disrepair as to explain the Gillard government’s deep unpopularity.

Still, this was also true of the Howard government in 2007. That election should surely have put to rest the myth that people only turn governments out of office when the economy goes bad. Voters were worried about rising interest rates and rising prices, but to the extent that they cast their ballots in response to the urgings of the hip-pocket nerve at all, they seemed more worried about what might happen in the future than what was actually happening at the time.

The fact that the still relatively healthy state of the Australian economy has been accompanied by no obvious political dividend for Labor is unquestionably concentrating the mind of many a Labor Party strategist. But in trying to solve this riddle, it is worth pausing over the psychological effects of Australia’s singular experience of the global financial crisis.

These are really only thrown into relief when set beside the experiences of those other developed nations with whom we are accustomed to comparing ourselves. This was the greatest economic meltdown since the 1930s. It threw millions out of work. It created mass homelessness. It has led to massive government deficits that, even with huge cuts in public spending, will take years to bring into balance. It threatened – indeed, still threatens – the banking systems of countries that just a few years ago were being held up as models for the rest of the world. Ireland, for instance, was until recently the Celtic Tiger; but when I spent an evening with some Irish historians in Dublin a few months ago, they were talking of their little republic as if it were a failed state, not just one that had fallen on hard times.

THE EFFECTS of the crisis on Australia were extremely mild by world standards. Americans and Europeans would die for our economic “problems.” In the circumstances, perhaps we can be forgiven for taking our affluence for granted, for imagining that governments come and go, creating mere “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs” – as the French historian Fernand Braudel so eloquently put it.

The “tides of history” that now matter most to Australians mainly concern the apparently insatiable Chinese demand for our resources. Most Australians, I think, expect that this will go on irrespective of who happens to be warming the government benches in Canberra. The economists also seem to think so. And for all I know they may be right. Western Australian premier Colin Barnett, in a recent Menzies Lecture at King’s College London, with the title “More than China’s Quarry,” unwittingly spent his allotted hour making the opposite case – that his state was indeed, in global economic terms, essentially a big hole from which to dig up stuff to send to China. He made it clear that his state now looks north to China and not east to Canberra. If there had been an opportunity for questions, I had intended asking him why, as mining magnate Lang Hancock wanted, they didn’t just secede.

Today, just as in late 2007, Australia seems to be experiencing a robust material affluence, shadowed only by a sense that our luck cannot last, that it all might come crashing down. Four years ago, it was spiralling personal debt and rising interest rates that worried many. Now, our sense of insecurity comes from a dawning realisation that the rest of the world is not doing quite as well as us. What if the United States defaults on its massive debts? What if the financial problems of Greece, Portugal, Spain or Italy provoke a general panic that brings the global banking system to its knees? And above all, what if the Chinese economy falters, and with it the market for our iron ore, our coal and our natural gas? Are we, as in the 1960s, a “lucky country” whose luck might be running out?

For the time being, we worry over global financial instability but expect that Chinese growth will continue to shelter us from the storm, just as we once counted on things like tariffs, quotas and fixed exchange rates. But like reliance on those now unloved economic instruments, a heavy dependence on resource exports has its costs. Economists already worry over the effects of the so-called two-speed economy, in which the mining sector outstrips all else, sucking in investment and skilled labour and pushing up the value of the Australian dollar to the disadvantage of other exporters. Conservationists worry over the industry’s damage to the Australian environment and the contribution of our exports to global warming. Farmers are increasingly anxious about the coal seam industry’s damage to land and water resources. International relations experts warn that we are in distinctly unfamiliar territory in having as our major trading partner a revisionist power with which we have no strategic alliance. Human rights advocates remind us that China is a political tyranny in which cheap labour is sustained by suppressing workers’ rights. Sociologists are concerned by the failure of mining companies, with their “fly in, fly out” approach to labour supply, to support regional development or foster community life among families dependent on the industry. And we should all be worried about a mining sector so rich and powerful that it can dictate to governments and pose as the ultimate guardian of the national interest.

How a Labor government seemingly old before its time, and a still relatively new prime minister, respond to these challenges will determine the course of Australian politics over the next couple of years. As a first step, the Labor Party itself will have to resist its own habit of navel-gazing. Its internal problems – which are also part of a larger global crisis for parties of the centre-left – need urgent attention, but not at the expense of considering the really big questions facing Australian social democracy, such as how to respond to continuing financial instability, what the mining boom means for the vast majority of us not directly involved in it, and what kind of relationship a middle-power, Western liberal democracy will have with a dynamic Eastern global superpower with a very different view of itself.

But for the time being, the “carbon tax” needs to be “sold” to a hostile electorate. Tony Abbott and the opposition parties hope this will be Labor’s Work Choices. Labor wants an outcome more along the lines of the Howard government and the GST: political pain followed by triumph. Either way, it will need to learn to tell a more appealing and persuasive story about where it is taking the country than it has so far managed under either of its last two leaders. •

The post Never so good? appeared first on Inside Story.

FOR ED MILIBAND, it’s been a pretty good war – two good wars, in fact. During his quest for the British Labour leadership, in which his only serious rival was older brother David, he claimed to have opposed the Iraq war. This seems to have helped his bid, although it’s easy to see why it infuriated his opponents. No one could point to any public statement in which Ed criticised the Blair government’s decision to partner George W. Bush and the United States in an aggressive and possibly illegal war.

Ed was at Harvard during 2003 and not yet an MP, but he was a rising star in Gordon Brown’s circus. There was nothing to prevent him from publicly condemning the decision, rather than confining his criticism to private conversations with friends and colleagues. Dissent would have attracted media attention, and might even have caused his political master and mentor, Brown, to linger a while longer over the issue. As it was, Brown took a transatlantic call from the younger Miliband brother, in which Ed urged giving the United Nations more time to search for weapons of mass destruction. And if the political journalists Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre are correct in their new book Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader, the first biography of the British opposition leader, then Brown took Ed’s objections seriously before opportunistically throwing in his lot with Blair.

The other war that has been kind to Ed Miliband is the one being prosecuted against Rupert Murdoch by Britain’s political class and a section of its media. The most dramatic events in this conflict occurred shortly after the appearance of Hasan and Macintyre’s book. At the time of publication, it was still apparently the position of Miliband’s office that Labour should not seek to link the issue of phone-hacking to Murdoch’s multibillion-pound bid to buy the remainder of BSkyB. We know this because of a leaked email sent to Labour frontbenchers on behalf of Tom Baldwin, Ed’s director of communications and a former employee of the Murdoch-owned Times. “Whether or not Ed has the courage to refuse to bow to the pressures all Labour leaders encounter from the Murdoch-owned media that tries to drag them to the right, remains to be seen,” comment Hasan and Macintyre. But Ed was there, along with David Cameron, amid the thunder and lightning at News International’s summer party.

