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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Unbeaching the whale: the book appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Olympic origins appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newspoll — and other polls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… and the Australian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Red flags appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you doing, Tim?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post John Curtin’s potato appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Modi’s expatriate army appeared first on Inside Story.

Even now, as Israeli forces push deeper into southern Gaza, the exact purpose of Israel’s approach is far from clear. Although Israeli leaders claim to be targeting Hamas alone, the evident lack of discrimination raises real questions about what the government is actually up to.

Is Israel’s eagerness to shatter Gaza a product of the same incompetence that led to the massive failure of the Israeli military to counter Hamas’s attack on 7 October, the plans for which ended up in the hands of Israeli military and intelligence officials more than a year earlier? Is wrecking northern Gaza and now southern Gaza a prelude to sending the territory’s entire population to Egypt, as proposed in a “concept paper” produced by the Israeli Intelligence Ministry?

Whatever the ultimate goal, Israel’s collective devastation of Gaza raises deep moral problems. But even judged purely in strategic terms, Israel’s approach is doomed to failure — and indeed, it is already failing. Mass civilian punishment has not convinced Gaza’s residents to stop supporting Hamas. To the contrary, it has only heightened resentment among Palestinians. Nor has the campaign succeeded in dismantling the group ostensibly being targeted. Fifty-plus days of war show that while Israel can demolish Gaza, it cannot destroy Hamas. In fact, the group may be stronger now than it was before.

Israel is hardly the first country to err by placing excessive faith in the coercive magic of airpower. History shows that the large-scale bombing of civilian areas almost never achieves its objectives. Israel would have been better off had it heeded these lessons and responded to the 7 October attack with surgical strikes against Hamas’s leaders and fighters in lieu of the indiscriminate bombing campaign it has chosen.

But it is not too late to shift course and adopt a viable alternative strategy for achieving lasting security, an approach that would drive a political wedge between Hamas and the Palestinians rather than bringing them closer together: take meaningful, unilateral steps towards a two-state solution.

Since the dawn of airpower, countries have sought to bomb enemies into submission and shatter civilian morale. Pushed to their breaking point, the theory goes, populations will rise up against their own governments and switch sides. This strategy of coercive punishment reached its apogee in the second world war. History remembers the indiscriminate bombing of cities in that war simply by the place names of the targets: Hamburg (40,000 dead), Darmstadt (12,000) and Dresden (25,000).

Now Gaza can be added to this infamous list. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has himself likened the current campaign to the Allies’ fight in the second world war. While denying that Israel was engaging in collective punishment, he pointed out that a Royal Air Force strike targeting Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen killed scores of schoolchildren.

What Netanyahu left unmentioned was that none of the Allies’ efforts to punish civilians en masse actually succeeded. In Germany, the Allied bombing campaign, which began in 1942, wreaked havoc on civilians, destroying one urban area after another and ultimately a total of fifty-eight German cities and towns by the end of the war. But it never sapped civilian morale or prompted an uprising against Adolf Hitler, despite the confident predictions of Allied officials. Indeed, the campaign only encouraged Germans to fight harder for fear of a draconian postwar peace.

That failure should not have been so surprising given what happened when the Nazis tried the same tactic. The Blitz, their bombing of London and other British cities in 1940–41, killed more than 40,000 people and yet British prime minister Winston Churchill refused to capitulate. Instead, he invoked the civilian casualties in rallying society to make the sacrifices necessary for victory. Rather than shattering morale, the Blitz motivated the British to organise a years-long effort — with their US and Soviet allies — to counterattack and ultimately conquer the country that had bombed them.

In fact, never in history has a bombing campaign caused the targeted population to revolt against its own government. The United States has tried the tactic numerous times, to no avail. During the Korean war, it destroyed 90 per cent of electricity generation in North Korea. In the Vietnam war, it knocked out nearly as much power in North Vietnam. And in the Gulf war, US air attacks disrupted 90 per cent of electricity generation in Iraq. In none of these cases did the population rise up.

The war in Ukraine is the most recent case in point. For nearly two years Russia has sought to coerce Ukraine through wave after wave of devasting air assaults on cities across the country, killing more than 10,000 civilians, destroying more than 1.5 million homes and displacing some eight million Ukrainians. Russia is clearly shattering Ukraine. But far from crushing Ukraine’s fighting spirit, this massive civilian punishment has only convinced Ukrainians to fight Russia more intensely than ever.

This historical pattern is repeating itself in Gaza. Despite nearly two months of heavy military operations — virtually unrestrained by the United States and the rest of the world — Israel has achieved only marginal results. By any meaningful metric, the campaign has not led to Hamas’s even partial defeat.

Israel’s air and ground operations have killed as many as 5000 Hamas fighters (according to Israeli officials) out of a total of about 30,000. But these losses will not significantly reduce the threat to Israeli civilians, since, as the 7 October attacks proved, it takes only a few hundred Hamas fighters to wreak havoc on Israeli communities. Worse, Israeli officials also admit that the military campaign is killing twice as many civilians as Hamas fighters. In other words, Israel is almost certainly producing more terrorists than it is killing, since each dead civilian will have family and friends eager to join Hamas to exact revenge.

Hamas’s military infrastructure, such as it is, has not been meaningfully dismantled, even after the much-vaunted operations against the al-Shifa hospital, which the Israeli military alleged Hamas used as an operational base. As videos released by the Israel Defense Forces show, Israel has captured and destroyed the entrances to many of Hamas’s tunnels, but these can eventually be repaired, just as they were built in the first place.

More important, Hamas’s leaders and fighters appear to have abandoned the tunnels before Israeli forces entered them, meaning that the group’s most important infrastructure — its fighters — survived. Hamas has an advantage over Israeli forces: it can easily abandon a fight, blend into the civilian population, and live to fight again on more favourable terms. That is why a large-scale Israeli ground operation is also doomed to failure.

More broadly, Israel’s military campaign has not deeply weakened Hamas’s control over Gaza. Israel has rescued only one of the 240 or so hostages taken in the 7 October attack; the other hostages freed have been released by Hamas, showing that the group remains in control of its fighters.

Despite large-scale power shortages and extensive destruction throughout Gaza, Hamas continues to churn out propaganda videos showing civilian atrocities committed by Israeli forces and intense battles between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops. The group’s propaganda is distributed widely on the messaging app Telegram, where its channel has more than 620,000 subscribers. By the count of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (which I direct), Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, has disseminated nearly 200 videos and posters every week from 11 October to 22 November through that channel.

The only way to deal a lasting defeat to Hamas is to attack its leaders and fighters while separating them from the surrounding population. That is easier said than done, however, especially since Hamas draws its ranks directly from the local population rather than from abroad.

Indeed, survey evidence shows the extent to which Israel’s military operations are now producing more terrorists than they are killing. In a 14 November poll of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank conducted by Arab World for Research and Development, 76 per cent of respondents said they viewed Hamas positively. Compare that with the 27 per cent of respondents in both territories who told different pollsters in September that Hamas was “the most deserving of representing the Palestinian people.” The implication is sobering: a vast portion of the more than 500,000 Palestinian men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four are now ripe recruits for Hamas or other Palestinian groups seeking to target Israel and its civilians.

This result also reinforces the lessons of history. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most terrorists do not choose their vocation owing to religion or ideology, although some certainly do. Rather, most people who become terrorists do so because their land is being taken away.

For decades, I’ve studied the most extreme terrorists — suicide terrorists — and my study of 462 people who killed themselves on missions to kill others in acts of terrorism from 1982 to 2003 remains the largest demographic study of these attackers. I found that there are hundreds of secular suicide terrorists. Indeed, the world’s leader in suicide terrorism during that period was the Tamil Tigers, an openly anti-religious, Marxist group in Sri Lanka that carried out more suicide attacks than Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad — the two deadliest Palestinian terrorist groups — combined. What 95 per cent of the suicide terrorists in my database had in common was that they were fighting back against a military occupation that was controlling territory they considered their homeland.

From 1994 to 2005, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups carried out more than 150 suicide attacks, killing about 1000 Israelis. Only when Israel withdrew military forces from Gaza did these groups abandon the tactic almost entirely. Since then, the number of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has grown by 50 per cent, making it even harder for Israel to control the territories in the long run. There is every reason to think that Israel’s renewed military occupation of Gaza — “for an indefinite period,” according to Netanyahu — will lead to a new, perhaps larger wave of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.

Although the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has many dimensions, one fact helps clarify the complex picture. Virtually every year since the early 1980s, the Jewish population in the Palestinian territories has grown, even during the years of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. The growth of settlements has meant the loss of land for the Palestinians and increasing concerns that Israel will confiscate more land to resettle more Jews in the Palestinian territories. Indeed, Yossi Dagan, a prominent settler and member of Netanyahu’s party, has urged the creation of settlements in Gaza, where the last settlements were removed in 2005.

The growth of the Jewish population in Palestinian territories is a central factor in fomenting conflict. In the years immediately after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, the total number of Jews living in the West Bank and Gaza numbered only a few thousand. Israeli–Palestinian relations were mostly harmonious. No Palestinian suicide attacks and few attacks of any kind occurred during this period.

But things changed after the right-wing government led by the Likud Party came to power in 1977, promising a major expansion of settlements. The number of settlers increased — from about 4000 in 1977 to 24,000 in 1983 and to 116,000 in 1993. By 2022, about 500,000 Jewish Israeli settlers lived in the Palestinian territories, excluding East Jerusalem, where an additional 230,000 Jews resided. As the settlements grew, the relative harmony between the Israelis and the Palestinians dissipated. First came the creation of Hamas in 1987, and then the first intifada of 1987–93, the second intifada of 2000–2005, and continuing rounds of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis ever since.

The near-continuous growth of the Jewish settlements is a core reason why the idea of a two-state solution has lost credibility since the 1990s. If there is to be a serious pathway to a Palestinian state in the future, that growth must come to an end. After all, why should Palestinians reject Hamas and support a supposed peace process if doing so means only more loss of their land?

Only a two-state solution will lead to lasting security for Israelis and Palestinians alike. That is the only viable approach that will truly undermine Hamas, and Israel can and should unilaterally press forward with a plan, taking steps on its own before negotiating with the Palestinians. The goal should be to revive a process that has been dormant since the last negotiations failed in 2008, fifteen years ago.

To be clear, Israel should couple this political approach with a military one, engaging in limited, sustained operations against the Hamas leaders and fighters responsible for the atrocities of 7 October. But the country must adopt the political element of the strategy now, not later. Israel cannot wait until after some mythical time when Hamas is defeated by military might alone.

Those who doubt that a two-state solution can ever be reached are right that immediately resuming negotiations with the Palestinians would not reduce Hamas’s will to fight. For one thing, the group is an avowed proponent of eliminating Israel. For another, it would be one of the biggest losers in a two-state solution, since a peace deal would almost certainly involve the prohibition of armed Palestinian groups aside from Hamas’s main internal rival, the Palestinian Authority, which would likely enjoy renewed support and legitimacy if it secured an agreement that the majority of Palestinians supported. And even if a two-state solution is achieved, Israel will still need a strong defence capability, since no political solution can completely eliminate the threat of terrorism for years to come.

But that is why the goal now should not be to immediately put forward a final plan for a two-state solution — something that is simply not in the realm of political possibility at the moment. Instead, the immediate objective should be to create a pathway for an eventual Palestinian state. Although sceptics claim that such a pathway is impossible because Israel has no suitable Palestinian partners, Israel can in fact take crucial steps on its own.

The Israeli government could publicly announce that it intends to achieve a state of affairs where the Palestinians live in a state chosen by Palestinians side by side with a Jewish state of Israel. It could announce that it intends to develop a process to achieve that goal by, say, 2030, and will lay out milestones for getting there in the coming months. It could announce that it will immediately freeze Jewish settlements in the West Bank and forgo such settlements in Gaza through to 2030 as a down payment that demonstrated its commitment to a genuine two-state solution. And it could announce that it is willing and ready to work with all parties — all countries in the region and beyond, all international organisations, and all Palestinian parties — that are willing to accept these objectives.

Far from being irrelevant to Israel’s military efforts against Hamas, these political steps would augment a sustained, highly targeted campaign to reduce the near-term threat of attacks from the group. Effective counterterrorism benefits from intelligence from the local population, which is far more likely to be forthcoming if that population has hope of a genuine political alternative to the terrorist group.

Indeed, in the long run, the only way to defeat Hamas is to drive a political wedge between it and the Palestinian people. Unilateral Israeli steps signalling a serious commitment to a new future would decidedly change the framework of and dynamics in the Israeli–Palestinian relationship and give Palestinians a genuine alternative to simply supporting Hamas and violence. Israelis, for their part, would be more secure, and the two parties would at long last be on a path towards peace.

Of course, the current Israeli government shows no signs of pursuing this plan. That could change, however, especially if the United States decided to use its influence. For instance, the White House could apply more private pressure to Netanyahu’s government to curtail indiscriminate attacks in the air campaign.

But perhaps the most important step that Washington could take now would be to jump-start a major public debate about Israel’s conduct in Gaza, one that allowed alternative strategies to be considered in depth and that brought forth rich public information for Americans, Israelis and people around the world to evaluate the consequences for themselves. The White House could release US government assessments of the effect that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is having on Hamas and Palestinian civilians. Congress could hold hearings centred on a simple question: is the campaign producing more terrorists than it is killing?

The failure of Israel’s current approach is becoming clearer by the day. Sustained public discussion of that reality, combined with serious consideration of smart alternatives, offers the best chance for convincing Israel to do what is, after all, in its own national interest. •

The post Israel’s failed bombing campaign in Gaza appeared first on Inside Story.

We need to bring some historical discrimination to debates about what was new about the Black Summer. In particular we need to look at the history of firestorms, the distinctive fatal fires of southeastern Australia that culminated in named days of terror: Black Thursday 1851, Red Tuesday 1898, Black Sunday 1926, Black Friday 1939, Black Tuesday 1967, Ash Wednesday 1983 and Black Saturday 2009. How did the summer of 2019–20 relate to this grim lineage?

Black Thursday, 1851

The British colonists of Australia came to “this continent of smoke” from a green, wet land where fire was cosseted and coddled. They had rarely, if ever, seen free-ranging fire at home for it had been suppressed and domesticated over generations. They had so tamed fire that they had literally internalised it in the “internal combustion” of the steam engine.

These representatives of the industrial revolution brought to Australia many new sources of ignition, yet they also introduced houses, cattle, sheep, fences and all kinds of material belongings that made them fear wild fire. And they found themselves in a land that nature and human culture had sculpted with fire over millennia, a land hungry for fire and widowed of its stewards by the European invasion. It was an explosive combination. They did not know what the bush could do.

The foundational firestorm of Australian settler history occurred a few months after the residents of the Port Phillip District heard the news that British approval had been given for their “separation” from New South Wales. The impending creation of a distinct colony, soon to be called Victoria, was a cause for much celebration in Melbourne in November 1850, and a five-day holiday was declared.

Three months later, on Thursday the sixth of February 1851, in the soaring heat of a scorching summer, terrifying fires swept across the forests, woodlands and farms of the southeast. “Separation” had been celebrated with hilltop bonfires and now it was sealed by a scarifying firestorm. It was right that fire should forge the political identity of the most dangerous fire region on the planet.

“Black Thursday,” wrote the visiting British writer William Howitt, who arrived the year after the fire, “is one of the most remarkable days in the annals of Australia.” “The whole country, for a time, was a furious furnace,” he reported, “and, what was the most singular, the greatest part of the mischief was done in one single day.” He then went on to make some startling parallels. “It is a day as frequently referred to by the people in this colony as that of the Revolution of 1688 in England, of the first Revolution in France, or of the establishment of Independence in the United States of America.” In Australia, Howitt seemed to be suggesting, it was nature more than politics that would shape our identity.

Black Thursday, “the Great Bush Fire,” was a revolution of a kind. It was the first of the Black Days to be named by Europeans, the first recorded firestorm to shock and humble the colonists. Although the newcomers had quickly learned to expect bushfires, this was something else; its magnitude and ferocity terrified all who experienced and survived it.

At first the Melbourne Argus could hardly credit the reports from the bush, but then the breathless testimony kept tumbling in. Drought, high temperatures and ferocious northerly winds fanned the flames into a giant conflagration. People rushed to fight with green boughs “as in ordinary bushfires,” but all were forced to flee. Flames leaped from tree to tree like lightning; the fire careered “at the rate of a horse at full gallop”; sheep, cattle, horses, kangaroos and smaller native animals hurtled before it and hosts of birds were swept up in it: “the destruction of the wild creatures of the woods, which were roasted alive in their holes and haunts, was something fearful to contemplate.” People “went to bed, or lay down (for many did not dare go to bed), in a state of the greatest suspense and doubt as to whether they should see daylight next morning.”

Four days after the fire, Frances Perry, wife of the Bishop of Melbourne, recorded that “in some parts of the country the people are completely panic-struck. They thought, and well they might, that the world was coming to an end.”

The words of survivors painted a picture strikingly similar to the grand panorama of Black Thursday (1864) by artist William Strutt. For his imagery he drew on reportage as well as his own experience of the heat, smoke and fear of the day. Over three metres in breadth, the painting depicts what Strutt called “a stampede for life,” where people and animals, eyes wild with panic, flee southwards in terror.

Stampede for life: William Strutt’s Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 (1864). Click here to enlarge. State Library of Victoria

The “Great Bush Fire” of 1851 was the first large-scale firestorm to terrorise the British colonists. It wreaked its havoc just a decade and a half after British pastoralists invaded the Port Phillip District of New South Wales. Sheep, cattle and people had swiftly moved into the grasslands of the southeastern corner of the continent, but in 1851 the invaders had only recently outnumbered Aboriginal peoples and Indigenous burning regimes persisted in some places.

Because of its timing on the cusp of this change, Black Thursday was an intriguing amalgam of old and new Australia. It was an event embedded in the unravelling ecological and cultural rhythms of the southeastern corner of the continent. But Black Thursday was also an outrageous outbreak of disorder, the first schism in the new antipodean fire regime, a portent of things to come.

Red Tuesday, 1898

European settlers feared and suppressed fire near their properties and towns, and misjudged its power in the bush. But it did not take them long to begin to use fire for their own purposes, even if clumsily and dangerously. “The whole Australian race,” declared one bushman, has “a weakness for burning.” The language the bush workers used — “burning to clean up the country” — was uncannily like that of Aboriginal peoples.

In the drier forests of the ranges (but generally not the wet mountain ash forests, which had less grass), graziers used fire as Aboriginal peoples had done: to keep the forest open, to clean up the scrub, to encourage a “green pick,” and to protect themselves and their stock from dangerous bushfire. But, unlike Aboriginal peoples, the newcomers were prepared to burn in any season. And the legislative imperative for settlers was to “improve” the land they had colonised — and “improvement” first meant clearing. The Australian settler or “pioneer” was a heroic figure depicted as battling the land and especially the trees.

This fight with the forest assumed theatrical dimensions in South Gippsland, where each summer neighbours gathered to watch the giant burns that, they hoped, would turn last year’s fallen and ring-barked forest into this year’s clearing. They needed to establish pastures as quickly and cheaply as possible. Small trees were chopped, undergrowth was slashed, and sometimes large trees were felled so as to demolish smaller timber that had previously been “nicked,” thereby creating, as one settler put it, “a vast, crashing, smashing, splintering, roaring and thundering avalanche of falling timber!” The slashed forest was left to dry until the weather was hot enough for the annual burn, the frightening climax of the pioneer’s year.

In the mostly wet sclerophyll forest of the South Gippsland ranges, some of it mountain ash, it was often hard to get a “good burn” because of the heavy rainfall and the thick scrub’s resistance to wind. Farmers therefore chose the hottest summer days for these burns, “the windier and hotter the day the better for our purpose.” These settlers of the world’s most fire-prone forests awaited the most fatal days.

A “good burn” could so easily become a firestorm and in Gippsland in 1898 it did. “Red Tuesday” (1 February) was the most terrifying day of the “Great Fires” that year, a whole summer of fear and peril. Intense clearing fires had accompanied ringbarking, ploughing, sowing and road-making in Gippsland for two decades, but settlers were still shocked by the Great Fires, which were like nothing they had ever experienced. Although they were stunned by the speed and violence of the firestorm, the new farmers understood that it was a product of their mode of settlement. Their principal pioneering weapon had run amok. As farmers burned their clearings into the encircling edges of the wet, green forest, they might have guessed that soon the fires would link up and overwhelm them.

Just as Black Thursday was memorialised in a great painting so was Red Tuesday captured in a grand work of art. When historian Stephen Pyne surveyed fire art around the world, he found Australian paintings to be exceptional for their gravitas, their capacity to speak to cultural identity or moral drama. “Bushfires did not simply illuminate the landscape like a bonfire or a corroboree,” he wrote, “they were the landscape.”

This is vividly true of John Longstaff’s depiction of Gippsland, Sunday Night, February 20th, 1898. Longstaff was born on the Victorian goldfields a decade after Black Thursday and travelled to Warragul to witness the long tail of the 1898 fires. Whereas Strutt’s painting was intimate in its terror and chaos, showing us the whites of the eyes of people and animals, Longstaff evoked the drama through its magisterial setting. Human figures are dwarfed by towering mountain ash trees and the immensity of the bush at night, and appear encircled and illuminated by fire. Flames lick at the edge of the clearing and a leaping firestorm races towards us from a high, distant horizon.

Longstaff exhibited his grand painting in his Melbourne studio in August of that year, lit by a flickering row of kerosene-lamp footlights. Gippsland, Sunday night, February 20th, 1898 is a painting of a landscape, and it focuses on the forest as much as the fire and the settlers. “The Great Scrub,” the enemy of the settlers, is a powerful presence in the panorama; it inspires as much awe as the flames. The people in the painting, who are seeking to “settle” this fearful forest, are enclosed and entrapped by its vast darkness. The erupting bushfire is both a threat and a promise.

Burning off

Firestorms became more frequent in the twentieth century, as sawmilling and settlement moved more deeply into the mountain forests of Victoria. The greatest of them came on Friday 13 January 1939, the grim climax of a week of horror and a summer of fire across New South Wales, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria. In that week, 1.4 million hectares of Victoria burned, whole settlements were incinerated, and seventy-one people died. Sixty-nine timber mills were engulfed, “steel girders and machinery were twisted by heat as if they had been of fine wire,” and the whole state seemed to be alight.

Judge Leonard Stretton, who presided over the royal commission into the causes of the fires, pitied the innocence of the bush workers, immigrants in a land whose natural rhythms they did not yet understand:

Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough. The experience of the past could not guide them to an understanding of what might, and did, happen.

Stretton investigated the settlers’ culture of burning, taking his commission to bush townships and holding hearings in temperatures over 100°F (38°C). His shocking finding was that “These fires were lit by the hand of man.” Yet rarely were they malevolent arsonists. Mostly they were farmers and bush workers, and their fire lighting was casual and selfish, sometimes systematic and sensible, and increasingly clandestine and rebellious. They were settlers burning to clear land and graziers firing the forest floor to promote new grass. Burning was a rite — and a right. They were landowners who, when they saw smoke on the horizon, threw a match into their home paddock.

Settlers felt “burning off” helped to keep them and their neighbours safe. Travellers to the Yarra Valley in the first decades of the twentieth century wouldn’t have been surprised to see “half a dozen fires on the sides of mountains.”

When the Forests Commission of Victoria was founded in 1918, it assumed control of the state forests and forced graziers out if they did not stop burning their leases. Forest officers, charged with conservation of timber, tried to suppress fire, but farmers and graziers believed that their burning kept the forest safe from fire by keeping fuel loads down. George Purvis, a storekeeper and grazier at Moe in Gippsland, explained to the 1939 royal commission that everybody used to burn off many years ago: “We could meet a few of our neighbours and say ‘What about a fire’… Nowadays, if we want a fire we nick out in the dark, light it, and let it go. We are afraid to tell even our next door neighbour because the Forests Commission is so definitely opposed to fires anywhere, that we are afraid to admit that we have anything to do with them.”

As a result, Purvis explained, the bulk of farmers did not burn their land as much as they wished. And so, as fires gathered force in the week before Black Friday, people desperately burned to save their property and their lives. It was considered better to burn late than never, and these fires (indeed “lit by the hand of man”) “went back into the forest where they all met in one huge fire.”

Perhaps fire was so much a part of the Australian landscape and character that it could never be eliminated or suppressed. It had to be accepted and used, and perhaps it could be controlled. The 1939 royal commission signalled a new direction. In his recommendations, Stretton gave official recognition to a folk reality and tried to give focus and discipline to the widespread popular practice of burning to keep the forest safe. He recommended that the best protection against fire was regular light burning of undergrowth at times other than summer. Only fire could beat fire.

Vivid word-picture: the report of the 1939 royal commission.

As Stephen Pyne observed, this “Australian strategy” was in defiant counterpoise to the North American model of total fire suppression. The strategy was reinforced by another royal commission, this one following the 1961 Dwellingup fires in Western Australia, which endorsed systematic, expansive, hazard-reduction burning of the jarrah forests of the southwest.

It took time for official “controlled burning” to supplant unofficial “burning off.” In 1967, a Tasmanian firestorm provided dramatic evidence of the persistence of rural traditions of burning. On 7 February, which became known as Black Tuesday, a “fire hurricane” stormed through bushland and invaded Hobart’s suburbs, coming within two kilometres of the CBD. The fire caused the largest loss of life and property on any single day in Australia to that time.

Black Tuesday had strong elements of Black Friday 1939 embedded within it. Of the 110 fires burning on that Tuesday, ninety started prior to the day and seventy were uncontrolled on the morning of the 7th. Significantly, only twenty-two of the 110 fires were started accidentally; eighty-eight were deliberately lit. In other words, bushfires were common, deliberate and allowed to burn unchecked. “No one worried about them too much,” reflected Tasmanian fire officer John Gledhill, echoing Stretton.

Tasmania’s 1967 Black Tuesday fire, with its heart in the expanding suburbs of Hobart, signalled a new type of firestorm in Australian history. The bush had come to town. But the town had also come to the bush, insinuating its commuters and their homes among the gums. This event initiated an era of fires that would invade the growing urban interface with the bush: Ash Wednesday 1983 (Adelaide and Melbourne); Sydney 1994; Canberra 2003, when more than 500 suburban homes were destroyed in the nation’s capital; and Black Saturday 2009, when only a wind change prevented the Kilmore East fire from ploughing into Melbourne’s densely populated eastern suburbs.

During the second half of the twentieth century, casual rural fire lighting gradually became criminalised. The law was enforced more strongly and public acceptance of open flame declined. Fire was gradually eliminated from normal daily experience as electricity took over from candles, kerosene and, eventually, even wood stoves. Firewood for the home became more recreational. “Smoke nights” — once part of the fabric of social life and an especially masculine ritual — went into decline as smoking itself became a health issue. Instead of being a social accompaniment and enhancement, smoking was pushed to the margins of social life, even becoming antisocial.

It had been different in the interwar years: in 1939 the Red Cross, “concerned about the health of the bush fire refugees,” appealed to the public for “gifts of tobacco.” Even for victims of fire, smoke was then considered a balm. On Black Sunday 1926, Harry King, a young survivor at Worrley’s Mill where fourteen people died, crawled scorched and half-blinded for four kilometres through the smoking forest to tell his story in gasps. At the end of his breathless account, he opened one badly burned eye and whispered: “I’m dying for a smoke, dig.”

The ferocity of “the flume”

The years of the most fatal firestorms were burned into the memories of bush dwellers: 1851, 1898, 1926, 1939, 1967, 1983, 2002–03 and 2009. Stretton’s vivid word-picture of Black Friday 1939, which became a prescribed text in Victorian Matriculation English, joined the paintings by Strutt and Longstaff in forming a lineage of luminous fire art.

The most frightening and fatal firestorms have all roared out of the “fire flume.” That’s what historian Stephen Pyne called the region where hot northerly winds sweep scorching air from the central deserts into the forested ranges of Victoria and Tasmania. In the flume, bushfires strike every year, firestorms every few decades. Firestorms are generated when spot fires ahead of the flaming front coalesce and intensify, even creating their own weather. They entrap and surround. Firestorms are bushfires of a different order of magnitude; they cannot be fought; they rampage and kill. Their timing, however, can be predicted. They come at the end of long droughts, in prolonged heatwaves, on days of high temperatures, low humidity and fierce northerly winds.

The firestorms are intensified by particular species of trees — the mountain ash and the alpine ash — that conspire to create a raging crown fire that kills and then reproduces the whole forest en masse. These tall ash-type eucalypts need a hot, fast-moving crown fire, upon which their regeneration uniquely depends, to crack open their seeds. The ecology of the forest depends on firestorms, so we know they also happened under Aboriginal ecological management.

In the last 200 years, the clearing, burning and intensive logging of the new settlers exaggerated and intensified the existing rhythm. In many remaining forest districts firestorms have come too frequently for the young ash saplings to grow seed, and so towering trees have given way to scrubby bracken and acacia. Those two colonial paintings captured the fatal, colliding elements of the Victorian firestorm: the peril, horror and panic of the people, and the indifferent magnificence of the tall, fire-hungry trees.

In 2009, I resisted use of the word “unprecedented” to describe Black Saturday because it was the familiarity of the firestorm that horrified me. Although the event was probably exacerbated by climate change, the recurrent realities were more haunting. As I wrote in Inside Story at the time, “the 2009 bushfires were 1939 all over again, laced with 1983. The same images, the same stories, the same words and phrases, and the same frightening and awesome natural force that we find so hard to remember and perhaps unconsciously strive to forget.” As a historian of the fire flume, I was disturbed by Black Saturday’s revelation that we had still not come to terms with what we had already experienced.

In the months following Black Saturday (2009), I was invited to assist the small community of Steels Creek in the Yarra Valley to capture stories of their traumatic experience. Working with historians Christine Hansen, Moira Fahy and Peter Stanley, I wrote a history of fire for the community that presented the ubiquity and sheer repetitive predictability of the phenomenon in that valley. One bushfire after another, year in year out. As we set out this rhythm, a deeper pattern emerged, which was the distinction in this region between bushfires and firestorms. The ferocity of the firestorms was generated not necessarily by trees near a settlement but by forests more than ten kilometres away, perhaps thirty or forty kilometres away. Survival in summer is not just a matter of clearing the gutter but also knowing what forests live in your region.

It has proven too tempting and too easy for Australians to overlook or deny the deep local history of the Victorian firestorm. Sometimes Aboriginal mosaic burning, which was applied to so many drier woodlands across the continent, is assumed to have been used in the wet ash forests too. For example, in his book Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe argued that “a mosaic pattern of low-level burns” was used in mountain ash forests and suggested that wild fires in the forests affected by Black Saturday “were largely unknown before the arrival of Europeans.” But this cannot have been the case, for when Europeans arrived they found mature, even-aged ash forests, the very existence of which was evidence of historical, powerful crown fires.

For example, botanist David Ashton identified one old stand of mountain ash at Wallaby Creek as dating from a firestorm in 1730. Furthermore, ash forests would have been destroyed by frequent fires, and low-level burns are not feasible in such a wet ecosystem. Aboriginal peoples would have used low-level cool burns to manage the drier foothill forests but not the ash forests themselves, for mature mountain ash trees can easily be killed (without germinating seed) by light surface fire. Woiwurrung, Daungwurrung and Gunaikurnai peoples used the tall forests seasonally and probably burned their margins, maintaining clearings and pathways along river flats and ridgetops. They were familiar with the forest’s firestorms and would have foreseen and avoided the dangerous days.

Even six generations after Black Thursday 1851, we stubbornly resist acknowledging the ecological and historical distinctiveness of the Victorian firestorm. It is astonishing that the Black Saturday royal commission cranked through 155 days of testimony but failed to provide a vegetation map in either its interim or final report. In one of my submissions to the inquiry, I drew the commission’s attention to this absence in their interim report, but it was not remedied. Senior counsel Rachel Doyle was more interested in pursuing the former Victorian police chief Christine Nixon about her haircut on 7 February than in directing the commission’s attention to the unusually combustible forests through which the fires stormed.

The royal commission went some way towards being more discriminating about the variety of bushfire, weather, topography and ecology, but not far enough. Forests featured in the commission’s report mostly as “fuel.” “The natural environment,” the commissioners explained in opaque bureaucratic language, “was heavily impacted.”

Thus the firestorm’s origin in the ecology of the forest was ignored even by a royal commission. Or people explained it away by interpreting such outbreaks as entirely new, as products of either the cessation of Aboriginal burning or of anthropogenic climate change. Indigenous fire and global warming are highly significant cultural factors in the making of fire regimes, but both work with the biological imperative. It is clearly hard for humanity to accept the innate power of nature.

The same tendency led Victorians up the garden path of fire policy. The most shocking fact about Black Saturday 2009 was that people died where they thought they were safest, where they were told they would be safest. Of the 173 people killed on Black Saturday, two-thirds of them died in their own homes. Of those, a quarter died sheltering in the bath.

As I wrote in Inside Story in 2009 and 2012, the “Stay or Go” policy was a death sentence in Victorian mountain communities in firestorm weather. Although the policy guided people well in many areas of Australia and had demonstrably saved lives and homes elsewhere, it misled people in this distinctively deadly fire region to believe that they could defend an ordinary home in the face of an atomic force. And it was this confidence in the defensibility of the home and denial of the difference of the firestorm (coupled with a faith in modern firefighting capacity) that underpinned the lack of warnings issued by authorities to local residents about the movement of the fire front on Black Saturday.

For much of the history of these forests, including their long Aboriginal history, no one believed their homes were safe in a firestorm. Evacuation was the norm. Sometimes the elderly and vulnerable were extracted by force from their homes by caring relatives and friends. Most people fled of their own accord. A “safe place” was a creek, a bare or ploughed paddock, a safely prepared or quickly excavated dug-out, a mining adit or railway tunnel, or just somewhere else. If you were trapped at home, there was an art to abandoning it at the right moment. The acknowledged vulnerability of homes made it essential for those caught in them to get out. And people in those earlier times were more inclined to look out the window, go outside and watch the horizon, sniff the air.

In 2009, the internet was a killer. The private, domestic computer screen with its illusion of omniscience and instant communication compounded the vulnerability of the home.

The Black Summer

The fire season of 2019–20 was completely different in character from Black Thursday (1851) and its successors. It might be compared best with the alpine fires of 2002–03, which were also mostly started by lightning in remote terrain and burned for months.

Coming after severe drought and more record heatwaves, the summer of 2019–20 tipped fire patterns into widespread rogue behaviour. It is not unusual for Australians to have smoke in their eyes and lungs over summer — the Great Fires of our history are remembered not only for their death tolls but also for their weeks of smoke and dread. But in the summer of 2019–20 the smoke was worse, more widespread and more enduring, the fires were more extensive and also more intense, NSW fires started behaving more like Victorian ones, and the endless “border fire” symbolically erased the boundary anyway.

Australia was burning from the end of winter to the end of summer, from Queensland to Western Australia, from the Adelaide Hills to East Gippsland, from the NSW south coast to Kangaroo Island, from the Great Western Woodlands to Tasmania. Everywhere, suddenly, bushfire was tipping into something new.

As spring edged into summer and the fires worked their way down the Great Dividing Range and turned the corner into Victoria, people who remembered Ash Wednesday (1983) and Black Saturday (2009) braced themselves. January and February are traditionally the most dangerous months in the southern forests. But this time central Victoria’s good winter rainfall and wetter, cooler February prevented the flume from ripping into full gear.

Therefore an unusual aspect of the fire season of 2019–20 was that these Great Fires did not explode out of the firestorm forests of Victoria and Tasmania. It was one reason why the death toll for such extensive and enduring fires was relatively low; they did not break out in the most fatal forests. Another reason was that Black Saturday had led to a new survival policy: to leave early rather than to stay and defend. Early evacuation thus became the enforced strategy of authorities well beyond the firestorm forests. Again, a regional and ecologically specific strategy became generalised as a universal policy. But at least this time it erred on the side of caution and surely saved lives.

The sheer range, scale, length and enduring ferocity of these fires made them unprecedented. The blackness of the named days of Australia’s fire history describe the aftermath of the sudden, shocking violence of a firestorm; it evokes mourning, grief and the funereal silence of the burned, empty forests. Black and still.

But when the fires burn for months, a single Black Day morphs into a Black Summer. There seemed never to be a black day-after; instead the days, the weeks, the months were relentlessly red. Red and restless. The colour of danger, of ever-lurking flame, of acrid orange smoke and pyrocumuli of peril. The smoke killed ten times more people than the flames. The threat was always there; it was not over until the season itself turned — and only then was it declared black. But the enduring image is of people cowering on beaches in a red-orange glow, awaiting evacuation. I think of it as the Red Summer.

Living with fire

A long historical perspective can help us come to terms with “disasters” and even ameliorate them, but most significantly it can also enable us to see beyond the idea of fire as disaster. There will be more Black Days and, under the influence of climate change, longer Red Summers. We have to accept and plan for them, like drought and flood. We should aim to survive them, even if we can’t hope to prevent or control them. We must acknowledge the role of global climate change in accelerating bushfire and urgently reduce carbon emissions. And we should celebrate, as I think we are already beginning to do, the stimulus that bushfire can give to community and culture.

In the quest for how to live with fire, Indigenous cultural burning philosophies and practices have much to offer all Australians. Sometimes we can even see a fired landscape (of the right intensity and frequency) as beautiful or “clean,” as Aboriginal peoples do. We are slowly learning to respect cultural burning and its capacity to put good fire back into a land that needs fire. But we must go further and actually allow Indigenous fire practitioners to take the lead again.

Victor Steffensen, a Tagalaka descendant from North Queensland, has written a humble and hopeful book, Fire Country (2020), which is as much about negotiating the bureaucratic hierarchies of fire power as it is about fire itself. As his mentor, Tommy George, declared in frustration, “Those bloody national park rangers, they should be learning from us.”

But cultural burning is not the same as prescribed burning. Sensitive controlled burning might, in some ecosystems, render the land safer for habitation, although it has proven difficult to achieve required levels in a warming world. And in a landscape of transformed ecologies, greatly increased population and rapidly changing climate, it is unreasonable and dangerous to expect Indigenous peoples to make the land safe for the proliferating newcomers; it would again set vulnerable people up to fail. Anthropologist Tim Neale has argued that the settler “dream of control” places an “impossible burden” on Aboriginal peoples, trapping them again within an idealised expectation of unchanging ancient behaviour.

Renewing and reviving Indigenous fire practices is important, first and foremost, for human rights, native title and the health, wellbeing and self-esteem of First Nations communities. We are fortunate that an additional opportunity presents itself: for a rapprochement between the exercise of Indigenous responsibility to Country and modern Australia’s need for labour-intensive and ecologically sensitive fire management on the ground. There is much creative promise in that partnership, and developing it will take time, patience and respect.

Throughout 2019, fire experts pleaded with the federal government to hold a bushfire summit to prepare for the dreaded summer, but the prime minister refused, fearing that acknowledging the crisis would give credence to climate action. Yet at the end of the summer he established another retrospective bushfire inquiry, the fifty-eighth since 1939. Many of the sensible, urgent recommendations of those earlier commissions have been ignored and await enactment. Rather than spending millions of dollars on lawyers after the flames, the nation would do better to spend a few thousand on environmental historians to distil and interpret existing, hard-earned wisdom.

Australian scholars of fire need to work on at least three temporal scales. First, there is the deep-time environmental and cultural history of the continent and its management over millennia. Second, there is the century-scale history of invasion, documenting the changes wrought by the collision of a naive fire people with the fire continent. And third, there is the long future of climate-changed nature and society. Black Thursday was the first firestorm after the invasion, an ancient ecological cycle with new social dimensions. Red Tuesday, Black Sunday and Black Friday were exaggerated by settlement and rampant exploitation. Black Saturday was more like the past than the future, a frighteningly familiar and fatal amalgam of nature and culture. But the Red Summer of 2019–20 was a scary shift to something new, fast-forwarding Australians into a new Fire Age. •

This is an abridged version of “The Fires: A Long Historical Perspective,” Tom Griffiths’s contribution to The Fires Next Time: Understanding Australia’s Black Summer, edited by Peter Christoff (Melbourne University Publishing, 2023).

The post Continent of fire appeared first on Inside Story.

Within three minutes of posting, two members of the group had commented on top of each other to say the photo was taken at the corner of Liverpool and Elizabeth Streets, Hobart, looking up what is now Elizabeth Mall towards the GPO clock tower on the left. That’s how quick and attentive people are in groups like this. And they were correct, I know the place perfectly well. I don’t live there anymore, but this is my home city.

Old photographs are posted in this group several times a day and each attracts many comments, and sometimes dozens. This is just one local history group among countless others on Facebook and other social media platforms. Nostalgia is the main theme, certainly, but with every post, comment and share, memories are stimulated and connections with place and community are enacted.

Recollections are often detailed and intricate. Concerning the date of the rainy-day photograph someone suggested the women’s coats indicate late 1950s. “A bit earlier I think,” came a swift reply. “By the mid–late 1950s hemlines had risen a few inches to a bit below the knee. I remember them well from my teenage dressmaking days!”

Others leapt in to name the make of the cars, the consensus being that the one in the foreground is an Austin A40 Devon, although a few people suggested a Hillman Minx. “I immediately could smell the upholstery,” said one. “Go Dad!”

Still others noticed the banks. People love to reminisce about banks. “What happened to the beautiful old bank on the corner?” someone asked. It’s still there, came a reply, now a branch of the National Australia Bank, but the clock has been removed recently, they thought, having not displayed the correct time for a while.

The Hobart Savings Bank on the extreme right of the image has been pulled down and replaced with what one commenter described as a “modern monstrosity.” Someone else claimed to still have a pink bankbook from there with a few pounds in the account, but: “I suppose the government has pinched that.” This person remembered being interviewed by the manager there for a home loan, $20,000 over twenty-five years at 6 per cent. “Real service back then by real people, all those tellers. We have lost so much.”

By this time I was thoroughly engrossed in the world of this photograph. I sent it to my two brothers. Yes, that’s an Austin A40, said Paul, and the car with the smashed-up grille in the centre of the photograph is a Chevrolet (“1939 I think”). He noticed the traffic lights, which I had missed, and how all the pedestrians are wearing titfers. Hats, that is. (I had to look that up.)

Mark remembered the Kodak store still trading in the 1970s. “Mind you, I remember when Hobart had half-a-dozen good photo/camera stores,” he added. As a keen photographer himself, he appreciated the mood and story in the photograph. It’s harder than it looks to take pictures that do that.

For me the main feature is the GPO clock. Our grandfather worked in that building, and I picture him glancing out the window at that very moment, hoping the rain might have eased in time for his bus ride home.

I like to know the origins of things, so I sought out the photograph’s descriptive information at the State Library of Tasmania. It does have a fairly precise date, May 1953. (So, the Facebook commenter knowledgeable about 1950s hemlines was right.) It is one of a series of about 12,000 images made between 1951 and 1973 by the Tasmanian Education Department. Hats off to the library staff for their work to preserve and digitise this series; it’s magnificent.

The photos cover a wide range of subjects other than schools and education, suggesting that the department’s photographers could be called on for a variety of assignments. Our rainy-day photograph shows that they might also fill the end of a roll on the way back to the office with whatever took their fancy.

Mark is right, it’s the mood of the photograph that is captivating. Wet streets are eternally interesting for photographers and artists, and this unknown photographer appears to have sheltered under an awning and brought the shutter down just as everyone is too busy getting out of the rain to notice or care.

See how they have caught the Chevrolet’s crumpled grille just as it swung around the corner towards us? This car has had a bingle, as my father would say, the sort of thing that could occur on any wet day. Central Hobart was not built for cars, and yet in these postwar years a lot more people could afford them. The result: frustration.

Then there’s the woman on the right who draws our gaze as she walks briskly away from us into the frame. With her reflection shimmering up from the pavement, she turns provincial Hobart into a scene John le Carré could have conceived. The cut of her coat is pure 1950s. Clothes rationing is out, Christian Dior’s New Look is in, and this woman can afford the latest modes.

Other women appear to be making do with their older things. The woman with the basket crossing the street, head down against the rain: she could have been wearing that severe jacket and skirt since the 1930s. She’d be about our grandmother’s age, I should think, part of a generation for whom frugality was a necessity and later a habit.

The more I look at the photograph, the deeper I fall into a liminal state between connection and disconnection. I know this place, and yet I don’t. I belong and yet I don’t. I think it’s the raindrops bouncing up off the road that gives the image its perpetual drama. Where is all that water going to go? In Hobart, it goes into the Hobart Rivulet.

Autumn is when the rivulet is most prone to flooding. In June 1954, thirteen months after our photograph was taken, flash floods forced several feet of water into the basement of O’Conor’s shoe shop. You can see the shop sign in the photograph. Staff working there to save the stock might have drowned if the floor-level windows had given way. There had been bad floods in 1923 and 1947, but the 1954 floods were said to be the worst in a hundred years.

The rivulet emerges on the slopes of kunanyi/Mount Wellington and runs through present-day Fern Tree and South Hobart. Reaching the city, it ducks underground and up again a few times before disappearing for a kilometre or so directly under the CBD. (In 2016 the rivulet wall was breached during building works, causing more than $15 million in damage to the Myer department store and several retailers in the adjacent Cat and Fiddle Arcade.) Then it comes up for air for a short stretch parallel to lower Collins Street, disappears, and finally meets the River Derwent at an outlet north of Macquarie Point.

For thousands of years First Nations Tasmanians moving seasonally through the Hobart region would have understood the rivulet’s seasons and moods, and how it connected with other natural watercourses to support animal and birdlife. Then, in February 1804, lieutenant-governor David Collins decided that this was the ideal place to establish a settlement. The “Run of clear fresh Water” he found there played a large part in his decision. Efforts the previous year at Risdon Cove, on the eastern side of the Derwent, had faltered partly for lack of reliable clean water.

Collins understood the need to protect the rivulet, and within weeks had issued instructions to the settlers not to pollute it or destroy the “underwood” close to its banks. By 1805 a footbridge had been built across it connecting a bush track leading north, which later became Elizabeth Street. This bridge was replaced in 1816 by a brick structure named Wellington Bridge after the famous duke. Today it is covered over by Elizabeth Street but a small void protected by a grille affords the curious shopper a reminder of Hobart’s earliest days.

The first European settlers quickly learned that although the rivulet could sink to a trickle in the summer, heavy rain or snowfall on the mountain could turn it into a torrent. And this was even before the town authorities decided to alter its course for the first time, in 1825, with what was known as the “New Cut” along a section of lower Collins Street.

The New Cut diverted the rivulet towards another creek and sent both of them away from their natural bed, which had been under the present site of the City Hall. Their confluence had formed a silty beach prone to flooding, and the diversion was designed to facilitate land reclamation in support of burgeoning waterfront industries.

Early maps of Hobart — this one for instance — show how the rivulet once pursued its own gentle course from the mountain to the river, and how ruthless was the grid of streets imposed on top of it. Over time the rivulet has been diverted, dammed and forced through numerous pipes, tunnels and culverts: controlled and exploited, in other words, for the settlers’ convenience.

David Collins’s instructions to protect the rivulet were ignored, and by the mid 1820s it had become polluted by refuse from humans, animals, tanneries and distilleries. Outbreaks of disease were inevitable. In 1828 the town sheriff reported that the rivulet had become a “receptacle for all the filth and impurity of the town.”

The strip along lower Collins Street was the worst, and just as likely to flood as before. It has never been a pretty part of town, as you can see. In high school I had to catch a bus along here and my moody teenaged thoughts were not enhanced by having to stare at a tired old watercourse while I waited. Residential housing had all gone by then and I didn’t know that these streets used to be known unofficially as “Wapping,” after the working-class waterfront area of London. For a hundred years or more, the people of Hobart’s Wapping suffered the most from flooding and pollution, as the poorest people often do.

Efforts over many decades to improve the supply and quality of Hobart’s water finally culminated in 1895 with the completion of two major reservoirs at the Waterworks Reserve above South Hobart, with a combined capacity of 500 million litres. They still supply Hobart’s drinking water.

The rivulet can still rise up in anger. Calamitous flooding in 1960 led to new control measures, but in 2018 the section along lower Collins Street once again turned into a seething and very dangerous torrent. A group of urban geographers noted then that the problem (not unique to Hobart) is that urban planning measures have become disconnected from nature and overlook the ecological functions of watercourses. Built-up areas deprive a city of green spaces that act like natural sponges. It’s hard to apply water-sensitive planning principles to a city already built.

At the end of my meditation on the photograph taken in Hobart in 1953 I returned to the original question: where does all that water go? How do we prevent our cities from becoming alienated from their natural environmental features? The upper reaches of the rivulet are better managed now, but the challenges are real. Still, the open waterway is fouled by rubbish and other pollutants, some from the South Hobart tip.

If you have fifty-three minutes to spare, spend them with Pete Walsh, the Platypus Guardian. Pete, who first sought solace at the rivulet after a serious medical diagnosis, was drawn there to reconnect with something he thought he was losing. Sitting on the bank one day he was astonished when a platypus emerged from the water and zoomed up to him, wiggling her bill as if she had something to say. He realised that a fragile population of platypuses was still managing — against all odds — to call the Hobart Rivulet home.

The more Pete visited the rivulet the more often he saw this zooming platypus, so he named her Zoom. That profound moment of connection inspired in Pete a passion to do what he could to preserve a habitat for these ancient animals, and a whole community of supporters has since joined him. If Zoom has a message, it must surely be to ask us to tread more lightly on this earth. •

The post A rainy day in Hobart appeared first on Inside Story.

Curtin’s famous statement came in late December — and I will quote it because it is meet and right so to do. The prime minister said: “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with Britain.”

With those carefully chosen words — “inhibitions,” “pangs” and “kinship” — Curtin acknowledged that this geopolitical pivot carried an emotional cost for Australians. The population was still overwhelmingly of British descent and “home” was Britain, even for many of those born here. Curtin’s words therefore implied a national coming of age, a relinquishment of childhood dependence, a step into maturity. A British dominion was asserting an independent foreign policy. Australia, facing peril, was insisting on a direct, unmediated relationship with the United States of America.

When we think of Curtin, it is so often this declaration that comes to mind for it represents a cool Australian assessment of geopolitical realities at a moment of existential threat for the nation. My predecessors as lecturers in this series have often revisited this declaration too. They have analysed the geopolitical world of Curtin and its transformation through the decades that followed: superpower rivalry and the cold war, the reconstruction of postwar society, the strengthening American alliance, the rise of China, empire and decolonisation, the reckoning with a settler nation’s colonial past, Australia’s defence and security in a globalised world. These are all extrapolations of the world Curtin knew; he either played a part in bringing them about or might reasonably have foreseen them. His words echo down the years with enduring meaning.

But there is a dimension of the future that he could not possibly see or even imagine. Indeed, it has blindsided us all. That is my subject tonight.

When John Curtin died in office in 1945, his legendary status was confirmed and his words gained even more weight. The year of his death became another turning point: the loss of a revered prime minister, the end of the second world war, a new era of social reconstruction in which Curtin had invested, the beginning of a long economic boom such as Australia had not known since the 1880s, and the unleashing of the atomic bomb.

The atomic era was born eleven days after Curtin’s death. On 16 July, the world’s first nuclear device was exploded at the Trinity test site in New Mexico. Stratigraphers identify geological eras by residues in rocks, and 1945 is marked in sediment by the abrupt global geological signature of nuclear fallout.

Curtin was acutely conscious of Australia’s place in the world. “World-mindedness” was a common phrase in the 1940s, expressing an aspiration for peace and understanding after decades of war. Curtin also thought globally, for he was a citizen of an empire that spanned the Earth, a pacifist and a politician keenly aware of the international labour movement. He was conscious that a land at the bottom of the globe could not isolate itself from an increasingly connected world. He revived and extended immigration and joined international negotiations leading to global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. His colleague, Dr Evatt, would later serve as president of the United Nations General Assembly.

So there was world-mindedness and there were global social and political perspectives, but did Curtin ever think in terms of the planet, a living, breathing, vulnerable Earth? Probably not. This requires environmental thinking in deep time and deep space, a consciousness that has evolved in our own lifetimes. It’s a perspective and an understanding that Curtin and his contemporary leaders could not have foreseen or even imagined.

John Edwards writes beautifully in the first volume of his book, John Curtin’s War (2007), of Curtin’s sense of time and space. Edwards reconstructs Curtin’s regular commute across the Nullarbor — his crossing of the vast treeless plain by train from Perth to Canberra, a journey that took him five nights and four days on six different trains with five changes of gauge. He describes Curtin and his fellow passengers smelling “the faint dry fragrance” of saltbush and mallee scrub “as it had been for millions of years.” When stretching their legs during the stops, they walked the bed of an ancient sea and “crunched fossils of sea creatures underfoot.” Edwards reminds us that “In its entire length the Trans-Australian track did not cross a single permanent stream of water.”

What a path to the parliament! There were 500 kilometres of “precisely straight track” surrounded by desert where Curtin “could see the circle of the plain around him from horizon to horizon.” At night through the right-hand windows he could pick out the points of the Southern Cross. He preferred not to fly, and anyway, the air services were neither frequent nor comfortable. But later during wartime, when he was forced to fly the Atlantic, Curtin told his secretary that he placed his hopes of making the crossing in the skill of the pilot, the rotation of Earth, and God Almighty. That is, human ingenuity, the steady old reliable planet, and God.

It is that view of the steady old reliable planet, the unchanging Earth, that has been disrupted in our lifetimes. How has our understanding of the world — the planet — changed since John Curtin’s death?

In the first decades of the twenty-first century we are living in “uncanny times,” weird, strange and unsettling in ways that question nature and culture and even the possibility of distinguishing between them. The modern history of the Western world — the Renaissance, the expansion of European peoples across the globe, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dawning of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution — these are chiefly stories of the separation of culture from nature; indeed, they are stories of the mastery of culture over nature. Now in our own time we find nature and culture collapsing into one another all around us. No wonder it feels uncanny.

The Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh uses the term “uncanny” in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). For him, the word “uncanny” captures our experience of what he calls “the urgent proximity of non-human presences.” He’s referring to other creatures, insects, animals, plants, biota, the very elements themselves — water, earth, air, fire — and our renewed and long-forgotten sense of dependence upon them.

The planet is alive, says Ghosh, and only for the last three centuries have we forgotten that. We have been suffering from “the Great Derangement,” a disturbing condition of wilful and systematic blindness to the consequences of our own actions, when we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support the survival of our species. That’s what’s uncanny about our times: that we are half-aware of this predicament yet also paralysed by it, caught between horror and hubris.

We inhabit a critical moment in the history of Earth and of life on this planet, and a most unusual one in terms of our own human history. To understand the implications of the present, we have to learn to think in deep time.

It’s very hard for us humans to comprehend or even imagine deep time. If you think of Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, that is, the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand, then one stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases all of human history. The discussion of deep time is full of these sorts of metaphors — human history as the last inch of the cosmic mile, the last few seconds before midnight, the skin of paint atop the Eiffel Tower. Metaphor is possibly the only level on which we can comprehend such immensities of time.

In the last couple of decades we have developed three powerful historical metaphors for making sense of the ecological crisis we inhabit. One is that we live in the Sixth Extinction. Humans have wiped out about two-thirds of the world’s wildlife in just the last half-century. Let that sentence sink in. It has happened in less than a human lifetime. This is an extinction rate a hundred to a thousand times higher than was normal in nature.

There have been other such catastrophic collapses in the diversity of life on Earth, five of them sudden shocking falls in the graph of biodiversity separated by tens of millions of years, the last one in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. We now have to ask ourselves: are we inhabiting — and causing — the Sixth Extinction? In 2014 the American journalist Elizabeth Kolbert wrote an influential book called The Sixth Extinction, and she subtitled it An Unnatural History. It is unnatural because the Sixth Extinction involves, to some extent, our consciousness and intent.

Another metaphor for the extraordinary character of our times is the idea of the Anthropocene. This is the insight that we have entered a new geological epoch in the history of Earth and have now left behind the 12,000 years of the relatively stable epoch known as the Holocene, the period since the last great ice age. The new epoch of the Anthropocene recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, its atmosphere, oceans, climate, biodiversity, even its rocks and stratigraphy. It places humans on a par with variations in Earth’s orbit, glaciers, volcanoes, asteroid strikes and other geophysical forces.

There is debate about exactly when the Anthropocene began, but one definition is that we were first jolted into the new epoch by the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, when we began digging up and burning fossil fuels. That brilliant and profligate exploitation of a finite, buried resource underpinned population growth and economic expansion — and it also unleashed carbon on a massive and accelerating scale and began changing the atmosphere of the planet.

Another date given for the beginning of the Anthropocene is around 1945, the year of Curtin’s death. It was, as we’ve seen, the beginning of the atomic era. It also initiated an exponential shift in the impact of humans on the planet. In the mid twentieth century, the human enterprise exploded dramatically in population and energy use and rapidly began to outstrip its planetary support systems. World population, water use, tropical forest loss, ocean acidification, species extinction, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, fertiliser consumption and so on, all soared after 1950. This turning point is known as the Great Acceleration.

So I’ve talked about the Sixth Extinction and the Anthropocene. And there is a third potent metaphor for the moment we inhabit. It concerns the history and future of fire. It suggests that we are entering not just the Anthropocene but also a fire age that historian Stephen Pyne has called the Pyrocene. The planet is heating due to human greenhouse gas emissions and it is heating so quickly that it threatens to tip Earth into an escalating cycle of fire. In other words, we are entering an extended fire age that is comparable to past ice ages.

Let’s take a moment to think about those ice ages.

Some 2.6 million years ago, Earth entered a period of rhythmical ice ages — a geological epoch called the Pleistocene — and during this epoch average global temperatures dropped 6–10°C and ice sheets at the poles extended dramatically across Eurasia and North America. These repeated glaciations were harsh and demanded innovation and versatility; they were a selective pressure on evolution and promoted the emergence of humanity on Earth. Throughout the Pleistocene, the ice ages were punctuated by brief warmer periods known as interglacials, which generally lasted about 10,000 years.

We are living in an interglacial right now; geologists have separated it off from the Pleistocene and called it the Holocene, which means “recent.” But it is really part of the same rhythmic pattern that has prevailed since we evolved. We humans are creatures of the ice. The Pyrocene — the fire age — is something we’ve never seen before. The Pyrocene threatens to knock Earth out of the steady planetary rhythm that has seen the birth of our own species.

How do we know about these ancient rhythmic ice ages? By reading the rocks, of course, but now also by studying the ice itself. I’m fortunate to have visited both of Earth’s ice caps, and the most awesome one is definitely ours, the southern one, Antarctica. I twice voyaged south with the Australian Antarctic Division, on the second occasion at the invitation of the Australian government to mark the centenary of Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14. After a long wait for a break in the weather, we held a ceremony on the ice at the historic huts, the place Mawson called “the home of the blizzard.” Through the years of Curtin’s political life, Antarctica was becoming a primary site for Australia’s world-mindedness, and in 1959 our nation was one of the original twelve signatories to the Antarctic Treaty, which was effectively the first disarmament treaty of the nuclear age.

Antarctica is where nine-tenths of the world’s land ice resides. Seventy per cent of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in that ice cap. That’s a discovery humans made in my lifetime. Antarctica is not only the coldest and windiest continent; it is also paradoxically the driest — and it is the highest. It has the highest average height of any continent because it is a great dome of ice four or five kilometres thick that has built up over millions of years. In the 1950s we discovered that the driest of all continents is actually a vast elevated plateau of frozen water. The implications of that discovery are immense: it means that world sea levels are principally controlled by the state of the Antarctic ice sheet. If the southern ice cap melted, oceans would rise by more than sixty metres.

As we enter the Pyrocene, Antarctica is vulnerable and fragile, more brittle than we expected. This year the expanse of winter sea ice around Antarctica diminished dramatically below its average by the size of Western Australia. The continent of ice is a precious glistening jewel that holds the key to our future and to our past. It’s a giant white fossil, a luminous relic, a clue to lost ages: it enables us to travel through time to the Pleistocene Earth. The ice is an amazing archive. Embedded in an ice cap are tiny air bubbles from hundreds of thousands of years ago. When you drill into an ice cap kilometres thick, you can extract a core that is layered year by year, a precious archive of deep time. I think of ice cores as the holy scripts, the sacred scrolls of our age.

The deepest Antarctic cores currently retrieve 800,000 years of climate history. Right now, the search is on for the first million-year ice core, and Australia is involved in the quest.

In the 1990s, a long 400,000-year Antarctic ice core was extracted from the inland ice sheet. It produced a rhythmic, sawtooth graph of past ice ages, revealing the heartbeat of the planet. The brief peaks on the graph represented warmer interglacials; the extended troughs were the cold ice ages. The ice core charted four full cycles of glacial and interglacial periods and established that the carbon dioxide and methane concentrations in the atmosphere moved in lockstep with the ice sheets and the temperature. It’s the barometer of the planet’s health — a graph of its nervous system — through hundreds of thousands of years.

Ice cores also revealed that present-day levels of greenhouse gases are unprecedented during the past 800,000 years. The level of carbon dioxide in the historical air bubbles has leapt since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since 1950. So, before Antarctica was even seen by humans, it was recording our impact. And it was this glimpse of the deep past as revealed in the archive of ice that shocked people into a real sense of urgency about the climate crisis.

These three metaphors — the Sixth Extinction, the Anthropocene and the Pyrocene — are historical concepts that require us to travel in geological and biological time across hundreds of millions of years and then to arrive back at the present with a sense not of continuity but of discontinuity, of profound rupture in our own time. That’s what Earth system science has revealed: it’s now too late to go back to the Holocene. It may even be too late to hang onto the Pleistocene, the long epoch that birthed our species. We’ve irrevocably changed the Earth system and unwittingly steered the planet into an uncertain future; now we can’t take our hand off the tiller. We have to use our awesome power wisely.

The metaphors of deep time that we’ve been considering have some visual counterparts in deep space that have also emerged in the last half-century. In 1968, the historic Apollo 8 mission launched humans beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time, out and across the void and into the gravitational power of another heavenly body. For three lunar orbits, the three astronauts studied the strange, desolate, cratered surface below them and then, as they came out from the dark side of the Moon for the fourth time, they looked up and gasped:

Bill Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!

Frank Borman: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.

They did take the unscheduled photo, excitedly, and Earthrise became famous, perhaps the most famous photograph of the twentieth century, the blue planet floating alone, finite and vulnerable in space above a dead lunar landscape. Frank Borman said, “It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life.” And Bill Anders declared, “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

A few years later, in 1972, a photo taken by the Apollo 17 mission and known as The Blue Marble became one of the most reproduced pictures in the world, showing Earth as a luminous breathing garden in the dark void. Earthrise and The Blue Marble had a profound impact on environmental politics and sensibilities.

Within a few years, the American scientists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock put forward “the Gaia hypothesis”: that Earth is a single, self-regulating organism. In the year of the Apollo 8 mission, Paul Ehrlich published his book The Population Bomb, an urgent appraisal of a finite Earth. During the years of the Moon missions, British economist Barbara Ward wrote Spaceship Earth and Only One Earth, revealing how economics failed to account for environmental damage and degradation, and arguing that exponential growth could not continue forever.

Earth Day was established in 1970, a day to honour the planet as a whole, a total environment needing protection. In 1972, the Club of Rome released its controversial and enormously influential report The Limits to Growth, which sold more than thirteen million copies and went into more than thirty translations. Authors Donella Meadows and Dennis Meadows wrestled with the contradiction of trying to force infinite material growth on a finite planet. The cover of their book depicted a whole Earth, a shrinking Earth.

Two decades later, on Valentine’s Day 1990, the Voyager spacecraft was tracking beyond Saturn, six billion kilometres away, when it unexpectedly glanced over its shoulder. Again, Voyager was not programmed to look behind as it journeyed into the unknown, but scientists decided to take a risk and commanded the spacecraft to look back. And so we have a picture of Earth as a mere speck of dust in space, an image that astronomer Carl Sagan called Pale Blue Dot. “Look again at that dot,” wrote Sagan. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

These images from outer space of the unity, finiteness and loneliness of Earth helped escalate planetary thinking. From a colossal integration of Earth systems data came a keen understanding of planetary boundaries — thresholds in planetary ecology — and the extent to which the human enterprise is threatening or exceeding them. Three identified thresholds have already been crossed: changes in climate, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle. At least we now understand our predicament even if we are perilously slow to act. The fossil fuels that got humans to the Moon now endanger our civilisation.

Now let’s bring this story back home to our place on this Earth. Australia is uniquely exposed to the grim, rough edges of these new world narratives. Shockingly, we are leading the world into the Sixth Extinction. Modern Australian history is like a giant experiment in ecological crisis and management. Ecologists working in Australia today often feel like they are ambulance drivers arriving at the scene of an accident. The southwest of Western Australia, for example, is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots and it is experiencing an exceptional loss of habitat. It is the site of what literary historian Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has called a “radical disappearance,” “an extinction event on a grand scale.”

And we inhabit the continent of fire, the driest inhabited continent, a land of drought and flooding rains that is held in the grip of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which means that Australia is on the frontline of the Pyrocene. Southwest Western Australia, with its sudden 30 per cent decline in rainfall since the 1970s, is one of the first places to experience the climatic shift expected with global warming. The Black Summer fires — when more than twenty-four million hectares of Australia’s southern and eastern forests burnt, including a million hectares of the Great Western Woodlands — were a symptom of our condition and became a planetary event. Smoke from those fires encircled the globe.

Furthermore, our modern history is a by-product of the Anthropocene. The British invasion of Australia was part of the age of empire and took place as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum in England. Thus ancient Australia’s transformation into a colony coincided with the start of the fossil fuel era. The Endeavour was a repurposed coal ship. The new nation became highly dependent on fossil fuels, especially on coal, and in recent decades it drew world attention by persisting with the political denial of climate change. Modern Australia, we have to remember, was built on denial: the denial of Aboriginal sovereignty and cultural sophistication, the denial of frontier violence and warfare. At the recent referendum about the Voice, we witnessed a further national expression of denial.

But we have many opportunities here too. Our robust democracy, our active citizenship, our capacity for creativity and innovation, our impressive community leaders (many of them young, most of them women), our unique and inspiring environment, our destiny as a renewable energy superpower. And the continent’s deep Indigenous human history. In just a generation we have turned upside down the way we understand the history of Australia.

When I was in primary school, the history of this country was told as a footnote to the story of the British empire. In my classroom, the book we used was A Short History of Australia, written in 1916 by Professor Ernest Scott. It began with what he declared was “a blank space on the map” and it ended with “a new name on the map” — that of Anzac. So the story of Australia climaxed with a national sacrifice on a beach on the other side of the world. Australia at that time was seen as a new, transplanted society with a short and derivative history, a planned, peaceful and successful offshoot of imperial Britain. Aboriginal peoples, depicted as non-literate, non-agricultural, non-urban and non-national, could have no “history” and did not constitute a “civilisation” — thus they could find no place in the national polity or the national story or even as citizens of the Commonwealth.

But in the half-century that followed, Australians realised that the New World they thought they’d discovered was actually the Old, and that the true “nomads” were themselves, the colonisers who had come in ships. From the early 1960s, archaeologists confirmed what Aboriginal people had always known: that Australia’s human history went back eons, into the Pleistocene, well into the last ice age, earlier than Europe’s. The timescale of Australia’s human history increased tenfold in just thirty years and the journey to the other side of the frontier became a journey back into deep time.

We now recognise the first Australians as the most adventurous of all humans, pioneer sea-voyagers who, over 60,000 years ago, saw the beckoning, burning continent of eucalypts glowing over the horizon of the ocean. The island continent girt by sea was transformed into a complex jigsaw of beloved and inhabited Aboriginal Countries and ecologies. Aboriginal societies were — and are — diverse, innovative and adaptive; over 300 languages flourished here. Now our histories of Australia strive, as the Uluru Statement puts it, to let “this ancient sovereignty… shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.” This challenge is not going away, no matter how many toddler tantrums the nation has. Reckoning with our colonial history is a daily responsibility of living on this continent.

Therefore we can now see more clearly that, on Australian beaches in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there took place one of the greatest ecological and cultural encounters of all time. Peoples with immensely long and intimate histories of habitation encountered the furthest-flung representatives of the world’s first industrialising nation. The circle of migration out of Africa more than 80,000 years earlier finally closed.

This is a land of a radically different ecology, where climatic variation and uncertainty have long been the norm — and now those extremes are intensifying. Australia’s long human history spans great climatic change and also offers a parable of cultural resilience. The history of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia takes humans back, if not into the ice, then certainly into the ice age, into the depths of the last glacial maximum of 20,000 years ago and beyond, into and through periods of average temperature change of 5°C and more, such as those we might now face.

When Europeans and North Americans look for cultural beginnings, they are often prompted to tell you that humans and their civilisations are products of the Holocene and that we are all children of this recent spring of cultural creativity over the last 10,000 years. By contrast, an Australian history of the world takes us back to humanity’s first deep sea navigators and to the experience of people surviving cold ice-age droughts even in the central Australian deserts. It brings us visions of people living along fast-retreating coastlines as they cope with the dramatic rising of the seas.

Human civilisation here was sustained in the face of massive climate change. This is a story that modern Australians have only just discovered, and now perhaps it offers a parable for the world. The continent of fire will lead the world into the new age of fire. But it also carries human wisdom and experience from beyond the last ice age.

Living on a precipice of deep time has become, I think, an exhilarating dimension of what it means to be Australian. We can now see that the modern Australian story, in parallel with other colonial cataclysms, was a forerunner of the planetary crisis. Indigenous management was overwhelmed, forests cleared, wildlife annihilated, waters polluted and abused, the climate unhinged. Across the globe, imperial peoples used land and its creatures as commodities, as if Earth were inert. They forgot that the planet is alive.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is clear that Australia is facing a new existential threat, quite different from that which Curtin addressed in 1941. We are embroiled in a climate emergency and biodiversity crisis that threaten to destroy our security and way of life.

It’s not just a threat; it’s actually going to happen unless we act swiftly and decisively. It is a planetary event, but Australia and its region are especially vulnerable to its effects. National security assessments and reports from Australian defence chiefs have acknowledged our predicament, identifying the climate crisis as “this clear and present danger,” “the greatest threat to the security and future of Australians” and “the Hundred Year War” for which we are seriously unprepared. To meet the challenge, we will need to recognise that we do indeed face a crisis, an emergency, and that we will be required to mobilise with a grave sense of urgency as if in a war.

In that December 1941 address to the people, Curtin sought to wean Australians off a subconscious cultural reflex to trust to luck, isolation and Britain. “I demand,” he said, “that Australians everywhere realise that Australia is now inside the firing lines.” He spoke of the need to shake citizens out of false assumptions of security; he talked of awakening “the somewhat lackadaisical Australian mind” and of the “reshaping, in fact revolutionising, of the Australian way of life until a war footing is attained quickly, efficiently and without question.” “We can and we will,” he promised.

What would a brave but realistic geopolitical pivot look like in our own time? What would constitute a Curtinesque act of visionary leadership now?

I think it would entail a recognition that, because of our extreme ecological and economic vulnerability in this escalating crisis, Australia needs to lead the world into the energy transition. Not to drag its feet, not to wait for other nations, but actually to demonstrate the path to zero emissions. To provide global direction and inspiration. And to do so out of intelligent national self-interest as well as out of “world-mindedness.”

Australia needs to grasp its opportunity as a renewable energy superpower. It needs to wean itself swiftly off its fossil fuel dependency, not cling to old, polluting forms of power and vested interests. A Western Australian like John Curtin would have to take on that challenge in the mining state, reminding constituents of the long-term significance of minerals in the renewable future. Of course it will be difficult and fraught. But that is what leadership is about: stepping wisely into the future that is coming for you.

Yes, it will be difficult but it is also simple. The physics of the planet are simple and we know what we have to do and what will happen if we don’t. The enemies of action are either ignorant and short-sighted or selfish and greedy. The pathway to electrification has been laid down clearly. The technologies are there or fast developing, as is the business momentum.

But the free market can’t move fast enough and government must lead. Even funding for the transition is readily available in the form of massive government fossil fuel subsidies that can be diverted, and windfall profits to the oil and gas industry that demand to be taxed. The economic, social and environmental benefits to the nation will be immense. I believe that the people are ahead of government on this and that they will welcome bold leadership. To paraphrase John Curtin, we should step into that future now, quite clearly, without any inhibitions of any kind, and free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with coal, oil, gas, Murdoch and Rinehart. •

The post The world after John Curtin appeared first on Inside Story.

Her causes are many and diverse, but linked by a unifying thread: always, Sylvie sides with the oppressed. For nearly sixty years she has fought for women’s rights, refugee causes, and for anyone whose treatment she deems unfair. Perhaps the best measure of her conviction is that she holds fast to causes, even at risk of personal cost.

Sylvie traces her radical roots to her Jewish paternal grandparents, David Leber and Rivka Szaladajewska, whose motivating creed was social and political change. Rivka was born on 26 September 1896 to an observant Jewish family in the Polish city of Łódź. She would later reject religion, and her family her, but she maintained a cultural and social connection to Judaism, working at the Grosser orphanage for Jewish children in the central Polish city of Piotrków Trybunalski. Her fierce commitment to the politics of the left, at a time when Jews were among the most prominent advocates for social democratic causes in eastern Europe and Russia, was another point of connection to her Jewish heritage.

David Leber was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, on 10 January 1887. While the details of his early life are sketchy, he was motivated from a young age by the tenets of social democracy. He was schooled first at a yeshiva, but left religious education to embrace Bundism, the influential secular Jewish movement that agitated for social and labour reform.

Bundism led David to Russia, and trouble. The February revolution of 1917 saw Bundists and Mensheviks align in a union of social democratic parties. When the February, or Menshevik, revolution was supplanted in October by the more radical Bolsheviks, the Bundists who supported Menshevism became pariahs, dismissed by the new regime as ineffectual gradualists and enemies of the communist state.

Though not a Menshevik himself, David was damned by association. His link to the Menshevik cause appears to have led to his arrest and deportation to Siberia. An accusation that he had sought to assassinate a public official may have been the pretext for his arrest. Whether or not he escaped from Siberia or was released, he is thought to have been rescued from the Soviet Union on a British ship.

Now back in Poland, David found work as a waiter, and met Rivka. Worsening anti-Semitism prompted them to leave their homeland for France in 1922. Rivka was pregnant when they made their way west, and a son, Samuel, was born in Paris on 3 December 1922. Against Jewish custom he was not circumcised, and David and Rivka didn’t marry until twelve years after his birth, with Rivka keeping her maiden name. Her choice to be known as Rivka Szaladajewska was both a stab at patriarchal custom and an affirmation of identity. Others might have seen the Polish suffix “jewska” as a millstone, but not her.

David and Rivka became part of a Parisian left-wing milieu that included other Jewish émigrés, among them the Russian-born artist Marc Chagall, with whom they became good friends. John-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were part of the same circle. David and Rivka brought their passions with them to Paris: they were united in their dislike of conventions for which they saw no purpose and in their commitment to social democratic principles and secularism. David continued to see these beliefs as inherent in Bundism: his experiences in Russia didn’t dim his enthusiasm for the Bundist approach to social change. A manifestation of his commitment to community and history was his involvement in founding the Medem Library in 1929, which is still the most important site of Yiddish learning in Europe.

David and Rivka were two of the thousands of Jews ensnared in 1942 by Operation Spring Wind, in which officials of the Vichy French state cooperated with the Nazi regime to arrest foreign and stateless Jews living in France. The operation was the first step in a plan to send Jews east to Auschwitz and their deaths. The two of them were arrested on 16 July in the infamous Vél d’Hiv round-up, interned at the Drancy transit camp in Paris, and then deported to Auschwitz on 24 July as part of convoy number 10. They were killed at Auschwitz, probably later in 1942, though when exactly isn’t certain. Rivka is thought to have taken her own life, throwing herself on an electric fence after she learnt that she was to be a victim of one of Josef Mengele’s depraved experiments.

Two years earlier, when the Germans marched on Paris, Rivka and David’s son Sam was a seventeen-year-old school student living with his parents in the 20th arrondissement. His response to the German advance was to cycle to the port of Royan on the Atlantic coast in the hope of finding passage to England. This plan failed and he returned to Paris, where he remained until November 1941, when David and Rivka compelled him to leave the city for Lyon in the zone libre, where he lived with friends.

German occupation of the zone in November 1942 prompted Sam to move to Grenoble, where he worked as a lathe turner before being corralled into the Chantiers de la Jeunesse Française, a national service scheme imposed on French youth by the Vichy state. Released from this obligation in mid 1943, he managed to avoid another, more insidious labour scheme — the Service du Travail Obligatoire, which sent young French men to Germany as indentured labour — by joining the Resistance in late 1943 or early 1944.

For life as a maquisard, Sam chose the stirring alias Serge Rebel, his new surname a testament to his task and heritage: Rebel is the anadrome of Leber. From David and Rivka he had inherited a commitment to the ideals of Bundism and socialism. He had joined the SKIF, the youth wing of the Bundist movement, in 1931, the year he turned nine. A strong anti-communist streak may have been another inheritance, though his opposition was fed also by his own experiences.

During the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, he had travelled to Spain to fight with the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalist forces. He was turned away on account of his youth, but took from the war an understanding that communists had undermined the Republican cause by concerning themselves more with anarchists than fascists.

His dislike of communism hardened when the French Communist Party, echoing Moscow’s line, adopted a neutral position at the start of the second world war, a stance he thought amoral and hopelessly naive. Later, in the Resistance, he objected to the division of the organisation along communist and anti-communist lines as a needless distraction. In his thinking, communists too often missed the point of the fight. And the point of any battle was to act, not to posture.

In the Resistance Sam worked in intelligence and sabotage. He and his fellow maquisards couldn’t spare explosives to destroy railway tracks so prised them out of position, ensuring that carriages travelling the tracks at Grenoble, an important railway junction connecting different parts of France, would tip over. Precious explosives were reserved for attacking factories that sustained the German war effort. In one instance, Sam recalled, bombs were used to kill German soldiers, but more often their targets were objects rather than people, collaborators aside. For traitors, direct violence always seemed justified.

Sam served with the Resistance until the liberation of France. His rewards were the Croix de Guerre, citations for brave conduct and good service, and a bullet wound, sustained during a firefight with German soldiers in March 1944, which led to three months in hospital, a shortened leg and a permanent and painful limp. Several decades on, Sam was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which doctors linked to spinal damage caused by his limp.

In later years Sam mentioned his war rarely, and usually only when pressed. School students and Holocaust historians sought him out for interviews, seemingly surprised to find a decorated maquisard living in McKinnon in suburban Melbourne. Sam obliged these requests, with humility and a trace of bemusement. He had fought the war against fascism as a solemn and obvious duty, a position that precluded the shaping of recollections as personal achievement. The fact he was speaking in his third language, after Yiddish and French, may also have shaped his responses, which could seem blunt.

“Sometimes an action went wrong and people got killed and things like that,” he told two interviewers in the 1980s. Nazi collaborators, he added, were “interdicted” on their way to or from work. These answers, on first reading dispassionate and perhaps even callous, did not reflect the man. Rather, they hint at Sam’s lifelong and noble belief in the primacy of the collective cause over the claims of the individual.

After the war Sam returned to Paris, a city that had visited both kindness and cruelty on the Lebers. His parents had found blessed sanctuary there in the 1920s; twenty years later, it was the place of their betrayal. He met Madeleine Benczkowski, and they married in 1948. His new wife, also French-born of Polish Jewish heritage, had been born in Paris on 20 January 1926. Her parents, Herschel and Chaya Benczkowski, had emigrated west from Poland in the years after the first world war.

Herschel was murdered at Drancy in 1942. Madeleine, her brother Sam and their mother Chaya survived the war thanks to the people smugglers who spirited them from Paris to Lyon, where they lived under false names and Madeleine was able to earn money as a furrier’s apprentice. In Madeleine’s vocabulary, “people smuggler” could be a term of endearment and a pejorative. She knew three types of people smuggler — humanitarians, money-makers and “bastards” who betrayed Jews to Nazis. The Benczkowskis’ saviour was a humanitarian and a money-maker, having taken payment in jewellery.

Sam and Madeleine began their married life in Paris as tailors, making men’s trousers from home. Their daughter Sylvie was born on 30 May 1950. The next year they resolved to emigrate to Australia, their decision to leave France prompted by the Korean war and the threat of another world war. They considered Canada, but chose Australia on the advice of Rose and Leon Goldblum, Sam’s cousin and her husband, who were living in Melbourne and recommended the city as a good, safe place to raise children. Rose and Leon were Auschwitz survivors. A preference for a warmer climate may also have influenced Sam and Madeleine’s choice. The Lebers sailed on the Italian ship Sydney, arriving at Station Pier, Port Melbourne, in February 1952.