In the end, Ed was not required to show any real courage over Murdoch. The running was made by Labour MPs Tom Watson and Chris Bryant. When Ed did eventually jump on the bandwagon, he earned much media praise, as if he had shown a singular political courage. He had done nothing of the sort. In the febrile atmosphere that surrounded the phone-hacking issue by July, it would have been more politically damaging for Miliband to have restrained himself than to have jumped in and joined the fun.

It’s perhaps unfair to say as much, and to blame a party leader for being cautious in his dealings with the Murdoch press. And it might be equally unfair to censure a young man wanting a political career for failing to articulate publicly his private objections to the Iraq war. To have broken with the party line over Iraq at a time when Ed was not yet even in parliament would have been hard work. But there’s a pattern here, one that extends to a range of other issues that Miliband has had to confront. He hasn’t yet had to take a bold moral stand on anything. Instead, on the big issues, he has followed the line of least resistance.

To Iraq and Murdoch can be added the introduction of ninety-day detention without charge for suspected terrorists in 2005. In private, he told Brown that it was “madness.” But he was not to be found among the forty-nine Labour MPs who helped to defeat the bill. As Hasan and Macintyre comment, it “was not Ed’s finest hour.” No it wasn’t; but their comment implies that there were many, other finer hours beside which Ed’s failure on this occasion needs to be set and judged. It is hard to find them. The assessment of another political journalist, Andrew Rawnsley, seems apposite: men and women like David Cameron and Ed Miliband who have spent almost all of their adult lives in politics – and that’s most of them these days – are “a cautious, calibrating breed.”

It was, no doubt, an act of calibration that also prompted Ed to keep mum over the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon in 2006. Blair refused to call for a ceasefire and Ed was “really pissed off”; but not apparently “pissed off” enough to risk his advancement with a show of disagreement. And when Tom Watson circulated a letter calling for Blair to go, Ed refused to sign. While he wanted his patron, Brown, to have the top job, he would not – to quote Sartre – plunge his hands “dans la merde et dans le sang.”

Where Ed has shown ruthlessness, it has been mainly over internal party matters or occasional policy issues. He worked hard to get rid of Damian McBride, a shadowy practitioner of the dark political arts in Brown’s office, whose appalling conduct caused his own demise. And Hasan and Macintyre also reveal that, as energy and climate change secretary, Ed stood his ground in demanding environmental concessions in the proposal to build a third runway at Heathrow. Brown was apparently “livid” about Ed’s demands, calling it “total betrayal.”

BUT THE most obvious instance of Ed’s ruthlessness was his decision to run against his own brother for the Labour leadership. Curiously, in Hasan and Macintyre’s telling, this episode is the one where Ed does reveal something like political courage. Yet it has clearly produced much bad blood between the brothers and has taken on the appearance of a family tragedy, with David and Ed said to be barely on speaking terms. And the critics have sometimes been harsh. Jon Cruddas, the no-nonsense Labour MP for Dagenham, simply couldn’t understand how Ed could run against his own brother. “Why don’t you fucking punch him?” he asked David. “That’s what I’d do.”

David didn’t, but Hasan and Macintyre show that he really has only himself to blame for his somewhat unexpected defeat. Only somewhat expected, I should stress; I spoke to a member of the Ed team a few days before the result of the leadership ballot was announced, and he was quietly confident that Ed had won. By that stage, at the very least he seemed in with a good chance after an impressive showing in the leadership election campaign, which involved more than fifty hustings meetings all over the country. (Party rank-and-file and members of affiliated unions have the right to vote in contests for the party leadership.) Earlier, David had been strong favourite. He looked and sounded prime ministerial; he raised the most money for his campaign; and he had behind him a successful senior cabinet career, culminating in a period as foreign secretary. But along with his gifts, David Miliband has some serious flaws in addition to the perception – perhaps somewhat unfair, for he is to the left of most Blairites – that he represents the continuation of New Labour.

One candidate for the leadership told Hasan and Macintyre that David mishandled the hustings meetings by appearing “irritated that he was having to stand there listening to the rest of us and the members of the audience.” This accords very precisely with my recollection of the hustings meeting I attended in Manchester; David looked bored, especially when he wasn’t talking, and he failed to connect with the audience. This is bad enough, but others have similar stories to tell. “David has always had a problem of looking over your shoulder for the next, more important person to talk to,” said a shadow cabinet minister. Other Labour insiders have commented that David is notoriously rude, even to people whose support he needs – like Labour MPs. (These stories have a ring of truth about them. As it happens, I witnessed identical behaviour from the same culprit at an official function in London. Along with much of Westminster, it seems, I can proudly boast the honour of having had David Miliband look over my shoulder. Happily, Geoffrey Robertson QC was lurking nearby, and David was off like a shot, in a flamboyant display of bad manners.)

By contrast, Ed Miliband has impressed with his “emotional intelligence” and interpersonal skills. Hasan and Macintyre relate this to the most unusual family background of these two brothers: David takes after a somewhat “princely” father, Ed after his more “down-to-earth” and “emotional” mother. David and Ed are the sons of one of Britain’s most famous Marxist scholars, Ralph Miliband, best known for his Parliamentary Socialism (1961). A rather obvious joke has done the rounds for some years: the father argued that socialism was impossible under a parliamentary system and the sons have devoted their careers to proving him right.

Ralph was a Jewish refugee from Belgium, who was lucky to escape to Britain in 1940. Ed and David’s mother, Marion, a Polish Jew, hid from the Nazis in a convent and was later sheltered by a Catholic family, arriving in Britain soon after the war. The Miliband boys grew up in a radical, cultured, intellectual and political household in Primrose Hill – apparently not quite as expensive or fashionable then as it is now. Regular visitors to this lively home included Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Tariq Ali and Tony Benn.

The family has been described as “extremely close” but the Milibands were also peripatetic. After teaching at the London School of Economics, Ralph took up a job at Leeds University; the family only joined him there when he suffered a heart attack. Later, he worked in the United States. Initially, the family accompanied him, but Ralph remained behind while Marion and the boys returned to Britain. Later, Ed lived with his father in America for a while. Ralph, however, was absent for nine months of each year while Ed was a teenager. This may well explain why he was “closer to his mother than his late father.”

The quarrel that has apparently developed between the Miliband brothers has sometimes overshadowed a generally solid performance by Ed during his first year as leader. He has had his problems, and was weakened at the outset by the (accurate) perception that if not for the votes of trade unionists, David would have won the leadership. The conservative press dubbed him “Red Ed.” And, most recently, the apparent implosion of Blue Labour – a party grouping that appeared to have Ed’s ear – after some ill-judged remarks calling for a freeze on immigration from its leading spokesman, Lord Glasman, has undermined his sense of ideological coherence. Most commentators agree that whatever you thought of Blue Labour’s “radical conservatism” it was the most intellectually lively corner of the post-2010 defeated party. Ed saw value in its stress on the building of a common life in local communities and will somehow need to salvage what is valuable and worthwhile from the current wreckage. Yet he will also need to deal with the very issue that Glasman raised: immigration. The latter’s remarks might have been unhelpful to Labour but they also served to dramatise a difficult issue that the party is still to come to terms with.