The family settled into Australian life in Grey Street, St Kilda, within a milieu that offered comfort and connections to the world from which they had come. Melbourne in the 1950s, and St Kilda in particular, was home to a community of French-speaking Jews from France and Belgium. In their company Sam and Madeleine found friends with whom they shared a common language and aspects of a common heritage. As for so many other migrants across time and place, such connections to the familiar were a sustaining tonic in difficult years.

Before the war, Madeleine had hoped to be an accountant, Sam an engineer. After the war, steady work and a safe home were aspiration enough. Madeleine sought work as a jewellery shop assistant but was rejected on account of her French accent, so she returned to what she knew, working from home as a seamstress. Sam worked as a toolmaker, and fitter and turner. He joined the Australian Metal Workers’ Union: the union movement, and the postwar Australian Labor Party, reflected some of his Bundist ideals.

For Sylvie, the initial contrast between life in Paris and life in Melbourne was less abrupt than it was for her parents. She spoke French at home and Yiddish at her kindergarten at the Bialystoker Centre at 19 Robe Street, St Kilda, which served also as a hostel for Jewish migrants and refugees from Europe. The Alliance Française, where Sam and Madeleine borrowed French-language books, was on the same street. Such was Sylvie’s immersion in this European milieu that she knew little English when she started at St Kilda Park Primary School. Daniel, her brother, was born in 1959.

***

If Sam, who died in 2011 aged eighty-eight, was an “activist,” he probably didn’t recognise it. His engagement with the political was not a conscious choice but the manifestation of a commitment to social democratic ideals; in his conception, actions gave honour and worth to thoughts. To be political, if that’s what others called it, was simply his way of being.

Sylvie has followed the same path, her activism inseparable from her work and passions. In this regard she is her father’s daughter. Madeleine, who died in 2015, was a quieter social democrat than her husband: she voted Labor and hoped for a society ordered on fairness and merit rather than money and privilege, but was not overtly political.

In 1979 Sylvie and her friend Eve Glenn formed Girl’s Garage Band, a seven-woman punk rock band with Sylvie on bass guitar, Eve on lead guitar, and Fran Kelly, not yet an ABC journalist, on vocals. The band became better known as Toxic Shock, the name a pointed reference to the bacterial syndrome associated with tampon use that at the time was harming and killing many women. The band’s 1981 single “Intoxication,” written by Sylvie, protested at the complicity of tampon manufacturers in the prevalence of the syndrome.

Through Toxic Shock, Sylvie could voice specific protest, rail against the patriarchal nature of the punk and post-punk scenes and the music industry generally, and express her passion for music. Give-Men-a-Pause, a women’s music show she hosted on 3RRR in the early 1980s, offered another stage to voice thoughts on life and music. In a 2015 article about the contemporary Australian popular music scene, she wrote of her enduring love for playing and listening to music, and her dismay at the persistence of the boys’ club that Toxic Shock strove to disrupt.

For Sylvie, music has been a passion, a motivation and, on occasion, a refuge from horror. In Queensland in 1972, some years before forming Toxic Shock, she was raped and very nearly murdered. She has written with compelling honesty of these crimes, the toll they have taken on her mind and body over half a century, and her determination always to fight back lest “the bastards win.”

Her response to the assault might be described as Leberian, for its hallmarks are concern for others and a remarkable and enduring capacity to resist. Initially she sought to shield her parents from the attack, worried that they, as European Jews who had lived through the war, had experienced enough anguish. Later, her understanding of the Lebers’ commitment to social justice motivated her to speak publicly about what she had suffered. A year after she was assaulted, she and a group of friends founded Women Against Rape, Victoria’s first rape crisis centre, housed within the Women’s Health Centre on Johnston Street, Collingwood. Women Against Rape supported victims in every way possible, while advocating simultaneously for legal change and community education.

Sylvie is a passionate advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, the experiences of her parents and grandparents having taught her something of the pain and indignity of being denied a home. When Arne Rinnan, captain of the infamous MV Tampa, made his last voyage into Australian waters before retirement, Sylvie and other Melbourne members of the Refugee Action Collective took to a small boat so that they might approach his cargo ship and salute him for his role in rescuing imperilled refugees during the Tampa affair of 2001. Rinnan’s moral example elicited an idiosyncratic touch: to signal her admiration, Sylvie fashioned a placard decorated with a love heart. Love, Sylvie believes, “is a revolutionary emotion.”

Sylvie named her daughter Colette Anna — Colette for the pioneering French author and feminist, and Anna for a great aunt who survived Auschwitz. Colette is a social worker, committed to many of the same causes as her mother. She works to prevent violence against women, and argues for the rights of refugees, including protesting their abysmal treatment by Australian governments, Liberal and Labor. Colette is another Leber ratbag, which makes her mother proud. It’s in the blood. •

The post The Lebers, a family of ratbags appeared first on Inside Story.

Its reforms to Medicare have the potential to transform the operation of a system that, despite its reputation for good health outcomes, is creaking if not yet collapsing. Much more healthcare would be delivered through general practitioners and much less through hospitals and emergency departments. Fee-for-service remuneration for doctors, long a barrier to reform, would be diluted by alternative funding models based on the needs of individual patients.

In turn, GP practices would take on nurses, nurse practitioners, physiotherapists and other professionals, enabling doctors to focus on the more complex cases for which their training qualifies them. Continuity of care would be given greater emphasis, particularly for the rapidly rising number of patients with chronic conditions.

That is the ambition. The announcements in the May budget were a first cautious step down this path. Given the history of false starts in health reform in Australia, the challenge will be implementation, and that means overcoming resistance from the medical lobbies. As health minister Mark Butler put it in May, stakeholders in health “have sharp elbows and loud voices and they don’t always agree.”

In the same speech Butler characterised the Medicare scheme introduced by the Hawke government as a great system for the 1980s but wholly inadequate forty years later. That makes a change from the traditional political boast that Australia has one of the best, if not the best, health systems in the world.

Butler said that chronic conditions were now the leading cause of illness, disability and death in Australia. More than 13,000 patients went to hospital ten or more times a year. Rather than sporadic visits to the doctor, he argued, they need a coordinated team of health professionals — GPs, allied health workers, nurses and specialists, among others.

The statistics are confronting. Chronic conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and mental illness comprised 12 per cent of GP case loads in 1962, had more than doubled to 27 per cent by 2015 and are now close to 50 per cent. A fee-for-service system that results in average GP consultations of fifteen minutes is unsuited to such a reality, as are regulations that discourage the involvement of other health professionals.

Butler argued that general practice was in its worst state since the introduction of Medicare, with a fall from 50 per cent to 14 per cent in medical graduates choosing it as a career. Rebuilding general practice is the government’s highest priority, he added, including reversing the substantial decline in bulk-billing.

The biggest gripe among doctors has been the refusal of successive governments to increase Medicare rebates, which remained frozen for a good part of the past decade. Despite that, profit margins for GP practices, which have in many cases expanded from small or solo enterprises into large businesses, have remained at about 35 to 38 per cent of turnover over the last decade, according to the Melbourne Institute. And despite the shortages of GPs in rural areas, OECD figures for 2020 showed Australia with 123 GPs per 100,000 people compared with an OECD average of eighty-eight. One reason for this difference is the dominance of GPs in Australia, compared with a greater reliance on other health professionals overseas.

May’s federal budget funded a small general increase in rebates but also included a more targeted approach, tripling bulk-billing incentives for consultations involving families with children under sixteen, pensioners and Commonwealth concession card holders. That increase translates to an extra $13.80 for a standard consultation in metropolitan areas up to an extra $26.50 in very remote areas. It applies from 1 November, so its effectiveness remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, bulk-billing rates have been falling and the Australian Medical Association has recently recommended higher fees for patients. In some areas outside the big cities the challenge is finding any GP, let alone one who bulk-bills.

Steve Robson, president of the Australian Medical Association, is offering no guarantees on the bulk-billing incentive. “My sense is that it will probably stabilise things,” he tells me. “In the longer term the question is if we are to make care available, equitable and affordable for the patients who are most vulnerable, there are going to need to be more strategies in place than bulk-billing incentives.” Elizabeth Deveny, chief executive of the Consumers Health Forum, is slightly more hopeful. Though the incentive is no silver bullet, she believes bulk-billing rates will rise.

The government is promising fifty-eight urgent-care clinics as alternatives to overburdened and costly hospital emergency departments. Extra funding will help bring what is still an antiquated system of digital health records into the modern age with the aim of ensuring ready access to patient information.

Perhaps of greatest longer-run significance are the other measures announced. The budget provides funding for more nurses, including those working in primary care with GPs, and offers incentives for practices to employ them and other health professionals such as physiotherapists. Again, the idea is to free doctors from tasks that others can perform — signing off on repeat prescriptions, for example, which currently involves four million GP visits a year — enabling them to concentrate on more complex services, including treating chronic conditions. The Grattan Institute estimates that every ten GPs in Australia are supported by three nurses or other clinicians, compared with ten in Britain.

Extra funding is promised for consultations of sixty minutes or more, which are typically required for chronic conditions. Rebates will rise for nurse practitioners, the highly qualified professionals who play a major role in many countries but have been marginalised in Australia.

Under a new MyMedicare program, the government is encouraging patients to enrol with general practices — a system widely used overseas — to provide continuity of care and funding based on patient needs. As Butler said in his May speech: “MyMedicare is the foundation upon which we can build a range of blended funding models to better serve the needs of patients that fall through the cracks of our 1980s Medicare.” It will extend to multidisciplinary care for chronic diseases and frequent hospital users.

The Grattan Institute’s blended funding model would provide multidisciplinary medical practices with 70 per cent of their existing funding through “capitation payments” — payments per patient rather than per consultation — and 30 per cent through fee-for-service. (In other words, the fee-for-service component would be 30 per cent of the current rate.) Capitation is calculated according to the health, risk and socioeconomic profile of patients who enrol with a practice. Practices would be encouraged to opt into this model with a $25,000 grant from the government.

Blended funding, together with many of the government’s other announcements are not so much new as recycled ideas or extensions of existing programs. Stretching back to 1997, several rounds of coordinated care trials have tested multidisciplinary care for mainly complex cases. But they were not continued. Blended funding models were tried in different programs between 2011 and 2014 and between 2017 and 2021.

The Grattan Institute study, which noted that health has seen “more pilots than Qantas,” found that many trials suffered from design problems and insufficient implementation time. It also reported concerns about “stakeholder capture” — a polite way of describing doctors defending their patches.

Creating multidisciplinary teams of health professionals and more alternatives to expensive hospital care harks all the way back to the community health centres established by the Whitlam government in the early 1970s, for which funding was cut by subsequent governments.

“Other countries have reformed general practice and their rates of avoidable hospital visits for chronic disease are falling,” says Grattan. “Australia has spent twenty-five years on a merry-go-round of tests and trials that have not changed the system and our rates are holding steady. We are spending more and more on hospitals, while neglecting general practice: the best place to tackle chronic disease.”

The OECD also stresses this point in its latest economic review of Australia. Noting the relatively high cost of hospital treatment, it points out that hospital admission rates in Australia for diseases that can be treated by GPs are close to the highest in the developed world.

If the history of healthcare in Australia shows anything it’s that reforms are hard-won. When the recently departed Bill Hayden, as health minister in the Whitlam government, moved to bring Australia into line with every developed country apart from the United Sates by introducing a universal national health system, doctors’ groups ran a campaign against “nationalised medicine” that would make Donald Trump proud. One article in an AMA journal compared the threatened “enslavement” of the medical profession to that of Jews in Germany, and a poster featured the slogan “Heil wHITLAm.” Maliciously false rumours were spread that Hayden had been a corrupt policeman and was mentally ill.

Although the Fraser government systematically dismantled Hayden’s Medibank it was resurrected as Medicare by the Hawke government in 1984 — although not without another nasty campaign by doctors spreading false rumours about health minister Neal Blewett, who successfully sued for undisclosed damages.

The Coalition kept campaigning against the scheme until shadow health minister Michael Wooldridge persuaded John Howard to support it in the 1996 election because it had become too popular to oppose. That didn’t stop the Howard government from chipping away and undermining it.

Despite their periods of paranoia, doctors have generally done well out of Medicare, notwithstanding funding cuts under Coalition governments. Not only are they no longer campaigning against Medicare, but they are voicing support for the Butler reforms. The minister’s decision to include representatives of all the main health professions on his taskforce no doubt helped, with its report paving the way for the subsequent announcements. It gave doctors a stake in the plans and allowed them to claim some of the credit.

As AMA president Steve Robson put it, “something unexpected happened” following the AMA’s campaign to modernise Medicare. “Government listened,” he added, and went on to recite a list of budget initiatives.

Nicole Higgins, president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, was positively effusive, welcoming the budget as “a game changer… For the first time in decades we have a government that’s committed to strengthening Medicare and general practice care.”

Former federal health department head Stephen Duckett, until recently health program director at the Grattan Institute and now an honorary professor at Melbourne University, puts this new mood into perspective. “Up until very recently the medical profession was opposed to any hint of any move whatsoever away from fee-for-service,” he says. “What has been announced so far is not going to fix primary care itself but what it is doing is signalling the direction of change. It is like putting a little bit of sand in the oyster: eventually a pearl will emerge.”

In between his work as an obstetrician and gynaecologist and as AMA president, Robson has been studying for a master’s degree in health economics, which he says has fired his interest in and concern about the economic sustainability of the health system. Reminded of the AMA’s reputation as the Builders Labourers Federation of the medical profession, he laughingly responds, “I think that award has gone to the Pharmacy Guild” — a reference to that organisation’s over-the-top campaign against the government’s introduction of sixty-day prescriptions.

But the heavy artillery remains ready to be deployed. Or, as Robson puts it, “There is a time to hold a hand and a time to slap it. At the moment we want to make it very clear that we are very keen to work with the government on sustainability and at the same time to make sure we are respected for the care we provide.”

Given the increased emphasis Butler is placing on the primary care provided by GPs, that approach makes sense for the doctors’ groups. Robson’s interpretation of blended funding under MyMedicare is that extra money for enrolled patients will be provided on top of existing fee-for-service payments — in other words quite different from the Grattan model of patient-based payments substituting in part for fee-for-service. Duckett suspects the Grattan formula, which follows overseas practice, may be too big a political hurdle for the government. Peter Breadon, Grattan’s health program director, says restricting patient budgets to a small part of total funding would be a missed opportunity for meaningful reform.

Given the doctors’ sensitivity, the government is treading warily, not responding to my request for clarification about how blended funding will work. It doesn’t use the word “capitation” in the context of blended funding because it raises red flags. “What we want to get completely away from is the UK system of capitation,” says Robson, a view echoed by the RACGP’s Higgins. Importantly, capitation-based patient enrolment is compulsory in the British system but would not be here. But Breadon argues that the real problem with Britain’s National Health Service is the severe austerity under which it operates, with long waiting lists and chronic workforce shortages. It’s not the British funding model that’s the problem, he says, “it’s the funding quantum.”

Nor, despite the increases in Medicare rebates and the bulk-billing incentive, is Robson making any concessions on rebates. To cover costs, he argues, they need to double from an average $40 per GP visit. As to whether the government is amenable to further increases: “They are not going to have a lot of choice if they want to make the health system sustainable.” So expect some future slapping.

Plenty of problems remain to be tackled. While bulk-billing rates for GPs are falling, they remain higher than for other health professionals. In 2021–22 the rates for allied health services were an average of 51 per cent compared with 88 per cent for GPs.

And in that year nearly half a million Australians decided against seeing a specialist because they couldn’t afford it. On average, about 50 per cent of initial appointments with a dermatologist, urologist, obstetrician or ophthalmologist cost more than double the $90 Medicare schedule fee. As with allied health care, those most affected were the ones who needed the services most, namely the sickest and the poorest.

The Commonwealth Fund, a US-based health research body that conducts international surveys, found that 28 per cent of Australians reported out-of-pocket expenses equivalent to more than US$1000 a year in 2020, exceeded only by Switzerland and the United States among eleven higher-income countries. Thirty-two per cent skipped dental care, which is not covered by Medicare, because of cost, second only to the United States.

Fee-for-service’s continuing predominance encourages overservicing. According to a 2015 OECD study, knee-replacement surgery in Australia occurred at almost twice the rate of France and almost five times the rate of Israel. Antibiotics were prescribed at twice the rate of the Netherlands.

Despite large government subsidies, private health insurance remains a bad deal for many patients, with premiums rising faster than inflation and significant out-of-pocket costs for private hospital treatment. Nor does the evidence show that this form of insurance has done anything substantial to fulfil its claimed objective of taking pressure off public hospitals, mainly because private practice is much more lucrative for doctors, as well as much more expensive for patients.

Prevention remains the Cinderella of the health system, neglected and funded at lower rates than in most OECD countries. Isolated examples of success, including one of the lowest rates of smoking in the developed world, haven’t brought forth similar efforts in areas crying out for attention, such as Australia’s high rate of obesity. The Abbott government abolished the Preventive Health Agency and only now is an interim body planned while legislation is brought forward for an independent Centre for Disease Control, expected to be running by early 2025. Its focus will be on preparing for future pandemics, but it also will have a broader prevention brief.

Then there’s the overall financing of health, which remains a muddle of overlapping Commonwealth and state responsibilities. The states run hospitals but they are jointly funded by the Commonwealth; when problems arise, they blame the Commonwealth and demand more money. Many aged care residents spend excessive and very expensive periods in hospitals because the Commonwealth funds aged care and lacks the incentive to move people to more suitable and much cheaper facilities. Thirty or more years of reports, recommendations and attempts at reform — most recently under the Rudd government — have failed to bring meaningful change.

National cabinet agreed in August to devote a special meeting before the end of the year to this and other issues in health. But there is still no word on a date or an agenda for this meeting.

For Labor, the longer-term question is whether caution will overcome ambition. On this, the last word belongs to Ian Hickie, professor of psychiatry at Sydney University’s Brain and Mind Centre:

Back in 2008 I had a book contract to describe the obvious failings in Australian healthcare. It was planned to challenge the national myth that our system was “exceptional,” literally “best in the world.” I didn’t persist as prime minister Kevin Rudd was promising sweeping national reforms and there was genuine community enthusiasm for a major revamp of Medicare.

How I wish I had persisted! The glaring structural faults in the system have simply grown wider and deeper over the last fifteen years. Now the federal health minister Mark Butler is saying in public what his predecessors would only discuss in private. Our 1980s-style Medicare no longer delivers a fair, equitable or sustainable system… The challenge for the Albanese government is not to get stuck in the arguments about how best to re-design the Titanic. •

The post Medicare’s forty-year update appeared first on Inside Story.

It is the eighth annual China Auto Forum, in April 2019, and a mere three months after the US electric car company Tesla began constructing a factory in Shanghai. The focus is on the transformation of an industry that is turning towards electrification. The executives are aware that what Wan says here can change the fortunes of their companies.

Many have tried to create a mass market for electric vehicles over the past 140 years, but all have failed. The widely held belief is that if anyone can succeed, it will be Elon Musk, the eccentric, ambitious and obscenely wealthy CEO of Tesla. But when the history of electric vehicles is written, it might be Wan Gang who will stand tallest.

The Musk–Tesla story is lore. Founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in Silicon Valley, Tesla struggled to get off the ground. Elon Musk, who had become wealthy on the back of startups like PayPal, began investing in the company in 2004 and took an active role in product design. After Eberhard was ousted following internal conflicts, Musk took over as CEO in 2008 just after the company began selling its first model, the Roadster.

Tesla sold about 2500 units of the electric sports car, but Musk’s stated goal was to make a mass-market electric vehicle. With every iteration, the car models got cheaper and sales grew — turning Tesla into the world’s most recognisable electric car brand and the world’s most valuable car maker. As of 2022, the company was selling more than 1 million cars annually. Still, the cheapest Model 3 — one that Musk promised would be the affordable car — costs well above US$35,000.

Wan Gang’s story is mostly unknown. His rise in the electric vehicle world started at about the same time as Musk’s. The car engineer by training was appointed China’s minister of science and technology in 2007. In the country’s top-down economic system, Wan’s policies incentivised the creation of hundreds of Chinese companies tied to making electric vehicles. The country now sells more than six million electric vehicles each year. That includes not just expensive cars but the complete range, with the cheapest selling for less than US$10,000.

Wan’s policies have also created some of the world’s largest and most valuable companies selling electric vehicles and lithium ion batteries. And the choices he has influenced haven’t only affected already established Chinese car companies; all big car manufacturers in the world for whom the largest market remains China have been affected.

While Musk fought Wall Street’s scepticism and benefited from waves of government subsidies to keep Tesla afloat through turbulent periods, Wan has shown how policy done right can drive technological disruption not just in China but worldwide. Both men are at the forefront of the global project to propel the world from the current economic age into the next — yet it is the lesser known of the two who has had the bigger impact.

In the mid 1960s teenager Wan found himself in the middle of a violent disruption of Chinese society. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution pitted rich against poor and urban elites against rural commoners. The Red Guard, a paramilitary force controlled by Mao, subjected those in the higher classes of society, such as Wan’s family, to humiliation, beatings and persecution. The Communist Party shuttered universities and sent students to villages for “re-education.” That’s how Wan, a city kid from Shanghai, found himself in Dongguo, a village in Jilin province near the North Korean border, working with other city teenagers to build basic infrastructure.

His work ethic caught the attention of local party members, and in 1974 he was unanimously elected as a team leader. Worried that because his parents were counter-revolutionaries he shouldn’t have been promoted, Wan spoke to the head of the local party branch. “Keep at it,” he recalled being told. “One day your parents will be heroes again.”

After Mao’s death, in 1976, universities were reopened and Wan studied physics at Northeast Forestry University in Harbin and then mechanical engineering at Tongji University in Shanghai, one of China’s most prestigious educational institutions. He excelled there and won a scholarship from the World Bank to pursue a PhD in Germany. For his doctorate at the Clausthal University of Technology he studied ways to reduce the noise made by internal combustion engines — the type of engine that powers all fossil fuel vehicles in the world.

In hindsight, his decision to study cutting-edge automotive engineering in Germany was perfectly timed. Following the oil crises of the 1970s, the global car industry was undergoing a period of major change. The German car industry wanted to stay ahead of growing competition from the United States and Japan, and was crying out for engineers like Wan.

He received job offers from six car companies, from Volkswagen to Mercedes. In 1991 he chose to join Audi, the smallest of the German majors at the time, reasoning that it presented him with the greatest opportunity to rise through the ranks.

Wan began in Audi’s car development division, helping to solve technical issues in design and manufacturing. After five years he realised that in order to climb the corporate ladder at Audi, engineers had to show success in more than one department. He duly moved to production, where he focused on car paint and was soon made head of a division with more than 2000 employees.

To effectively manage them all, he deployed techniques he had learned during his years in Dongguo. On an employee’s birthday, for example, he would carry two bottles of beer to the workshop floor and spend time getting to know them. The effort paid off, and Audi eventually promoted him to its central planning division, giving him oversight of a manufacturing process that produced a car every sixty seconds.

Wan also kept a keen eye on his home country. Deng Xiaoping, who took over as the country’s leader after Mao’s death in 1976, called the Cultural Revolution a “grave blunder.” In the late 1980s he set about reforming China’s economy, including the country’s almost non-existent car industry. He welcomed foreign companies — for example Germany’s Volkswagen and France’s Peugeot and Citroën — to build factories in joint ventures with domestic players. If foreign companies were worried that their Chinese partners would steal their technology, it seemed like a cost worth paying for access to the country’s vast untapped market.

By the 1990s the Audi brand had become a favourite of China’s elite; government officials were often seen being chauffeured around in black Audi saloons. As one of the car maker’s top Chinese-born executives, Wan led many company visits to China, at a time when the country’s car industry was expanding.

On these visits he noticed how the industry’s rapid growth was increasing air pollution and exacerbating China’s reliance on oil imports. If his home country was to go the way of its Western counterparts, as its leaders hoped, then these problems would become intractable. At the beginning of the twenty-first century China was consuming one barrel of oil per person per year, whereas in Germany the figure was twelve and in the United States it was twenty.

Wan wanted his fellow Chinese to have the quality of life he enjoyed as an immigrant in Germany, but given China’s large population, he realised that this might not be possible. It was quite likely that the country couldn’t afford the bill from importing all the oil, even if that much oil could be extracted somewhere, which itself wasn’t guaranteed. Fossil fuels are finite. The way out was to develop cars that could be powered by something other than oil.

In 2000 Wan got a chance to share his ideas with Chinese government leaders. Zhu Lilan, the country’s science minister at the time, visited Audi’s headquarters and factory in Ingolstadt, Germany. During the trip — designed to showcase what state-of-the-art car makers look like — he proposed to her that, rather than continuing to tinker with the internal combustion engine, China could leapfrog the West by using a completely different technology.

At the time, the United States produced some fifteen million cars each year while China produced only 700,000. But international car companies like BMW, General Motors and Toyota were starting to work on electric cars — powered by batteries or hydrogen — that produced no particulate pollution and reduced the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. And Wan was convinced this form of transport would be the future of the passenger car. If China were to become a leader in electric cars within the next decade or two, Wan told Zhu, the country could become the electric car hub of the world.

Zhu invited Wan to come back to China and make his case to the State Council, the country’s highest ruling body. Wan knew that if he succeeded then he could alter China’s history. He found support from Li Lanqing, then vice-premier of China, who in 1952 had started China’s first major homegrown car maker, First Automobile Works. Chinese cities were starting to struggle with the problem of smog. But more importantly, if Wan was right, China could become a technology leader and avoid the humiliation of having to rely on Western countries to bring modernity to its people.

A few months later Wan moved back to China. Under the auspices of Tongji University, which gave him a professorship, he began working as the lead scientist on a secret government program for advanced vehicle technologies. Along the way he played a key role in convincing important members of the State Council to set up policies that would encourage the development of alternative fuel transport, and in 2009 he launched a new- energy vehicle program that would reshape China’s car industry.

Wan’s political acumen was essential. “The automobile’s importance to growth, trade, innovation, military technology, and the environment is, for practical purposes, immeasurable. The industry is a point of national pride,” wrote Levi Tillemann in The Great Race in 2015. “Since the time of Henry Ford, no automobile industry in the world has ever become internationally competitive without that kind of government intervention.”

In the 1930s the US government paid for the construction of more than 100,000 miles of roads under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. It later set up research programs to push for more fuel-efficient engines and established improved safety regulations. In the same decade the Japanese government provided cheap loans to domestic car makers, funded technology programs and undermined US players through tariffs to protect domestic companies. In other words, China’s industrial policy approach, which would rely on subsidies and regulations, was a tried-and-tested method to boost the car industry.

Wan’s plans were bigger still. The car makers he would unleash wouldn’t just serve Chinese customers but would make the sorts of cars that would dominate the future of the car industry — by throwing away internal combustion engines and placing all the country’s bets on zero-emissions transportation.

Wan’s appointment as China’s minister of science and technology came one year before China was due to hold the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. An image-conscious Communist Party spared no expense to show off what it was capable of. This would be the first “green” Olympics, the party declared, as it announced the closure of coal-fired power stations and factories for weeks, returning blue skies to the smog-choked capital. It also promised to plant enough trees to offset the emissions caused by athletes’ air travel.

Wan had been on a deadline ever since being put in charge of China’s advanced vehicle program back in 2000: to produce electric buses and cars in time for the 2008 Olympics. It wasn’t the first time electric vehicles had been launched at an Olympics. BMW had produced two prototype lead-acid battery-powered electric cars for the 1972 games in Munich. But China’s plan was far more ambitious: to have 1000 electric buses and cars ready for the Beijing games.

By 2007 Wan Gang had many research institutes and industrial partners, including state-owned car makers BAIC, SAIC, Dongfeng and Chery, working on the project. But China still hadn’t mastered the technologies required to make effective electric vehicles: efficient motors powered by advanced batteries and controlled by sophisticated software. Though it had produced and even successfully tested prototypes, China did not possess the manufacturing capability to make 1000 such vehicles. Rather than admit defeat, the government scaled back its ambitions; a BAIC subsidiary would produce fifty electric buses and Chery would make fifty hybrid electric cars.

Chery had to hire Ricardo, a British engineering consultancy, to help meet the deadline, according to Levi Tillemann’s research. After many long hours the new team had developed a system, which could be bolted on to the Chery A5, a compact car, that allowed it to automatically switch between a petrol-powered engine and an electric motor.

But work on the computer algorithms that enabled the switching had begun late in the process. That meant Chery had to specifically train drivers for the hybrids who could manually switch between electric and internal combustion engine modes. The BAIC buses seemed to work well but were retired within three years because their batteries quickly degraded.

None of this came out during the Olympics, and the spectacle had the world enthralled. “Blockbuster,” wrote the New York Times. “Astonishing,” wrote the Guardian. “The world may never witness a ceremony of the magnitude and ingenuity,” said the Sydney Morning Herald.

After the Olympians went home, the industries restarted and restrictions on car use were lifted. Unsurprisingly, smog returned to Beijing. Within months, in 2009, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest market for cars, selling thirteen million gas-guzzlers. That meant even more particulate pollution — tiny particles capable of entering the human bloodstream and leading to breathing problems. The pollution can cause cancer or stroke, and the higher the number of particles belched out, the greater the harm caused.

The Chinese leadership could see the problem from the windows of its Beijing offices. That is why, even though China’s electric vehicle industry was clearly lagging, the government’s support for Wan’s ideas to electrify transport did not wane.

Despite the disappointing delivery of electric vehicles at the Beijing Olympics, Wan was able to get approval for a bigger rollout of new-energy vehicles with a hefty subsidy for each new car purchased. The bet was technology neutral, encouraging car makers to make battery-powered cars, plug-in hybrids (large battery and a combustion engine), and fuel-cell cars (consuming hydrogen fuel to produce only water as exhaust).

The program aimed to sell 1000 new-energy vehicles in each of the ten largest Chinese cities by 2012, and the government was prepared to provide as much as US$10,000 per car in direct subsidies to incentivise people to buy them. It would also give indirect subsidies to car companies and battery makers in the form of tax cuts and cheap land for factories. The government bill for all that ran into the billions of dollars.

With continued support, the plan eventually began to work. BYD, a Shenzhen-based battery company, launched the plug-in hybrid F3DM — it looked like a carbon copy of the Toyota Corolla — months after the 2008 Olympics. Thanks to the subsidies, there were 10,000 of them on China’s roads by 2011.

Even as electric vehicles began appearing on the streets of Chinese cities, the number of fossil fuel cars sold in China continued to increase. In 2012 the country sold fifteen million passenger cars. Predictably, pollution worsened, and the figures were available for all to see with the government beginning to openly share air-quality data.

Publication of these figures was a surprise. It would almost certainly make the government look bad. But it was a calculated move. In 2014 China’s Premier Li Keqiang used the data as the basis for a declaration of war against pollution at the annual gathering of the National People’s Congress.

The government had provided a carrot, in the form of direct and indirect subsidies for electric vehicle makers. Now it had a stick. Wan Gang’s ministry was directed to work with local governments to introduce regulations to control the number of new cars on the roads each year. If city residents wanted a licence plate for a fossil fuel car, they needed to either enter a lottery or bid in an auction. Sometimes the amount they would have to pay for the new licence was higher than the cost of the car itself. For new-energy vehicles, it was first come, first served.

In 2011 the country sold about 1000 battery-powered cars and plug-in hybrids. By 2022 that number stood at nearly seven million and China had become the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles. In some years, the annual rate of growth was 300 per cent. As a fraction of all cars sold, electric vehicles now make up more than 25 per cent of total sales — a figure that is already higher than the government target of 20 per cent for 2025 sales. It’s clear the future of cars in China is electric, and the country’s push has accelerated the electrification of transport globally.

In 2018 Wang Zhigang succeeded Wan Gang as minister of science and technology. Since then Wan has remained a key player in the country’s electrification efforts, but his impact was clear even before he left his government job. Between 2009 and 2017 the Chinese government spent more than US$60 billion on electric cars, according to a study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. To put that figure in perspective, it is more than the market cap of General Motors, which produces some eight million cars each year.

Wan’s push also created industrial jewels such as BYD, the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles, which counts Warren Buffett as one of its biggest shareholders. It doesn’t just sell electric cars around the world; it also sells electric buses. It operates electric bus factories in California and Ontario that have the capacity to build more than 1000 buses each year.

In that sense, the money the Communist Party spent has already paid dividends. Today, China doesn’t just have factories that can produce electric cars; it has an entire supply chain, from the globally mined metals that are used to make batteries to the complex software installed in electric cars. Crucially, the country also has people who can run every level of the supply chain. Though most of this talent is domestic, many Chinese electric car firms are now wealthy enough to poach staff from international companies.

Other countries are trying to play catch-up. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — the largest injection of cash from a US government in climate-oriented investments — includes some US$100 billion worth of incentives for electrification of transport in the United States. Similarly, bullish plans for electric vehicles have been hatched in Europe, where strict emissions criteria have forced car makers to pivot to selling only electric vehicles within the next decade.

During Wan’s time as China’s minister of science and technology, all the countries in the world signed the 2015 Paris agreement. Electric cars are a crucial climate solution, and China has shown it is possible to scale the technology quickly. That’s led to many countries banning the sale of new fossil fuel cars by 2040 or earlier. Markets covering more than 20 per cent of car sales globally now have a mandate to fully phase out internal combustion engine vehicles.

What Wan Gang, with China’s backing, has shown is that succeeding in scaling a green technology requires supportive government policies, substantial public and private investment, and empowering entrepreneurs. Done right, it can also give a country a commanding technological lead over the rest of the world. For “climate capitalism” to work, all three are required to ensure technologies can scale within a few decades to get the world to zero emissions. •

This is an edited extract from Akshat Rathi’s Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions, released in Australia this month.

The post Climate’s quiet achiever appeared first on Inside Story.

I have to start with my parents because without them I would not be here. My mum was born in 1910. She is a Binjarib woman, a direct descendant of the original Nyoongar people from the Pinjarra area in the southwest of Western Australia. A Binjarib Nyoongar. We consider ourselves coastal plain people and we have a strong spiritual and cultural connection to both fresh water and salt water.

Fresh water because we lived right near the bilyah, the river which flowed down from the hills to our east. Salt water because within walking distance of where we lived, the river emptied first into the estuary, then the ocean to the west. It was the perfect location for hunting and fishing throughout the year.

Our mob are the Binjarib traditional and custodial owners. Our ancestry can be traced through both our oral history and the recorded history of the wadjerlar [white people] colonists since settlement. It was Mum’s people, my ancestors, who were killed by white soldiers at the massacre which took place in Binjarib country at Pinjarra in 1834.

Our stories and songlines, our sacred and special sites, and our very cosmology are deeply imbedded in our Binjarib language, land and cultural knowledge. My mum taught us her Binjarib Nyoongar language, but insisted we never spoke it at school. To the white authorities our language was the devil’s own. We risked being taken away from our families if we were ever heard speaking it.

We loved listening to the yarns Mum told. She made us so proud that some of our people had survived the 1834 massacre. How our ancestors had come up against wadjerlar soldiers on horseback, with guns and swords when our maaman only had spears, koondees and boomerangs. Yet despite the overwhelming odds, with many of our people dying, there were those who had lived to pass on to our own children and grandchildren the stories and language for us to share the truth of what happened.

My mum was a very special woman. She was born in Nyoongar Boodja — Nyoongar country — the only sister with five brothers. Like my mum, my uncles passed the Binjarib stories on to their children. Of course, their recollections were from a male perspective, but the outcomes all tallied. Each one of her brothers loved Mum and treated her with utmost respect. I have never known any of my five uncles to say even one angry word to their sister. Ever!

Mum was the keeper of our Binjarib history and stories, a very strong-minded woman, much loved and respected by all her family. Not even government policy could break the family bonds that existed between Mum, her husband, ten children and all her brothers.

One particular policy that really irked Mum related to the citizenship rights papers, as they were referred to among our family at the time. Those Aboriginal people who were given the papers were allowed to enter pubs and buy alcohol. They were also permitted to be on the streets before the six o’clock morning curfew and after the six o’clock evening curfew. It gave them quite a bit of freedom to go about their business and they were seen as “white citizens.”

On the downside, anyone granted those papers was not allowed to interact or socialise with other Aboriginal people. Family members included. If caught doing so, they would lose their papers and face jail.

As Mum told us, “I would never apply to get those papers. I have spent too much of my life being separated from my brothers. First, in New Norcia Mission, and then I was put in Moore River Native Settlement. My brothers and their families are worth more to me than being classified as a white person. I love my family so the government can keep their papers.”

Dad, too, was born in 1910, in the springtime. At least, that was the year the authorities estimated he came into the world. Dad was not a Nyoongar man. His mum, my paternal Nanna Mary, was a Palyku Mulbpa woman from around the Nullagine area. His father was a wayfaring Irishman.

Dad was born in the Pilbara on the banks of the Shaw River at Hillside Station. The homestead was not far from Marble Bar, about seventy miles southwest of the small goldmining town, but it was more than 900 miles north of Perth. He was taken away from Nanna Mary and sent to Perth when he was very young, about eight years old.

Dad always told us that he first met Mum when he was living in Moore River Native Settlement. Mum had been sent to the same place from New Norcia Mission as a fourteen-year-old when she was deemed old enough to go out and work on the stations.

Although they were never sent to work at the same place, Mum and Dad told us it was really tough working on the stations. He cleared the land, put up fences, broke in horses, rounded up cattle and fixed windmills on the stations where he worked. Mum worked in various homesteads as a housemaid. She kept the homes clean and cooked all the meals for the station owners and their family, sometimes for ten or more people.

The hours were long, from sunrise to sundown, and they were paid a pittance. But my mum and dad were survivors. And they always caught up with each other whenever they were sent back to Moore River Native Settlement if their work ran out on the stations.

As it turned out, government and religious rules proved to be hurdles to their plans for a long-term relationship. Back then, if Aboriginal people wanted to marry, they had to apply to the government, and their respective churches, for permission to do so. When my parents finally married in 1934, after years of red tape, they shared a whole lot of love, mutual respect, appreciation and tolerance for each other, and it endured over their years together.

As Dad often told us, “I met the love of my life at Moore River Native Settlement when I was fourteen years old, back in nineteen twenty-four. From that day onwards, I knew your mother was the only one for me. I have never regretted marrying that beautiful girl.”

Theirs was a love story that lasted more than fifty years. Right up until he died in August 1992, many years after Mum, who passed away in 1975, Dad still proclaimed his love for her.

Apart from his own children and our mum, Dad had no other immediate family living around Pinjarra. From time to time he was visited by our people from up north. And though it was usually very late when they turned up, Dad always walked to our fence line to talk with them. Mum warned us kids not to stickybeak when we tried to sneak a glimpse of them standing out in the moonlight talking with Dad. From what I could barely hear, the men spoke in a language I couldn’t understand. Mum said it was “men’s business.”

I realised later that us kids were multicultural even in our own country: Binjarib Nyoongar, Palyku Mulbpa and Irish. When tracing our family tree, very early mention is also made of an American ancestor who sailed here and married a Nyoongar woman from the Albany region. Another interesting fact Mum often told us was that her great-great-grandmother was of Chinese heritage. In the features of some of my siblings there is definitely a strong Asian influence.

Ancestry aside, to the Australian government back then we were classified as Aboriginal. Since colonisation, our people had been through some traumatic times with very limited freedom to do what we wanted. Even when we were adults, government policy dictated everything we did. The rules applied to everyone, and authorities made sure they were diligently enforced. Our people had to be strong just to survive.

In those days, as long as I had my mum and dad, a feed and a bed, I was okay. But I have to tell you, there were periods in my life as a young Nyoongar girl that I found really hard going. To some I know it may sound petty, but back then it bothered me, especially when I got to an age where I began to notice things happening around me and I overheard comments by family and friends.

For instance, when people talked about who was the prettiest in our Connell family — and there being six sisters — my name always seemed to be last on the list. My older sisters with their pretty faces, perfect brown skin and long jet-black hair have won beauty contests. Rightly so. They were very beautiful. Glamorous photographs and huge beauty competition trophies attest to those facts.