Hasan and Macintyre’s biography is sympathetic to Ed, yet contains plenty of material that will be grist to the mill for doubters. Like much of Britain’s political elite, Ed is white, male, in his forties and Oxbridge educated. Unlike them, he is Jewish, state-school educated and the product of a most unusual upbringing. He seems, in his person, almost to exemplify Blairite triangulation. But as Ed himself seems to realise, identifying left, right and centre these days is not quite as straightforward as in New Labour’s heyday.

In the end, he might actually need to take a stand. •

The post The brothers grim appeared first on Inside Story.

Just as the crisis engulfing the Murdoch family emboldened Britain’s political class to announce (yet again) the inauguration of a new politics, a voice from the old spoke up. Lecturing at the New Labour think tank, Progress, Tony Blair reassured his audience that while the world had changed, the word would stay the same.

“I remain unremittingly an advocate of third way, centre ground, progressive politics that came to be called New Labour. From 1997 to 2007 we were New Labour. In June 2007 we stopped. We didn’t become Old Labour exactly,” he added, in a generous concession to the man he was attacking, Gordon Brown. “But we lost the driving rhythm that made us different and successful.” Blair did not mention that if his “driving rhythm” had been successful in overcoming the resistance of his chancellor, it would have seen Britain join the euro – with disastrous consequences.

Blair also warned the party against moving to the left, against indulging in a “politics of protest.” His was an unabashed defence of Labour as a progressive party, one with the courage and imagination to be a party of “change-makers.” But there is nothing so retro as a politician whose language no longer speaks to the times. And for all his electoral success, Blair long ago ceased to speak to the times. His neophilia belongs to another age, and is about as relevant to ours as Harold Macmillan’s “never had it so good” and Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology.”

In any case, since the 2010 election Labour has given few signs of tacking to the left. On the contrary, a significant group of thinkers inside the party is arguing for a radical conservatism – if that’s the word for it – which is otherwise known as Blue Labour. Recently described in the Independent as “Westminster’s most voguish intellectual tendency,” Blue Labour is the talk of the town – at least among the small minority who worry over such matters as the renewal of Labour politics. The key figure here, and the man who coined the term itself, is Maurice Glasman, or Baron Glasman of Stoke Newington and of Stamford Hill in the London Borough of Hackney, as he has been called since his elevation to the House of Lords earlier this year. Glasman is also an academic at London Metropolitan University who came to the attention of the Miliband brothers largely through his role as a community activist leading an alliance of organisations called London Citizens. Among its work has been a high-profile community campaign to persuade businesses to adopt a living wage.

The Labour MP most closely associated with Blue Labour is Jon Cruddas, but both Miliband brothers appear to be keeping a watchful eye on the project. Initially, Glasman seemed closer to the older Miliband brother, writing a key speech that David delivered during the Labour leadership contest embodying ideas now associated with Blue Labour. But it was the winner of that contest, Ed, who nominated him to the House of Lords, and Glasman is now regarded as part of the opposition leader’s intellectual circle. James Purnell, the strongly Blairite former work and pensions secretary, has also identified with Blue Labour.

But Glasman, who combines a formidable intellect with the skills of a successful political entrepreneur and an old-fashioned social compassion, is the founder and main inspiration. Blue Labour’s guiding principle is that people and nature were not produced to be sold, and so should not be treated as commodities. A democratic politics must resist capitalism’s tendency to treat them in this way. In this view, Glasman is influenced by the Hungarian philosopher and economist Karl Polanyi, on whose ideas Glasman drew in Unnecessary Suffering: Managing Market Utopia (1996), a book based on the doctoral thesis he completed at the European University Institute in Florence. It made a case for the kind of social market developed in West Germany after the Second World War, one in which democratic organisations and institutions – many of them devoted to developing and maintaining vocational skills – prevented a domination by either state or market. Here was a “third way” politics, but one rather different from that of Blair and New Labour. Glasman contrasted the West German social market with what he called “market utopia,” in which equilibrium can supposedly be achieved without the intervention of voluntary organisations or a democratic state. He calls his own vision the “virtue economy,” a truly skilled and productive society to be contrasted with a “virtual economy” dominated by the banks.

Critics sometimes accuse Glasman of nostalgia – by which they seem to have in mind a nostalgia about British working-class life – but Unnecessary Suffering has very little at all to say about Britain; it is mainly concerned with West Germany and Poland. Glasman did, however, point out that it was the policy of a British Labour government in its occupation zone after the war that helped facilitate the West German social market, in contrast with the more freewheeling approach of the United States. Here, there is a quiet claim for the social market as a legacy of British Labour thought rather than an exotic phenomenon.

NOTWITHSTANDING the impressive recovery of the German economy since the 2008 crash, Glasman and Blue Labour now seem to have less to say about the German model of the social market than about reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity, values that locate their ideas in a longstanding and very British tradition of working-class voluntary action and self-help. But on this point, too, there are critics, who worry over Glasman’s understanding of the history of British labour and welfare. The historian Pat Thane has pointed out that the mutual tradition only ever covered a minority of the population. It left large numbers of vulnerable people to the mercy of the market, with women in particular commonly finding themselves outside its net. State welfare developed, often in tandem with voluntary action and in response to demands from voluntary sector activists, to bring social protection to people unable to gain access to the “democratic” institutions celebrated by Blue Labour.

Glasman, it should be said, is not opposed to state action. Governments have a role in supporting the voluntary organisations that he sees as critical in democratising the economy and promoting vocational skills. Nevertheless, 1945 and the Attlee government represented “the trigger” for a “long-term decline” in which the “universal benefit replaced mutual responsibility as the basic principle of welfare.” Glasman looks more fondly on Labour’s earlier traditions of cooperation.

Audiences of the secular, cosmopolitan, left-leaning and middle-class variety are most likely to shift uncomfortably in their chairs when Glasman starts talking about patriotism. He locates Blue Labour as part of a radical English – and with less confidence, I think, a radical British – patriotic tradition in a manner occasionally reminiscent of E.P. Thompson but looking specifically to the ideas of R.H. Tawney and G.D.H. Cole. The identification of the left with patriotism was once more or less taken for granted but since the 1960s has become a much less comfortable fit. Central to Glasman and Blue Labour’s vision, however, is the value of the local and familiar, including a love of family, country and popular culture. Unrestrained capitalism threatens all of them; hence Blue Labour’s defensive, even conservative mission. But in its resistance to capitalism’s drive towards commodification and the state’s drive to managerialism, it also claims to be radical.