My youngest sister, Hannah, much like our oldest one, Janie, has a natural Nyoongar and Asian-influenced beauty, with her black hair, dark doe eyes and smooth unblemished olive skin. But me? With my very pale skin, honey-blonde hair and hazel eyes, thanks to the genetic traits I inherited from my Irish grandfather, I seemed destined to miss out on the compliments. Especially from other Nyoongars.

When my brothers wanted to be extra mean to me, they said our mum had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital. I hardly ever got any compliments. Oh, I sometimes received a mention, but mainly because I was very good at sports and smart in schoolwork. But as a young girl I always felt I missed out when the really pretty faces were handed out in heaven.

I know Mum loved me and she always said, “Lavinia, it’s not what you look like on the outside. It’s whether you are a good person on the inside that counts. God is watching what we do, not what we look like. He already knows those details. So you remember that’s how He will judge us. By our actions. Who cares what other people think? They are just ordinary humans.”

My mum’s words eased my mind. Still, at the time I always thought maybe I should have been the one called Jane. In my mind it surely was a match with me being plain.

There were other tough things about being a Nyoongar girl. And knowing how to fight was one of them, and it was going to come in useful throughout my life. When my four brothers had to fight five other boys, I always fought the boy who was about the same age as me. No hair pulling, biting or scratching like girls fight. It was stand back, shape up and punch each other. Queensberry Rules boxing, Dad said. Maybe if I wasn’t such a tomboy and hadn’t belted them up, those boys might have called me pretty.

Though I was never — and I am not now — a vain person, there were times when people commented on my appearance in a really spiteful way. It was so hurtful to be told, “Lavinia, you wanna know something? From a distance, yeah, you looked gorgeous. But up close? Nah. Nah. You don’t even look Nyoongar. Are you sure you’re Aboriginal? You are so white.” Then the laughter.

When I was thirteen, this was said to me in front of a group of my peers. My two best friends got so angry with the person who said it, they wanted to punch into him. At the time I retorted by telling that bloke to get nicked. He apologised only because he was scared my friends wanted to hit him, but I could tell his apology was fake. Besides, his words were out and they couldn’t be taken back. It stung. I realised later that I was angry for two reasons. One for being called ugly, but also it hurt more to be challenged about being a Nyoongar just because of the light colour of my skin. Thanks, Grandfather!

Another time, I was asked by an acquaintance if I was truly an Aboriginal and whether I should be talking about Nyoongar people. I turned and walked off, but not before I told him to go fornicate with himself with the old Queensland bush medicine, a big prickly pineapple.

I told that mean-mouthed bastard in both English and Nyoongar. Fortunately, that second time I was no longer a teenager. I was in my mid twenties, yet it brought back a reminder of the days when I was younger and more vulnerable to mean comments like these.

Another painful memory as a youngster relates to government policy and its impact on our people. At any given time, it wasn’t hard for the authorities to keep track of us Nyoongars. Especially those six families who owned land and were permanent residents in the town, like our family and Uncle Levi’s.

Because our land was near a big swamp, the police identified us as the “Swampies.” There were also about seven other Nyoongar families living in the area, but they had all set up camps on reserved government land. They became known as the “Reserve Mob.” They had found steady work on the farms and with government agencies, like the public works department, and settled with their families in Pinjarra. In all, there must have been close to eighty Nyoongars in the town who had no intention of moving away.

Then there were transient families who only came to town for seasonal work and moved on when that ran out. They usually stayed with relatives for the duration and sent their little ones to the same state school we went to. Sometimes when that happened, the number of Nyoongar kids in the classes almost doubled. Some families also enrolled their children in the local Catholic school. Strict government rules said it was compulsory for all young Nyoongar kids to get educated. Rain, hail or shine.

If we missed even one day, there had to be a note from Mum or Dad or one of the older sisters who had already left school. If there was no note, the police could be, and often were, contacted by the school and sent to check why we hadn’t turned up.

There was one cardinal rule for every Nyoongar, whether you were transient or a permanent resident. If you were moving into town or leaving the place, you had to report your movements to the police. Failure to comply could mean jail for the parents and the forced removal of their children.

I remember when my first cousin Gertie, who was some twenty years older than me, had her six children taken away from her. Her oldest child, Margie, at eleven, was only a year older than me, and Nina, the youngest, only six. Yet they were unceremoniously placed in a Catholic mission because she could not account for why her koolungahs were not at school.

It didn’t matter that Gertie was heavily pregnant and needed help with other serious health issues. Or that her husband, Dan, had to travel away for weeks at a time shearing sheep for farmers in other towns so he could earn some money for his family.

Her children were attending the local Catholic primary school, so maybe they were under even closer scrutiny and monitoring by the convent nuns. More so than those of us at state school. I don’t know the reason. I do know that it upset a whole lot of people in our Nyoongar community.

Those six kids were an integral part of our family group. Everything changed when they were taken away by the government. Everybody grieved for them, it was so sad. We missed them terribly. It took a long time, especially for everyone in our close-knit families, to adjust to not having them around.

Even though they were allowed to come home during the summer for the school holidays, it was never, ever the same. Most people seemed to understand why their mother, after delivering her seventh baby, turned to alcohol to blot out the hurt of not having all her kids with her. Luckily other family members helped to rear the new baby. But as a one-year-old, that little boy was taken away too. It was a terrible time for everyone, especially us kids. Their departure hurt even more because we kids had spent a whole lot of our lives growing up with them. Then suddenly, they were gone.

We had all gone bushwalking together, hunting for kaardas (big yellow speckled goannas), rabbits, parrots, koomools (possums) and wild ducks. Picking wild berries. Pinching mulberries from the big tree in the middle of the wadjerlar neighbour’s farm, running through the paddocks and being chased by big angry cows and bullocks.

We would spend nearly all our summer months together at the river swimming, fishing and catching marrons — freshwater crayfish. The river sustained us in so many ways. We not only had our bush tucker, but pinched the juicy grapes and ripe stone fruit — apricots, nectarines and peaches — from the orchards that grew near the river. As a last resort, there were always the nuts from the pine trees that grew alongside the Anglican church. Mum didn’t like us eating those because it was said they caused rickets or some illness like that in kids.

And I remember a big mob of us kids crammed together on the back of my dad’s old Model T Ford going to the estuary, crabbing and camping out. We rarely went alone, with other family members in their own vehicles forming a mini convoy of winyarn, rickety old trucks and motor cars heading out.

I clearly remember being taught what we could and couldn’t eat from the bush, and all about our medicine plants. Making sure we tossed some sand into the river to let the spirits know we were there before we cast our fishing lines. Learning from our oldies about our culture and using our own language. We felt so special, having our own Binjarib words. Like some secret code that only we would know. Being reared in the mission, Mum and Dad would have never, ever allowed it, but in secret our older girl cousins taught us our Nyoongar swear words.

At home we were taught our Nyoongar language and culture. We learned that unlike the wadjerlars, who only had four seasons in a year, we had six. Biruk — when it is very hot in December and January; Bunuru — still hot but with the promise of cooler days in February and March; Djeran — cooler weather with signs of early rain in April and May; Makuru — when the heavy showers come down in June and July; Djilba — a time of new growth and flowers everywhere in August and September; and Kambarang — warmer sunny days around October and November. Our Elders explained that our bush medicines and our food supply depended on and varied with each of our seasons.

We were taught what signs to look for when hunting kangaroos, emus, goannas, possums and rabbits. The one thing our family was never allowed to eat was the booyaiy — long-necked turtle — because that was our totem. We spent so much of our time honing our bush skills. To us it was childhood heaven.

Sometimes we even packed some bread or damper and cold meat from home and took it with us, along with a flagon of sweet black tea. That way we would stay at the river nearly all day. If any of us kids happened to have some money, we’d chuck in and buy a loaf of bread, chips, tinned meat or polony and a bottle of cool drink to share. There were even times when Mum let us book up at the local grocery store and paid the account on Dad’s payday. Whenever that happened, a couple of packets of Granita biscuits was the favourite with all of us.

Things were tough at times, but we rarely went hungry or thirsty over summer because we all shared what we had. While in primary school, I remember reading about the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Those two may have had the mighty Mississippi but they had nothing on us lot. We had the pure, clear waters of the Murray. It was like God himself had given us Nyoongars this special gift out of nowhere. Serendipity. •

This is an edited extract from Louise K. Hansen’s Smashing Serendipity: The Story of One Moorditj Yorga, published by Fremantle Press.

The post Two worlds appeared first on Inside Story.

She is best known for her startling, sprawling novels, especially Carpentaria (2007), which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Since then, each of her new works has been a major literary event. There have been two further dizzying novels — The Swan Book (2013) and Praiseworthy (2023) — as well as the Stella Prize–winning Tracker (2017), a complex choral biography of Aboriginal activist Tracker Tilmouth.

Wright enjoys a significant reputation overseas, and her work has been translated into French, Italian, Polish and Chinese. The Chinese language translation of Carpentaria (2006) was launched by the Nobel Prize–winning author Mo Yan. In France, Carpentaria is the first Indigenous novel to be set for the Agrégation, the national civil service exam, and the first Australian novel since Patrick White’s Voss (1957) to have that honour.

It is difficult to encapsulate the full significance of Wright’s works because it is so far-reaching — cutting across boundaries of time, space and culture — and because it is still emerging. More than anything, her writing introduces into Australian letters a completely new form of thought and speech. In the linguistic universe opened up by Wright’s writing, the reader is made aware of ways of being in the world that are completely distinct from those of capitalist modernity. The achievement of her writing is that this does not come over as either a lost world or a forbidden enclave, but as an open challenge and invitation.

The mesmeric Prelude to her novel The Swan Book begins by asking its reader (listener) to entertain an image…

Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kind of cut-snake virus in its doll’s house. Little starts shining over the moonscape garden twinkle endlessly in a crisp sky. The crazy virus just sits there on the couch and keeps a good old qui vive out the window for intruders. It ignores all of the eviction notices stacked on the door. The virus thinks it is the only pure full-blood virus left in the land. Everything else is just half-caste. Worth nothing! Not even a property owner. Hell yes! It thinks, worse than the swarms of rednecks hanging around the neighbourhood. Hard to believe a brain could get sucked into vomiting bad history over the beautiful sunburnt plains.

What are we to make of this? The virus that lives in the doll’s house of this speaker’s mind is an intriguing revision of the angel in the house. This virus is the demand for an impossible purity, for an ideal purity that only exists to cast all real things into abject impurity.

This ideal, which is said to be far worse than the outward disparagement of “rednecks,” ignores all notices of eviction. It is not the emblem of any living value but the insidious product of “bad history.” It is at the same time something residing in the innermost recesses, and spewed forth in all directions across the plains. These “beautiful sunburnt plains” steal a wry glance at Dorothea Mackellar’s ubiquitous poem, but decide that, nevertheless, they are still beautiful sunburnt plains.

This kind of teasing circularity is the basic metier of Wright’s prose. She never lets you hold onto a metaphor too long before she gives it another twist and sends it in a new direction. She never lets her conceits become conceited. For this reason, her writing presents its difficulties. But it achieves its central aim when it forces you to stop and listen. If you try to skim ahead in Wright’s novels you lose the plot, even though in many cases the novels seem not to have one. But when you lose the idea that there is a plot, that means you have stopped listening, and it is time to slow down and bend an ear.

Reading an Alexis Wright novel is like being placed under a spell. When I teach Alexis Wright to my students at the University of Western Australia, I tell them not to read but listen. Her writing pulses with the unmistakeably cadences of the spoken word. The rhythm of this speech, even though it takes place in English, draws on an entirely different social world and cosmology. The voice in Wright’s work gains a substance and life that convert her writing into speech.

Wright’s adult life was forged in the rough and tumble world of central Australian Indigenous politics of the 1980s and 90s. Her writing, for all its wild wonder, is also intensely and intimately political. The politics is overt in her nonfiction works Grog War (1997), Take Power (1998) and Tracker, but is never far from the surface of her novels either.

Wright’s novels are often classified as magical realist. Certainly, a novel like Carpentaria is indebted to the tradition of writing that became globally influential with Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the late 1960s. But it is important to not lose sight of the “realism” in magical realism. What the concept of realism captures, on the one hand, is that Wright’s works deal with real-world problems — colonialism, climate change, family breakdown, sexual abuse, addiction. But more than these problems, Wright’s realism institutes a relationship with the real conditions of human life. Here there is a sharp break from Western secularism, because these real conditions are nothing other than the determinations of Country. In this respect, the real is exactly what we might, from a secular point of view, call magic.

Carpentaria begins with a cosmic joke about the fictional town of Desperance, where much of the novel is set. The town had been built at a river mouth to serve as a port for the surrounding region. Then, after a big wet, the river shifted course and decided to join the sea somewhere else. The town became pointless. A river port without a river. The real joke, though, is the town was always pointless and the river was simply drawing attention to this fact.

What becomes clear in Wright’s work is that Country has its moods, and if you have ever tried to reason yourself out of a mood, you will quickly meet the limits of reason. But though reason founders, knowledge continues, albeit a particular kind of knowledge.

It takes a particular kind of knowledge to go with the river, whatever its mood. It is about there being no difference between you and the movement of water as it seasonally shifts its tracks according to its mood. A river spurns human endeavour in one dramatic gesture, jilting a lover who has never really been known, as it did to the frontier town built on its banks in the hectic heyday of colonial vigour.

In Wright’s work, the living bridge of signification between day-to-day life and the insistence of Country is the basis of meaningful voice. The flawed father in Carpentaria, Norm Phantom, has many failings, but he possesses the gift of voice:

Norm had a hypnotic voice, his eyes cast spells, he distilled memory like the flooding river emptying into the sea. He made people wish they were there when it really happened. He made them feel that it was better to have been alive in the time of the real people, his ancestors.

It is one of the striking things in Wright’s work that someone who lives in a shanty at the edge of a country town in the middle of nowhere is endowed with this singular power. The power, that is, of carrying the world inside their voice. The power of connecting people to the ground of their being.

Wright’s work teaches us about the close relationship between voice and listening. For Wright, listening is the direct complement of voice. Everyone might think they listen, but more and more we seem to be entering an age of listening deficit disorder. Indeed, the refusal to listen has almost become a virtue, since it means you are no one’s fool, that nobody will take you for a ride. This points to the close correspondence of trust to listening. The refusal to listen is the triumph of non-trust. But Wright shows us that trusting what is good is the foundation for ethical life.

She seems to be saying that being taken for a ride is not the worst thing in the world. There is a soft spot in her writing for those who are prepared to take on the work of narrating the universe, from Norm Phantom in Carpentaria to Cause Man Steel in Praiseworthy.

The charisma of these rough-hewn men who speak without fear is something that Wright found fascinating in Tracker Tilmouth. She knows they are flawed and full of themselves, but she can also see the crucial thing that they offer their people, which is to remain uncowed. In Wright’s world you are stupid if you take these people too seriously, but you are even more stupid if you fail to take them seriously enough.

Having known Tracker for much of his political life, and having worked closely with him in a range of campaigns, it fell to Wright to find an adequate way to express the life of this extraordinary person. She knew instinctively that conventional biography was not the answer. What emerged instead was a sprawling oral history — an oral history of a man who was also an event.

This does not get rendered in the genteel distance of the “life and times” biography. Instead, it transpires in the real time of the spoken word. The book is written in a tumble of intersecting chapters by those who knew Tracker. Her informants include Tracker himself, who is able to maintain a sly detachment from his larger-than-life persona. The cast of authors spend time — they are in no hurry — recalling, reminiscing, castigating and fuming about Tracker and his exploits. Half the time, even in moments of great seriousness and the gravest importance, they just shake their heads and laugh.

One can sense a certain element of Tracker in many of the more memorable characters in Wright’s novels. One can also see something of the author herself. Her admiration for Tracker expresses qualities that are also the hallmark of Wright:

An extraordinary reader of the times, he spared no one from hearing his verdict on them, be it those from his own communities, politicians, business people or professional academics, whether they wanted to hear exactly what he thought of them or not.

Wright herself learned to write by listening, as she made clear in a lecture given at the Sydney Opera House in 2001 (published as an essay in Southerly magazine in 2002). She recalls a childhood spent listening to her grandmother:

[My grandmother] had stories to explain everything — who we are, who each of us were, and the place on our traditional country that was very deep and special to her. She was our memory. She was what not forgetting was all about. It was through her that I learnt to imagine.

Here Wright makes clear that her grandmother’s voice was not something that belonged simply to the woman who was speaking. Her grandmother’s voice was speaking the Country. Or more to the point, the Country was speaking through her. In Ambelin Kwaymullina’s lyrical treatise on Indigenous sovereignty, Living on Stolen Land (2020), she writes that “Life doesn’t move through time / Time moves through life.”

The voice of Wright’s grandmother instantiates this movement of time through the self. This voice held everything — memory, significance, relationships, rules, rights. It also provided the very ground of imagination. This fundamental precept of Indigenous cosmology — we don’t move through Country, Country moves through us — continually works its way through Wright’s work. This moving through is experienced as a voice. This is what makes listening so important in Wright’s world because in the act of listening, Country is given the opportunity to move through its human subjects.

The visionary characters in Wright’s novels, whether black or white, are marked by the fact that their voices are not their own. In Carpentaria, Elias Smith washes up miraculously one day on the mudflats near the town, where he is nursed back to health by Norm Phantom. His ocean ordeal has rendered Elias fully in the service of this deeper voice, in a way that clearly recalls Wright’s description of her grandmother.

Although Elias never remembered his origins, he was able to acquire other people’s memory. They gave him their imagination. Through adopting their childhood memories as his own, he was able to close the gap on the past he could not remember… He told his story so persuasively he was able to convince people just about anything.

In The Swan Book, set in a climate-devastated near future, we follow the life of an abandoned Aboriginal girl, Oblivia Ethylene, who finds herself catapulted into national life. While the book opens with an interior monologue in Oblivia’s voice, she never speaks in the main part of the novel. Instead, she is forever spoken for.

In this respect the novel offers Oblivia as the sine qua non of Australian Indigenous policy, in which the Indigene is a silent object whom everyone is trying to co-opt for a different purpose. At every point when Indigenous voice threatens to emerge — that is to say, in a politically meaningful way, rather than as multicultural ornamentation — the Australian polity reacts in a way to silence it. Or, to put it more accurately, to speak over the top of it.

But at the same time the muteness of Oblivia is also the face of genuine traumatic speechlessness. Wright’s novels are loquacious. The mainly Indigenous people constantly argue with each other over almost everything. Sometimes this is given in direct dialogue, but often we get it paraphrased by Wright’s narrator in their distinctive dry irony. But even so, this bubbling speech is occasionally punctuated by moments of sudden overwhelming traumatic stillness. Points at which speech stops.

Oblivia’s muteness is also an expression of this moment when speech, even the capacious, multitudinous vocality of Wright’s speakers, reaches its traumatic limit. Oblivia’s own people were brought to silence by the loss she embodied:

They were too speechless to talk about a loss that was so great, it made them feel unhinged from their own bodies, unmoored, vulnerable, separated from eternity. They had been cut off.

This kind of speechlessness was memorably dramatised in the harrowing scene in Warwick Thornton’s frontier film Sweet Country (2017) where the Aboriginal woman Lizzie is unable to provide testimony of her own rape, even though this testimony will likely save her husband who is on trial for killing the perpetrator.

In The Swan Book, we thus have this strange experience of a silent protagonist. But one who constantly attracts the speech of the other. Her subjectivity is not so much removed as collapsed, like a dying star into a darker denser orb. Is Oblivia a victim? Is she a figure of picaresque pathos? Is her silence really an oblivion? A mute silhouette in the space of subjectivity? She is, in the end, not quite any of these things because she is never really abandoned, for the simple reason that she is sustained by the narrative voice itself.

But how can we tell the difference between a voice that speaks for and over the top of Oblivia and one that holds her firmly in its metaphysical hands? The main difference is that the narrative voice, which is the characteristic voice we find in all of Wright’s novels from Plains of Promise (1997) to Praiseworthy, does not especially care for Oblivia.

It may seem a little paradoxical to assert that the voices that care most for Oblivia are the ones that suck the life out of her, and the voice that does not is the one that upholds her right to exist. Yet, this is the situation that Indigenous people have had to contend with insofar as their colonisation has been heavily mediated through the discourse of humanitarianism.

This aspect of what might be called tough love is something that we see throughout Wright’s writing. One of the attractions of her work is the rigorous way in which it denies certain convenient pieties. For example, while the white people in her novels are often mercilessly caricatured for their hypocrisy and venality, the Indigenous people are far from saints.

Her novels have little time for what is considered nice. They begin from the position that niceties never prevented, and will never prevent, the destitution of Indigenous people nor the continuing extraction of material wealth from their lands. Her novels do not depict Indigenous people as a deserving poor or make a case for charitable redress. Thus, her Indigenous characters, for all their flaws — and in a certain sense, because of their flaws — retain their sovereignty.

There is a strange double movement in Wright’s writing. On the one hand her novels activate the critical faculties, making you question things, weigh contending positions, see bitter ironies, appreciate the most profound dilemmas. But on the other hand, one is also compelled to surrender to the voice. As Australia votes on whether it is fitting to amend the Constitution to guarantee an Indigenous Voice to parliament and government, Wright’s work offers a sense of what this means and why it is important.

Indeed, Wright’s works are a living enactment of Indigenous voice, a subject that Australians have been asked to form a view on. Because it was immediately and brazenly converted into a culture war, this historic opportunity to listen might become yet another act of silencing. By rejecting the voice, Australia will not only reject a constitutionally recognised Voice but deprive itself of a mechanism to learn what it is to live in a world where voice is truly meaningful. •

The post The voice of Alexis Wright appeared first on Inside Story.

The host used materials created by the Victorian Women’s Trust to get us talking, including a set of cards laid face down between mugs of tea and plates of biscuits. We took turns picking up a card and reading the text on the reverse side. One was about events in New South Wales in 1881:

Forty-two Yorta Yorta men living at the Maloga Mission petition the governor to grant them land, to support themselves raising stock and cultivating crops. The petition is published in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph. Six years later, representatives from the Maloga Mission present the governor with a petition to Queen Victoria, again requesting land.

Eventually the NSW government did set aside 730 hectares in the area for a reserve that came to be known as “Cummeragunja,” or “our home.”

Another card told of the 1963 Yirrkala bark petitions:

The Yolngu Nation from Yirrkala in the East Arnhem Region sends Bark Petitions to the federal parliament. They object to land on their reserve being excised for bauxite mining, without consultation. Territories Minister Hasluck rejects the first petition, challenging the validity of signatures. A second bark petition adds the thumbprints of clan Elders…

The petitions led to a parliamentary inquiry, which visited Darwin and Yirrkala to collect evidence. The committee didn’t support a halt to mining, but it did recommend that sacred sites be protected and the Yolngu compensated for loss of livelihoods.

Dating back as far as 1788, the twenty-nine cards detail resistance, protests, pleas, petitions, strikes, walk-offs, court cases and letters to newspapers. They record the creation of new representative organisations — including the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (1924), the Australian Aborigines League (1933), the Aboriginal Progressive Association (1937) and the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (1958) — and the release of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Together, the cards tell a compelling story of a 235-year struggle for land, recognition and justice, of which calls for Voice, Treaty and Truth are the latest manifestation.

Since that conversation, I have played a small role in the Yes campaign, handing out flyers outside a supermarket, a train station and a pre-polling centre. Plenty of people have been supportive and I’ve had constructive, civil conversations with individuals who were genuinely unsure about how to vote. I’ve also been labelled a racist and a race-traitor and accused of not acknowledging that the “real” Uluru Statement from the Heart is much longer than just one-page. This is trivial stuff compared with the abuse copped by First Nations’ representatives on both sides of the campaign, but the atmosphere feels like it has become increasingly polarised as the vote approaches.

Perhaps that was inevitable once the Coalition made the vote partisan and turned the campaign slogan, “Vote No to the Voice of Division,” into a self-fulfilling prophecy. But anger and resentment at the idea of a Voice haven’t come out of thin air. Misinformation and sheer falsehoods need receptive ears. Just as the push for Yes is informed by the long struggle for recognition and rights, so the No campaign draws on deeper wellsprings, including an entrenched defensiveness about Australia’s past.

In a talk at the Byron Writers Festival in August, historian Henry Reynolds recalled the intellectual environment he encountered when he started teaching at the University College of Townsville in 1965. Although it later became James Cook University, at the time the college was a northern outpost of the University of Queensland, and the main textbook set by Reynolds’s southern professors was Gordon Greenwood’s Australia: A Social and Political History.

Greenwood’s collection, with essays by six researchers, was reprinted twelve times between 1955 and 1975, and widely used in teaching around the nation. But it contained nothing about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Reynolds scoured academic reviews of the book and found that “not one of the eminent historians who reviewed it realised there was something missing.”

This is evidence of what art historian Bernard Smith called “the white blanket of forgetfulness” in his 1980 Boyer Lectures. Twelve years earlier, in his own Boyer Lectures, the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner had introduced a similar concept — the great Australian silence. Reflecting on the lack of Indigenous voices in histories and commentaries, Stanner said that “inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness” but must be structural, like “a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape.”

More recently, in Telling Tennant’s Story, Inside Story contributor Dean Ashenden showed how this view has been constructed and maintained. Stopping in the old railway town of Quorn near the Flinders Ranges on the road north from Adelaide, Ashenden finds lots of information about the Ghan but nothing about the Aboriginal people of the area, “who they were or how they fared when the inexorable frontier arrived.” The story was similar all the way up the Stuart Highway.

This is my story too. Growing up in South Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, my main exposure to Aboriginal Australia was seeing people sitting under trees in Victoria Square and the Adelaide Parklands. I had an inspiring fifth grade teacher who introduced us to the culture and lifestyle of the central deserts, and around the same time I met a group of Pitjantjatjara elders who were staying with a neighbour who had worked at the old mission of Ernabella (now Pukatja).

Despite these experiences, though, I never thought to ask who had lived on the lands around Adelaide prior to 1836. I don’t recall hearing the name of the Kaurna people until I was in my early twenties. Like so many, then and now, I was blanketed in forgetfulness.

When he arrived in Townsville, Reynolds was struck by the very visible presence of Aboriginal people in North Queensland — something he was not accustomed to in Tasmania. When he started researching local history with his students he knew they had to include the story of relations between coloniser and colonised. And once they went looking, they discovered records of dispossession, conflict and war waiting to be found, not just in the oral stories handed down through Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal families but also in newspapers, court records and diaries.

The first newspaper in North Queensland, the Port Denison Times, was established in 1861. Reading through copies in the Bowen Council Chambers, Reynolds found that frontier violence was openly acknowledged in the nineteenth century. What’s more, the morality of the colonialism was fiercely debated in its pages.

Yet when Reynolds first pitched his landmark 1981 book, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia, Penguin knocked it back because there were already “too many books about Aborigines.”

“Invasion” is still a rarely used word to refer to the origins of the Australian state. “Settlement” remains far more common, suggesting a benign process that met with little resistance and was long ago complete. The Voice referendum is unsettling because it tugs at the corners of the blanket of forgetfulness to destabilise the dominant sense of who we are as a nation.

Many within the No camp believe that nothing is to be gained by looking back and it is time to draw a line under history. After all, we’re all Australians with equal rights. To give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a Voice to Parliament amounts to special treatment and breaches the basic liberal-democratic tenet that every citizen has one equal vote and equal standing before the law.

If we are to move forward together based on a shared commitment to liberal principles, though, we must surely confront the fact that the colonisation that shaped Australia and its institutions was entirely illiberal. It did not treat First Nations peoples equally. It ignored their rights, stole their property, suppressed their languages and cultures, denied them voice and votes. The liberal state is supposed to uphold freedom and equality, but the Australian state denied both of those things to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and faced down their fierce resistance with violence, segregation and imprisonment.

The push for constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Nations peoples anchored in the Voice reminds us of these deep and unresolved wrongs. Its challenge to the legitimacy and identity of the liberal state was bound to be met with anger and resentment. Yet, as political philosopher Duncan Ivison has argued, the Voice also provides a way forward — an opportunity “to reset what seems currently fixed.”

As Ivison writes, “By providing a legal and political framework within which Indigenous peoples’ voices can be heard on matters of deep concern to them, whilst at the same time engaging with the core political structures of the Australian state, it offers a distinctive opportunity for ‘re-founding’ these relations.”

I still hold a hope that the opinion polls are wrong and a surge of undecided voters will swing the vote to Yes on polling day. But I’m not optimistic. Whatever the result, I’m confident that history will keep reaching into the present in unsettling ways.

Each successive generation, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, migrant or locally born, will discover, and rediscover, discomfiting truths that pierce the great Australian silence. Historians and others won’t stop delving into the trove of archival and anecdotal records, stirring up the sediment of the past to cloud the waters of the present. Some Australians, many even, may fail to listen or refuse to hear. But there will always be those who grapple with the insistent moral and political demands history makes on us. There is no foreseeable point in the future where we can draw a line under things and say, we’ve dealt with that, now let’s move on. •

The post Yes or No, history won’t go away appeared first on Inside Story.

But it also confirms one of the most important lessons of the economics Nobel’s past quarter-century: that economics can shed light on all sorts of real-world issues — from whether you should worry about the quality of a used car to the price a woman pays for taking over childcare while her husband builds his career.

These are not the sort of things for which most people think the Nobel Prize in economics is awarded. Indeed, the economics Nobel is the outsider of the Nobel group, and arguably the most misunderstood. Goldin’s win should help shift views about this latecomer among Nobels.

Back in 1898 Alfred Nobel’s will established prizes for the people “who have during the previous year rendered the greatest service to mankind” in each of six fields. The dynamite magnate’s chosen fields were physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, literature and the pursuit of peace. Economics was not on the list.

The science Nobel quickly gained an unsurpassed reputation. The literature prize, if sometimes quirky, nevertheless acts as national canonisation for whomever receives it; it made Patrick White famous to millions of Australians who never came close to reading him. And the peace prize frequently generates political controversy: comic songwriter Tom Lehrer said of Henry Kissinger’s 1973 peace prize that it made satire obsolete.

The economics prize came seven decades after its sibings, pressed on the Nobel committee in 1968 by the Swedish central bank. It occupies the Nobels’ uncomfortable middle ground, aspiring to the hard-edged epistemological standards of physics but enduring accusations that it is as political as the peace prize.

Economics in 2023 is in a particularly tough corner. According to surveys such as a 2019 YouGov poll of British voters, it is markedly less popular than the physical sciences. And anti-economics views, once confined to the fringe, seem to be spreading into the mainstream.

On the left, economists are widely resented for their tendency to suggest governments should spend money more cautiously on everything from welfare payments to underground rail lines. On the right, once less sceptical of economics, the very idea that pointy-headed economic experts might have something to contribute is now often derided: that 2019 YouGov poll of UK voters found Brexiteers less than half as willing to trust economists than Remain voters were.

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that economics is less popular than, say, chemistry. As the economist Thomas Karier wrote in his 2010 book Intellectual Capital: Forty Years of the Nobel Prize in Economics, “human behaviour is notoriously fickle and difficult to summarise with a few fundamental equations.” Another economist, Russ Roberts, hit a similar note in an online essay: “there are too many factors we don’t have data on, too many connections between the variables we don’t understand and can’t model or identify.”

The result: interpretation and the investigator’s biases play roles in the social sciences that they don’t play in the physical sciences.

On top of this, as economists from Roberts to John Quiggin have noted, economics is a discipline in which peculiarly few questions receive definitive answers. When Edwin Hubble and Fred Hoyle proffered different ideas about how the universe is evolving, they had to wait just a few years to figure out who was clearly right. (As it happened, though, astronomers didn’t become eligible for the physics prize until after Hubble’s death.) Economists almost never resolve disputes that way.

When a controversial figure receives the economics Nobel, their political allies often leap clumsily to claim vindication. When Milton Friedman won in 1976, the political right rushed to laud his free-market worldview, though his Nobel-cited monetary-theory work suggested the United States left interest rates too high during the Great Depression. When the equally widely admired David Card won in 2021 for work on minimum wages, left-wing commentators crowed that he had shown governments should raise minimum wages to reduce poverty, a view Card specifically disowned.

A frequent Nobel committee response to this problem usefully highlights the difficulty of reaching categorical conclusions on economic issues. The 1974 economics prize, for instance, went jointly to two men who had previously shared little more than a common continent: Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist who championed the importance of market signals, and Gunnar Myrdal, a development economist who had served in one of Sweden’s Social Democrat governments.

That pattern repeated in 2011: Thomas Sargent, a leader of the “rational expectations revolution,” won with Christopher Sims, famous as a critic of rational expectations. Then in 2013 Eugene Fama won for creating the efficient markets hypothesis — and behavioural finance expert Robert Shiller won in part for showing where Fama’s hypothesis went wrong.

Sometimes people detect a more sinister pattern in Nobel wins. This tendency reached a high point in the 2016 book The Nobel Factor, by Swedish economic historians Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg. The book’s cover blurb uses the familiar newspaper practice of posing a sensational question without answering it: “Was it a coincidence that the market turn and the prize began at the same time?”

Offer and Söderberg press the case that it was no coincidence at all, that the prize was a Swedish central bank plot to undermine the dominant Keynesianism of the time, to give itself greater power and to push popular perceptions of economics in a more market-oriented direction. Indeed, Offer and Söderberg suggest that the plot worked, with the Nobel successfully promoting what is known as the “market turn” in economics, which lasted from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Look at the overall pattern of prizes though, and you might start to think the plotters have displayed rank incompetence. Yes, the late twentieth century produced a crop of future Nobel Prize winners, mostly American, who wanted to promote the power of markets and limit the power of government in various ways. Hayek in 1974 was followed by Friedman in 1976, who at the time was almost unavoidable: even The Nobel Factor concedes that he was for a time the most cited economist ever, above both Keynes and Marx.

A decade later came more market promoters: James Buchanan in 1986, followed by Robert Lucas (1995), Robert Mundell (1999), Finn Kydland and Ed Prescott (2004), Thomas Sargent (2011) and Eugene Fama (2013). But this gang comprises just nine winners out of seventy-five between 1969 and 2016.

The timing seems worse still for Offer and Söderberg’s thesis. Check those dates again: the Nobel committee only got around to gonging the third of these hard-edged free-marketeers (Buchanan) in 1986. By then Reagan and Thatcher — and, in Australia, Hawke — had already implemented the most dramatic of their pro-market policy changes. Why plot to change world history and then wait until it became unnecessary before putting your conspiracy fully into action?

Another story fits the timeline much better: after Keynesianism failed to deal well with the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks, the economics profession began to reconsider Keynesianism and to take more interest in other models. The Nobel committee simply followed that intellectual trend, cautiously, waiting for the passage of time to confirm a particular idea’s lasting effect.

The Nobel Factor barely mentions the effect the oil shock had on economic thinking after almost three decades of postwar growth. Offer and Söderberg also downplay that the intensely pro-market ideas were mostly incorporated in the default view or discarded before the turn of the century.

In fact, when you look closely at the past twenty-five years of economics Nobel winners, “right-wing plot” is not the phrase that springs to mind. A more likely lesson is that, for whatever reason, the winners of the economics Nobel have often taken economics away from the clichéd idea of calculating, rational Economic Man.

Assigning laureates to categories is a fraught business. But the biggest theme of the past quarter century has probably been behavioural economics, which looks at how psychological and social factors lead people to make decisions classical economic theory might not suggest. Such prizes went to George Akerlof and Daniel Kahneman before the 2008–09 financial crisis, and to Elinor Ostrom, Robert Shiller and Richard Thaler after it. In second position would be issues of poverty (Amartya Sen, Angus Deaton, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer). It’s hard to paint such concerns as disclosing a right-wing agenda.

Various technical methodological breakthroughs have also been rewarded. At the very least this category should probably include James Heckman, Daniel McFadden, Vernon Smith, Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, Roger Myerson, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens — though thinkers such as Paul Romer could probably fit here comfortably too).

Other winners have tackled very real-world problems. George Akerlof explained why you might be right to worry that the used car you just bought is a lemon. Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson found the best way for governments to auction radio frequency rights. Ben Bernanke showed why bank failures can turn a slowdown into a depression, before getting to test his ideas as US central bank chief in 2008–09, with some success. And David Card’s work suggested that raising the minimum wage might not throw people out of work the way most economists feared.

Card’s prize-winning work in particular suggested that the Nobel committee was growing more interested in economics that actually overturned previous beliefs on a practical question.

Card and his co-author, the late Alan Krueger, identified a nice natural experiment, a rise in New Jersey’s minimum wage law, and used it to explore the effects of the minimum wage. They found that a higher New Jersey minimum wage didn’t push New Jersey’s unemployment rate up. As a result, economists are now less certain about the damage caused by increases in low statutory minimum wages.

Yet here we confront again that uncomfortable reality: economics is a social science. And in real-life situations you often just have more going on than you know how to deal with. Practical experiments like Card’s are not controlled experiments capable of replication. Rather, they happen in the middle of very complex societies. As just one example, the New Jersey employers had early notice that the minimum wage would be hiked, and some may have cut their workforce before the raise took effect.

So debate continues about what, if anything, Card’s New Jersey natural experiment proved. Reputable polls of reputable economists suggest a slight majority still think a big increase in the minimum wage across the United States would probably cost jobs.

And yet examining questions like this can yield clear insights about how society might improve itself — and that seems to be the case with this year’s laureate, Claudia Goldin. Perhaps even more than Card, she has convinced many of her colleagues that what they might have thought was going on wasn’t fact the real story.

When Goldin was growing up, she says, she read most of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and the famous fictional detective’s fascination with mysteries rubbed off on her. “I think of myself as Sherlock Holmes,” she told me last year.

In her work on women’s labour, Goldin could not simply pick up existing statistics. She had to act as a real-world Sherlock Holmes, piecing together the picture of women’s labour market experience from a messy pile of incomplete historical data. As friend and fellow economics professor Deirdre McCloskey notes, “She’s just wonderful about finding new sources of information about the past… that’s what makes her unusual.” Economics has sometimes favoured maths nerds, but nowadays it likes data nerds at least as much.

Goldin has put her hard-won data to many purposes. But among her most important is her investigation of the gender pay gap in most professional and managerial occupations across most Western nations.

People talk about “how we need to devise methods to eliminate bias,” she says. “I couldn’t agree more. But that isn’t going to solve the big issue.” Rather than rely on bias as an explanation, Goldin describes how the gender pay gap arises predominantly from the “couple inequality” between men and women with professional or managerial training. In this dynamic, she argues, women often end up effectively sacrificing their own careers when children arrive so that their husbands can work longer hours and get ahead. What Goldin has identified is the skewing effect of social expectations built up over decades — in a sense, the raw weight of history on today’s labour market.

As McCloskey puts it, Goldin “brings a fresh perspective to what is usually thought of as sheer exploitation.”

Goldin’s explanation for the gender pay gap is particularly remarkable because she has gone to such lengths to assess all the more popular explanations — hiring bias, pushy men, negotiation dynamics, occupational segregation. And perhaps most remarkably of all, given the sensitivity of this territory, her gender work has so far proved immune to attack. It simply fits the facts far better than any of the alternatives.

In an ever more complex social world, Goldin has shown it is still possible to put together a convincing story about what is going on.

Goldin’s pay gap research is in some ways harder to describe than, say, David Card’s minimum wage work. (One of her own attempts is here.) But more so than Card, Goldin’s work points to solutions. Notably, she argues many businesses need to change the way they structure jobs and pay to give professionals and managers more flexibility to take care of children for a few years without destroying their careers.

None of us should overstate economists’ ability to answer complex economic and social questions. But neither should we understate the importance of trying — and of acknowledging those who make truly great attempts. •

The post What the Nobel Prize tells us about economics appeared first on Inside Story.

Attorney-general Mark Dreyfus’s representative in the Senate, Murray Watt, made that pledge to Senator Thorpe on 7 November last year. Lawyer Megan Davis, an adviser to the government on the vote, was equally emphatic: “A referendum to establish a Voice to Parliament will not impede an unceded, unextinguished sovereignty asserted by First Nations people.” As 2023 began, Dreyfus repeated his view that putting the Voice in the Constitution would have no impact on sovereignty. Labor senator Malarndirri McCarthy gave a similar assurance on the ABC’s Q&A in late January.

But the government seemed reluctant to define what Indigenous sovereign rights entailed. During the July debate on the constitutional alteration bill, government speakers avoided mentioning that the Uluru Statement envisaged the Voice as a step towards a treaty. (The Greens were keen to make that point.) While the government remains nominally committed to implementing the Uluru Statement’s demand for Voice, Treaty and Truth, the fact that a Voice would enable a treaty has more often been highlighted by the No than the Yes campaign.