There are perhaps dangers in this vision, with its emphasis on “the preservation of status,” “attachment to place,” common sense in preference to “external values,” and a commitment to “a common life.” In April Glasman was widely quoted in the press as accusing Labour in government of having “lied to people” about immigration, causing “a massive rupture of trust.” “Working-class men can’t really speak at Labour Party meetings about what causes them grief, concerns about their family, concerns about immigration, love of country, without being falsely stereotyped as sexist, racist, nationalist,” he added.

It is, of course, legitimate to criticise Labour’s approach to immigration, and to point to the very real limits of the progressive middle-class imagination in such matters. The latter has not always been well attuned to the concerns of working-class people who, in times of growing scarcity, rightly worry over access to jobs, housing, welfare and medical care. This was revealed all too starkly at the last election when Gordon Brown, not realising that his microphone was still on, referred to Gillian Duffy, a Rochdale grandmother, as a “bigoted woman” after she had raised the issue of immigration with him. But it’s also worth considering what Blue Labour’s priorities might mean for how communities respond to strangers. A Blue Labour rejoinder would perhaps focus on the building of relationship-based conversations about people’s shared goals. All the same, those who imagine Blue Labour might translate easily to Australia will need to consider how it might react with the country’s poisonous asylum-seeker politics.

Glasman celebrates the working class’s attachment to popular culture. But in response to a lecture Glasman recently delivered at King’s College London, the labour historian Ross McKibbin pointed out that the dominant modes of popular culture in Britain during the twentieth century have been commercial; a point of which we have been forcibly reminded by the phone-hacking controversy. Of course, not everyone who opens a copy of the late and lamentable News of the World, or indeed any of the other red-top tabloids, will share the values that these publications celebrate. Nonetheless, millions of people delight in the consumption of commercial popular culture, which is national and global, not local. Glasman would like to see Britain’s football clubs pass out of the ownership and control of foreign capitalists and back to local communities. But millions of Britons continue to take pleasure in the successes of their team, even when they know that it is essentially a business being run for private profit. In these cases, trust functions – or falters – less in horizontal relationships among ordinary citizens sharing a common life than between those who create popular culture for profit and those who buy it from them.

“Faith communities” have a particularly important role to play in forming the kind of democratic local culture that Glasman advocates. Members of different religions will not be able to agree on everything but they can usually agree over the value of family life. For this and other reasons, they have good cause to worry about capitalism’s tendency to turn everything into a commodity. The campaign for a living wage, says Glasman, is an example of the kind of agreement possible among faith communities when they decide to work with the matters they have in common rather than their disagreements and disputes. Glasman’s work on West Germany has been critical in informing this understanding. While Christian Democracy and Social Democracy represented different and often antagonistic traditions in a German context, they were able to find sufficient common ground to agree on the essentials of the social market, a society that avoided domination by either market or state.

DOES Blue Labour offer any lessons for Australia? It’s not hard to find Australian left intellectuals who have been developing ideas along parallel lines: Race Mathews’s writings on cooperatives and Tim Soutphommasane’s effort to reclaim patriotism for the left spring to mind. I recently invited Glasman to the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies here in London to talk about the possible implications of Blue Labour for Australian Labor. Apart from claiming Shane Warne as a Blue Labour icon, he identified the strength of Catholic social thought in the history of the Australian Labor Party as a point of connection with Blue Labour’s stress on faith communities.

Here, Glasman raises a good point. Catholic social thought helped mobilise support for Labor in the early years of the party, not least by giving the bishops a premise with which to argue to their congregations that the party was acceptably reformist rather than an unacceptable continental-style socialist party. While not free of sectarianism, the labour movement was a place where Catholics and Protestants could cooperate. And although it was divisive in the 1940s and 1950s, when it came to be identified with Bob Santamaria and “The Movement,” Catholic social thought has often worked for the left in recent years, providing secularists and Catholics with a “social justice” platform on which to cooperate around issues such as union rights, Indigenous reconciliation and asylum seekers. The overall effect has probably been to bring back to Labor some of the children of those who abandoned it for the conservative parties in the 1950s.

Blue Labour’s stress on community organising and revitalising Labour’s grassroots might also have resonance within the Australian Labor Party at a time when it is considering the national review undertaken by John Faulkner, Bob Carr and Steve Bracks. The review calls for the revitalisation of the party below and, like Blue Labour, envisages a Labor Party enlivened by “a community-organising model” that would seek to “empower and equip members to work in their local communities on campaigns, to build stronger community connections and to recruit members.” Its controversial recommendation for community involvement in preselecting candidates also emerged in Blue Labour discussions.

There is an important sense, however, in which Glasman and Blue Labour are involved in an enterprise that does not have an obvious Australian parallel. The debate about the future of the Australian Labor Party seems confined mainly to essentially electoral, sociological and organisational issues. Why are the branches dying? Why has the educated “political class” taken command of the party? What is to be done about unions? How can factionalism be reduced? How can Labor reconcile its inner-city support base with the need to appeal to suburbanites? These are all important questions, but not half as important as, say, what kinds of ideology, image and policies should a centre-left party embrace in a country whose economic success depends on selling resources to China?

By contrast, while Blue Labour could not yet be said to have generated a large number of original public policy ideas, it is grappling with big questions about how a party of the left might respond creatively to the problems being thrown up in modern, post-crash, post–New Labour Britain. It’s part of a wider conversation about ideology and policy, and the most significant response so far to David Cameron’s Big Society – with its stress on winding back the centralised state in favour of local and voluntary effort – and to the main inspiration for that Conservative “vision,” Phillip Blond’s Red Toryism.

But Blue Labour is also a reaction against the “driving rhythms” of Tony Blair and New Labour, with its centrally directed targets, its top-down managerialism, its meddling bureaucracy, and its suspicion of – and even contempt for – grassroots, democratic organisation. In place of Blair’s “driving rhythms,” Blue Labour values the gentler pulses of settled communities, loved places and cherished traditions. •

The post British Labour’s blues appeared first on Inside Story.

GEORGE ORWELL once called Britain “the most class-ridden country under the sun.” But as the historian David Cannadine has pointed out, Orwell cannot (or at least should not) have been arguing that Britain was more unequal than any other country. After all, it isn’t. But Britain is decidedly “class-ridden” in the sense that it remains obsessed with class.

The recent royal nuptials might have been a PR boon for the monarchy, but they also provided a predictably apposite occasion for this obsession to find suitably rich expression. The monarchy is admittedly rather more popular these days than during the unpleasantness of the 1990s, and one sign of its renewed vigour is that “The Firm” felt confident enough to deliver a very flamboyant humiliation to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown by neglecting to invite these two former Labour prime ministers along to the wedding. Kathy Lette scored an invitation, as did the Beckhams and Elton John. But apparently even a decade as prime minister and the reputation of having saved the monarchy from itself are not enough these days to get you a ticket into Westminster Abbey during periods of peak demand.

That the monarchy remains a pillar of this hierarchical society is no less evident. If there is one thing that everyone in the country now knows about the Middletons, it’s that they run a party goods firm. They might be very rich, and Kate – or Catherine as she’s now called – might look like a princess. She might even have attended “£23,000 a year Marlborough College,” as it’s invariably described – and once you know the annual fees, you also know what you’re dealing with. But when the relationship between Kate and Will was called off for a while a few years back, the story did the rounds that Prince William’s posh friends call Kate’s mum Carole “Doors to Manual” because she was once an air hostess. And there was recent press coverage that made it clear that Will’s grandparents had been remarkably dilatory in making the acquaintance of the Middletons; they supposedly slipped in an invitation to the palace shortly before the wedding. Whether any of this is actually true is rather beside the point. That someone might have even represented it as true speaks eloquently for the ways in which class still matters in Britain.

That Kate was jolly lucky to have won her prince was an undercurrent of much of the media’s class obsession – without anyone putting it so impolitely. A historian in her late twenties somewhat sheepishly admitted to me just before the big day that the wedding was a matter of great interest among her friends of a similar age, young women who had spent their teenage years fantasising about catching the prince and who, even now, hadn’t quite given up hope that he might yet see the error of his ways. By contrast, one always sensed that quite a lot of people felt Charles had been rather lucky to catch Diana who, after all, was at least an aristocrat. She and the Spencers had a place in the pecking order in a way that Kate and the Middletons do not.

In recent weeks, public angst about class has turned to the “chav,” who is something like a “bogan” or “westie” in Australia. You would imagine that the sheer number of scandals that have arisen from careless tweeting would by now have prompted a little more circumspection, but not on the part of a certain Lib Dem peer: “Help. Trapped in a queue in chav land. Woman behind me explaining latest EastEnders plot to mate while eating largest bun I’ve ever seen.” The baroness later explained that she hadn’t meant any offence. But as the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee has commented, replace “chav” with “nigger” or “Paki” and you see the extent to which contempt for the working class is no less acceptable among some of Britain’s educated elites than disdain for Islam.

This is hardly surprising, because there’s very little common ground on which Britons of different classes now meet. They live in different suburbs, send their children to different schools, pursue different leisure activities and consume different media. They continue to speak in different accents. The royal wedding was supposed to be an occasion on which all classes joined hands in a national celebration. Perhaps it was; but for many, it was simply a welcome day off and a grand excuse to head for the pub. A list of royal street parties planned for London made it plain that you were much more likely to find one in bountiful Bromley than battling Barking.

As for much of the last century, education remains the main site onto which British people project their anxieties and fantasies about class. Schools and universities, of course, have long been treated as essential instruments in effecting social mobility. “Equality of opportunity” and “meritocracy” are now such warm and fuzzy goals for the political class, whatever their political stripe, that it’s easy to forget that the sociologist who coined the latter term, Michael Young, also the founder of the Open University, did so with a more or less pejorative purpose.

YOUNG’s brilliant 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy was in essence a warning about the dangers of a world in which the successful were enjoined to believe that they enjoyed their success as the direct consequence of their own merit. Supposedly written as a doctoral thesis in AD 2034, in Young’s meritocracy “the eminent know that success is just reward for their own capacity” while “the inferior man has no ready buttress for his self-regard.” Those who achieved a lowly station in life had nothing to blame but their own lack of merit. This was a transparently fair society in which “as a matter of quite elementary justice, neither man nor child should be judged stupid until he was proved to be.” (The creepy, incessant monitoring of personal intelligence in Young’s dystopia may well have been the model for reform of the education system under New Labour, with its endless tests and examinations. It certainly resembles it.)

Yet the idea of meritocracy retains a powerful allure. In the guise of the future author, Young remarks that “intelligent people tend, on the whole, to have less intelligent children than themselves; the tendency is for there to be continuous regression towards the mean – stupid people bearing slightly more clever children as surely as clever people have slightly less.” Although it’s not yet 2034, it’s possible to test this theory by reference to the Young family at least, since Michael’s son Toby, a journalist and broadcaster, is one of the principal spokesmen for Britain’s “free school” movement.

Over the last year the Conservative–Liberal Democrat government has extended the Labour government’s policy of allowing certain government schools to be run independently of local authorities. Where Labour encouraged privately sponsored academy schools to take over from “failed” comprehensives, the Tories have permitted schools ranked “outstanding” to transform themselves into academies and escape the supposedly dead hand of bureaucracy. But the coalition government has also given its support to the establishment of free schools. Here, apparently, is David Cameron’s “big society” in action: local people banding together in voluntary endeavour to achieve a common goal.

The first free school to gain government approval was the West London Free School planned by Toby Young. It will provide “a classical liberal education that’s every bit as good as that provided by Britain’s best independent schools but which is accessible to all, regardless of income, ability or faith.” Parents who want the best education for their children will no longer have to pay high fees to send them to an independent school, or move to an area – invariably middle-class – where the local comprehensive is acceptable to them.

Toby Young makes the fair point that because of this tendency for the quality of a local school to depend so heavily on the socio­economic status of the area in which it is located, parental income plays a critical role in determining the quality of the education a child receives. Under his proposal for a free school, run by parents and teachers rather than local authorities yet still governed by state admission rules, an excellent education is accessible to all. As Young puts it, he hopes his plan for “comprehensive grammars” would honour his “father’s inclusive philosophy, but without the unhelpful egalitarian baggage.”

Needless to say, the free schools have their critics. They point out that at a time when other schools face government cuts, money is being invested in these new facilities. It is said that they will create a more seriously divided state school system and weaken existing schools by diverting both scarce resources and middle-class children from existing comprehensives.

In some ways, however, the most serious objection to the free schools – and, indeed, to much of the present government’s “big society” baggage – is given away in a throwaway comment by Young himself. He estimates that as the leader of the project he’s “devoted between forty and sixty hours a week to it for the last eighteen months.” His wife jokes that if he had been equally assiduous in pursuing his career, he could send his kids to Eton.

Yet who but a member of the British elite would be able to plough up to sixty hours a week of voluntary time into a project of this kind? Only the very highly motivated and well-off are likely to be able to muster the time and resources necessary to set up and then maintain such an institution. And the very same cohort is likely to dominate the strategic direction of such schools once they open, thereby making a mockery of the vision of dispersal of power that underpins the whole big society enterprise.

Whereas, if they wished to do so, parents have had to rely on their own resources to create a private school, the Tories and their Lib Dem friends ensure they can now pursue their ambitions compliments of the British taxpayer. This is admittedly not so very different from the case with private schools in Australia, which even when they have more money than they know what to do with, still draw substantially on the public purse. But we have become so relaxed and comfortable about this that we fail to see how peculiar paying vast sums to already rich schools must look to others – especially to others such as the British with their class angst.