First Nations activists have good reason to explore the possible meanings of Indigenous sovereignty, but not all of them agree. Some Indigenous Australians, for example, reject “sovereignty” and “treaty” as counterproductive “separatism.” Some who want a treaty reject the Voice as an impediment (Warren Mundine) or as a diversion (Michael Mansell), while others who will vote Yes see the Voice as the body that could legitimately negotiate a treaty with the Australian government. Such diversity has been one of the revelations of the referendum debate.

Three clusters of First Nations thinking have become evident. Some, as mentioned, reject “separatism,” a term broad enough to include the Voice and any treaty. Others, supporters of “Blak sovereignty,” warn that constitutional recognition would pre-empt sovereignty recognised in a treaty. A third group takes a gradualist position, envisaging sovereignty as a steadily accumulating regional practice of land and native title rights.

Against “Indigenous separatism”

The anti-separatist position is exemplified by two First Nations participants in the referendum debate: academic psychologist Anthony Dillon and senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Writing in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph on 24 April 2019 under the heading “Close the Gap on Myths,” Dillon attacked a series of “myths”: that only Aboriginal people are expert on Aboriginal affairs, that only Aboriginal adults can raise an Aboriginal child, and that government is totally to blame for the problems facing Aboriginal people.

It is also a myth, Dillon wrote, that “we cannot move forward until this country acknowledges the atrocities of the past” and that Aboriginal people are victims of colonisation. And it is a myth that “Aboriginal people are an homogeneous group with all members equally disadvantaged,” given that many are thriving. “When we speak of closing the gap,” he wrote, “let’s focus on those who are most disadvantaged.”

Dillon believes these myths distract us from “the important issues facing Aboriginal people, like the need for employment, job readiness, good schools, ready access to modern services, and good housing.”

More recently, in 2022, in an essay titled “The Voice: Self-Determination or Separatism?” Dillon argued that “self-determination” policies mistakenly assume that Indigenous Australians are essentially different from other Australians and essentially similar to each other. Many individuals’ access to education and employment had, he said, been weakened as a result.

For Dillon, the leaders of the Yes campaign are those who successfully grasped education and employment opportunities despite self-determination policies. The Voice would, he argues, empower these successful Indigenous people to entrench a policy paradigm that is failing other Indigenous people. If anyone needs a voice, he says, it is the Indigenous Australians whose lives are much worse than the lives of Voice advocates. He has since confirmed that he will vote No.

As a National Party senator, Jacinta Price can seem like a typical rural conservative populist, repeatedly positioning herself as a critic of urban elites. She gives this stance a particular inflection: as the champion of abused women and children in First Nations communities who can’t gain the attention of the powerful (including leaders of Indigenous organisations). We should “amplify” the regions, she says, so we can hear the unheard.

Yet Price and the Nationals haven’t endorsed the Liberals’ proposal for a legislated regional Voice, so it isn’t clear how they would amplify the cries of the unheard — other than by persuading them to vote National. The constitutionally enshrined Voice, says Price, is likely to be a “bureaucracy” controlled by those whom she has called “the Qantas-sponsored leaders of the activist industry.” She blames Indigenous policy failure on these activist elites.

Price is ambivalent about whether we should characterise “the regions” in cultural terms. Social policy should assist people according to their needs rather than their distinct culture and historical experiences, she says. But she also sees the problems of Indigenous remote communities as cultural. When she recently denied that Aboriginal people are suffering intergenerational trauma as a result of colonisation, she suggested that their lives are instead blighted by “something much closer to home” — violent ways continuing from precolonial times.

Campaigning for a No vote, Price has highlighted her own family’s experiences. As a second-generation agent of what anthropologist Paul Burke calls the “Warlpiri diaspora,” she grew up in a household in Alice Springs rather than in the Warlpiri homelands. In this location and in her choice of a non-Indigenous husband she has followed her mother. Burke describes the “Warlpiri matriarchs” of this Australia-wide diaspora as “refashioning” Warlpiri tradition by adding non-kin to their stock of social capital. Price has presented her family as paradigmatic of a unified Australia threatened by Indigenous separatism.

Blak sovereignty as a rupture with the past

Having left the Greens earlier in the year and announcing herself as a leader of the Blak sovereignty movement, Lidia Thorpe moved the following amendment to the referendum bill during July’s parliamentary debate:

Nothing in this Act shall be taken to cede or disturb the Sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people means an unceded right held in collective possession by the members of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations which confers usage, access and custodianship to the lands, waters and natural resources of what is now known as Australia, and the right of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to exercise an unimpeded and collective self‑determinate governance over their political, economic and social affairs.

Two features of Thorpe’s thinking are worth highlighting. Although she has sometimes demanded that Australian law align with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, she hasn’t acknowledged the UNDRIP’s approach to sovereignty.

According to Article 46 of the UNDRIP, Indigenous peoples’ self-determination should do nothing to “dismember or impair totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.” In other words, the UNDRIP would require that First Nations sovereignty coexist with and pragmatically accept Australian sovereignty, working within Australia’s federal and state constitutions and laws. Yet Thorpe’s formulation of Indigenous sovereignty includes these words: “Sovereignty has never been ceded, our sovereignty does not coexist with the sovereignty of the crown.”

In their repudiation of Australia’s legal framework, the Blak sovereigns distinguish themselves from advocates of Indigenous sovereignty who see potential in Australia’s existing Constitution. One of them, Michael Mansell — a No advocate — believes parliament should create a seventh state of Australia, its territory combining all Aboriginal lands (as long as the owners consented).

Other champions of Indigenous Australia’s many emerging polities also see potential in federalism. As University of Technology Sydney legal academic Alison Vivian and her co-authors wrote in 2017, “divided sovereignty, shared jurisdiction and a capacity to evolve in response to changing community values are fundamental attributes of federations.”

Thorpe’s rejection of Australia’s legal traditions includes a dismissal of apparently progressive laws such as native title, which she has labelled “an insult.” Of the parliament in which she now sits, she has said, “Not one piece of legislation that has ever come out of this place has been good for us. You know why? Because it’s deliberate. It’s deliberate. This place is here because they need to get rid of the Black problem.”

Such words imagine Blak sovereignty as necessitating a revolutionary rupture from an entirely bad past. As I understand the Blak sovereign position, the rupture would be brought about by truth-telling — a process of enlightenment — that would leave Australians with such a sense of collective shame that they would sign a treaty establishing First Nations sovereignty in whatever terms First Nations wanted.

This scenario conceives human history in a way that owes much to a religious imagination. By picturing a moment of settler colonial awakening, confession and collective self-perfection, Thorpe turns her back on the opportunities created by recent Australian law and policy. Hers is a historical imagination alienated from messy, incremental politics.

This anti-politics can’t concede that settler colonial history is punctuated by moments of crisis, negotiation, compromise and concessions in law and institutional design. In the Keating and Howard governments’ responses to two High Court judgements that recognised “native title” (Mabo in 1992, Wik in 1996) we have recent history that discourages  this abject pessimism.

The Blak sovereigns seem unwilling to conceive Indigenous agency as experimental, and they too easily dismiss open-ended settler colonial ideologies and practices such as “recognition.” For example, University of South Australia legal academic Irene Watson writes that “there are no remedies in the recognition game; it is like the game of snakes and ladders, which goes up and down, but leads to only one ending, our assimilation into the white Australian nation. Genocide: there is currently no other alternative on offer.”

In recent Australian historical scholarship, the idea of a settler colonial society taking genuinely progressive steps has been under suspicion among historians and political scientists who take the “settler colonial studies” approach. This view aligns with Indigenous doubts that Australia could ever overcome its original sin. To quote Watson writing about the Voice in 2017:

The current discussion in Australia about possible constitutional recognition of First Nations is out there for public consumption, in an electorate noted for its conservatism. What it means beyond the terra nullius narrative is yet unknown, but there is little to suggest that it means much more than the continuation of that same narrative: the terra nullius body dressed in the costume of “recognition.”

Sovereignty as a steadily accumulating practice

In contrast with a rupture with the past, Indigenous sovereignty could also evolve from the imperfect structures of reformed settler colonial government, including the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act (1976) the Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Act (2006), the various state and territory land rights acts, and the Native Title Act (1993).

Consider the following contrast. The “Detailed Outline of the Blak Sovereigns’ Position on the Referendum” declares that “Land rights are central to our Sovereignty. Native Title is not land rights. Our struggle for real land rights is an assertion of our Sovereignty.” Others, though, see native title legislation as the context for nurturing First Nations’ capacities for sovereignty.

That way of thinking gained academic impetus more than twenty years ago when Marcia Langton and her colleagues at the University of Melbourne joined with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in an Australian Research Council–funded project, “Agreements, Treaties and Negotiated Settlements in Settler States: Their Role and Relevance for Indigenous and Other Australians.”

In a 2002 paper, “The Nations of Australia” Langton celebrated agreements signed under the Native Title Act that acknowledged the “ancient identities” of nations such as the Wik, Thaayorre and the Alngith. Referring to Indigenous signatories as “Aboriginal nations,” she wrote: “Corporations acknowledge that pre-existing Aboriginal polities exist as a profound reality in our political and economic landscape. The Constitution does not.” She hoped that constitutional amendment would eventually acknowledge “the pre-existing Aboriginal polities, or Aboriginal nations.”

Twenty years later, proposals for amending the Australian Constitution have taken a different form — not the constitutional acknowledgment of First Nations as sovereigns but the inscription of an Indigenous Voice to advise federal parliament and the executive. But these two calls for constitutional recognition share a commitment to Indigenous regionalism — a commitment also sustained by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in the years 1990 to 2004.

Langton’s Negotiated Settlements project argued that the practice of native title — especially after the Howard government’s 1998 amendments to the Native Title Act — was a stimulus to the reformation of Aboriginal polities:

In the minimal form of Aboriginal land-holding corporation, we find that governance and dominion, such as those rights of possession asserted among Aboriginal groups in disputes over territory, are achieved both within and between such groups. As a result, we find that there are transactions that may be construed as governance in a larger entity than the clan itself.

Langton was arguing that asserting customary law in matters of land title is one stimulus for the capacity and will to act regionally. The Negotiated Settlements project concluded that “the making of agreements [has] become the principal form of engagement between Indigenous nations and the modern nation-state.”

The project never lost sight of the fact that in these dealings Indigenous Australians have negotiated not only with governments but also with non-Indigenous corporations. Private enterprises have had a material interest in recognising Indigenous polities by contracting with them.

Indigenous polities have not always had the human and material resources they need to deal with corporations and government agencies. In a paper published in 2015, Langton described the Prescribed Bodies Corporate, the organisations that hold native title, as overburdened and under-resourced. She warned against assuming that PBCs’ roots in Aboriginal customary law meant they possess sufficient social capital to do all that is expected of them.

Langton also pointed to a danger of excessive localisation and thus of “balkanisation.” To work well as polities, old forms of social organisation would have to do new things, such as forge regional alliances. She applauded native title holders who were seeking “economies of scale” through “regional governance bodies” and saw hope in the regionalist visions of Native Title Representative Bodies.

Pointing to the “conflicting values at work: traditional values to stay local on the one hand, and the pressures of the organisational world on the other,” Langton exhorted “Aboriginal people themselves to change their mindset about the highly localised social world that they prefer, and make a decision to escalate their administrative organisational capacity to a much higher level than they are accustomed to.”

With this background, Langton was an excellent choice to lead the design of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament with Professor Tom Calma. When it was released in December 2021, their model emphasised the local/regional foundations of the Voice. The boundaries of the thirty-five Voices would be determined by discussions between governments and Indigenous organisations.

In each region, a Voice would either be designed from scratch or (more likely) built on existing Indigenous organisations and so “leverage existing approaches… with adaptation and evolution as needed.” This continuity would give the thirty-five Local and Regional Voices legitimacy in Indigenous eyes.

Calma and Langton declined to present a blueprint for the Voices, instead suggesting nine guiding design principles. The legitimacy of the National Voice, they said, would derive from “the strength, legitimacy and authority of Local & Regional Voices.” They recommended that the National Voice not come into operation “until the vast majority of Local & Regional Voices are fully established.” The Langton and Calma vision of regionalism is descended from the regionalism that ATSIC (which had thirty-six regions) practised and that the Negotiated Settlement project theorised as the emergent practice of land rights and native title.

The contest between the Yes and No campaigns has been an opportunity for the Australian public to learn about First Nations’ political diversity. What has become increasingly clear is that the Yes/No contest has been a misleading guide to that diversity.

For example, the Yes/No divide obscures the common ground between Jacinta Price and Noel Pearson. Both Pearson (in his 2022 Boyer Lectures) and Price have argued that social policy should pay attention to socioeconomic need and not assume that Indigenous problems are distinct in causation and solution. Both of them were also very critical of the Albanese government’s abolition of the cashless debit card in 2022.

Price wins the applause of some conservative Australians by urging a critical appraisal of Indigenous traditions, but she is not the only First Nations person to urge Indigenous Australians to allow space for critically assessing the claims of “custom.” Revision of custom is part of Langton’s project too.

The building of First Nations is a concern of people on both sides of the referendum debate. Warren Mundine is a No campaigner, but he also advocates that First Nations be recognised by treaties with Australian governments. As chief executive officer of NTSCORP Ltd, the native title service provider for Traditional Owners in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, Mundine’s approach to sovereignty emerges from the practice of native title. He believes that the path to First Nations treaties will be more direct without a National Voice in the Constitution.

The strength of the Indigenous opposition to the Voice amendment has surprised and puzzled Australians who pay attention to Indigenous affairs. But the 2022 Reconciliation Barometer, conducted between 21 July and 28 August last year (before and after the prime minister’s announcement of the draft amendment) provided clues to minority Indigenous disquiet about Yes campaign themes. While 57 per cent of Indigenous respondents judged it “very important” to protect a “First Nations Body” by putting it in the Constitution and a further 30 per cent chose “fairly important,” a substantial minority of respondents weren’t committed to some of the key ideas on which the Yes campaign has drawn.

About a quarter of respondents didn’t consider themselves to be well informed about the history of Australia, about the histories of First Nations people and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. The same proportion (but not necessarily the same respondents) disbelieve or feel “unsure” about the truth of some of the main themes issuing from the critical history of colonisation — the frontier wars and the stolen generations.

Asked how we should face up to the “wrongs of the past” (deeds not specified by the survey), about half the respondents chose “There should be forgiveness for the wrongs of the past and all Australians should now move on,” a higher proportion than those who chose “Must be rectified before all Australians can move on” (38 per cent).

On the causes of Indigenous Australians’ “disadvantage,” about a third of Indigenous respondents didn’t agree that “past race-based policies” were to blame, and they didn’t see disadvantage as “Australia’s colonial legacy.” Some flatly disagreed with this linking of cause and effect; others declined to express a view. When the survey listed nine kinds of “disadvantage,” the proportion denying that government policies had caused them ranged between 9 and 12 per cent.

In 2022, the Barometer didn’t ask respondents to agree or disagree with the statement “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are responsible for their own disadvantages today.” But in four previous Barometers (2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020) between a quarter and a third of Indigenous respondents agreed with that statement.

Some Indigenous support for voting No comes from those who prioritise a treaty as the guarantee of the sovereignty they believe constitutional recognition would deny. While the 2022 Reconciliation Barometer didn’t ask respondents to rank Treaty and Voice or to choose between them, it did show that Indigenous support for a treaty is on the same level (54 per cent very important, 32 per cent fairly important) as Indigenous support for a constitutionally entrenched “Indigenous Body.”

While the Reconciliation Barometer 2022 suggests that a very high proportion of Indigenous Australians support the Yes case, it also reveals Indigenous support for ideas about history, responsibility and treaty-making that resonate with the No campaign.

The Yes/No alignments of First Nations Australians may not be an accurate guide to their differing views about sovereignty, but the debate about how to vote has at least focused attention on larger questions that Indigenous representatives will probably need to debate if a Voice is established. I see four questions.

In what ways are First Nations people distinct from/the same as other Australians? This is a cross-cutting question, open to many contextual answers.

At what scale can Indigenous representation operate? Some would agree with Warren Mundine that there can be no effective representation of Indigenous interests above the level of a First Nation. Others argue that a national representative body is both possible and necessary.

What is the relationship between citizenship within a First Nation and Australian citizenship? This question arises when Indigenous Australians debate whether access to welfare should be contingent on the approval of local Indigenous authorities (as it has in the Cape York experiment).

The question arises also in debates about what role (if any) Indigenous community organisations should play in the authentication of the Indigenous identity of individuals.

As the Australian Indigenous project experiments with the political and legal devices that Australian history is making available, such questions will demand attention. In this sense, the recently revealed diversity of Indigenous opinion about the Voice is but a stage in the formation of First Nations’ political thought. •

The post A steady path to sovereignty? appeared first on Inside Story.

As we walked across the village’s central playing field after church, Wea described the scene there just over thirty-five years ago: seven French military helicopters, two dozen army trucks, and some 300 French special forces and police sharpshooters ready for action. In the bush near Gossanah, nineteen Kanaks were holding twenty-three French police hostage. They had raided the island’s gendarmerie, met more resistance than expected and killed four police before decamping to a remote cave with seized weapons and their hostages.

The raid was intended to be part of a territory-wide show of force by the Melanesians in support of independence for the country they called Kanaky. Seven months earlier, in September 1987, a narrow majority of white and other settlers had voted in a referendum to remain with France. The Kanaks had boycotted the poll in the belief that the result had been preset by officially encouraged immigration in previous decades. Kanaks had occupied traditional lands in the north of the main island, a settler ambush had killed ten Kanaks, and in January 1988, a sharpshooter had killed a Kanak would-be guerilla leader holed up in a seized farmhouse.

Despite the planning, the Ouvéa rebels found themselves acting alone in April–May 1988 — and a tough reaction to the kidnapping offered France’s ambitious conservative prime minister, Jacques Chirac, a chance to boost his prospects in the looming national presidential elections.

Just three days before Chirac faced off with Socialist incumbent François Mitterrand in the second round of the election, and after half-hearted negotiations for a peaceful surrender, Chirac ordered an all-out assault on the cave. Sixteen Kanaks were killed during the attack, two executed after their capture, and their leader was allowed to die of wounds without medical attention. Two soldiers died, and all the hostages were freed.

As it turned out, Mitterrand prevailed in the election. Chirac was replaced as PM by a Socialist, Michel Rocard, who brought the shocked Kanak leader, former Catholic priest Jean-Marie Tjibaou, and the loyalist leader, businessman Jacques Lafleur, to Matignon near Paris, locked them in, and presented a plan. Putting off a vote on independence for ten years, it pledged more training and involvement for Kanaks, and more investment in rural and island lands.

Tjibaou made a unilateral decision and signed the deal. Lafleur did too. They shook hands for a photo. And so the Matignon Accord was born. A decade later, in 1998, the Nouméa Accord postponed the independence decision for another fifteen to twenty years, when it would be put to three spaced-out referendums to make sure every voter made a considered choice.

Many Kanaks — among them Charles Wea’s uncle, a former protestant pastor named Djubelly Wea — had misgivings. A strong believer in independence, Djubelly had been among Gossanah villagers detained and roughed up by French troops looking for the cave. After the troops’ assault, he and twenty-eight others were jailed for several months in Paris without trial.

When Tjibaou came to Ouvéa on the first anniversary of the cave attack to speak at the burial site of the nineteen Kanaks, Djubelly stepped forward, shouted, “Long live Kanaky! Long live independence!” then pulled out a pistol and shot dead the former priest and his deputy, Yeiwéné Yeiwéné. A bodyguard then fatally shot their assailant too.

Walking through Gossanah, Wea and I came to a small, tiered garden with walls of coral rock that turned out to be Djubelly’s grave. Back in Nouméa, his victim, Tjibaou, is venerated as a kind of Gandhi or Mandela of the Pacific, and an Oceanic cultural centre designed by Renzo Piano is named after him. I asked Charles how his uncle’s reputation stands now.

His answer shocked me. “A lot of people think he was right,” the Kanak diplomat said. “They are saying: after more than thirty years of talk, where have we got?” Shocking it might have been, but his answer chimed with the sense that the politics of New Caledonia have come in a grand circle since 1987, with an increasing risk of an explosion like the Ouvéa cave drama.

When the time came for the series of three independence referendums promised in the Nouméa Accord, the French government was back in the hands of a conservative president, Emmanuel Macron. Like his predecessors, left and right, Macron was against giving the Kanaks any more voting weight than other French citizens, though the accord had “frozen” the electoral roll at 1998 to keep out later immigrants.

In the first referendum, in 2018, the vote for independence was 43 per cent. By the second, in 2020, it had grown to 47 per cent. The third vote was looming as a close-run thing at the end of 2021. Then, in September that year, Covid-19’s Delta variant swept through New Caledonia, quickly infecting over 13,000 of its 270,000 people. More than 280 of them died, about 60 per cent of them Kanaks.

With its communities having embarked on the customary year of mourning, the Kanak parties begged for the referendum to be postponed for a year. Quarantine restrictions limited movement, adding to the disadvantages faced by Kanak parties campaigning with village meetings while the urbanised loyalists could rely on the internet.

Macron, for his part, was facing his first re-election test in April 2022. His competition came from the further right, notably Marine Le Pen. He needed a boost for French national pride, especially after Scott Morrison delivered his humiliating submarine decision in September 2021.

When he and territories minister Sébastien Lecornu insisted the New Caledonia vote go ahead, the Kanak parties decided on a boycott. Participation fell from around 86 per cent in the earlier two independence votes to 43.9 per cent, with the non-voters concentrated in Kanak regions. Of those who voted, 96.5 per cent chose No and only 3.5 per cent Yes.

The result was immediately declared “null and void” by the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a forum of Vanuatu, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. The Pacific Islands Forum — a wider regional grouping that includes Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian states as well as Australia and New Zealand — was more diplomatic: the boycott needed to be considered in “the contextual consideration and analysis of the result.”

Unfazed, Macron declared that “France is more beautiful because New Caledonia decided to stay.” Local opponents of independence were also jubilant. “Tonight we are French and we will stay that way. It’s no longer negotiable,” said fervent loyalist Sonia Backès, president of the Southern Province region. To her, the Nouméa Accord was defunct, allowing the electoral rolls to be thrown open to more recent arrivals and special economic support for Kanak-dominated regions to be wound up.

Macron echoed these sentiments when he visited New Caledonia in July this year accompanied by a squadron of Rafale fighters and their air refuellers and transports designed to demonstrate France’s ability to swing military power into the Pacific. New Caledonia was French because it had chosen to be French in three referendums, he told a crowd of 10,000 tricolour-waving Europeans and Polynesians in Nouméa’s Place des Cocotiers.

Now the next stage of economic development could begin, he said, transforming locally mined nickel into a low-cost green-energy industry and expanding agriculture. The voice of France would resonate across the Indo-Pacific, boosted by a new military academy in the territory for the region’s armed forces. “If independence is to choose tomorrow to have a Chinese base, here, or be dependent on other fleets, good luck!” he declared.

On the political future, he invited loyalists and independence parties to a trilateral dialogue, mentioning more than once that the freeze on the electoral roll had always been “transitional” and had led to “exclusions and frustrations.” He had already inducted Backès into government as a junior minister, responsible for citizenship.

Macron then travelled on to Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, where he declared France was an “enhancer of sovereignty” for Pacific island nations, helping protect them against a “new imperialism.” The ironies were not lost on his audiences.

Kanak and loyalist parties were back in Paris for those talks last month, and will continue negotiating in Nouméa later this month. In Paris, Macron’s prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, now presiding over a minority government, put forward what was described, strangely, as a document martyr, a paper to be chewed over and torn apart before taking any final form.

On the critical question of electoral eligibility, the new external territories minister, Gérald Darmanin, revealed voters in territorial and regional elections would need to have been born in New Caledonia or resident for ten years. Whether or not the pro-independence alliance, FLNKS, agreed, the electoral roll would be “unfrozen” in this way before provincial elections due by May 2024.

Questions of self-determination, meanwhile, would be deferred for at least “two generations” from a new accord, Darmanin said — probably about sixty years. “There is no longer a sword of Damocles,” he added, although only the loyalists had felt thus threatened.

Aside from the backlash among Melanesian countries, Macron’s decision is seen as folly by some seasoned observers in New Caledonia, and appears likely to raise tensions and threaten unrest. Mathias Chauchat, a public law professor at the University of New Caledonia, says Macron is being likened to Bonaparte, who listened to no advice, even from his own ambassadors. “The French politicians are living in the past, in the 1960s,” he tells me. “I don’t understand it. It’s crazy. France is not a modern state like the other democracies.”

Others I spoke to wondered if the Kanak leadership would have the stomach to abandon their comfortable positions, as Macron is gambling they won’t. But being ousted after the electoral roll changes could harden their attitude. A return to violent protest was likely, and could happen without much warning. Chauchat shares those fears. “If you lose the majority, you have to go on the street, the terrain,” he says. “It would lead to unrest.”

I recount the remark Charles Wea had made at his uncle’s grave to Patrice Godin, a social anthropologist who has studied and lived among the Kanaks for decades. For Godin, Wea’s remark reinforces the risks of changing the electoral system to make any real decolonisation unimaginable for a long time.

“When political negotiations fail, it is not the most open and moderate leaders who prevail, but the most radical,” says Godin. “One wonders whether the French government is aware of this. I am currently sensing great concern among Kanak elected representatives and political decision-makers. If they fail to change the government’s policy, they know that their activists, their voters and the majority of the Kanak population will withdraw their support.”

These leaders are already facing a great deal of criticism, he adds. “If the government doesn’t listen to them, it will contribute to the rise of a new generation of Kanak politicians who will be less conciliatory than those they are discussing with today. This may take time, but it is inevitable. Kanak demands are too far advanced for the movement to die out.”

True, Godin says, the thirty-five years since the Matignon Accord have changed the Kanak people and their way of life, producing more graduates, managers and intellectuals. “But this evolution has in no way altered the Kanak desire for decolonisation. Quite the contrary, as shown by the results of the three referendum consultations on the way out of the Nouméa Accord. We might even say that this desire is more considered and it is a result of the changes that have taken place.”

The nationalist idea has matured to the point where the Union Calédonienne’s Daniel Goa and some other Kanak leaders are talking of “interdependence” with France following a transfer of sovereignty, an arrangement that recalls the pacts of free association the Cook Islands have with New Zealand or the Marianas with the United States.

While full independence was “false gold” for the Kanak parties, “it’s very difficult for them to ask for an associated state because they think France will lie to them,” Chauchat says. “There is no trust between the current French government and the Kanaks. If you want an agreement, you need trust first.”

Such an idea was proposed by Mitterrand’s high commissioner in Nouméa, Edgard Pisani, during the 1987–88 troubles, and would achieve decolonisation while maintaining French military bases. (The Kanak parties have no interest in building their own military.) But the option has since been studiously ignored by Paris, perhaps because it might win local support.

“There is no other solution, and definitely no solution in France,” says Chauchat, adding: “France never honours its words. It has always failed in its decolonisation processes… It will end in tragedy like everywhere.” The best option now for the Kanaks is to prevent the opening up of the electoral roll and keep the dream of independence alive, he says. “We have to wait.”

Macron still needs to persuade New Caledonia’s parties to agree to his new plan, and then his minority government must win a 60 per cent vote of approval from a joint sitting of the national assembly and senate to amend the French constitution, into which the Nouméa Accord is written. He is hoping his show of French force against China will win regional sympathy, which seems unlikely. The island states have no particular liking for China, but they will take its money and projects, and they will use its perceived threat to get more out of the other powers.

“If, as President Macron claims, France’s project is to contribute to the creation of an Indo-Pacific axis to stem Chinese expansion in the region, it will have to be admitted into the club of states of the region,” Godin says. “For the moment, this is proving difficult. The small island states see France as it is in the region, one of the last old-style colonial powers. All these countries are in favour of New Caledonian independence, and more or less openly support Kanak nationalist claims.”

France lacks the resources for a region-wide aid and development effort. And the United States and its allies need the support of the island states against Chinese coercion. “From this point of view, France is more of a pebble in their shoe than a reliable and legitimate ally,” says Godin. “By clinging to the last shreds of its colonial past, France is in fact a cumbersome ally.”

Still, Macron’s ambition, recalling Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, has its fans. Many Australians sympathise with Macron over the submarine affair and appreciate the way he called out Morrison as a liar. Richard Marles, the defence minister, is said to have struck a rapport with his French counterpart, Sébastien Lecornu, the same man who as territories minister helped push through the third referendum in New Caledonia. Marles is due in Nouméa in December for a gathering of Pacific defence ministers hosted by Lecornu.

Potentially complicating Australia’s approach was foreign minister Penny Wong’s appointment in March of Australia’s first ambassador for First Nations people, Justin Mohamed. The ambassador’s office, she said, “enables deep engagement with many of our closest partners including the Pacific family” and embeds Indigenous perspectives in Australian foreign policy.

Yet when she visited New Caledonia in April, Wong failed to acknowledge that the Kanaks — who were the first to settle its islands some 3000 years ago and now make up 42 per cent of the population (with Europeans accounting for 24 per cent, according to the most recent census, in 2019) — should be accorded a special right of decolonisation. “Institutional arrangements in New Caledonia are a matter for the people of New Caledonia and the French state,” was as far as she went, while repeatedly praising the French contribution to “security and prosperity in the Pacific.”

Of course, if Wong does want to raise the First Nations angle at some point — always difficult given Australia’s history — a No majority in our own referendum this month won’t help.

Meanwhile, though, pro-French loyalists are losing ground overall in the Pacific. In French Polynesia, the independence party led by veteran nuclear-testing opponent Oscar Temaru has won a majority in the assembly and now leads an autonomous government. In New Caledonia, a Kanak has just won a seat in the French senate for the first time after a vote-swapping deal with a dissident loyalist who beat Backès for the other seat. Every year recently, about 2000 white residents pack up and leave, gradually shifting the demographics, and métissage (intermarriage) between Kanaks and Polynesian migrants is on the rise.

Bonapartist or Gaullist, Macron is unheeding. His policies could well be driving New Caledonia back to the tense days of the 1980s, a condition of civil war. Younger Kanaks may see violence as a way of speeding up the French exodus. “Emmanuel Macron seems to be blinded by his ambitions for France and to understand nothing of what is happening today in New Caledonia and in the Pacific,” says Patrice Godin. “I still want to believe that it’s not too late to wake up.” •

The post France’s stubborn grip appeared first on Inside Story.

Nearby on stage, illuminated by blue and pink lights, was a Yamaha piano and Nord Wave synthesiser, a set of drums, a double bass on a stand, and an upended tenor saxophone. Leaning against a piano leg was an open backpack full of sheet music. The 616 club has twenty or thirty tables and a standing area, with a jumble of air-conditioning ducts running overhead. Attendance was reasonable, but not crowded. The audience was mostly middle-aged or older.

The day before, Nock had learned by chance of the death of a woman who had captivated him in America forty years ago. It prompted a reflective mood. Chatting between the sets he remarked that someday soon he wanted to begin an account of his career, of his life in music, not to glorify himself but to understand his lifetime playing jazz.

Perhaps he had not been the best jazz pianist of his generation, he said, but he had never wanted to be. All the same he had been pretty good. Listening now to some old tracks he was sometimes surprised to hear how good. The best jazz pianists of his time, perhaps better than him, he thought, included Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea. He pondered a moment. Maybe not Chick.

A few weeks earlier Nock had told me he planned to compose more and perhaps perform less. At eighty-three “my fingers don’t move the way they used to,” he complained. “My memory is not so good. I worry about myself sometimes. There is a time you have to pack it up. I would like to bow out then.”

Nock probably doesn’t expect anyone to take these melancholy thoughts seriously. Once seated at the piano, his baseball cap shading him from the stage lights, he sheds his years. Body inclined to the piano, fingers darting over the keys, head twisted towards the saxophonist, bassist and drummer on his right, eyes half closed, teeth bared, one foot tapping, singing inaudibly to himself, cackling with delight as the music builds, Nock’s lively presence resembles photos of him at the piano in Sydney before he left for America more than sixty years ago. Age amuses him. Introducing his band at a 616 performance a few years ago, he stumbled over the name of his bassist, a late substitute. “A senior moment,” he told the audience, tapping his head in disbelief, “and at my age!”

The 1 September performance marked the tenth anniversary of the opening of 616, which Nock had played with the same band in 2013. Karl Laskowski was on tenor sax, Brett Hirst on bass, and James “Pug” Waples on drums, all of them younger than Nock by many decades. They mostly played Nock’s compositions, including “Vale John,” a piece from his new Hearing album. They also played Ornette Coleman’s 1958 Jayne. It was edgy music that left plenty of room for improvisation and extended solos from Nock and Laskowski, as well as Hirst and Waples. Along with Cecil Taylor, another free jazz exponent, Coleman was one of Nock’s early musical influences.

Nock might disregard age, but even so his latest album is not a young pianist’s music. The thirteen lyrical, spare pieces on Hearing, released on ABC Jazz in July, are mostly his own compositions and all are played solo on piano. Their mood is often elegiac. They are the creation of a mature artist unconcerned by flourish and display.

Playing one of the tracks from Hearing on his Sydney 2MBS program, jazz writer and presenter Frank Presley described Nock as a piano “genius.” Even allowing for the customary overstatement of the jazz world, it is high praise. It is wonderful music, each note distinct and thoughtfully played, with Nock’s characteristic depth beneath its surface.

The album brings reminders not only of his long career, of the development of a style drawing on free jazz, bebop, hard bop and fusion, of nearly thirty years of playing in the United States when jazz was in one of its most creative phases, but also of his love of Bach. At home “I play a lot of Bach these days, the inventions, partitas, fugues — I play a lot, badly,” he says. Bach is a “compendium of stuff. As a reference tool it is the best, a great springboard.” “You might hear a bit of Bach” in his recent album, he tells me “because it is there.”

Nock was unavoidably absent from 616 for a while after being knocked over at a pedestrian crossing, his shin pinned underneath a heavy SUV. (“It was, like, a truck!” Nock says indignantly.) Otherwise he played there from time to time even during the pandemic. If you stopped by on one of those nights and hadn’t heard Nock before, you could find yourself listening with astonishment to the piano player on the raised platform, in the obscuring pool of blue and pink lights, shoulders hunched over the keyboard.

The quality of his playing, his musical inventiveness, his fluency and command are all out of the box, of a quality you had no reason to expect to find under the air-conditioning ducts of an office building in Ultimo.

You could ponder this and also realise with bewilderment that the pandemic meant there were just twenty or thirty people in the room, sometimes fewer. It was like being in front of a Cézanne with only one or two other people in the gallery. Nock was untroubled. Between sets he chatted to friends at the tables, beer in hand, chuckling. He is remarkably modest, though there has always been tension between his boundless musical ambition and the injunction in his New Zealand childhood that he should never skite.

It is nearly forty years since he returned from the United States. What he brought back with him, what he gave so much to acquire, what distinguishes him as a musician, was a quarter century of music-making with the best jazz musicians of his generation, with skills impossible to acquire in any other way embedded in his mind and fingers. He brought back the experience not only of listening to the best players of American jazz in the sixties, seventies and eighties, and of knowing them, but also of creating his own part in the greatest years of bebop, hard bop and fusion jazz, a time now past yet still as much a part of our contemporary culture as Impressionism.

He returned in 1985 with those skills, that knowledge, together with a long catalogue of his recorded music and plenty of his own compositions on dog-eared bundles of paper, and otherwise with a few keyboards, a Hanon piano exercise book he had been using since he was seventeen, and not much else by way of physical possessions or financial substance.

Nock’s American career followed the curve of a great phase in jazz. He landed in Boston in 1961, the year after Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, around the time of Hank Mobley’s Soul Station and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps. It all seemed to happen at once. Nock was playing when Mingus was still in his forties and Bill Evans and Ornette Coleman barely in their thirties. Louis Armstrong was still playing. Sidney Bechet had died in France only a few years earlier.

By the time Nock left in 1985 it was all fading away. It was the year before Miles Davis made the electronic-funk album Tutu, book-ending a jazz era that had begun not long before Nock arrived and ended not long after he left. Many love the music that came before and came after, but that wasn’t what came in between. With thirty more years of playing and teaching since, Nock has continued to explore, to move on, yet his style, his values, arise from an experience in jazz now impossible to replicate.

Born in New Zealand in 1940 and raised in the small North Island town of Ngaruawahia, Nock was introduced to the piano by his father, an amateur player. As the pianist tells it, he was soon enthralled by jazz, listening with wonder to the broadcast of the 1953 Toronto concert of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell on piano, Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Charles Mingus on bass and Max Roach on drums. “Here is some truth,” he thought. “Here is something that is definitely happening.” When Nat King Cole visited New Zealand two years later, the fifteen-year-old took himself to Auckland to hear him.

Shocked by the sudden death of his father in 1952, he had experienced a spiritual crisis, abandoning the Catholicism of his boyhood. Music “became my religion.” Yet formal musical training was out of reach. Unlike many of his contemporaries, including Jarrett, Hancock and Corea, Nock was entirely self-taught. “I had been playing for ten years,” he recalls “before I knew what a scale was.”

He blew out of New Zealand at eighteen, terrified by the risk that his life might be insignificant. He was, he told his biographer Norman Meehan, “afraid of being a nonentity,” a particular problem for a New Zealander enthralled by the most American of musical forms, jazz.

Talented, energetic, always learning, Nock was successfully performing in Sydney and Melbourne before he was twenty, playing piano in bands backing visitors Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan, forming the then well-known 3-Out Trio and recording the album Move in 1960. “It was a huge hit,” recalled Nock, adding characteristically, “in many respects it’s been downhill ever since.” Nock’s ambition was to move to the United States, the home of jazz. “I do have a big ego,” he reflects. “I was pretty arrogant. I was single-minded to the exclusion of everything else. I think that explains my success. I was headstrong.”

At twenty-one he was on his way to Boston’s Berklee School of Music on a scholarship from Downbeat magazine. He soon dropped out of Berklee but remained in Boston four years, playing in local clubs and in backing bands for visitors including saxophonists Yusef Lateef, Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Stitt and Zoot Sims, and clarinetist Pee Wee Russell.

By 1964, he was the pianist in Lateef’s band, touring the United States and playing on Lateef’s remarkable Live at Pep’s albums. Settling in New York he played local clubs, toured with singer Dionne Warwick, and was delighted when Art Blakey engaged him for Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, replacing the departing Keith Jarrett. It still rankles with Nock that he was hospitalised with hepatitis after one performance with Blakey. “I was in great health — up to that moment!” he laments. The job passed to Chick Corea.

With a group led by West Coast saxophonist John Handy, Nock again toured, before settling in San Francisco in 1967. Handy’s admired album Projections, released in 1968, featured Nock on keyboard. In San Francisco, Nock formed what was widely regarded as one of the first jazz-rock fusion groups, Fourth Way. The band made several admired albums and played a celebrated appearance at the 1970 Montreux Jazz Festival, before dissolving in 1971.

Four years later Nock was back in New York, this time often playing solo. In the late seventies he reached a new peak with the Mike Nock Quartet, a band that included saxophonist Michael Brecker. The quartet’s 1978 album In, Out and Around recorded Nock at his magical best in those New York years, notably on “Hadrian’s Wall” and “Shadows of Forgotten Love.”

While there are excellent piano solos from Nock, some of the most pleasing tracks are those in which the interplay between sax and piano is most inventive. Nock also played the saxophone as a teenager, so he knows what the saxophonist wants and plays to it. That is most evident on the title track but true of all the tracks on the album. “In, Out and Around,” Nock thinks, has “stood the test of time.” He credits Becker but adds, “I was playing pretty good in those times.”

With a US bassist and drummer Nock recorded Ondas in Oslo a few years later. The album was released by ECM Germany. He wrote all six compositions on the album, so they represent both his compositional accomplishment and his style after twenty years of playing at the top level. The album includes a longer version of “Forgotten Love,” and “Land of the Long White Cloud” — both played with wistful restraint.

At a time when there were white bands and black bands, Nock was an unconcerned outsider. Yusef Lateef and John Handy are both Black. Nock mostly played with Black musicians. Even now, long after he left the United States, his language trails the culture in which he was immersed. He speaks of his “stoodents,” of having “atta-tood.” His colleagues are cats (or black cats). Good music is cool.