A similar pattern is suggested in the even more recent proposal for a New College of the Humanities in London, a brainchild of the philosopher A.C. Grayling. It will assemble a team of celebrity academics including Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Linda Colley and David Cannadine and charge its pupils £18,000 a year for the privilege of attending their lectures – approximately double the already hefty fees most students face under the recent increases.

Unsurprisingly, the proposal is controversial at a time when government cuts are forcing some very tough decisions within universities about what they can offer prospective students. Terry Eagleton called it “odious.” Where some British left-wing moderates such as Anthony Crosland had once viewed the United States as a model of classlessness that Britain should emulate, Grayling’s college represents for its critics the nightmare of an elitist American private university system about to run riot in Britain. But unlike the famous US institutions it is supposedly seeking to emulate, this “private” college – if it does get off the ground – will depend substantially on public resources. It will need to enter into an agreement with an existing college for library resources, and it proposes teaching parts of the University of London curriculum. It also seems that its celebrity lecturers will not, in most cases, be resigning their present posts, which is certainly a good way of saving on salary bills.

All of this is a far cry from Michael Young’s Open University but not so very far from his meritocracy. Young’s satire made it clear that most members of the meritocracy would be the offspring of other meritocrats. In modern Britain, meanwhile, the rich and successful know that, like the “chavs” they despise, they are only getting their just deserts. •

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“DADDY teaches big children about the olden days.” My five-year-old daughter’s description of what her father does for a living – working as a historian in a university – is probably as good as any other. It’s less clear whether her account would satisfy critics of the teaching of history in English schools.

In a country whose education system remains dominated by tests, targets and tables, historical understanding even among children of her tender age comes under close and frequent scrutiny. According to the National Curriculum for England, by the age of seven most students should be able to “show their developing sense of chronology by using terms concerned with the passing of time” – including “before,” “after” and “a long time ago” – “by placing events and objects in order, and by recognising that their own lives are different from the lives of people in the past.” They should be “beginning to recognise that there are reasons why people in the past acted as they did,” starting “to identify some of the different ways in which the past is represented” and using information “to answer questions about the past on the basis of simple observations.”

These laudable goals will be achieved by examining changes in their own and their family’s lives, as well as the lives of people living “in the more distant past” in their local area or elsewhere in Britain. They should go on to learn about significant people and events from British and world history. One suggested event is the Gunpowder Plot; but it’s unclear whether five- and six-year-olds will be introduced to the finer points of disembowelment.

The English – and this is a curriculum only for the English – are fortunate that, unlike their counterparts across the Irish Sea in Ulster, they can contemplate the teaching of the Gunpowder Plot without worrying whether it might foster the kinds of community tension likely to prompt a modern-day Guy Fawkes to try blowing something or somebody up. Nonetheless, the debate over the teaching of history in English schools is haunted by the fear of national fragmentation – the kind of fragmentation that might cause a British born-and-bred Muslim to strap on a bomb and take a ride on the Tube. The popular US-based British historian Simon Schama advocates “a truly capacious British history” which “will not be the feeder of identity politics but its dissolvent.”

Schama is actually one of the more sagacious contributors to this debate, but I still find this particular view of the role of history in schools abhorrent. It’s not the proper role of history, nor of history teaching, to dissolve identity politics. Nor should its primary function be to foster national identity, or promote community belonging – another of Schama’s claims for its importance. Yet this is the weight school history is being made to bear, not so much in the mainly sensible curriculum documents produced by official England, still less among real teachers and students in real classrooms in real schools – but in the speeches of politicians and the posturing of a few celebrity historians.

The celebrity historian is so ubiquitous in this country that I sometimes wonder whether the subject’s advocates shouldn’t make more of the admittedly remote possibility of becoming rich and famous. Perhaps someone should start an X Factor–type history talent quest to locate the Simon Schamas, Niall Fergusons and Lucy Worsleys of the future. The Tudor historian and television presenter David Starkey, sometimes described as the “rudest man in Britain,” would be an ideal judge, making Simon Cowell seem a kitten by comparison. (Starkey complained last year about “pretty” female historians who showed off on their book covers and always seemed to have first names ending in “a.”)

Richard Evans, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, has been rightly scathing about the impoverishment of debate about school history by politicians across the political spectrum. Nonetheless, it’s Conservatives who have been responsible for the latest round of impoverishment. First, there was the love-in between Michael Gove, the education secretary, and Niall Ferguson, now a Harvard professor, at the Guardian Hay Festival in May last year. After Ferguson laid out his vision for school history – which would involve teaching students why over the last 500 years the West came to dominate the rest of the world – Gove, who was in the audience, asked, “My question is, will Harvard let you spend more time in Britain to help us design a more exciting and engaging history curriculum?” Ferguson said he would be spending the next academic year in London and was “looking forward to your call.”

It’s unclear whether the call came, but in a recent interview Ferguson seemed pleased to be returning to the United States: “Who wants to stick around to be sneered at when you can actually be appreciated?” But one effect of the exchange between Ferguson and Gove was to set off a controversy over whether the Tories would be letting one of their favourites loose on the National History Curriculum. Would British schoolchildren be indoctrinated in the virtues of the British Empire? The left went apoplectic, not least because of their particular loathing of Ferguson, who was described by Laurie Penny in the New Statesman as “a poster-boy for big stories about big empire, his books and broadcasting weaving Boys’ Own-style tales about the British charging into the jungle and jolly well sorting out the natives.” (An anonymous critic was more forthright: “He has the kind of face you want to punch.”) It was erroneously reported that yet another conservative British historian resident in the United States, Andrew Roberts, the author of the execrable A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, much admired by George W. Bush, would also be advising the Tories. Only Gove’s announcement that Schama would be advising the government “on how we can put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum” put an end to this silliness.

Unfortunately, however, that speech set off silliness of another sort, for Gove also complained of the “tragedy” that had seen “the sundering of our society from its past.” Children were “growing up ignorant of one of the most inspiring stories I know – the history of the United Kingdom.” The current curriculum, he said, denied “children the opportunity to hear our island story. Children are given a mix of topics at primary, a cursory run through Henry the Eighth and Hitler at secondary and many give up the subject at fourteen, without knowing how the vivid episodes of our past become a connected narrative.”

THERE’S much in these comments that will be familiar to Australians from their own “history wars,” which in recent years have included battles fought over history in schools. In her book History’s Children, Anna Clark discussed the rising sense of panic among political and media elites since the early 1990s caused by a sense that children were growing up ignorant of Australian history. The lack of a “connected narrative” became a particular favourite of John Howard during the twilight years of his administration, when he worried over the “fragmented stew of ‘themes’ and ‘issues’” that he claimed was a feature of classroom teaching.