Nock’s engagement with music was so complete that great events of America passed him by. He arrived in the United States a few years before John Kennedy was killed, and was there for Los Angeles riots, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the freedom march from Selma to Montgomery, the Vietnam war and Robert Kennedy’s assassination. He was all but oblivious. “It is amazing,” he says, “particularly since I was working with Black musicians. I have learnt more about those events watching ABC documentaries since I’ve been back than I ever did living through it in the States.”

By 1981, still only forty-one, Nock could claim a hard-won place in the world of American jazz. He had worked with many of the greats and learned from them, including Sonny Rollins, Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman among many others. He had formed and led two widely admired bands in quite different jazz genres, and been part of many celebrated recordings. He had become an accomplished soloist and composer, as well as a band pianist. He had been panned sometimes but far more often praised by reviewers, including favourable mentions in Downbeat.

All the while he had been growing, refusing to stay still, refusing to be part of commercial music, developing a style that was recognisably his own. While his music is usually melodic, he doesn’t often play jazz standards. “I play them sometimes,” he says, “but not too often because, hey — why?” Even Rollins recorded “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top”; it is hard to imagine Nock doing so, although he says he has “huge respect” for standards and the American songbook. His own compositions are tuneful but not memorably so, and usually built from simple, repeated chord forms. They are the building blocks of a mostly improvised musical structure. With an average length of around thirty-two bars, a Nock composition might take less than a minute played straight through. A seven- or eight-minute track based on his melody is mostly improvisation around it.

Nock has always had an ambivalent relationship to solo performing. He seems to prefer the music made when he plays with others, even when (or especially when) they are playing his own compositions. “I was not burning to make a solo record, or to be a soloist,” he says of Hearing. He also thinks of music-making as a cooperative activity.

Refusing classification, Nock seeks “freedom of expression” using “all the elements” of modern jazz. Though an accomplished technician, Nock more commonly refers to feeling than technique when talking about jazz. “Jazz is an attitude,” he says, “it transcends style. You play who you are. The best jazz musicians are also inspiring people.” Technically skilled music “doesn’t interest me.” He wants to “communicate feeling.” He quotes the advice often attributed to Armstrong: it ain’t whatcha say, it’s howcha say it.

By the early 1980s, when Nock had been playing in the United States for twenty years, jazz had long given way to pop and rock among young audiences. Jazz record sales were on their way down to a level just above classical and just below children’s music. The internet was only a few years away, and with it would come file sharing and the long, slow and irreversible decline in physical album sales.

Always uncertain, Nock’s career became perilous. As a studio musician in New York he found work, but not always the kind of work he wanted. In Manhattan he lived in tough and scary neighbourhoods. From time to time he was mugged. Thieves broke into his apartments. Relationships crashed. Married twice and divorced twice, he wanted more stability in his personal life. He did not own a home or significant financial assets, his income was meagre. If he thought about getting by in America as he grew older, he would have been troubled.

At the end of the eighties he moved out to New Jersey to join his then partner and her children. An hour’s drive west of New York City, Basking Ridge is an affluent white community in which Nock felt alien. His income at the time was never more than $30,000 a year in today’s US dollars, not enough to contribute much to household expenses. “I was living outside the gig zone for New York,” he recalled, and work dried up.

With few bookings or prospects of them, Nock’s life hit rock bottom. He had performed at the top level in the United States but, as Meehan records, financial success, strong sales, popularity, “passed Nock by.” He had depression, panic attacks and no money. His partner left for the west coast. Across America countless jazz musicians put away their instruments and turned to other trades. Unattached, unfunded, Nock tried Europe for a while, and then left for New Zealand.

His decades in America had given Nock what he sought — the opportunities to play the piano, to be in bands with other accomplished musicians, to be of good standing in a society of other players of stature, to practise his craft, to develop his art. Money didn’t mean much to him, which was good because there was never much. “Sure it was a hard life,” he reflects, “but what’s wrong with a hard life?”

In New Zealand he played gigs and took part in TV documentaries. Then came a call from an old friend, inviting him to take a teaching residency at the Queensland Conservatorium. He found he quite liked the chance to encourage eager young players like he’d been thirty years earlier. Not long after, eminent reed player, band leader and teacher Don Burrows called to offer a job at the Sydney Conservatorium. “Are you kidding?!” Nock responded when Burrows asked if he was interested in the job. Of course he was interested! Nock would teach generations of students there for nearly thirty years, retiring at seventy-eight. It was the first time he’d had a steady income in his entire life.

The early years back in Australia were difficult. “It took me a while to think about being back here. You don’t have the stimulus here in jazz, especially compared to New York. I’ve withdrawn a lot. I was always thinking about going back.” Looking back now, though, he thinks “the most fruitful period of my life has actually been back in Australia.”

He has been in Sydney for thirty-seven years, a lot longer than he was in the United States or New Zealand. He may have missed New York, but Nock has been able to compose as well as teach, perform, and record well-received solo albums and ensemble music. For a while he also worked selecting music for the jazz division of Naxos records. Over time he became more comfortable playing and teaching jazz in Australia. It was an opportunity to “share what I learnt. Later it was a dream, with lots of opportunities to play. I got together a band, all sixty years younger than me. An unexpected blessing at my age.”

His personal life bloomed. Twenty-five years ago, a decade or so after he came back to Sydney, Nock married Yuri Takahashi, a former cultural diplomat for Japan, and a specialist in Burmese language and cultural studies. She took her PhD in Burmese Studies at Sydney University and now teaches at the ANU. A fan, they met at one of Nock’s performances.

Their home is a semi-detached brick cottage on a quiet street in the inner-western Sydney suburb of Ashfield, an area of Federation cottages and low-rise flats. It is the first property Nock has owned, ever. They have kept many original elements — kitchen food lockers, decorative plaster cornices. Nock is also a painter and his colourful abstractions decorate the walls. The rooms are heaped with musical instruments and equipment, records and CDs, sheet music, books.

A sunny Saturday morning in August this year finds the couple at home in Ashfield, Nock sitting at his Kawai piano in a living room crowded with instruments. Around him are three young players — Ben Lerner on saxophone, Nick Jansen on bass and George Greenhill on drums. The group meets more or less weekly. Today they are practising a melody Nock wrote sixty years ago.

“I wrote the song when I lived in Boston,” Nock remarks. “It’s difficult. Even I have trouble with it these days. Difficult, but a simple melody.”

“Deceptively simple,” says Greenhill.

Nock plays the tune on the piano, then the group joins in.

Nock stops. “We weren’t getting that right.”

“You don’t mind if I am a bit late for those quarter notes?” asks Lerner.

“You asked me to be very big at the start. Maybe less full on?” queries Greenhill.

“Definitely, yes,” says Nock.

Lerner suggests playing a tune for an hour “until the drumming is completely right.”

“Yeah, put it on a loop until it is fucking perfect,” Greenhill agrees.

“What is perfect in jazz — there is no perfect,” Lerner responds.

“The better people know a line, the more you can stretch the melody,” Nock observes, changing the subject and playing the melody of another composition.

Nock isn’t pleased with his own playing. “It’s a bitch, that song. I don’t know what happens. This doesn’t sound right. I have to change my technique to play that little bit. I have to keep my fingers flat.” He critically examines his fingers.

“Don’t question yourself, Mike,” urges Greenhill.

“We are in the refinement stage of this,” says Nock. “A big learning curve for us. Let’s get the melody right.”

“That’s it!” says Nock, after another try. “It’s kinda crazy.”

“Not crazy!” insists Jansen.

“It’s feeling better,” Nock agrees. “Let’s lay out the song more clearly.”

“Mike, we are here to learn from you,” Greenhill says encouragingly.

“Yes — Mike Nock and his Three Problems,” adds Lerner.

Nock has been playing the piano now for over seventy years. At eighty-three he says he is at a “funny stage of my life — a golden era” with “lots of things changing.” He finds himself “thinking about things more.” Since he is “running out of time” he is “more interested in what I am doing now” rather than planning for the future. He may play less, compose more. “I want to write more music,” he says, though his days are still “pretty full.” He practises often to keep his fingers flexible, and swims as often as he can. The road accident reminded him of “how quickly things can change.”

Sound of mind, in reasonable health, still playing, still composing, still mentoring, Nock is tranquil. “It is easier to ride the horse in the direction it is going,” he has decided. As for the ups and downs of his career, Nock judges that “it worked for me. I’ve had a blessed life.” •

The post Blessed life appeared first on Inside Story.

Be assured that I’m not going to be sifting through your rubbish on bin night. In my day job as a social history curator I interpret historical material for display in exhibitions, and in that work the context and significance of objects is critical. In my downtime, though, I grub for the bits of history left behind in charity shops, collectables shops and markets. I’m not a collector; I just like being in the presence of old stuff.

Fine antique shops bore me because everything in them has already been assessed for its market value. All is tidily identified, with no space for adventure or mystery. I’m drawn to the places where I can be unsettled by orphaned artefacts and random associations. In charity and collectables shops it’s up to the customers to establish significance, and they’ll do this through Google searching of course, but also by drawing on their own imagination and memories.

“Oh, my mum used to have one of those!” is a commonly overheard remark, referring perhaps to vintage Tupperware or a Corningware casserole dish. I once spotted a glass jug exactly the same as the one my mother used for mint sauce, but I didn’t buy it, because really, it was rather ugly. Maybe she thought so too, but it was what she had.

Whether or not someone will buy other people’s discarded stuff depends entirely on how they reimagine its use and reinvest it with new meaning. Inversion of value is something that the French writer Raymond Queneau had great fun with in his 1967 poem “The Bin-Men Go on Strike”:

it’s strike day for the bin-men
it’s a lucky day for us
we can play ragpicker or peddler
junk dealer who knows even antiquarian
there’s a little bit of everything…

A little bit of everything. I like that. It’s a tough call, Queneau goes on, between the “eyeless armless noseless doll” or the tin of sardines “that lost all its sardines on the way” or the “can of French peas that lost all its French peas on the way,” all of it “yawn[ing] in the midday sun… ripe for the picking.” Suddenly you see a work of art abandoned by some “ignorant philistine”: the Mona Lisa is it? Or The Night Watch, the Venus de Milo or The Raft of the Medusa?

Carol Rumens chose “The Bin-Men Go on Strike” for her poem of the week earlier this year in the Guardian. She suggests that Queneau conjures “art from soiled fragmented images” and, in so doing, simultaneously goes in the opposite direction and reduces art back to rubbish. Who gets to declare what is art and what is not art? And so, I thought when I read the poem, who gets to declare what is history and what not? Anyone. Feeling superfluous is very freeing.

On a trip to Melbourne in June this year I was happily playing this game in my head in the Chapel Street Bazaar — one of the largest second-hand markets I’ve ever seen — when I was brought up short by a commemorative plate, one of those limited-edition ceramic pieces that people collect for display on shelf or wall.

After blinking at it for a few seconds I realised it depicts a moment shortly after the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788. A couple of ships lie at anchor, a Union Jack has been hoisted, and convicts and marines are busy rowing barrels of supplies to a small jetty. Someone has pitched a tent, and already a few trees have been felled to create a clearing.

It was priced at $95. Gingerly I picked it up and turned it over. The painting was titled “Ships of the First Fleet, Sydney Cove” and had been commissioned by Westminster Australia (a company specialising in commemorative ceramics, I later learned) for a limited firing to mark the Australian bicentenary in 1988. The original work was painted by maritime artist Ian Hansen.

Immediately I was taken back to the raucous year-long “celebration of a nation” that was 1988. Most particularly I remember the promotional jingle that planted a twelve-month earworm in all our heads:

Come on give us a hand,
Let’s make it grand!
Let’s make it great in ’88,
Come on give us a hand!

“The road to the Bicentenary was certainly a winding and treacherous one,” notes Frank Bongiorno in The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (2017). His remark makes me wish I had been paying more attention to the swirl of entangled ideologies going on at the time, but, living in Hobart and wrapped up in my own life, I wasn’t.

The First Fleet re-enactment did penetrate my world, mainly because the “tall ships,” as everyone called them, visited Hobart in early January 1988 for a race to Sydney ahead of the spectacular re-enactment event on the harbour on 26 January. Also on that day in Sydney a protest was attended by more than 40,000 Indigenous Australians and supporters from across the country. I don’t have Indigenous heritage and I confess it barely registered with me.

Mostly I recall a lot of people running about in period costume and the myriad television specials, concerts, books and so on. The official bicentennial logo — a map of Australia in green and gold diagonal stripes — was impossible to ignore. It was on everything from caps to coffee mugs to commemorative coins.

I thought it would be on the back of this plate too, but no, this was an unofficial production. I put it back on its little stand. It all seems such a long time ago now. Gradually I started to notice the clutter of other things on the same shelf. A matching hen and rooster in ceramic. A glazed figurine of a cat. A couple of lamps. A decanter and glasses. A bunch of artificial tulips in a vase. A stack of video cassettes topped by a biscuity-looking bust of the Madonna and child.

Tucked in next to the plate was a ceramic bell labelled “4 generations souvenir bell $45,” featuring an illustration of four generations of the royal family: the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince George. The illustration was obviously taken from a photograph of Prince George’s christening in 2013, and I discovered later that it was posed to match a photograph taken in 1894 of the christening of the future Edward VIII. In that photo, Queen Victoria is seated holding the baby prince while the child’s grandfather and father (later Edward VII and George V) stand behind. In each photo the elderly female monarch is flanked by three future English kings. Extraordinary when you think about it.

Here then, in this crazy jumble of stuff, was a glorious freewheeling rejection of the power of professional museums to control the language of acquisition and display; a laugh-out-loud moment for a curator on a day off. This is what I turn up for in collectables shops.

The centrepiece was the commemorative plate, innocently inviting the viewer to remember the earliest days of white settlement on this continent. The flag seen on the right had been hoisted at an informal ceremony on 26 January 1788 at which Captain Arthur Phillip, having decided that this was the best place to establish the colony, had gathered a small party of officers and others to drink to the success of the new colony and the health of their king, His Majesty George III.

And there, depicted on that other useless ceramic thing — the bell — are George’s smiling descendants. There’s his little namesake, who will one day (presumably) be crowned George VII. The god they all worship makes an appearance too, on that altar of video cassettes, also as a babe in arms.

A little bit of everything, at the heart of which was a yawning absence. “Ships of the First Fleet, Sydney Cove” doesn’t depict a single Indigenous person — not one of the Eora people who had cared for that coast for tens of thousands of years before Phillip’s men planted the Union Jack there.

There is nothing to suggest the complex meeting of two vastly different cultures, none of what Inga Clendinnen, in Dancing with Strangers (2003), called “hugger-mugger accidents, casual misreadings, and unthinking responses to the abrasions inevitable during close encounters of the cultural kind.” Certainly there is no hint of violent dispossession. This was a 1988 view of 1788, and all the manufacturer wanted was to make money by producing something that people would be happy to display in their living rooms.

Actually — and this is no surprise in a collectables shop — I was surrounded by numerous examples of complex cultures and histories reduced to toy-like simplicity for domestic consumption. Walking about with fresh eyes I noticed a moustached Mexican doll in a sombrero, several black baby dolls (one of them ludicrously dressed in a grass skirt), some “golliwogs,” some “African” masks and a couple of very choice examples of “Aboriginalia.”

It’s within the collectables market, in bricks and mortar and on online, that we find the best kitsch, and a lot of it is genuinely good fun. It makes us smile, and sometimes generates fresh inspiration for artists and other creatives. But look again at what lurks. While these objects tell us little about the cultures their makers sought to represent, they tell us a great deal about ourselves. Our ignorance, our insularity and casual racism take artefactual form and, over time, fall to the bottom to form a giant, heaving slurry of stuff that we often just don’t know what to do with.

“You’re not going to buy it are you?” my son Harry queried when I told him about the commemorative plate that evening. Of course not, I said, although the thought had crossed my mind. But to do so would enhance the market for this kind of thing, and would, I thought, make me complicit in the artefact’s reductive re-enactment of the past. To own it would be to accept its message. For the price of $95 I would be rejecting Clendinnen’s warning that the people of the past are more than “just ourselves tricked out in fancy dress.”

So I walked away. Yet the plain truth of it is that I’d be embarrassed to own the plate myself and I’m hoping that a public museum somewhere has acquired one so that I can shuffle responsibility from the personal to the collective. I did some searching through various online collection databases but had no success with this particular item, although that’s not to say it’s not there somewhere.

But the 1988 bicentenary seems to be fairly well represented in public collections generally, which is heartening. It shows that, after all, there is a role for publicly funded museums (and libraries and archives) to preserve evidence that disturbs and unsettles our comfortable views of ourselves and our history. It is a job too important to be left to chance. At some point, bin-men and curators all need to get back to work.

Post-referendum we are likely to be feeling more than unsettled. What does the future hold? Australia Day 2024 is not that far away. •

The post You’re not going to buy it are you? appeared first on Inside Story.

These fears echo critiques already in the Australian ether. You might have heard that Indigenous self-determination policy failed. Or maybe you have doubts that it was ever properly tried — that Indigenous people were ever given a chance to manage their own affairs. Either way, self-determination might seem like an empty promise.

The term itself is associated with policies introduced by the Whitlam government in 1973. Under the banner of self-determination, Gough Whitlam held a royal commission into Aboriginal land rights, set up a federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs, affirmed First Nations cultures and funded Indigenous corporations. Whether this amounted to the hoped-for “self-determination” — in the eyes of First Nations people themselves, or of the United Nations for that matter — is debatable. Regardless, many scholars and activists consider the 1970s and 1980s a high point for self-determination in Australia.

After that, supposedly, things fell apart. In the decades that followed, governments’ commitment to the language and ideals of self-determination faltered and even withered away entirely. Persistent socioeconomic inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the early years of the twenty-first century convinced some thinkers that self-determination had failed.

For conservative critics, self-determination through national forms of Indigenous representation contradicted the ideal of the equality of citizens and divided the nation. In 2005, reflecting those views, the Howard government dismantled the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, which the Hawke government had set up to provide an elected national Indigenous structure of governance and representation. Then, two years later, it launched the Northern Territory Emergency Response, winding back many of the self-governing freedoms of remote communities while also boosting funding for Indigenous organisations on the ground.

Thinkers and activists on the left also argued that self-determination had failed, but for the opposite reason: true self-determination had never properly been attempted.

But we are not so convinced that self-determination, as either a policy framework or a political vision, was a failure. Although governments’ commitment to listening has at times waned, we’ve seen things improve when First Nations people have had a say on their own affairs.

One way First Nations people have done so is through their own organisations. The policy changes of the 1970s prepared the ground for the growth of an Indigenous organisational and institutional sector that now has a life of its own. Governments have certainly created the contexts that hinder or support Indigenous self-determination, but the self-determination genie is out of the bottle.

First Nations self-determination is not waiting for governments. The Indigenous community sector has been insisting on having a voice where policymakers would otherwise have forged ahead without their input. The long-term improvements in Indigenous wellbeing achieved by this sector reveal how much we might gain by creating a constitutionally enshrined Voice. First Nations people are asking governments to listen to their views, because that’s what works.

The Indigenous community-controlled sector is made up of an array of non-profit organisations based in Indigenous communities, governed by boards made up of Indigenous people and serving the interests of Indigenous people. Although Whitlam often gets the credit, this was not his invention. It began with the initiatives of First Nations people.

Aboriginal people in places like Redfern looked to the example of the Black Panther Party in the United States, which was running medical clinics and other urban survival programs for Black communities. The Aboriginal Legal Service opened a shopfront offering legal representation in Redfern in 1970 after activists began recording incidents of police violence. The Aboriginal Medical Service came the following year.

Then, in 1972, the Murawina preschool and childcare service opened as a breakfast program run out of the AMS, with Aboriginal women in full control from 1973. Around the same time, the Aboriginal Housing Company also began operating in inner Sydney. A group of these same community organisers from Redfern set up the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in early 1972. Legal academic Larissa Behrendt (a Eualeyai/Gamillaroi woman) has argued that the embassy’s commitment to building Aboriginal-controlled institutions — the AMS, the legal service, Aboriginal community-controlled childcare and the Black Theatre — was its enduring legacy.

As that timeline shows, the Whitlam government’s commitment to self-determination was a response to the calls of First Nations people. Just as the proposed Voice emerged as a First Nations idea, an earlier generation’s self-determination also began as an Indigenous project rather than a government agenda. The Black Theatre, established in 1972, actually announced Whitlam’s election win during the interval of its performance of Basically Black in December 1972.

Whitlam’s new Department of Aboriginal Affairs had an enormous budget, and Aboriginal organisations in Redfern and elsewhere suddenly received generous funding with minimal government oversight, at least initially. Even in the 1970s, though, the Indigenous sector’s vision diverged from official views. Governments were mostly interested in achieving socioeconomic parity with the non-Indigenous population, but the Indigenous sector understood itself as something more; it was to be a means of achieving self-determination.

Gary Foley (a Gumbainggir man), for instance, explained that the AMS considered itself “in the context of the political struggle because we’re simply an extension of that struggle, working… to ease the plight of the people we are politically working for.” Funding to the AMS and other organisations allowed Indigenous people to present their voice.

Two key bureaucrats in the Whitlam government, H.C. Coombs and Barrie Dexter, likewise intended Indigenous organisations to become a means by which First Nations people could voice and achieve their political aspirations (as these organisations had already been doing). In other words, they were to have a representative function. And this was considered appropriate: they were locally based and drew on existing partnerships and networks. For the Whitlam government, the blossoming sector was an organic expression of an Indigenous polity.

This community-controlled sector evolved over the decades from a tiny cluster of organisations powered by a few volunteers and minimal grants to a professionalised enterprise. In the 1970s, the institutional structures that could be used to express self-determination were limited: a handful of community-controlled services and a couple of land councils. Today, health remains the largest segment of the community-controlled sector, but it also extends to legal, education and family violence prevention services, along with Aboriginal statutory land rights and native title organisations, and Indigenous regional governance structures.

The organisations in this sector are mainly government-funded services, with governance drawn from communities. Although they are publicly funded, the fact that they draw money from various levels of government means they avoid being entirely dependent on any. Many are represented by the national peak body, the Coalition of Peaks.

Today, a growing, highly educated professional class exists within the Indigenous community. Numerous Indigenous parliamentarians have been elected across Australia. The community-controlled sector has enabled First Nations people to challenge institutions, forge pathways into universities, create culturally safe spaces in schools and workplaces, and take up ranks in the professions and academies.

Of course, the appalling inequities in health, incarceration rates and education reveal that much more needs to be done. Far from rendering the proposed Voice redundant, these successes give us a glimpse of what can be achieved when First Nations people are empowered to manage their own affairs.

While both ends of the political spectrum were decrying the death of self-determination in the early 2000s, a coalition of grassroots Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations coalesced into a new campaign. They wanted to Close the Gap.

At first this was a community-driven movement promoted by people across the political spectrum searching for new policy consensuses in Indigenous affairs. Led by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (renamed the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2008) and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, Tom Calma (a Kungarakan/Iwaidja man), Close the Gap brought a human rights approach to questions of health equity. It campaigned for clear targets that would “close gaps” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

As governments became more involved, though, the Indigenous organisational sector was shut out of the movement. In 2007 and 2008, the Council of Australian Governments settled a series of agreements, referred to as Closing the Gap, that included Indigenous policy targets for life expectancy, infant mortality, early childhood education in remote communities, reading, writing and numeracy, retention rates to year 12, and employment outcomes. They also included national partnership funding agreements negotiated among governments. The Indigenous organisations that had campaigned for this approach were consulted but had no seat at the negotiation table.

Each year since 2009 the prime minister has tabled an annual Closing the Gap Report (to which the Australian Human Rights Commission has responded annually with its counter reports, Close the Gap). The outcomes have been disappointing.

Self-determination, meanwhile, seemed to be at a low ebb. When the authors of the Uluru Statement called for a First Nations Voice to achieve “justice and self-determination” in May 2017, the Turnbull government immediately dismissed the proposal. Like other conservative governments, it was suspicious of national articulations of Indigenous self-determination through representation, preferring instead to work with local Indigenous organisations.

In the meantime, governments had begun developing a Closing the Gap Refresh, and in October 2018 a newly formed Coalition of Aboriginal Peak Organisations intervened in the Refresh process. Labelling this intervention an “act of self-determination,” the Coalition of Peaks wrote to the prime minister, premiers and chief ministers insisting that Indigenous communities must be represented in these negotiations. They wanted a voice.

At that stage, the Coalition of Peaks was an alliance of thirteen organisations across the health, legal, family violence prevention and land rights/native title sectors. (It now comprises more than fifty peak and member organisations.) Governments had consulted them individually in the processes for setting priorities and targets, but they had not been included in drafting policy documents or the Council of Australian Governments’ decision-making process. They now insisted that governments go beyond consultation to shared decision-making with “those representing Indigenous communities.”

Once it was accepted, Indigenous involvement produced a markedly different agreement. Alongside greater involvement of First Nations people in decision-making it led to greater transparency and accountability. The new National Agreement on Closing the Gap included a significantly stronger focus on Indigenous-led data and evaluation processes; strengthened structures to enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to share decision-making authority with governments and so accelerate policy and place-based progress; a stronger and defined role for the Aboriginal community-controlled sector; and a clearer policy objective in the reform of government systems.

The Coalition of Peaks is particularly concerned about improving the quality of Indigenous access to, control of and use of data. It also ensures that independent First Nations–led reviews will be carried out following independent reviews by the Productivity Commission. The idea was to create a mechanism whereby governments could be held accountable to First Nations people. It wanted to flip older models of accountability upside down.

Of course, the Coalition of Peaks is imperfect and limited in its representation of Indigenous communities. Not all its member organisations agree on all policy priorities and targets, nor do its positions represent the full diversity of Indigenous political interests. Significantly, the Coalition of Peaks is not a democratically elected representative body and most of its member organisations remain dependent on government funding, which is determined in turn by the political cycle. Its capacity to challenge governments, therefore, is necessarily limited.

The proposed Voice, on which Australians will soon have their say, will not share these weaknesses. Enshrined in the Constitution, outside short-term political cycles, it will be freer to speak more clearly than the Coalition of Peaks ever could. Selected by First Nations communities, it will be even more accountable to the First Nations communities it will represent.

If even the imperfect Coalition of Peaks has achieved greater accountability for governments and empowered local Indigenous leaders to address local concerns, we think the Voice could achieve much more.

So, did self-determination ever fail? As Wiradjuri scholar Robynne Quiggin has argued, Indigenous Australia is self-determining and calls on governments to catch up with its agenda. “The most consistent call from Indigenous Australia since the abandonment of self-determination policy is — ‘listen to us,’” she says. “Consistent with the fact that we continue to be self-determining despite government policy, we say… ‘work with us so that we can set our own course.’”

When Whitlam heeded Indigenous calls for self-determination and identified the emerging Indigenous community-controlled sector central to achieving that vision, his government set in motion a form of self-determination that can’t be contained. Indeed, the Indigenous sector has been described as the defining legacy of Whitlam’s self-determination policy.

Since the 1970s, and through the energy, experiences and empowerment of the Indigenous sector, new generations of First Nations leaders have emerged across the community, academy, public sector and business world. The Indigenous professional class is booming, growing in size by some 75 per cent between 1996 and 2006 and gaining on the professionalisation of the general population.

First Nations people are exercising increasing control of their own affairs in the domains of land rights, health, education and environmental management through Indigenous organisations, as well as self-government through local Aboriginal councils. Building on experiences in this sector, First Nations people within government bureaucracies and peak bodies are also advancing Indigenous interests. These successes show us this is what works.

But the Closing the Gap Refresh experience also shows that, while governments might listen to Indigenous communities, these voices can also be overpowered and even silenced when bureaucratic systems take on a life of their own.

We don’t yet know what the long-term effects of the National Agreement will be, and there is much the Coalition of Peaks was unable to achieve. Nonetheless, First Nations people created an interim form of Indigenous representation at the highest levels while the constitutional discussion rolled on. This, we suggest, is a kind of self-determination, particularly in the absence of other more fully representative options such as the Voice.

Given these successes, a constitutionally enshrined Voice is the obvious next step for Indigenous self-determination. What remains to be seen is whether Australians will be willing to take it. •

The post Self-determination works. The next step is the Voice appeared first on Inside Story.

I was lucky enough to work with Ken Inglis and friends on Dunera Lives: A Visual History, published in 2018. The book is an attempt to tell something of the Dunera story through 500 images, one of which attracted far more comment than any other. This was a grainy black-and-white photograph from Bern’s collection taken on 14 December 1938, a month after the anti-Semitic violence of Kristallnacht.

The photo shows fifteen-year-old Gerd Bernstein (Bern’s original name), dressed in a suit, raising a glass to his family. His mother Helena, father Otto and maternal grandmother Sophie Maas sit at a table in their Berlin home at Wielandstrasse 17. A picture of young Gerd hangs on the wall.

The faces most exposed to the camera are those of grandson and grandmother. Gerd looks thoughtful and hesitant, even sad, while on his grandmother’s face I see both love and terror — love for him, and terror about what the future holds for her Jewish family. The next day Gerd left Berlin on a Kindertransport, bound for Britain. On 17 December, alone in Britain just two days after leaving home for a strange and unfamiliar country, he turned sixteen.

His parents survived the war despite his father Otto’s imprisonment in Theresienstadt concentration camp from 1942 to 1945. Otto was the sole survivor among the hundred people with whom he was transported to Theresienstadt; Sophie died there.

After the visual history appeared, Bern and I discussed readers’ reactions to this photograph and the intense, heavy sadness it prompted in many, me included. Bern would have none of it. He thought this response muddled, our emotions skewed by knowledge of the Holocaust.

In Bern’s mind, this photograph showed a moment in the life of his family, no more and no less. To view the photograph through the lens of the Holocaust was a mistake, and he made a point of reminding me that in 1938 the Nazis had not yet embarked on the systematic destruction of European Jewry.

Bern’s position on the photograph reflected his historical preferences. The substance of any history, Dunera’s included, is in the detail. He saw history through a lens that allowed little room for the floating of partly conceived ideas and none at all for speculation, no matter how worthy the intention. If there were a place for emotion, it was after the facts were established. Perhaps his approach could be called traditional. I can’t imagine Bern thinking much of the modern belief that histories can be retold on the basis of emotions.

Whatever the merits of Bern’s approach, it made him a wonderful informant. His view of the past as the stuff of hard facts meant that he spoke only about what he knew. If he didn’t know the answer, he said so. If he thought the question irrelevant, he made that clear too, then explained why. He punctured myths, of which Dunera has more than its share, and raised questions that forced historians and others to think anew about key moments in the story.

Recently I asked him about an incident that looms large in Dunera history and memory. On the voyage to Australia, British guards treated the internees with calculated brutality in a gross, and in some cases criminal, dereliction of duty. The Dunera canon tells that guards, as part of this sustained assault, forced internees to walk over broken glass strewn across the deck of the ship.

The glass was there, Bern told me, but he doubted it was placed deliberately, and he and others simply stepped around it. While the weight of evidence about this incident is against him, I know that Bern, as a historian of the Dunera, never spoke idly. On that basis alone, his account demands consideration.

Ken Inglis cherished Bern’s clarity and commitment to accuracy. They corresponded from the start of Ken’s Dunera project — which also led to a second book, Dunera Lives: Profiles, in 2020 — exchanging emails regularly until Ken’s death in December 2017. Their voluminous correspondence, now part of the Inglis Dunera papers at the National Library of Australia, reveals two scholars in respectful and admiring conversation, one testing notions and ideas, the other encouraging or discouraging those possibilities.

While Bern was an oracle on Dunera, on one aspect of the story he had no answers. When the Dunera internees arrived in Australia, most were incarcerated first at Hay in western New South Wales. Because the camps there could house only 2000, around ninety-five of the internees, seemingly chosen at random, were taken instead to Tatura in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley, along with other men who had travelled on the Dunera and been deemed dangerous by British authorities.

Bern was part of this Tatura rump, and there he stayed for the duration of his internment, which lasted until January 1942. Thus, he knew nothing of camp life at Hay. Ken would chuckle at this inconvenience, suggesting that Bern had been remiss in not arranging his internment to suit the needs of future historians.

Bern exerted a strong influence on the writing of the two volumes of Dunera Lives, saving us from mistakes and misinterpretations, and suggesting lines of enquiry that emerged as themes in the books. He was our most prolific and important informant. If our telling of a story differed from the one he knew, he always gave our version a fair hearing. On the odd occasion, we might even have convinced him.

On other occasions, not at all. In Dunera Lives we took a strong line on Winston Churchill’s role in the Dunera affair. While Churchill’s wartime government would later issue an apology of sorts to the Dunera internees for the appalling treatment they suffered, by that time many had already concluded that British liberalism was a chimera. Bern was of the opposite view. He held that Churchill had no choice but to act as he did, and that to suggest otherwise was to allow historical judgement to be derailed by the luxury of hindsight.

This position was entwined with another view to which Bern stuck fast. The Dunera had delivered him to Australia, where he made a rewarding and productive life. As he said often, there was nothing for him in postwar Europe, whereas in Australia, as a young man with energy and purpose, he was able to embrace education and new beginnings, free of the restrictions and prejudices that had shaped his life in Germany.

For Bern, his good fortune was the story, and this mattered more than issues such as the question of Churchill’s culpability. He thought the Dunera the luckiest thing to ever happen to him. Perhaps the fact that his parents survived the Holocaust also influenced this position.

Bern was an unusual Dunera boy in other ways, too. While happily Australian, he maintained strong links to his homeland. He returned to Berlin and Germany often, visiting past haunts and chasing up friends. He continued to speak and read German, and listened to German news on the radio. A couple of years ago Bern wrote to tell me about the Exilmuseum in Berlin, after he had heard mention of the nascent institution on a German radio program. He wondered if the museum’s curators would be interested in learning about the strange story of the German and Austrian exiles who in 1940 found themselves interned in rural Australia. They were.

For other Dunera boys, such engagement with Germany and Austria was anathema. Their wartime experiences and knowledge of the Holocaust poisoned their feelings for the land of their birth. Many never returned to Germany and Austria; many chose to avoid Germanic culture and language.

Bern too knew the pain of persecution and the tragedy of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism forced him and his mother to flee Germany for Britain. Hitler’s regime murdered his grandmother and imprisoned his father. But never did he allow the pain and injustice of the past to determine the direction of his life. It was a remarkably brave choice, and one that not all Dunera boys were able to make, or even wanted to.

Bern’s longevity conferred a sad and perhaps unwanted title. He was the last Dunera boy in Australia, and among the last anywhere. It is thought that there is a Dunera boy alive in France, and another in New York, and possibly others of whom my colleagues and I don’t know, though it is unlikely that these “unknowns” would number more than one or two.

Bern accepted his position with grace, acknowledging the dubious honour as a responsibility rather than a burden, which surely it was. To the best of my knowledge, he never refused a request for an interview, and was diligent in answering questions from scholars and members of the Dunera diaspora. Perhaps he saw duty in these tasks; the Dunera had led him to a good life in Australia, and provided both a scholarly purpose in his later years, and enduring friendships.

On what proved to be his last weekend, Bern travelled to Melbourne, where he delighted in the company of Peter Danby’s family. Danby, originally Peter Danziger, was also a Dunera boy, though the friendship was older than that, the two having met in Britain. Bern was accompanied by Peter and Joanna, two of his three children. The Brent–Danby friendship is now carried by the next generation.

In September 2022 I took the British author and activist Jennifer Nadel to meet Bern in his Canberra home. Jennifer’s father, George Nadel, was a budding scholar when he was deported to Australia on the Dunera. She knows little about his internment, but enough to realise that George’s postwar silences hid deep trauma. For Jennifer, Dunera has been a difficult and painful word.

Aside from their Jewish heritage, George Nadel and Bern had little in common. George was born Austrian, Bern German. Both had a passion for history, though they were driven by differing approaches and emphases. George, who went on to found and edit the venerable journal History and Theory, was an academic who practised history in more formal worlds and ways than Bern. If Bern were ever a reader of that journal, I imagine him warming more to the history than the theory. Bern saw the Dunera as a ship of salvation; for George, the Dunera seems to have heralded only misery.

And yet both men survived the Dunera, and by 2022 Bern was one of very few people anywhere in the world who could talk directly of the experience. Through Bern, Jennifer was given a privileged glimpse of a past about which George never spoke. As we drove away from Bern’s home, she said that his German-accented English, and certain of his mannerisms, evoked fond thoughts of her father.

When I wrote to Jennifer to tell her of Bern’s death, she immediately recalled his bearing and presence, and the importance to her of their meeting. Bern’s willingness to act as a conduit to the past, to talk openly and directly about Dunera, helped many people like her to better understand the story and their part in it. In so doing he aroused emotions. I wonder what he made of that.

Jennifer described meeting Bern as a privilege. It’s the right word. To have known, talked and corresponded with him was a privilege, and something I cherish. Ruhe sanft, lieber Bern. •

The post A Dunera life appeared first on Inside Story.

The stars are our ancestors lighting up their campfires across the night sky. The universe exploded into being fourteen billion years ago and is still expanding. As it cooled and continued to inflate, an opposite force — gravity — organised matter into galaxies and stars. Everything was made of the elements forged by stars. Around billions of fiery suns, the interstellar dust and debris of supernovas coalesced as planets, some remaining gaseous, some becoming rigid rock. Earth, with its molten core, its mantle of magma and a dynamic crust, was born. The planet is alive.

In the shallow waters off the western coast of the continent metamorphosed by the Dreaming sit solid mementos of the beginning of life. They are living fossils, cushions of cells and silt called stromatolites. After life emerged in a fiery, toxic cauldron in an ocean trench, bacteria at the surface captured sunlight and used it to create biological energy in the form of sugar. They broke down carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, feeding off the carbon and releasing oxygen as waste. Photosynthesis, Earth’s marvellous magic, had begun. It was just a billion years after the planet was formed.

To later inhabitants, oxygen would seem the most precious waste in the firmament. But it was a dangerous experiment, for the oxygen-free atmosphere that had created the conditions for life was now gone. Stromatolites hunched in the western tides descended from the creatures that began to breathe a new atmosphere into being.

Two billion years ago, enough oxygen existed to turn the sky blue. The same oxygen turned the oceans red with rust. Thus life itself generated the planet’s first environmental crisis. This ancient rain of iron oxide is preserved today in the banded ores of the Hamersley Range. The universe was then already old, but Earth was young.

The planet was restless and violent, still seething with its newness. When separate lands fused, the earth moved for them. Australian landmasses shifted north and south as crusts cruised over iron-rich magma. Large complex cells fed off the growing oxygen resource and diversified rapidly. For almost 400 million years the whole planet became gripped by glaciation and scoured by ice, and most life was extinguished. The long reign of the ancient glaciers was written into rock.

As the ice withdrew, life bloomed again. Organisms of cooperative cells developed in the oceans and became the first animals. Six hundred million years ago, a supercontinent later known as Gondwana began to amass lands in the south, and their titanic fusion created a chain of mountains in central Australia. Uluru and Kata Tjuta, inspirited by the rainbow python, are sacred rubble from this momentous first creation of Gondwana.

Life ventured ashore, protected now from dangerous radiation by the strengthening shield of ozone gas around Earth. Plants and animals sustained each other, the essential oxygen circulating between them. Gondwana united with other continents, creating a single landmass called Pangaea. When the planet cooled again, surges of glacial ice scoured life from the land once more. But life persisted, and its reinventions included the seed and the egg, brilliant breakthroughs in reproduction. They were portable parcels of promise that created a world of cycads and dinosaurs.

Earth gradually changed its hue over eons. Rusted rock and grey stone became enlivened by green, joining the blue of the restless oceans. Chlorophyll conquered the continents. Pines, spruces, cypresses, cycads and ferns found their way up the tidal estuaries, across the plains and into the mountains, but the true green revolution awaited the emergence of flowering plants. These plants generated pollen and used animals as well as wind to deliver it. Insects especially were attracted to the perfumed, colourful flowers where they were dusted with pollen before they moved to another bloom. It was a botanical sexual frenzy abetted by animal couriers. The variety of plants exploded. Nutritious grasslands spread across the planet and energy-rich fruits and seeds proliferated. As this magic unfolded, Gondwana separated from Pangaea again and consolidated near the south pole, where it began to break up further.

The cosmic dust that had crystallised as Earth, dancing alone with its single moon and awash with its gradually slowing tides, seemed to have settled into a rhythm. The bombardment of meteors that marked its early life had eased. Giant reptiles ruled, small mammals skulked in the undergrowth, and flowers were beginning to wreak their revolution.

Then, sixty-six million years ago, the planet was violently assaulted. A huge rogue rock orbiting the Sun plunged into Earth. The whole planet shuddered, tidal waves, fires and volcanoes were unleashed, soot blackened the atmosphere, and three-quarters of life was extinguished. The largest animals, the dinosaurs, all died. But the disaster of the death star also created the opportunity for mammals to thrive. The comet forged the modern world.

Flat and geologically calm, the landmass that would become Australia was now host to few glaciers and volcanoes. But ice and fire were to shape it powerfully in other ways. About fifty million years ago, in the final rupture of Gondwana, Australia fractured from its cousin, Antarctica, and voyaged north over millions of years to subtropical latitudes and a drier climate. Fire ruled Australia while Antarctica was overwhelmed by ice. The planet’s two most arid lands became white and red deserts.

The newly birthed Australian plate rafted north into warmer climes at a time in planetary history when the earth grew cooler, thus moderating climatic change and nurturing great biodiversity. It was the continent’s defining journey. It began to dry, burn and leach nutrients, the ancient soils became degraded and impoverished, and the inland seas began to dry up. In the thrall of fire, the Gondwanan rainforest retreated to mountain refuges and the eucalypt spread. Gum trees came to dominate the wide brown land. The bush was born.

Three million years ago, when North and South America finally met and kissed, the relationship had consequences. Ocean currents changed and the Pleistocene epoch, marked by a succession of ice ages, kicked into life. Regular, dramatic swings in average global temperature quickened evolution’s engine. The constant tick and tock of ice and warmth sculpted new, innovative life forms.

In southern Africa, an intelligent primate of the forests ventured out onto the expanding grasslands and gazed at the horizon. This hominid was a creature of the ice ages, but her magic would be fire. One day her descendants walked north, and they kept on walking.

By the time they reached the southeastern edges of the Asian islands, these modern humans were experienced explorers. They gazed at a blue oceanic horizon and saw that there was no more land. But at night they observed the faint glow of fire on a distant continent. And by day they were beckoned by haze that might be smoke and dust. What they did next was astonishing.

The people embarked on an odyssey. They strengthened their rafts and voyaged over the horizon, beyond sight of land in any direction — and they kept on sailing. They were the most adventurous humans on Earth. They crossed one of the great planetary boundaries, a line few land-based animals traversed, one of the deep sutures of tectonic earth. This was over 60,000 years ago. The first Australians landed on a northern beach in exhaustion, wonder and relief. They had discovered a continent like no other.

The birds and animals they found, the very earth they trod, had never known a hominid. The other creatures were innocent of the new predator and unafraid. It was a bonanza. But the land was mysterious and forbidding and did not reveal its secrets easily. The people quickly moved west, east and south, leaving their signatures everywhere. They had to learn a radically new nature. Arid Australia was not consistently dry but unpredictably wet. The climate was erratic, rainfall was highly variable, and drought could grip the land for years. The soil was mostly poor in nutrients and there were few large rivers. But these conditions fostered biodiversity and a suite of unique animals and plants that were good at conserving energy and cooperating with one another.

The first people arrived with a firestick in their hands, but never before had they known it to exert such power. For this was the fire continent, as distinctive in its fire regimes as in its marsupials and mammal pollinators. Fire came to be at the heart of Australian civilisation. People cooked, cleansed, farmed, fought and celebrated with fire. The changes they wrought with hunting and fire affected the larger marsupials which, over thousands of years, became scarce. People kept vast landscapes open and freshly grassed through light, regular burning. By firing small patches they controlled large fires and encouraged an abundance of medium-sized mammals. As the eucalypt had remade Australia through fire, so did people.

They had arrived on those northern beaches as the latest ice age of the Pleistocene held the planet in its thrall. Polar ice was growing and the seas were lower, which had made the challenging crossing from Asia just possible. People could walk from New Guinea to Tasmania on dry land. This greater Australia, now known as Sahul, was the shape of the continent for most of the time humans have lived here. People quickly reached the far southwest of Western Australia and the southern coast of Tasmania. From the edge of the rainforest they observed icebergs from Antarctica, emissaries from old Gondwana.

For tens of thousands of years after people came to Australia, the seas continued to retreat and the new coastlines were quickly colonised. Every region of the continent became inhabited and beloved, its features and ecologies woven into story and law. Trade routes spanned the land. People elaborated their culture, history and science in art and dance, and buried their loved ones with ritual and ceremony in the earliest known human cremations. Multilingualism was the norm. Hundreds of distinct countries and languages were nurtured, and the land was mapped in song. This place was where everything happened, where time began.

As the ice age deepened, the only glaciers in Australia were in the highlands of Tasmania and on the peaks of the Alps. For much of the continent, the ice age was a dust age. Cold droughts settled on the land, confining people in the deserts to sheltered, watered refuges. Great swirls of moving sand dunes dominated the centre of the continent but the large rivers ran clear and campfires lit up around the lakes they formed. About 18,000 years ago, the grip of the cold began to weaken and gradually the seas began to rise. Saltwater invaded freshwater, beaches eroded, settlements retreated, sacred sites became sea country. The Bassian Plain was flooded and Tasmanians became islanders. Over thousands of years, Sahul turned into Australia.

The rising of the seas, the loss of coastal land, and the warming of average temperatures by up to 8°C transformed cultures, environments and economies throughout the continent. People whose ancestors had walked across the planet had survived a global ice age at home. In the face of extreme climatic hardship, they continued to curate their beloved country. They had experienced the end of the world and survived.

The warm interglacial period known as the Holocene, which began 13,000 years ago, ushered in a spring of creativity in Australia and across the planet. Human populations increased, forests expanded into the grasslands and new foods flourished. Australians observed the emergence of new agricultural practices in the Torres Strait islands and New Guinea but mostly chose not to adopt them. They continued to tune their hunting and harvesting skills to the distinctive ecologies of their own countries, enhancing their productivity by conserving whole ecosystems. A complex tapestry of spiritual belief and ceremonial ritual underpinned their economies. The sharing of food and resources was their primary ethos.

Strangers continued to visit Australia from across the seas, especially from Indonesia and Melanesia. Four thousand years ago, travellers from Asia brought the dingo to northern shores. During the past millennium, Macassans from Sulawesi made annual voyages in wooden praus to fish for sea cucumbers off Arnhem Land where they were generally welcomed by the locals. The Yolngu people of the north engaged in trade and ceremony with the visitors, learned their language, adopted some of their customs and had children with them. Some Australians travelled by prau to Sulawesi.

In recent centuries, other ships nosed around the western and northern coasts of the continent, carrying long-distance voyagers from Europe. One day, early in the European year of 1788, a fleet of tall ships — “each Ship like another Noah’s Ark” carefully stowed with seeds, animals and a ballast of convict settlers — entered a handsome harbour on the east coast of Australia and began to establish a camp. These strangers were wary, inquisitive and assertive, and they came to stay. They were here to establish a penal colony and to conduct an agrarian social experiment. They initiated one of the most self-conscious and carefully recorded colonisations in history on the shores of a land they found both beautiful and baffling.

They were from a small, green land on the other side of the world, descendants of the people who had ventured west rather than east as humans exited Africa. They colonised Europe and Britain thousands of years after the Australians had made their home in the southern continent. They lived in a simplified ecology scraped clean by the glaciers of the last ice age, and were unprepared for the rich subtlety of the south.

For 2000 years before their arrival in Australian waters, the Europeans had wondered if there might be a Great South Land to balance the continents of the north. By the start of the sixteenth century, they confirmed that the planet was a sphere and all its seas were one. They circled the globe in tall sailing ships and voyaged to the Pacific for trade, science and conquest. The British arrivals were part of the great colonialist expansion of European empires across the world. For them, success was measured through the personal accumulation of material things; Australians were the opposite.

On eastern Australian beaches from the late eighteenth century, there took place one of the greatest ecological and cultural encounters of all time. Peoples with immensely long and intimate histories of habitation encountered the furthest-flung representatives of the world’s first industrialising nation. The circle of migration out of Africa more than 80,000 years earlier finally closed.

The British did indeed find the Great South Land of their imagination seemingly waiting for them down under and they deemed it vacant and available. It was an upside-down world, the antipodes. They would redeem its oddity and emptiness. The invaders brought the Bible, Homer, Euclid, Shakespeare, Locke and the clock. They came with guns, germs and steel. With the plough they broke the land. They shivered at “the deserted aboriginal feel of untilled earth.” They dug the dirt and seized it. Sheep and cattle were the shock troops of empire; their hard hooves were let loose on fragile soils and they trampled them to dust. Australian nature seemed deficient and needed to be “improved.” Colonists believed that the Australians were mere nomads, did not use the earth properly, and therefore did not own it.

But the true nomads were the invaders and they burned with land hunger. War for possession of the continent began. It continued for more than a hundred years on a thousand frontiers. Waterholes — the precious jewels of the arid country — were transformed into places of death. It was the most violent and tragic happening ever to befall Australia. So many lives were sacrificed, generations of people were traumatised, and intimate knowledge of diverse countries was lost.

Australia entered world history as a mere footnote to empire; it became celebrated as a planned, peaceful and successful offshoot of imperial Britain. A strange silence — or white noise — settled on the history of the continent. Nothing else had happened here for tens of thousands of years. Descendants of the newcomers grew up under southern skies with stories of skylarks, village lanes and green hedgerows from the true, northern hemisphere. And they learned that their country had a short triumphant history that began with “a blank space on the map” and culminated in the writing of “a new name on the map” — Anzac. So the apotheosis of the new nation happened on a distant Mediterranean shore. The cult of overseas war supplanted recognition of the unending war at home, and the heroic defence of country by the first Australians was repressed. They were disdained as peoples without agriculture, literacy, cities, religion or government, and were allowed neither a history nor a future.

The British and their descendants felt pride in their new southern land and pitied its doomed, original inhabitants. Colonists saw themselves as pioneers who pushed the frontier of white civilisation into the last continent to be settled, who connected Australia to a global community and economy. They were gratified that their White Australia, girt by sea, a new nation under southern skies, was a trailblazer of democratic rights: representative government, votes for working men, votes for women. But the first Australians lay firmly outside the embrace of democracy. They continued to be removed from country onto missions and reserves; they did not even have a rightful place in their own land, and every aspect of their lives was surveyed.

The invaders lived in fear of invasion. Had they used the soil well enough, had they earnt their inheritance? Would strangers in ships, boats, threaten again? Had they reckoned with their own actions in the land they had seized? There was a whispering in their hearts.

New peoples arrived down under from Europe, the Americas and Asia, and the British Australians lost their ascendancy. Australia became the home again of many cultures, vibrantly so, and a linguistic diversity not seen on the continent since the eighteenth century flourished. Many languages of the first peoples persisted and were renewed. The classical culture of the continent’s discoverers endured; their Dreamings, it was suggested, were the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia. A bold mix of new stories grew in the land.

The invaders of old Australia did not foresee that the people they had dispossessed would make the nation anew. The society they created together was suffused with grief and wonder. The original owners were recognised as full citizens and began to win their country back through parliament and the courts. They believed their ancient sovereignty could shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.

But now the planet was again shuddering under an assault. The meteor this time was the combined mass of humans and their impact upon air, oceans, forests, rivers, all living things. It was another extinction event, another shockwave destined to be preserved in the geology of Earth. The fossilised forests of the dinosaurs, dug up and burnt worldwide since Australia was invaded, had fuelled a human population explosion and a great acceleration of exploitation. Rockets on plumes of flame delivered pictures of spaceship Earth, floating alone, finite and vulnerable in the deep space of the expanding universe. Ice cores drilled from diminishing polar ice revealed, like sacred scrolls, the heartbeat of the planet, now awry. The unleashing of carbon, itself so damaging, enabled a planetary consciousness and an understanding of deep time that illuminated the course of redemption.

The Australian story, in parallel with other colonial cataclysms, was a forerunner of the planetary crisis. Indigenous management was overwhelmed, forests cleared, wildlife annihilated, waters polluted and abused, the climate unhinged. Across the globe, imperial peoples used land and its creatures as commodities, as if Earth were inert. They forgot that the planet is alive.

The continent of fire led the world into the new age of fire. But it also carried wisdom and experience from beyond the last ice age.

Humans, as creatures of the ice, were embarked on another odyssey. It would take them over the horizon, to an Earth they have never before known. •

References: The stars are our ancestors: B.T. Swimme and M.E. Tucker, Journey of the Universe • “the most precious waste in the firmament”: Richard Fortey, Life: An Unauthorised Biography • “The planet is alive”: Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg’s Curse • iron oxide, the seed and the egg: Reg Morrison, Australia: Land Beyond Time • the true green revolution: Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey • expanding grasslands: Vincent Carruthers, Cradle of Life • distinctive in its fire regimes and mammalian pollinators: Stephen Pyne, Burning Bush • conditions of biodiversity: Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters • Sahul and the last ice age: Billy Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming • conserving whole ecosystems: Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe, Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? • “each Ship like another Noah’s Ark”: First Fleet surgeon George Worgan in Grace Karskens, People of the River • agrarian social experiment: Grace Karskens, The Colony • guns, germs and steel: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel • “the deserted aboriginal feel of untilled earth”: George Farwell, Cape York to the Kimberleys • “the true, northern hemisphere”: Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus • “a blank space on the map”: Ernest Scott, A Short History of Australia • a whispering in their hearts: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts • “the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia”: Noel Pearson, A Rightful Place • “a bold mix of the Dreamings”: Alexis Wright, The Swan Book • “we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood”: The Uluru Statement 2017 • a great acceleration: John McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration • “the heartbeat of the planet”: Will Steffen • the new age of fire: Stephen Pyne, The Pyrocene.

The post Odyssey down under appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps emboldened by the university’s assent, the embassy responded with a further request. On behalf of the Russian government, it also wished to confer on the university’s chancellor, Australia’s former foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans, “a medal for promoting international cooperation.”

This new offer struck us both as an ingenious ploy to have the university’s most senior figure preside over the unveiling of the bust. The embassy could then inform the foreign affairs ministry in Moscow, and presumably the anonymous philanthropist, that it had pulled off a public relations coup.

The offer of the bust was unremarkable. One of the jobs of an embassy is to build networks of contacts that might prove useful in acquiring and exercising influence in its host country; and one of the assets Russian embassies can draw on is Russian literature — which, as Ernest Hemingway remarked in A Moveable Feast, changes you as you read it.

But the context was important. Relations between Australia and Russia had been tense since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. Since then the Russian president had been directing an “insurgency” by alleged separatists in eastern Ukraine, and Australia had responded with economic sanctions.

Australia strengthened the sanctions after the destruction of flight MH17 in July 2014, which it had concluded was Russia’s doing. Prime minister Tony Abbott had consequently expressed an intention to “shirtfront” Putin when he came to Australia for the looming G20 meeting in Brisbane. (Abbott’s verb captured media attention globally and baffled interpreters in both Russia and Australia.)

With its scope for building networks of influence in government and the public service much reduced by Russia’s actions, the embassy naturally focused its efforts on the media, the arts and academia. It seems a fair assumption that Russian embassies in other countries were also seeking to cultivate academic contacts and generate positive publicity for Russia by proffering busts of Pushkin and/or other Russian luminaries to universities, libraries and the like.

The acting dean asked me to draft some remarks for ANU’s chancellor to deliver at the handover ceremony. I had worked for Gareth Evans twice when he was foreign affairs minister: in 1991, as his interpreter on a visit to the Soviet Union in its last months; and later, in 1992–93, in a junior policy-advice role when he and the Keating government responded to the Soviet Union’s dissolution by Yeltsin and the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine.

This meant I was familiar with Evans’s exacting approach to public speaking, and his views on Russia in general, views influenced by his own circle of well-informed friends in Russia. (In this regard, with the possible exception of Kevin Rudd, Evans is probably unique among Australian politicians.) I drafted the remarks accordingly.

In the event, Evans left my work pretty much intact. But he polished it a little and gave it his own stamp — with, for instance, the following ironic flourish: “I am personally very honoured to receive this commemorative medal for contributions to consolidating international cultural cooperation, though a little embarrassed, because I’m not quite clear what I might have done to deserve it.”

He also strengthened a key paragraph regarding the destruction of flight MH17:

In Australia, the shooting down of MH17 just over four years ago continues to particularly burn in our collective memory. While it seems very likely that the militia member who pressed the button to fire the missile that caused so many Australian and other lives to be tragically lost did not intend to destroy a civilian airliner, unless and until that mistake is frankly acknowledged and redressed it is hard to see how any Australian government can invest our bilateral relationship with more substance.

He later told me that he’d found the ceremony “a very tricky occasion to navigate.”

My only cavil with Evans’s refining of my handiwork was his insertion of the words “the Russian soul” at one point in the speech. I could understand why a consummate diplomat chose to do so, but (as Vladimir Nabokov is said to have quipped) “as if a soul has nationality.” In my view, the expression supports the notion that Russians are somehow emotionally more profound than other peoples.

Exactly that claim was made a year after the ANU ceremony by one Valery Malinovsky, who, his Polish name notwithstanding, was a prominent figure in the pro-Putin claque in Australia. Russians, he said, “have deeper emotions; are more hardworking; stand for traditional values — we believe that a woman’s role is to preserve hearth and home, whereas Australian women are feminists who do not put the family first; and we are more patriotic.”

In the same vein, here is Putin in 2014:

So, what are our particular traits? It seems to me that the Russian person thinks mainly about the highest moral truths. Western values are different, focused on oneself. Personal success is the measure of success in life: the more successful a man is, the better he is. This is not enough for us… we are less pragmatic, less calculating than other peoples, we have bigger hearts. Perhaps this reflects the grandeur of our country, its boundless expanses. Our people have a more generous spirit.

I wasn’t at the ANU ceremony, but was given accounts by some who were. The bust itself, as I later saw, is a hefty bronze affair in the Roman and Russian martial tradition. It looks oddly extravagant in the cramped precinct that contains what remains of the university’s once proud tradition of the study of European languages.

In his own remarks for the occasion, Russian ambassador Grigory Logvinov claimed that “international specialists in literature had established that Pushkin is the most universal and greatest poet of all time in any language.”

This assertion recalls a memorable passage in the unpublished memoirs of Andrzej Walicki, an authority on the history of Russian thought, a friend of Isaiah Berlin and Nobel Prize–winning poet Czesław Miłosz, and for some years a professor at ANU. Walicki relates how, as a student at the University of Warsaw in 1951, he attended a series of lectures given by a visiting Soviet professor, one Fyodor Zhurko, who had set himself the task of demonstrating the impregnability of four postulates: that Pushkin was the world’s greatest poet; Tolstoy the world’s greatest novelist; Alexander Ostrovsky the world’s greatest playwright; and Vissarion Belinsky the world’s greatest literary critic.

At his first lecture Zhurko encountered unexpected resistance: most of the students knew that to engage in debate on this level was pointless, but one Tadzio, from a rural village, asked how it could be that Pushkin “ranked above such poets as Byron.” Somewhat flustered, Zhurko responded that he did not know foreign languages and had not read Byron, but Pushkin’s pre-eminence had been “proven by Soviet science.”

This response prompted Tadzio to retort that he “also does not know foreign languages” (Walicki writes that “the comic effect was unintentional”) but he did know Pushkin’s work, and in his view “Mickiewicz was no less of a poet.” Zhurko retorted that Polish literature undoubtedly was great, indeed possibly the third greatest after Russian and Ukrainian, but that Pushkin’s standing as the greatest poet of all time in any language was for Soviet science “axiomatic.”

Following this exchange, as Walicki relates, Zhurko said to his Polish hosts that he had no wish to proceed with the following lectures in the series, as “у вас национализм очень сильно развитый” (“nationalism is very deeply entrenched here”).

An inscription beneath the bust given to ANU records that it was donated not by a philanthropist but by the “International Charity Fund ‘Dialogue of Cultures — United World.’” A little research reveals that the partners of the “charity fund” include Russia’s foreign affairs and culture ministries. These ties suggest that, while purporting to be some manner of non-government organisation, the outfit is in fact an agency of the Russian state. The following excerpts, with their idiosyncratic English, are from a mission statement on the organisation’s website.

Since its establishment in 2005, «Dialogue of Cultures — United World» Fund has implemented more than 450 projects in different countries. The Fund works closely with international organizations, state authorities of the Russian Federation and Russian non-governmental organizations, educational institutions in the field of international cooperation, culture and education.

Each culture — a combination of unique traditions, customs and holidays, this age-old wisdom, passed on from generation to generation, this galaxy of outstanding writers, artists, musicians and scientists, this particular philosophy, vision and thinking — it’s what makes the beauty of the world around them depth and complexity, then, of which each of us draws inspiration daily. To preserve and develop national culture — the noble task of mankind.

Fund «Dialogue of Cultures — United World» retains and promotes the historical uniqueness of ethnic groups living in the modern world and to create a tool for cultural rapprochement of peoples, through the creation of worldwide sites for a living dialogue of cultures.

More exploration of the website reveals that in 2007 in Brisbane the fund established a monument to one K.E. Tsiolkovskiy, described by the site as “a Russian provincial teacher and scholar, founder of Soviet cosmonautics, who paved the way into space for all the mankind… The scientist was born in Russia, but his discoveries belong to the entire world.”

The website also reports that donated busts of Pushkin have been placed in Ulaanbaatar, Dhaka and Montevideo; and that the Mongolian bust was handed over in 2015 by the then minister counsellor of the Russian embassy, Igor Arzhaev. Arzhaev is currently Russia’s consul general in Sydney, and Russian-language publications in Australia suggest he devotes much time to liaising with those diaspora members in Sydney who support the current Russian leadership’s policies. Prominent among these is the self-styled “Aussie Cossack,” Simeon Boikov, with whom Arzhaev is pictured below in Russian diplomatic uniform.

More important, the fund’s website reveals ties between the fund and prominent members of Putin’s close entourage, including Sergei Naryshkin, a member of the National Security Council and head of SVR, Russia’s foreign espionage service, and Sergei Glaz’ev, “Advisor to the President for Eurasian Cooperation.” Glaz’ev, who is among the most energetic proponents of the forcible reabsorption of Ukraine into the Russian empire, also has ties to the Australian Citizens Party via the LaRouche movement, a longstanding far-right American activist group.

Middle man: Igor Arzhaev (third from right), Russia’s consul general in Sydney, with “Aussie Cossack” Simeon Boikov (in green). Facebook

The tale of the ANU bust contains a dual irony. If any Australian politicians deserve formal recognition for their promotion of international cooperation, surely none is more worthy than Gareth Evans, for none has done more in support of the ideal of a “rules-based order.” Conversely, no one, not even Donald Trump, has been more conspicuous than Vladimir Putin in their efforts to undermine such a mechanism to manage the inevitable conflicts between nation-states and great powers.

But there’s a third irony, more piquant and profound. It’s hard to think of a state that has killed or been complicit in the deaths of more of its poets than Russia. An incomplete but well-verified list compiled by literary scholar Vera Sokolinskaya contains the names of hundreds of Russian writers, journalists and artists executed, imprisoned or forced into exile by Russia’s rulers.

For various reasons, Pushkin is on the list. From the age of twenty he was internally exiled several times for his verses; in 1826 Tsar Nikolai I appointed himself Pushkin’s censor (though in practice the role was carried out by the chief of the tsar’s secret police); and in 1829 his request to travel abroad was denied.

But two other decisions by Tsar Nikolai combined to prove fatal for Pushkin. In 1831 the poet married Natalya Goncharova, a legendary beauty and thereafter an adornment at court. Two years later Nikolai appointed Pushkin to the humiliatingly lowly position of kamer-junker (gentleman of the chamber), which effectively entailed only one duty: his, and Natalya’s, regular appearances at court balls.

Probably sensing danger from would-be seducers among his wife’s jostling admirers, burdened heavily by debts and unable to afford life in St Petersburg, Pushkin sought royal permission to retire to his modest country estate — and was denied. In 1835 a young French officer of the Russian Horse Guards began provocatively wooing Natalya; by January 1837, according to the mores of the time and place, Pushkin felt compelled to provoke a duel. He was wounded fatally and died in extreme pain thirty-six hours later.

Had it not been for the tsar’s whims, Pushkin would probably have lived well beyond his thirty-seven years. (Pushkin’s final years and fate are an epic tragedy: see, among various accounts, Elaine Feinstein’s judicious biography.) Today, though, this victim of Russian autocracy is presented as a demigod whose writings prove the innate superiority of what Putin and his supporters claim is “Russian civilisation.” •

The post Weaponising Pushkin appeared first on Inside Story.

Its population was ethnically mixed but with a strong dominance of Ukrainians, who made up 73 per cent of the people. Russians constituted a significant minority of 22 per cent, followed by people identifying as Jews, Belarusians and Moldavians, all making up just under one in a hundred. Other nationalities of the Soviet empire, from Bulgarians and Poles to Azeri, Koreans, Germans, Kyrgyz and Lithuanians, made up the remaining 3 per cent.

Regional differences in political outlook were strong. Although all regions voted in favour of separating from the Soviet Union in the December 1991 referendum, some were more enthusiastic than others. In Lviv, in the west of the country, 95 per cent of the people voted and 97 per cent of them approved the declaration of independence, which had been made in late August in response to the coup attempt in Moscow. In Crimea, an ethnically strongly Russian region at the other extreme, only 68 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls, with 54 per cent of them voting in favour.

Donetsk, an industrial region in the east of the country with strong economic ties to Russia, stood somewhat between these extremes. There, 77 per cent registered their vote and 84 per cent of those people voted for independence.

With the partial exception of the three Baltic republics, all post-Soviet nations have struggled with three interrelated crises: a crisis of democracy, an economic crisis and corruption. Outside the three Baltic outliers (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), the relatively well-performing Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are all resource-exporting economies. Everybody else is struggling.

In terms of wealth per person (measured by GDP per capita), Russia is about at the level of China (US$10,500), while even the rich Baltic countries are nowhere near the United States (US$63,500) or Australia (US$51,800).

The comparative poverty of the region is partly a legacy of the Soviet economy’s poor performance, and partly a hangover from the economic catastrophe of the 1990s. In Ukraine, agriculture continued to be run by the disastrously unproductive collective and state farms until 2000. Other economic reforms were also slow in coming.

Meanwhile, the unravelling of the integrated Soviet imperial economy, the economic burden of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, ageing and inefficient equipment, and dependence on Russian oil and gas were problematic legacies.

Moreover, Ukraine’s state apparatus had controlled no more than 5 per cent of Ukraine’s GDP before 1990 (the rest was under the direct control of Moscow). Officials thus “lacked the experience necessary to take quick and effective control” of the economy, as the writer Marco Bojcun puts it. The quick expansion of the share of the economy controlled by Ukraine’s officials — reaching 40 per cent on the eve of independence — only added to the problems.

Together, these issues combined to create a disaster: between 1991 and 1996, Ukraine’s economy contracted every year by at least 10 per cent and as much as 23 per cent. Overall, it had contracted to 43 per cent of its 1990 level by 1996 — a decline worse than the United States experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The main reason nobody starved after 1991 was similar to Russia’s: the existence of private gardening, a legacy of the Soviet period. “The overwhelming majority of workers have out of town kitchen gardens,” wrote a worker from the Dnipro region in 1996. These were “little patches of land given them by the factory management under an agreement with the agricultural authorities… People work five days in the factories and two days on their plots.” According to official statistics, by 1996 some 80–95 per cent of fruit, vegetables and potatoes came from such plots. Even a quarter of all livestock were raised in private gardens.

Ukraine’s economy has not recovered nearly as much as that of resource-rich Russia, and its economic growth has stagnated since 2009. Russia’s war by proxy in Donbas since 2014 again stunted economic growth: between 2013 and 2015, Ukraine’s GDP halved.

The current war will have catastrophic consequences for this overall picture. In early 2022, the World Bank predicted a contraction of the economy by 45 per cent. In the same year, 47 per cent of surveyed Ukrainians reported that they did not have “enough money even for food” or had money sufficient “only for the most basic items.”

Post-Soviet countries are not only poor, they are also among the world’s most corrupt. Among European countries, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are all known as deeply corrupt societies. Of the 336 politicians whose secret offshore financial accounts were leaked in the “Pandora Papers” of 2021, thirty-eight came from Ukraine, among them president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This was the largest number of any country in the world. Russia’s figure was nineteen.

Over time, however, Ukraine has improved its record. In Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a higher score means less corruption. Ukraine initially improved significantly after 2004. While this progress was undone after a few years, improvement has been steady since 2009. Meanwhile, Russia has stagnated since 2012 and is classified today as more corrupt than its neighbour.

Corruption and economic crisis do little to embed democracy. Maybe unsurprisingly, then, the majority of the societies that succeeded the Soviet Union are ruled by authoritarian regimes. (Nine out of fifteen of them, or 60 per cent, according to the 2021 classification by Freedom House, an organisation that measures democratic performance.) Only the three Baltic states, which are members of both NATO and the European Union, are classified as consolidated democracies. Three others, Ukraine among them, are hybrid regimes, where authoritarian elements compete with democratic ones.

Within this general context, Ukraine is doing relatively well. Between 2017 and 2022 it was classified as “partly free” by Freedom House, its score oscillating between 60 and 62 on a scale out of 100, where the higher number indicates a higher level of civic and political liberty. Such numbers do not indicate that Ukraine is a beacon of democracy, however, either in the region (where Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia stand out as the freest countries, with scores of between 89 and 90) or around the world (the troubled United States scored 83 in 2021, while Australia stood at 97).

But Ukraine contrasts positively with Russia, which has been categorised as “not free” with a score of 20, falling to 19 in 2022. And Vladimir Putin’s state, in turn, still compares favourably with other dictatorships in the region, which are even more repressive: Belarus with 11 and Tajikistan with 8. For comparison, China scored 9 in 2021 and North Korea 3.

To a significant extent, the predominance of authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space is a Soviet legacy. “In all parts of the former Soviet empire,” write two legal scholars who studied this problem in detail, “the socialist party-state structure left a shared legacy of an executive-dominated state.” Change depended on whether a postcolonial or neocolonial mindset won the day.

In other words: did people want to stay in the Russian orbit or not? If not, the obvious choice was an orientation towards Europe, which came with mixed constitutions stressing checks and balances, weakening the executive; if yes, the constitution would be modelled much more closely on Russia’s “crown presidentialism,” further entrenching the centrality of the executive. In Ukraine, the former tendency won out, but not without political struggles.

One rather basic aspect of democracy is that governments are changed peacefully by elections. Ukraine is doing quite well in this regard, particularly if compared with its two autocratic neighbours. In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko has been in power since 1994; in Russia, Putin since 1999. Ukraine, meanwhile, has seen seven presidencies since 1991: of Leonid Kravchuk (1991–94), Leonid Kuchma (1994–2005), Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10), Viktor Yanukovych (2010–14), Oleksandr Turchynov (2014), Petro Poroshenko (2014–19) and now Volodymyr Zelenskyy (since 2019).

The majority of these presidents were elected to office and left when they lost elections or decided not to contest them. Two were removed through revolutions, one peaceful (the Orange Revolution of 2004–05), one violent (the Revolution of Dignity, or Euromaidan, of 2013–14). But both revolutions resulted in elected governments again, not the imposition of revolutionary dictatorships.

Ukraine’s presidents ruled in competition with parliament, at first the one elected under Soviet conditions in 1990, then, since 1994, a post-Soviet one. This competition was formalised in the 1996 constitution, which put the directly elected president next to a one-chamber parliament that limited presidential powers to a much larger extent than in Russia.

Its unusually strong parliament became an issue because of the fragmented party system, however. First, there were too many parties; second, the existing parties were not based around major ideological positions or clearly elaborated political philosophies; third, there were many socially influential groups competing for power. As one observer puts it, this system was based “not on ideological factors, but on the competition of financial and industrial groups and regional elites” interested “in dispersing power in order to control at least a small segment of it.” The result was “political instability.”

Ukraine’s political system, then, constituted something of a unique case, both within the post-Soviet space and in the world at large. Its huge number of parties — more than 120 were officially registered in 2002 — were often internally divided as well. In the words of one observer, this fragmentation was “unprecedented for a modern democratic republic.” For another, it “hindered democratisation” by making it “difficult for the population to orient itself politically.” But the diversity also made it more difficult for would-be autocrats and their networks of clients to consolidate power.

The same can be said for the much-quoted regional fragmentation of Ukraine. On the one hand, regionalism has defined voting behaviour and hence fragmented the political system. In both parliamentary and presidential elections until 2019, voters in the more Russian and Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea voted for one set of parties, while those in the more Ukrainian-speaking western Ukraine preferred a different set. “No party managed to elect candidates across Ukraine,” writes political scientist Paul D’Anieri. Presidential elections show a similar regional pattern.

At their extreme, regional divisions can define conflict lines within Ukraine, including the threat of secessionism and ethno-political conflict. On the other hand, regional identities and political networks also help balance power within the broader political system and prevent any one group of elites from monopolising power. Ukraine’s regional, cultural, religious and economic diversity can be seen as an asset as much as a liability. For historian Serhii Plokhy, it is “one of the main reasons for Ukraine’s success as a democracy.”

Of the three main regional power groups, one is based in Kharkiv in the northeast; the second in the industrial heartland around Donetsk in the east; and the third in Dnipro in central Ukraine, the heart of the Soviet Union’s defence and space industries. These were already part of the political structure of late Soviet times, and they led to a specific form of “patronal democracy” in which clans competed for political power within a republican set-up.

At the same time, winners often tried to replace this competitive structure with a single hierarchy of power. The first attempt came under Leonid Kuchma, who built a “patronal autocracy,” but the Orange Revolution of 2004 destroyed this system and reverted to dual competition between president and parliament on the one hand and multiple power networks on the other.

Yanukovych then tried again, and successfully neutralised competing clans — until ordinary citizens intervened to stop this usurpation of power. The 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity not only undid Yanukovych’s dictatorial slide but also led to an election labelled by two experts as “probably the fairest one in the country’s history.” This transformation of the political system was one-sided, however: while it did constitute a redemocratisation, it didn’t eliminate regional and patronal politics.

It was only with Zelenskyy’s election in 2019 that things began to change in this regard. Zelenskyy was “no chief patron and [had] no patronal pyramid” but instead gathered strong support from the new middle and creative classes, campaigning on an anti-corruption platform. He mostly spoke Russian during his campaign, which helped overcome regional differences between Russian speakers in the east and Ukrainian speakers in the west. He achieved what many thought impossible: his election was the first in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history where voting did not follow regional patterns. •

This is an edited extract from Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story, published this month by Melbourne University Press.

The post Ukraine’s struggle for democracy appeared first on Inside Story.

In retrospect, what were we thinking? Did we really believe private companies would put serving the public above profit? That companies wouldn’t take advantage of light-touch regulation? That their insistence on commercial confidentiality wasn’t designed to protect their operations from scrutiny?

Which leads to another question: is our whole approach to social services systemically flawed?

Mark Considine, a professor of political science at Melbourne University with decades of experience in examining social programs, thinks so. His recent book The Careless State brings together what we tend to see as separate problems — problems that add up to an indictment of the privatisation and deregulation of Australian social policy — and provides some pointers to how we could do better.

Social services reform became an extension of the enthusiasm for financial deregulation, free markets and privatisation that swept the world during the 1980s and was taken up by the Hawke and Keating governments in Australia. Why not try market-based reforms in new areas, even though they were outside the traditional market economy? Lumbering, inefficient bureaucracies and the community service model went out of fashion; competition, choice and entrepreneurial flair were all the rage.

Efficient markets are driven by price competition, but in the new social service markets prices were set by a single purchaser of the services, which was the government. But governments lost touch with how services were provided and often found themselves reduced to mopping up and repairing when things went awry.

Not-for-profit providers shrank, unable to compete with the often ruthless cost-cutting and understaffing of their profit-making rivals. Clients, particularly the vulnerable, often fell prey to lack of information or misleading information. The absence of real alternatives made choice illusory.

Another result was that the quality of services deteriorated. “If money can be made by providing a terrible service, that is what a market will allow,” writes Considine. Serious fraud and rorting of the rules, costing billions of dollars, were evident in all the market-driven services he examined.

So what now? The timing may just be right for a serious reassessment. A change of government in Canberra and the searing experience of robodebt might provide the impetus for change.

One of those who commented on a draft of Considine’s book was Glyn Davis, who was vice-chancellor of Melbourne University. Davis has since been appointed by Anthony Albanese to head the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and wants to pursue the issues Considine identified.

Not surprisingly, The Careless State has struck a chord with non-government providers and charities, though not so much with for-profit enterprises. It also has attracted international attention: Considine has been invited as the keynote speaker at the annual Social Outcomes conference in Oxford next month.

Considine says that Britain saw a similar shift to market-based services, starting with the Blair government. But it was never as gung-ho in its approach and is already well on the way to a reconsideration. He recalls a British bureaucrat remarking that his counterparts in Canberra “were always more Catholic than the Pope.” Denmark, Israel and the Netherlands have already moved away from a free-wheeling market approach towards a more mixed model of public coordination and governance.

Australian politicians are starting to take notice as well. As chair of the select parliamentary committee on employment services, Victorian federal Labor MP Julian Hill kept the attention of his audience of employment providers with a provocative speech last October. “Over two decades of evidence raises legitimate questions about the impact of marketisation,” he said, “and there are a growing number of informed sceptics deeply concerned that competition and choice has failed and will continue to fail the most vulnerable consumers.”

The Albanese government made some changes to employment services last year. Among them was that those jobseekers considered the easiest to return to work are no longer assigned to employment agencies, for whom they were easy earners, but are instead referred to a digital service. The existing system remains for two-thirds of unemployed people, however, including an estimated 500,000 who have been on benefits for more than a year — a figure that has barely changed despite a substantial fall in overall unemployment.

The government’s changes prompted Hill to ask his audience: “Will you respond to the greater flexibility in the system and upfront investment by investing in people? Or will we see more ‘creaming and parking,’ as has plagued the privatised system for twenty years, underinvesting in those who need the most help?” Hill was referring to the fact that more money could be made by “creaming” — moving the easiest clients quickly into jobs — while “parking” those with greater needs but fewer prospects of employment.

Those hoping Hill’s views may be tempered by Liberals on the committee could be disappointed. Russell Broadbent, a Victorian Liberal MP with a long record of hewing an independent path, is the committee’s deputy chair. He praises Hill’s bipartisan approach, is impressed with the critique developed by Considine (who has given evidence to the inquiry), and is concerned the present system plays into the hands of those who argue that “everyone who hasn’t got a job is a slacker. That is just not true — most have multiple barriers to entry into the workforce.”

Broadbent also makes broader criticisms of the market-based social services. “How come private aged-care providers drive exceptionally beautiful cars? It’s not because they’re living on the breadline: it’s because they have taken their million dollars out and say to the managers ‘there’s the money that’s left — make it work.’” He hastens to add that not everyone deserves to be tarred with the same brush.

When Paul Keating’s government shook up employment services in 1995 it went further than most developed nations. The Commonwealth Employment Service was retained but forced to compete with private job agencies. The unemployed would be able to shop around for the best service, and quality would be assured by competition between providers.

As the rhetoric of the time put it, the government would be steering, not rowing. It would set the policies but not run the services. The shift fitted nicely with another fashion — the drive for smaller government.

Capturing the mood of the moment, Keating favourably compared the new market with the previous public “monolith.” But Considine quotes another reason Keating gave for the reform: “One of the things you have always got to do when you think about social reform in Australia is to make it Tory-proof… you have got to hermetically seal them so they can’t get their nasty little right-wing fingernails under them and tear them away.” In short, Labor adopted a policy it thought the Liberals could only agree with.

That’s not quite how it worked out. The Howard government did retain the changes but reshaped them in its own, harsher image. It increased the proportion of employment services transferred from the CES to private providers from 30 per cent to 50 per cent and whittled it away further in subsequent years. Then it closed the government body down completely, leaving the whole field to non-government providers.

It also removed the “mutual” in the mutual obligation policy introduced by the Keating reforms, cutting spending on the training programs that the government had provided for long-term unemployed and introducing Work for the Dole as a condition for retaining benefits. This pandered to the populist notion mentioned by Broadbent — the unemployed as “slackers” or “bludgers” (see also robodebt). Although it has been shown to do almost nothing to help people find real jobs, Work for the Dole has been retained by the Albanese government.