Even more than Howard’s interventions in these matters, Gove’s have been largely unencumbered by known facts about the teaching of school history. For instance, he has repeated the urban myth that the only subjects taught in English schools are the Tudors and the Nazis. A recent report from the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (usually referred to as Ofsted) implicitly rejected Gove’s central claim, dismissing as “myth” the belief that “too little British history is taught in secondary schools.” Students spend considerable time studying it and know a great deal about the things they had studied. British history was “neglected” only in the sense that too much attention was given to England at the expense of the rest of the British Isles.

News of an imbalance between British and world history should come as no surprise, for it is mandated in the National History Curriculum. Alongside a local history study (which will necessarily be British), the study of Ancient Greece and the study of one other ancient civilisation from elsewhere in the world, students between the ages of eight and eleven are required to look at Roman Britain, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Tudor age and Britain either in the Victorian age or since 1930. From twelve to fourteen they must study British history from 1066 through to 1900, as well as some European and world history.

The picture after the age of fourteen is less rosy. History becomes optional at this stage, a cause of complaint among history teachers. Nonetheless, 30 per cent of students still take it, making it one of the most popular options. And those who do take it in their senior years are required to complete a substantial component of British history: at least 25 per cent.

When I attended a debate on school history organised by the Historical Association last July, there was much stress among the speakers – mainly teachers and academics – on learning history as a “right.” If this is so, England is still a long way from achieving equal rights. After the age of fourteen, you are most likely to study history if you attend a private school, and least likely if enrolled at one of the newer academy schools. The latter operate outside the ordinary structure of the government school system, usually with a combination of government money and private sponsorship, and they were often set up as replacements for ordinary high schools deemed to be failing. They are not bound by the National Curriculum and in some cases have reduced the amount of history they offer even to younger pupils. They are also more likely to deploy non-specialists to teach history. In schools’ struggle to rise up the all-important school league tables, history often finds itself displaced by maths and English. Indeed, the emphasis on school rankings means that only the more able students even in comprehensive schools are encouraged by their academic advisers to take history after they have turned fourteen, since it is seen as a demanding option.

The government is well aware of this problem of unequal access and the marginal status of history in academy schools, but it is a point that receives no attention when history warriors such as Gove and Ferguson go into battle. Nor do they draw much attention to Ofsted findings that consistently point to the high quality of history teaching in most schools. Teachers felt they were being told how to suck eggs when Ferguson advised them to enliven their classes by using technologies such as video games and television. Many have been using technologies like these for years.

It’s much easier to shoot the messenger – Ofsted – as Ferguson did when he accused it of being “in deep denial about the damage its beloved new history has done.” Ofsted’s most recent report was based on inspections of 166 primary and secondary schools. It’s unclear how many schools Ferguson visited.

No one contends that the teaching of history in English schools is ideal in every respect. Ofsted found that in the earlier years of school students often knew about particular events but could not place them in a longer narrative. It also recognised that changes to the broader curriculum sometimes saw history crowded out. Too few students are studying history during their more mature school years because of the failure to make it compulsory beyond the age of fourteen, while those who do continue sometimes find themselves working over subject matter already studied in earlier years.

There are real pedagogical and conceptual issues at stake in the debates over the history curriculum. But criticisms of school history from the political right are only nominally about educational or historiographical matters. As in Australia, history in schools is a magnet for a much broader set of anxieties about young people, nationhood and citizenship. The demand for a coherent and unified historical narrative, full of facts, also works symbolically, as a call for a more coherent and unified nation. Richard Evans perceives in it an effort “to turn history in our schools into a vehicle of crude nationalist indoctrination.”

Conservatives want a coherent historical narrative; but only so long as they get to write it themselves. Narratives don’t emerge naturally from the facts of the past; facts never speak for themselves. One role of a history education is to teach students that history is about the posing of difficult questions, and that historians often disagree about what is worth asking. They also have an unsettling habit of disagreeing about answers. Indeed, even the construction of the most anodyne chronology will involve choices with large implications, both for historical understanding and for politics. •

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IN 1932 the English socialist intellectuals Sidney and Beatrice Webb visited the Soviet Union. They returned to Britain with glad tidings. Soviet communism, they reported, represented “a new civilisation” destined to spread throughout the world. Quite apart from its massive economic and technical achievements, Soviet communism upheld a “code of conduct based on service to the community in social equality.” “The Worship of God,” they said, had been replaced by “the Service of Man.” The Webbs presented Stalinist Russia as a giant experiment in democracy providing for “the personal participation in public affairs of an unprecedented proportion of the entire adult population.”

Where historians have found starvation, tyranny and terror, the Webbs saw the working out of a new morality superior to that on offer in the West. Not even the Great Terror and the show trials of the 1930s caused them to hesitate. On the contrary, whereas the first edition of their study of the Soviet Union, Soviet Communism, had as its subtitle A New Civilisation?, by the time the second edition had appeared for the benefit of Left Book Club readers in 1937 the interrogative had disappeared.

Long before they became apologists for Stalinist Russia, the Webbs were among the founders of the London School of Economics and Political Science, or LSE. Although it’s the subject of Oxford-educated Sir Humphrey Appleby’s ridicule as Jim Hacker’s alma mater in Yes Minister, the LSE is one of the most distinguished academic institutions in Britain. It has a towering international reputation in the social sciences, and attracts the best academics and students from all over the world, many of whom pay very high fees for the privilege.

In recent months, the LSE has incurred what is these days politely called “reputational damage.” Its occasion has been the outbreak of a civil war in Libya, its cause the institution’s links with the Gaddafi dictatorship. The LSE’s problems in this connection are manifold. It had accepted £1.5 million over five years – of which £300,000 has been paid – from the Gaddafi Foundation for its Global Governance program. It signed a £2.2 million contract with the Libyan Economic Development Board for LSE staff to train Libyan officials in the ways of good government. The director of the LSE, Sir Howard Davies, also visited Libya to provide advice to Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, for which the university received a payment.

Some of the connections between the LSE and the Libyan regime are less direct but no less real for that. There is, for instance, Sir Peter Sutherland, a former chairman of BP. Sutherland was in the tent – literally – when Tony Blair kissed (happily for Blair, not literally) and made up with Gaddafi in Libya in 2004. Subsequently, Sutherland announced a £545 million oil deal with Libya – which from the West’s point of view was just the kind of outcome the rapprochement with the rogue state was intended to produce. Shortly afterwards, Sutherland became chairman of the LSE’s court of governors. Recently, he had the melancholy duty of accepting Davies’s resignation.

The link-man in all of these goings on was Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, one of the dictator’s sons. Saif arrived at the LSE in 2002 and later produced a doctoral thesis on global governance. Whether that dissertation was partly plagiarised, ghost-written, or both, is currently the subject of an investigation, as is the broader question of the LSE’s relations with the Libyan regime.

Saif had many of the characteristics that went down well among “progressive” intellectuals and New Labour types in Blair’s Britain. He had plausible manners and looked good in a suit. He gave the impression of Anglophilia. He flattered his hosts by speaking their “language,” banging on in impeccable English about “governance,” “civil society,” and “democratisation” as if the mere use of such buzzwords would obscure the reality that he was the pampered son of a brutal dictator running a Middle Eastern kleptocracy. Above all, he had lots of money; no rundown student digs for Saif. Lord Mandelson was apparently part of his circle. Saif clearly did not want for friends in his London heyday but it’s hard these days to find anyone willing to admit to an intimate acquaintance with him.

Hard, but not impossible. One old associate, Benjamin Barber, a senior fellow at the Demos think tank in the United States and a former member of the Gaddafi Foundation board, complained in the Guardian last week that the demonising of Saif had “made it extremely difficult to pursue a diplomatic track in Libya.” Saif, he claims, “is a man divided, torn between years of work on behalf of genuine reform that at times put him at risk, and the pull of clan and familial loyalties that drew him back into the bosom of a family defined by political tyranny and the rule of an autocratic leader and father.”

What is lacking in this amateur psychology – which echoes so many acts of rationalisation by those who have spent recent years treating with this vile regime – is any recognition that Saif might have a material interest in the survival of the family business. Saif is rich and powerful because his father has run Libya since the late 1960s. If his father ceases to run Libya, he may well remain rich – presuming he can get his hands on the loot the Gaddafi family will have salted away for just such a rainy day – but he won’t be powerful. Yet apparently, when Saif is not waving firearms about, or threatening “rivers of blood” – a nod to Enoch Powell, perhaps – or vowing with Churchillian resolution to “fight until the last man, until the last woman, until the last bullet,” he is quietly pursuing the same reform agenda to which he has so selflessly devoted himself over the last decade. Or so Barber seems to believe.

Barber is one of those who accepted money from a US-based consultancy firm, the Monitor Group, to visit Libya. Monitor appears to have played an especially unpleasant role, although one yet to be untangled. In his thesis, Saif thanks Monitor for helping him with research, and the company admits having assisted him. Monitor also accepted a US$3 million contract from the Libyan government to spin the Libyan dictatorship as all sweetness and light; the image-conscious group now admits that it shouldn’t have done so, although it presumably won’t be returning the money.

Much of that money, in any case, will have been passed on to others in exchange for their services. As part of its efforts to help Libya improve its international standing, Monitor agreed to arrange for the very best academics to visit Libya and help ensure that poor Colonel Gaddafi would no longer be so misunderstood among ordinary folk who might in their ignorance be inclined to associate him with the blowing up of aeroplanes and the killing of innocent civilians. But that’s so 1988; Monitor would help them get with the program.

Just what these academics received for their troubles remains undisclosed, but rather like Saif’s apparent eschewal of budget student accommodation, they wouldn’t have stayed in backpacker hostels. Nor would they have worked for free. Interestingly, Sir Howard Davies was named in the Guardian as a senior adviser to Monitor, as was Sir Mark Allen. Allen, a former diplomat, is credited – if that’s the word for it – with a central role in the 2004 rapprochement with Libya, as well as with negotiating the release from a Scottish prison of the only man to be tried for the Lockerbie bombing – a great propaganda coup for the Libyan regime. He later worked as a special adviser to BP and, predictably, as a member of one of the LSE’s advisory boards.

One of Monitor’s performing academics was Anthony Giddens, the renowned sociologist, “Third Way” theorist and former director of the LSE. Giddens visited Libya on two occasions and wrote in the New Statesman in 2006 of his three-hour meeting with Muammar Gaddafi (“You usually get about half an hour when meeting a political leader”). Giddens seemed fairly impressed by the old warrior, noting Gaddafi’s liking for Third Way thinking. Gaddafi apparently made “many intelligent and perceptive points” and Giddens gained “the strong sense” that Gaddafi’s “conversion” was “authentic,” even if also motivated by a desire to escape sanctions. In what would become a familiar refrain among Libya’s British friends, Giddens didn’t neglect to note that then LSE student, Saif, was “a driving force behind the rehabilitation and potential modernisation of Libya.”

The love affair of certain LSE academics with the Gaddafi family would become manifest in various episodes in the years ahead. There was the invitation to Saif to deliver the 2010 Ralph Miliband lecture, named in honour of the socialist academic and father of current Labour Party leader, Ed. There was also the excruciating occasion when Saif’s dear old dad, having been beamed in live from Libya to the LSE to give a lecture, was addressed as “Brother Leader” by the young academic asked to introduce him. This was a particularly bad look as the academic concerned, Alia Brahimi, happened to be a research fellow in a program funded by Libyan money.

Many a university vice-chancellor, when contemplating Davies’s and the LSE’s fates, has probably been prompted to reflect that “there but for the grace of God go I.” Indeed, the International Centre for Prison Studies at my own university, King’s College London, received £700,000 from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office over six years to help the Libyans improve the running of their prisons. The college principal, Rick Trainor, defended this program in terms of the college’s mission of “service to society,” just as Davies defended the value of the LSE’s program to train Libyan civil servants.

No doubt all this is true, even if it conveniently overlooks both the vast sums of money involved and the propaganda value – to Libya – of the contacts with these academics. The LSE’s claims that the Libyan money didn’t affect its academics’ research agenda is both untestable and implausible. How, for instance, does one assess the research project never even conceived, or the awkward questions never posed by those who find themselves the beneficiaries of official largesse? Questions, for instance, such as who actually wrote Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s PhD thesis.

Meanwhile, those who claim that Davies and the LSE are scapegoats for a university sector increasingly forced to seek money from unorthodox sources (such as arms dealers and Middle Eastern dictators) portray as reluctant supplicants those who delighted in their ability to combine political insider status – both in Tripoli and Whitehall – with entrepreneurial success. Not everyone came to the party. The LSE’s acceptance of Libyan money had its internal critics, such as the late Fred Halliday, the best-known scholar of the Middle East in the institution. But his warnings were brushed aside. And there are LSE students and staff who resent the damage the whole affair has caused to their school’s reputation.

But there were also careers to be advanced, and institutional ambitions to be fulfilled. Those who bring in large amounts of money are treated within universities as princes, in Britain no less than in Australia. The beer might be small when set beside the world of business and government, but money and power matter in universities as elsewhere.

Similarly, the brutality of the Gaddafi regime might seem less important when compared with the activities of the monster for whom the Webbs provided an apologia in their Soviet Communism. Nonetheless, the embarrassment suffered by Libya’s British academic barrackers might cause them to tread a little more warily in their future dealings with dictators and donors.

In the meantime, references to Libya become ever more scarce on LSE staff members’ online personal profiles. As George Orwell might have put it in 1984, “Britain is at war with Libya. Britain has always been at war with Libya.” •

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