Against a background of rapidly increasing demand for social services, the same arguments for choice and competition influenced new policies in aged care, childcare, vocational training and later the NDIS. In the first two decades of this century, aged care spending rose from 2.8 per cent to 3.5 per cent of the total federal budget. For childcare the increase was from 0.77 per cent to 1.53 per cent; for employment services, including income support and job assistance, from 3.3 per cent to 4.5 per cent.

In the name of “contestability,” for-profit firms were allowed to offer their services alongside not-for-profit companies and community organisations. “A church agency with a history of 100 years of philanthropic work to the unemployed would be considered no better and no worse than an entrepreneur seeking to make a profit from the same social services market,” writes Considine.

Even the most respected charities were sucked into the vortex of ruthless competition. In 2005, the Salvation Army in Victoria was forced to repay more than $9 million for fraudulently upgrading unemployed clients to a “highly disadvantaged” classification so that they attracted much higher fees. Staggeringly, a 2012 audit found that only 42 per cent of job-finding fees charged by providers were genuine.

Private providers also sprang up like mushrooms when vocational education and training was progressively deregulated and privatised, starting under the Hawke government in the 1980s and eventually enfeebling the states’ TAFE systems. The reforms culminated in what Considine describes as “the most spectacular frauds yet seen in any social program… With extraordinary profits to be made, the system was deluged with providers targeting the most disadvantaged customers with courses that had little value and sign-up incentives that made it appear they were getting their program for free.”

Students had choices but insufficient information to make them meaningful, particularly if they were international students. In theory, they could switch to other providers if they were unhappy about the quality of the training they were receiving. In practice, enrolment and course fees created effective barriers. The education and training provided by some firms were so poor that childcare firms refused to employ their graduates.

Childcare itself has also performed poorly. Government subsidies for the rapidly expanding sector often feed almost directly into higher fees and bigger profits. A 2021 study found that an Australian couple on average wages spent 16 per cent of their income on childcare, compared with 3 per cent in South Korea, 4 per cent in Sweden and 5 per cent in Iceland.

“In effect childcare providers lift fees according to what the consumers will bear, with politicians then pressured to reduce some of the cost this generates for families,” Considine writes. He adds that childcare has also become a real estate business, with a bias towards the suburbs with the best prospects for capital gains.

The shortcomings in another market-driven sector, aged care, were tragically thrust into the spotlight during Covid, particularly in Victoria. The aged care royal commission’s scathing report labelled the neglect of clients, including physical and sexual abuse by staff, a “disgrace” that “should be a source of national shame.” Cutting costs on meals, typically described in promotional material as “home cooked”, meant many in care were malnourished.

The pandemic also highlighted how the best-quality care was being provided in government-run homes, where there were far fewer deaths. Eighteen reviews of aged care over twenty-four years led Considine to the conclusion that governance of the sector was “catastrophically weak.”

Substantial increases in funding disguise the fact that the system has not kept up with the increased demands of an ageing population. Considine estimates a 40 per cent reduction in spending per client over twenty-five years, coinciding with the steady shift from a community service to a market model.

Regulation has increased but is often ineffective. Large-scale gaming of the system is evident, with the proportion of nursing home residents classified as needing complex health care — which attracts higher funding — increasing from 12.7 per cent to 53 per cent over the decade to 2019.

Inspections of facilities do occur, but always with plenty of notice. “You knew at least a week ahead,” says one executive quoted in the book. Remarkably, the industry has prevailed in its strong objections to unannounced inspections. The Australian Aged Care Quality and Safety Agency is compromised by operating inside the health department, which makes the policy decisions in aged care.

For providers, the incentives are perverse: rather than rewarding them for higher standards, the system encourages them to cut costs to generate higher demand and bigger profits. Staff are underpaid and undertrained, which also means they lack the authority to advocate on behalf of clients.

Considine believes the aged care royal commission has not gone anywhere near far enough in its recommendations. “There’s a lot of regulation raining down from above but not much internal self-management and learning,” he says. “We haven’t actually laid out the basis of a transparent care strategy. I think there is still a very high likelihood, even with more trained personnel, that the management of some of these residential places could be behaving in a really unsatisfactory fashion.”

The National Disability Insurance Scheme, the largest reform in social policy since Medicare, is admirable in its charter to give everyone with a serious disability the right and the means to obtain the assistance they choose and need. What sets it apart from the other social programs Considine examined is the role of two intermediaries — local area and support coordinators — who help clients draw up a plan and implement it, making for more effective choice.

But the NDIS still incorporates some of the same problems Considine identified in the other programs. It relies on a market for services, with the aim of using competition between providers to achieve greater efficiency. But the services offered have not always been adequate in terms of quality and availability.

The NDIS example raises another weakness in market-based social programs — what Considine calls the “black box.” Instead of the government prescribing how services are delivered, it allows providers to offer services according to their own “secret recipe,” in the interests of innovation, competition and efficiency.

Considine gives the example of a provider who suggests weekly appointments when monthly appointments are adequate; clients then ask for higher funding to cover this. The government’s National Disability Insurance Agency, or NDIA, may see costs going up but be unable to act effectively against over-servicing because it doesn’t know enough about the services provided or has limited ability to act.

The Quality and Safeguards Commission is supposed to be the NDIS cop but it is seldom on the beat. In 2020, when it reported on the death of a person whose carer was charged with manslaughter, it had received more than 8000 complaints over two years but banned only one provider.

Considine identifies other inequities in the NDIS, with better-off or more articulate people or their families able to argue for better care plans. And the government’s arm’s-length approach creates the ever-present danger of fraud, as it has done in other choice-based social systems.

Last year, the NDIA reported that eighteen people had been charged since 2020 over alleged fraud against the NDIS totalling up to $14 million. At the same time, the head of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, Michael Phelan, estimated that as much as a fifth of the $30 billion annual spending on the NDIS had been misappropriated. His agency had uncovered fake NDIS clients, systematically inflated invoices, payments for services never provided, and a network of professionals helping criminals exploit the scheme.

The picture Considine paints is not unremittingly bleak. Workplace health and safety has moved in the opposite direction, from a private insurance market approach to something closer to a public–private partnership, with greater government — in this case state government — involvement and control. The cost of the schemes Considine examined in New South Wales and Victoria rose and fell at different times but were ultimately brought under control alongside improvements in health and safety.

Employers are still able to choose their insurers, but uniform standards were set and operators are required to be more transparent, encouraging a “learn from the best” culture, as opposed to the black box approach. And workplace inspections occur without prior notice.

One other area Considine identifies as an outlier is maternal and child health, which is still a public service delivered by state governments and local councils at centres staffed by specialist nurses. The service is available to everyone; to the degree choice is provided, it involves public rather than private providers. The service has a high reputation, says Considine, and offers few opportunities for fraud or “creaming.”

While the Albanese government seems prepared to listen to critics of the present system, and while at least some people believe it is open to persuasion, its risk-averse approach to change raises questions about its willingness to embrace wholesale reform.

Some signs are less than encouraging. The government’s draft national care and support economy strategy talks, among other things, about “functioning markets, sustainable funding and… productivity gains.” In its response, the Australian Council of Social Service urges the government to look at better options, including alternatives to markets, given the “litany of systemic failures and inadequacies with markets in social services.” Anglicare argues that the government should take back the control and operation of employment services.

Considine believes the markets-and-choices model has been exhausted. The pendulum needs to swing back towards empowering the clients and staff of the services — “from choice to voice,” as he puts it.

A culture of improvement and innovation must come from within. Vulnerable people in particular should have access to specialists who advocate for their needs. The black boxes within which providers guard their business models have to be replaced with more transparency. Governments need to take responsibility for services as well as setting the standards.

Is that enough? “I don’t have the view that nationalising these services is necessary,” says Considine. “In most of these social services, where the government has been working with community organisations, it works well. There are some private organisations in childcare and aged care and parts of the NDIS who are credible.

“I don’t have a problem with a mixed economy. I have a problem with running a social service as if is a market. You need to run it as a public service because that is what it is.” •

The post “You need to run it as a public service because that is what it is” 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.

Before 1988, grandparents had near-automatic right of entry. Over the next two decades a slow accretion of administrative, regulatory and legislative measures put permanent residency increasingly out of reach. Slowly but surely the focus of Australia’s migration program shifted to working age migrants with useful skills.

That shift might make a certain kind of economic sense, but what does it mean for grandparents who want to live near their Australian-based children and grandchildren but don’t have Australian citizenship? And what are the implications for families who might come to rely on grandparents for all kinds of help yet live in a country that makes permanent residence so difficult?

I began to get a sense of life on a long-stay temporary visa when I called Edward Adams for an interview about his experiences as a British citizen living in Australia. (Many of the names in this article have been changed to protect privacy.) He couldn’t talk because he was busy picking up a grandchild from school, but promised to call back later.

Seventy-two-year-old Edward and his wife Tracey, sixty-four, have lived in Australia for most of their grandchildren’s lives. “We just couldn’t imagine not being here to help in their formative years,” Edward tells me by phone from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast after delivering his grandchild safely home.

Along with school pick-ups and drop-offs two or three times a week, Edward and Tracey step in at short notice to look after the children if son Rory or daughter-in-law Matilda get caught up at work. They also provide extra support when Rory is travelling for business. “And that means our son and daughter in law have been able to be much more productive than they would have been if we weren’t here,” Edward argues.

When not with the grandchildren, the couple have other distractions. They’ve joined the local golf club and made lots of friends. For all intents and purposes, they are settled in Australia, just a short walk away from Rory, Matilda and the grandchildren. Because they aren’t permanent residents or citizens, buying land and building a house required approval from the Federal Investment Review Board. Edward estimates that this added $40,000 to the cost. Since they sold their house in England, their Sunshine Coast house is the only home they have.

Originally from Bath, west of London, Edward and Tracey both retired in 2014. They came to Australia at the end of that year, ahead of Rory and Matilda’s marriage the following March. Although Rory lived in Sydney, the wedding was held on the Sunshine Coast, and Edward and Tracey immediately fell in love with the area. Edward joked that if Rory moved north, then he and Tracey would consider migrating to Australia.

And that’s how it went. Soon after the wedding, Rory’s employer asked him to move and, in 2016, Edward and Tracey came back for a six-month stay on a standard visitor visa. They returned the following year, this time on a twelve-month visa that they were able to renew for a second year by making a short trip to New Zealand.

Edward and Tracey had put money aside — around $100,000 — to apply for permanent residency via contributory parent visas. But they hit the brick wall of the balance of family test. They needed to show that half of their children are Australian citizens or permanent residents — or, if the family is scattered across different countries, then more of their children live in Australia than in any other country.

They have another younger son, Phillip, in England, who doesn’t yet have a family, and if that had been the end of the story they wouldn’t have had a problem. With one son in each country they would meet the threshold having at least half their children settled in Australia.

But Edward has another son, now in his forties, from a previous marriage that ended acrimoniously when Edward’s first son was just two years old. Frequently overseas for work, Edward failed to meet the regular access requirements set down by the court to share custody. He supported his son financially but was otherwise largely absent as a parent. Edward and his first son are only rarely in contact.

The balance of family test is a pure numbers game: it takes no account of the depth or closeness of family bonds. Since Edward has two children in Britain and only one in Australia, the system locks him out, and so it locks Tracey out too. And it counts for nothing that they’ve been emotionally enmeshed in the lives of their three Australian grandchildren since the eldest was a baby, or that they frequently care for them.

In 2019, another option to stay in Australia opened up for Edward and Tracey, when the federal government introduced the sponsored parent (temporary) visa. This visa isn’t subject to the balance of family test and enables parents to live in Australia for up to a decade. In May 2019, Edward and Tracey’s son Rory was among the first to be approved as a sponsor, and in August the couple returned to Bath anticipating a three- to four-month wait. But within a week of submitting their medical checks they were granted visas and in early September they were on a plane to Australia.

“It was very swift,” says Edward. “Our dealings with the immigration department have been very satisfactory.” It came at a stiff price, though, which is part of the reason why this option hasn’t been anywhere near as popular as expected.

If they’d not been tripped up by the balance of family test, Edward and Tracey could have applied for permanent residency by pursuing one of two options. The first is the “contributory” parent visa, which costs at least $47,955 per person. Around 7000 were granted last financial year but 86,000 people are still waiting in the queue. Given the backlog, Home Affairs advises that a new application “may take at least 12 years to process [their emphasis].” The expert panel commissioned by the government to review Australia’s migration program reckons this is an underestimate; it puts the processing time at fifteen years.

The second, non-contributory, parent visa is much cheaper, with charges starting at $4560 per person, and there are “only” 51,000 people currently in the queue. But since far fewer visas are issued each year — just 1500 in 2022–23— the wait is much longer. Home Affairs advises it will take “at least 29 years” for a new application to be processed; the expert review panel warns it’s likely to be more than forty years.

Given the delays, costs and difficulty of getting a permanent visa, and the number of people, like Edward and Tracey, excluded by the balance of family test, you might expect more families to follow their lead in opting for the sponsored parent (temporary) visa. The government anticipated significant demand for the visa when it was introduced in 2019 and capped the program at 15,000 places annually “in recognition of the challenges of an ageing population, as well as the overall budget impact of older migrants.” It need not have worried — by March 2023, almost four years later, only 8204 visas had been issued.

Why has interest been so low?

Covid travel restrictions are part of the equation, but price is also a barrier. A three-year visa costs more than $5000 and a five-year visa more than $10,000. The same fee must be paid again when the visa is renewed — so a ten-year stay will cost $20,000 per person in two upfront payments.

Visaholders must also pay compulsory private medical insurance at about $5000 per year (although at least one big insurer will no longer provide cover for holders of this visa aged over seventy). And families who sponsor a parent must prove that they have a taxable income of at least $83,455.

There’s a sting in the tail, too: parents on this visa are barred from applying to settle permanently either under the contributory or non-contributory options.

Edward and Tracey might not have been able to establish their lives on the Sunshine Coast and watch their grandchildren grow up if it hadn’t been for the efforts of Arvind Duggal. For someone who insists he’s not “political” and just wants “a happy family life” Arvind has had a big impact during two Australian elections when he’s managed to put parent visas on the agenda and influence the policy promises of the Coalition and the Labor Party.

Arvind hails from Jalandhar, a city in Punjab famous for manufacturing cricket bats and other sports equipment. He migrated to Australia with his wife and two-year-old daughter in 2008 without realising he wouldn’t be able to bring his mother to join them. Because he has two older sisters living in India, the balance of family test prevented him from sponsoring his mother to settle in Australia permanently.

Arvind, who was working as a bus driver, discovered that two of his workmates, Parminder Sohal and Davinder Pal Singh, were also dissatisfied with the existing options for bringing parents to Australia. In 2015 the three men launched an online petition to then home affairs minister Peter Dutton.

Despite its far from catchy title — “Introduce Long Stay Visa for Parents Who Want to Spend Quality Time with Their Family”— the petition took flight and eventually attracted close to 30,000 signatures. The non-political Arvind was thrust into the unaccustomed role of activist and advocate. Having started out not even knowing the name of his local MP, before long he was well-versed in the crucial marginal seats where migrant votes might be influential.

Most mainstream media paid little attention, though SBS reported extensively on the issue, especially via its Hindi and Punjabi language services, as did news outlets catering to specific migrant communities. But in the closely fought 2016 federal election Arvind’s petition had the major parties scrambling to outbid each other to offer a new temporary long-stay parent visa.

Labor moved first. Two weeks before the poll opposition leader Bill Shorten promised a renewable three-year visa. At the end of their stay, parents would only have to leave Australia for four weeks and could then return for another three years. This was a big improvement on the existing visitor visa, which offered a maximum stay of just one year and forced parents to leave Australia for at least six months between visits.

Three days later, the Liberal Party trumped Labor by pledging that a re-elected Coalition government would introduce a five-year visa. Both parties would require parents to hold private medical insurance and post a bond to cover any future expense for government services. Labor set the bond at $5000; the Liberals based it on the existing Assurance of Support scheme (between $5000 and $15,000, depending on who sponsors whom and for how long).

The Coalition squeaked home and within months things started moving. The government launched a discussion paper and announced community consultations to help design the new visa, which it “envisaged” would be in place the following year.

Arvind’s supporters were elated. “My heart is in celebration by the chance of having my mum close to me for longer than six months sporadically,” wrote one of them on Facebook. “I cannot express how happy I am for reading this media release… having my mum for at least three years near her only grandchild is a dream… Gosh, I am in tears!!!!!!!”

But it wasn’t until March 2019, just before the next election rolled around, that details were announced. In the slow transition from generous campaign promise to concrete policy the new visa had been hedged about with bureaucratic conditions and high fees.

Arvind still works in transport, though these days he’s a customer service officer. “Peter Dutton betrayed us on his election promise,” he says when we meet for coffee in Adelaide at the end of his shift.

Eight days before the 2016 election, Arvind received a personally addressed email from the Office of the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection signed by Mr Dutton’s media advisor. It explained that the promised new visa would require sponsoring families to post a refundable bond “within the existing parameters.” There was no mention of a fee. Yet when details were finally announced in 2019, the application charge was a hefty $5000 for a three-year stay and $10,000 for five years.

The email also reassured Arvind that “the number of visas is not capped.” But when it eventually came to fruition, places in the program were limited to 15,000 annually.

Arvind says the Coalition chose to capitalise on the huge pent-up demand to bring parents to Australia. “It’s like selling a bottle of water in the desert,” he says. “You can choose the price… This is making money from grandparents visiting their grandchildren, which is un-Australian.”

Arvind was also disappointed with three other aspects of the new visa. A family must have a high taxable income to qualify as a sponsor, something not mentioned in the election campaign. It can only sponsor one set of parents. And parents must leave Australia for at least three months to renew their visas. (The email from Mr Dutton’s office said they’d need to leave Australia for “a minimum period of four weeks.”)

As Inside Story reported in the run up to the 2019 election, Labor promised to address some of Arvind’s concerns, saying it would remove the annual cap on the existing temporary long-stay parent visas and slash the fees by 75 per cent. The price of the three-year visa would come down to $1250 and a five-year visa to $2500.

After losing in 2019 Labor felt no need to publicly renew its promises ahead of winning the 2022 election, though Arvind says he was privately assured that an Albanese government would honour its earlier commitments. He’s now concerned that he’s seen no action.

“If Labor fails to deliver then migrant communities will have every reason to lose our faith in the Australian political system” he says. “It’s not setting a good example for our kids who just want family time with their grandparents.”

From the start, Arvind and his bus driver colleagues had modest ambitions for their campaign. All they asked for was an extension of existing visitor arrangements to allow parents to stay for up to three years. He doesn’t see why that should be so hard or cost so much extra.

The campaign has been stressful and taken a toll on family life. “If we didn’t have the balance of family test, I never would have done this,” Arvind says. “Just to get a long-stay visa took seven years.” He’d like to put the issue behind him, but he can’t quite let it go. “It’s not just about me,” he says. “So many people had faith in the campaign. They have worked really hard for it, but ultimately they’ve been very disappointed by the end product.”

Misook and her husband Soejun are also in Australia on long-stay parent visas, but their experience is far less happy than David and Tracey’s. They had no trouble with the balance of family test — their only child is an Australian citizen — and their long-stay visa enabled them to stay here while they endure the long wait for their contributory parent visas to be processed.

Misook and Soejun fall into the category of migrants “stuck in permanently temporary limbo,” in the words of home affairs minister Clare O’Neil. The expert review of Australia’s migration program calculated that 90,000 temporary visa holders have already lived in Australia for more than five years, long enough to “lose their connection with their home countries and become embedded in the Australian community.”

“My husband and I have stayed in Australia, legally, for almost eleven years in the hope of living here permanently and becoming Australian citizens,” Misook says.

The South Korean couple and their eighteen-year-old daughter Eun moved to Australia from Seoul in November 2012. Misook’s employer, a global company, sponsored her on a temporary skilled work visa to fill a vacancy in its Australian operations. She believed she would be able to seek permanent residence after being with the company for a year, only to find that this was out of reach due to her age. Applicants under the Employer Nomination Scheme must be under fifty, and Misook was already fifty-one. A possible exemption applied if Misook could stay with the same firm for four years and earn a salary above a very high threshold, but she had to leave her job in 2015 before meeting that condition.

By this time, Eun was at university. Having failed to meet the requirements for sponsorship, Misook and Soejun looked for other ways to stay in Australia with their only child. Since they were now too old to apply for skilled migration, Soejun got a student visa and went back to study.

By 2017, Eun had qualified as a lawyer, started working and become a citizen. This enabled Misook and Soejun to apply for contributory parent visas. Almost six years later, they are still waiting for a decision. In order to remain in Australia while the process drags on, they spent $20,000 to secure sponsored parent (temporary) visas valid for five years. The couple keep themselves engaged by volunteering for their local council, but Misook is frustrated that the visa conditions prevent them from working even when Australian employers are struggling to find qualified staff.

“Actually, my husband and I are healthy and have skill to work here in Australia, but we can’t work due to the ridiculous visa condition,” she says. “I have been suffering from a financial difficulty to pay all living cost due to the long delay of the visa process.”

Misook says she contributed more than $250,000 in taxes while working for the IT company; Soejun also worked and paid tax, and he and Eun paid thousands more in fees to study as international students. Yet they can’t use Medicare or any other government services. With their long-stay visas expiring in December 2024, the family’s anxiety and uncertainty grows.

Despite their generally positive experience, Edward says he and Tracey also have some concerns. The reality that their five-year visas expire in September 2024 is starting to weigh on their minds, and they are preoccupied with securing a second five-year stay. Their biggest worry is that they’ll be forced to leave Australia for at least three months to do so. Once processing times are added in, Edward reckons they could be away from their grandchildren for up to nine months, interrupting those close relationships and disrupting the lives of their son and daughter-in-law, who rely on help with childcare to manage busy professional lives.

Then there’s the cost. Since they have no home to go back to in England, Edward calculates they could be out of pocket $50,000 in accommodation and airfares.

“That’s money that would otherwise be spent here in Australia,” he says, noting that some of it would probably go to Rory and Matilda and their young family to help them weather rising prices and increasing mortgage repayments. “Most grandparents offer financial support to their families especially during today’s worldwide recession,” he says. “I don’t see any downside for the government in allowing us to apply onshore and granting us a bridging visa while our application is processed.”

Edward’s other concern is that he and Tracey won’t be eligible for travel insurance for the journey because they don’t hold Australian visas extending beyond the period of their trip. And once they’re in Britain they face a catch-22: because they’ve been away from that country for more than three months and are no longer considered residents, they can’t access the National Health Service unless they are returning permanently.

Edward has learned from Facebook that some three-year visa holders have been granted a waiver to apply for a renewal onshore because their presence in Australia is vital to enabling their adult children to stay in the workforce. But he’s unsure whether the rules were only relaxed because of Covid travel restrictions and fears he and Tracey may not get the same dispensation.

The rules appear clear cut. The Home Affairs website says permission to apply onshore “may” be approved if the parent is unable to depart Australia due to accident, serious illness or a disaster in the home country, but will not be approved because leaving Australia is inconvenient or the applicant has “sold assets in their home country”.

A letter to immigration minister Andrew Giles from Edward’s local MP brought no joy. The minister fobbed the inquiry off by referring to mandatory conditions applied to temporary visas under the migration regulations. But with its long duration, Edward thinks the sponsored parent (temporary) visa is in a different category to other temporary visas and doesn’t understand why it can’t be renewed in Australia.

“If we applied onshore and were granted the visa it’s not like we’re gaining any extra time on the ten-year limit,” he says.

The reasons for preventing subclass 870 visa holders from applying for a new visa onshore are opaque. It could be a manifestation of the “Genuine Temporary Entry requirement” — a demonstration that temporary parent migrants like Edward and Tracey still have a life elsewhere and aren’t trying to settle permanently. But given that the visa allows a ten-year stay, this is an absurd piece of bureaucratic rigamarole. Perhaps, as one government insider told me privately, “it’s just a very poorly designed visa.”

I have had serious reservations about the sponsored parent (temporary) visa from the outset. When it was first promised at the 2016 election, I described it for Inside Story as Claytons immigration, a reference to the faux whisky marketed in Australia in the 1970s with the tagline “the drink you have when you’re not having a drink.”

The visa offers neither permanent settlement nor a truly temporary stay. It’s a messy political compromise cooked up to appease migrant communities in marginal electorates.

The influence of the “ethnic vote” is not a new phenomenon. Historian Rachel Stevens records that Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government relaxed the requirements for family migration in its second term in “a pragmatic move designed to gain electoral votes from naturalized southern European migrants.” In the 1980s, Labor supported family migration for the same reason. Stevens cites veteran political journalist Michelle Grattan’s view that “without the southern European vote, the ALP would have lost the 1987 federal election by 2 per cent.”

Yet campaign-driven appeals to specific voters in marginal electorates rarely produce well thought out policy. The sponsored parent (temporary) parent visa is a good example. Designed to appeal to overseas born voters in key seats, it is likely to launch chickens that will come home to roost on some future minister’s desk.

What happens, at the end of a ten-year visa, if a parent has become too frail to return to their homeland, or if they no longer have the family or community supports to sustain them there? Human lives are messy and complicated and tend to explode administrative systems and rules, no matter how detailed and prescriptive. In fact, we already see stories like this, because of the absurd processing delays for permanent parent visa.

In 2020, SBS reported that ninety-eight-year-old grandmother Esmeralda Rosario was facing deportation to India after living in Australia on a bridging visa for twelve years. She had arrived on a tourist visa and then applied for an aged parent visa. In 2019 her application was refused because, unsurprisingly, the nonagenarian failed to meet the health requirement and her care was judged likely to impose significant costs on the Australian community.

SBS also documented the similar case of 93-year-old Mollie Manley. She had been living in Australia on a bridging visa for eleven years when her application for permanent residence was refused. The great grandmother had passed all relevant medical tests when she first arrived in Australia, but by the time her application was assessed she was blind and in aged care. She too was slated as a potential burden on the healthcare system.

Cases like these generally end up in drawn-out appeals before they finally land on the desk of the immigration minister with a request to intervene and grant a visa on compassionate grounds. The minister’s public interest powers can only be exercised after every administrative and legal avenue has been exhausted — a stressful, expensive and inefficient process that takes years.

Plenty of similar cases are yet to come. In March 2023, 17,223 parents were living in Australia on bridging visas — a subset of the 137,000 parents in the combined queue for contributory and non-contributory visas. Most of those people will either die waiting for a decision or end up being rejected because they have become too old and frail to meet Australia’s health requirements.

In 2016, I warned that a long stay parent visa could attract a lot of elderly migrants to Australia. At the time, there were already 80,0000 applicants queuing up for permanent visas, and I figured demand would be significantly higher after factoring in people who were put off applying by the cost or the endless delays for a permanent visa, plus those like Arvind’s mother and Edward who had been excluded by the balance-of-family test.

When the Labor opposition promised to remove the cap on numbers and slash the visa fee, the same concerns re-emerged. Migration expert Bob Birrell predicted “at least 200,000 parent applications” in three years if Labor won government. Demographer Peter McDonald estimated that up to two million families could be interested in sponsoring a parent.

So far, the sponsored parent (temporary) visa hasn’t proved anywhere near that popular, and not because the cap of 15,000 places remained in place or because Covid has interrupted travel plans. The likely reason is that the visa is cumbersome and expensive. But the government would be wise to tread carefully in reforming it. If it was cheaper and easier to access, then the ten-year visa may well become as widely used as Birrell and McDonald suggested, and that would invite a range of unintended consequences.

The Clayton’s approach to migration satisfies nobody and simply defers difficult choices. The government should have the courage of its convictions and either commit to parents being considered “close family” with a near automatic right to join their children in Australia, or say, no, sorry, such a policy is not acceptable to most Australian voters and the best we can offer is a genuinely temporary stay of shorter duration. •

This article is adapted from The Parent Conundrum, a narrative exploring Australia’s troubled approach to parent migration commissioned by the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute, although the views expressed should not be taken represent its views.

The post The visa that missed its mark appeared first on Inside Story.

Apart from its election record, which for the last thirty years has been the gold standard, Newspoll’s status derives from its longevity (Roy Morgan Research is the only polling brand that has been around for longer), where it is published (an upmarket newspaper read by most federal politicians, with an online presence featuring excellent graphics) and its frequency (unmatched). Poll addicts crave nothing more than a known quantity, easily accessible trend data and a regular fix.

It’s not just the percentages Newspoll generates that matter; it is also the way the Australian interprets the figures. How much the figures themselves matter, and how much the Australian’s interpretation matters, is difficult to say. Both are recycled by politicians and journalists, among others, without much thought being given to whether they make sense.

In the latest poll, conducted 12–15 July, Labor’s primary vote was down (from 38 per cent, 16–24 June, to 36 per cent), as was the Coalition’s (35 per cent to 34 per cent), but Labor’s two-party lead grew from 54–46 to 55–45 — rounded, as are all Newspoll figures, to the nearest integer. As Adrian Beaumont noted in the Conversation, Labor “may have been unlucky” in the rounding of the two previous Newspolls but it “was probably lucky” this time.

At the Australian, the judgement of long-time political editor Simon Benson was unequivocal. Focusing on the fall in Labor’s first-preference support rather than the rise in its two-party share, he declared: “Labor’s honeymoon is officially over.” “Officially”? It was as if Newspoll should be recognised as having the same sort of status as the Australian Bureau of Statistics, say, or the Australian Electoral Commission. If, as Phillip Coorey observed, “the latest Newspoll” was merely “the latest to declare the government’s honeymoon over” (it was the Australian not Newspoll that declared it) then it was uniquely the Australian that made it “official.”

Benson took it for granted that Labor’s “honeymoon” came to an end once its first-preference support declined to a post-election “low” by an amount Benson judged to be significant. No matter that this support for Labor was still well above the 32.6 per cent (primary) or 52.1 per cent (two-party) vote recorded at the May 2022 election. The “honeymoon” had ended, and that was now “official.”

An electoral honeymoon, unlike the real thing, can end it seems — or begin to end — at whatever moment a poll-watcher chooses. Last September, when Labor’s two-party support in Newspoll reached 57 per cent — just two points higher than its current level — and its primary support stood at 37 per cent (one point ahead of where it currently sits), Benson judged that “the electoral honeymoon for Anthony Albanese continues”; in the preferred prime minister stakes, Albanese (61 per cent) was well ahead of Dutton (22 per cent), figures virtually unchanged from July.

This year, at the beginning of March, when Labor’s two-party support was at 54 per cent (three points lower than it had been in September) but its primary support still on 37 per cent, Benson took it as “a sure sign that the romance of the honeymoon phase is coming to an end for the government.” At 54–28, the Albanese–Dutton head-to-head had changed as well, but not dramatically. By mid May, however, when Newspoll estimated Labor’s two-party support at 55 per cent (its current standing) and its primary support at 38 per cent (higher than its current 36 per cent), he wondered whether it was “now the beginning of the end of the government’s honeymoon”; head-to-head, Albanese was still ahead of Dutton 56–29.

The day after the Australian published Newspoll’s figures for July, Nine’s metropolitan dailies published the latest figures from their July poll, the Resolve Political Monitor. Resolve’s percentages read as if Labor’s honeymoon was still in full-swing: Labor on 39 per cent, not 36 (the Newspoll figure); the Coalition on 30 per cent, not 34 (the Newspoll figure).

Political polling is nothing if not competitive. Making its own call about the end of Labor’s honeymoon, Resolve was not to be outdone. In March, after his poll had produced exactly the same figures (39–30) it would produce in July, Resolve’s director Jim Reed took Labor’s fall from 40 per cent in his previous poll as “another confirmation that the honeymoon highs have come to an end.” In June, Resolve had Labor back on 40 per cent. What had previously been a “honeymoon high” was now a sign of something quite different; in May, after all, Labor’s support had been 42 per cent, two points higher. Resolve, the Sun-Herald reported, “had started noting declines in Albanese and Labor’s honeymoon ratings early this year.”

Clearly, the only rule these commentators seem to follow in declaring an electoral honeymoon to have ended is that the level of support for the government in the latest poll is lower than the level recorded in the immediately preceding poll. Neither absolute levels of support nor the longer-term record count. If subsequent support for the government rises and falls — even if it is to a level higher than the previous high — one can declare an end to the honeymoon all over again. Neither the rise nor fall need be outside the poll’s margin of error — a figure the Australian and the Nine newspapers parade endlessly but their commentary studiously ignores.

Poll-watchers who have insisted for years that the Australian interprets its Newspoll data to cheer up or cheer on the Coalition may have noticed that its reading of the latest Newspoll backed up the interpretation of the Fadden by-election offered by the Liberal National Party candidate in Fadden, Cameron Caldwell. The Australian gave Caldwell’s interpretation the hortatory headline, “Fadden result ‘shows the honeymoon is over for Labor.’”

As well as spelling the end of the honeymoon, the result in Fadden showed “concern over the Indigenous voice” to be “high,” Caldwell argued. Columnist Joe Hildebrand — a vocal Yes supporter — recycled and generalised Caldwell’s line in the Daily Telegraph: “It could not be clearer,” he wrote, “that voters are rewarding the Prime Minister for his moderate and centrist direction and punishing him for the one aspect of his government” — the Voice — “that has been cast by his critics as radical or woke.”

Perhaps voters in Fadden were concerned about the Voice. “Using Fadden as a trial run,” Coorey had written on the eve of the by-election, “Dutton is attempting to turn the Voice into a lightning rod for broader discontent with the government.” After the by-election, however, another senior journalist, Paul Bongiorno, was equally adamant that “Dutton didn’t push his opposition to the referendum in the campaign”; having “raised it in a doorstop a few weeks ago, he dropped it as the poll neared.”

How anyone could conclude that Dutton had succeeded in making the Voice an issue based on nothing more than the result in Fadden, neither the Australian nor Hildebrand explained. One needs survey data, not a set of electoral returns, to determine whether Caldwell’s claim has merit. Bongiorno reports Caldwell saying that “people raised the Voice with him quietly because they didn’t want to be accused of racism or prejudice if they raised it publicly” — raised with him, he might have added, because they assumed Caldwell would not have thought such concerns racist or prejudiced. But Coorey, citing another LNP source, discounts the idea that views about the Voice affected the result: “the Voice had little impact either way,” he reports.

Even if the Voice was not shifting voters against Labor, were voters shifting against the Voice? As luck would have it, Newspoll’s latest poll also included a question on “whether to alter the Australian Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice.” For the Yes side, the topline numbers brought no more cheer than Caldwell: Yes, 41 per cent; No, 48 per cent; Don’t Know, 11 per cent. The corresponding figures after the same question was asked three weeks earlier: 43–47–10.

The changes between June and July may have been small but they played to the dominant media narrative about the Voice: that support is declining; that No has now overtaken Yes; that the referendum, if not doomed to failure, is not on a path to success. In June, Benson had cautioned that it would be “foolhardy” to “make a call… four months out from polling day” (expected mid October), and that it was “not over yet for the voice.” Now, just three weeks later, with the margin between Yes and No growing from four points to seven — well within what the Australian describes as Newspoll’s “theoretical margin of error” — Benson concluded that “the voice referendum [was] in serious trouble,” support “gradually collapsing” with “confusion over the detail, the scope and the function of the voice… killing any goodwill many undecided voters may have had.”

More striking than the topline figures was a startling shift in the differences between women’s responses and men’s. The new poll reported a seven-point rise in support for Yes among men and a ten-point fall in support among women. Suddenly, from being more likely to vote Yes than to vote No (a six-point gap), women were more likely to vote No than to vote Yes (a gap of eleven points) — a turnaround of seventeen percentage points. And from being more likely to vote No than to vote Yes (a fourteen-point gap), suddenly men were almost as likely to vote Yes — a twelve-point change.

By any measure, these were remarkable changes. The movement of one-in-five women from the Yes column (48 per cent down to 38 per cent) to either the No column (42 per cent up to 49 per cent) or the Don’t Know column (10 per cent up to 13 per cent) in such a short time — and before the start of the formal campaign — is difficult to credit. The movement of one-in-ten men from the No column (52 per cent down to 47 per cent) or the Don’t Know column (10 per cent up to 8 per cent), while only half as big, also stretches credulity.

Since the shifts were in opposite directions, they largely cancelled each other out. Had the shift among either group been less dramatic, the topline results might have looked quite different. For example, if support among women had declined by no more than half as much as Newspoll reports, support for the Voice would have stood at 43 or 44 per cent and opposition at 45 or 46 per cent. This would have represented an improved result, not a worse result, for the Yes camp than Newspoll’s figures of three weeks before. What might the headline have been then?

When Newspoll asks about the Voice, Benson writes, “female voters have until now been significantly overrepresented among the undecideds.” Now, when Newspoll asks those respondents who initially say they “don’t know” whether they “approve” of the alteration to the Constitution, “which way they would lean if forced to profess a view,” things are different: “women voters are now significantly more likely to say No.”

Neither Newspoll nor the Australian is keen to disclose the patterns of response to the initial question — before respondents were leant on to choose Yes or No — in the last three polls. Benson failed to reply to a request that the Australian do so; YouGov, the British-owned firm that conducts Newspoll, said it “can’t really comment.” As a consequence, Benson’s account can’t be confirmed independently. Yet the rules of the Australian Polling Council, of which YouGov is a founding member, say that if “voting intention figures are published with the undecided participants excluded, the proportion who were thus excluded should be published.”

Why might women have moved from Yes to No? Benson attributes the shift to the “targeted campaign by the No camp.” Crucial to this was the fact that the government, “in its contortions over the voice,” had “vacated the field of talking to voters’ primary concern — the cost of living.” Noting that “any pollster… will tell you female voters are more highly attuned to cost-of-living pressures than male voters” — though “cost of living is by far the issue of most concern to a majority of all voters” — Benson insists this gave the No camp a “strategic edge.” The No campaign had also “spent significant funds directly targeting women.” This, in his view, “appear[ed] to have paid off.”

To have “paid off” to anything like the extent Benson implies, the No campaign would have needed not only to have targeted female voters but also to have done so across most of the social media platforms on which the No campaign’s advertising, coordinated by Advance Australia, has largely been conducted. But targeting of this kind is not what the evidence shows. An analysis of the three Facebook pages — Fair Australia, Not Enough, and Referendum News — that Advance Australia has been populating concludes that only one (Not Enough) was targeting voters in the two largest states.

If the other two pages were “essentially ignoring New South Wales and Victoria” — the two states where the majority of women (and men) reside — the No campaign can hardly have been reaching the majority of female voters. Moreover, while the ads on Referendum News skewed “towards a female audience,” the ads on the other pages skewed to different demographics.

Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that the No campaign did enjoy the kind of success Benson attributes to it, are we to conclude that as well as shifting women in extraordinarily large numbers to the No side, the No campaign — in a terrible own goal — also shifted a large number of men across to the Yes side? If not, what did shift these men? This is not a question Benson attempts to answer; everything he has to say goes to explaining why support for the Voice should be falling rather than why, among men, it might have risen.

The explanation for the “rise” in support among men may lie in nothing more profound than the vagaries of polling. Newspoll has asked its Voice question with its current response architecture three times (the first is here). If one looks at all three polls — not just, as Benson does, the last two — among men the Yes–No split is 45–46, 38–48, 45–47: it’s the second (June) poll, not the third (July), that is the odd one out. If the second poll underestimated support among men, the most recent poll may simply be correcting that.

Before the latest Newspoll, only one poll had ever reported finding more men than women in favour of a constitutionally inscribed Voice. Conducted in December 2022 by Freshwater Strategic, it showed only the narrowest of differences in support between men (51 per cent) and women (50 per cent); but even in this poll, more men (30 per cent) than women (22 per cent) were opposed. The most recent poll to use the same response architecture as Newspoll — a poll conducted by Essential Media (5–9 July), a week ahead of Newspoll — shows women (49 per cent) more likely than men (44 per cent) to support Yes, and men (47 per cent) more likely than women (40 per cent) to say No.

None of this appears to have registered at the Australian. For Benson, the referendum had “suffered a collapse in support among women voters,” with women “for the first time… now more likely than men to vote no, a central change to core support.” The precipitous fall in support among women was noted by the paper’s national editor, Dennis Shanahan. The story about a new gender divide got a run in an editorial on the day it broke, and another run the next day. Other outlets, too — seemingly less concerned with objectivity, which requires critical evaluation, than with neutrality, which requires no more than reporting what is newsworthy — reproduced the figures.

Could such a shift have happened? Bongiorno — another strong supporter of a Yes vote — thought it not only could have happened but had happened, even as he took out the standard insurance against being held personally responsible for his report. “If you can believe the opinion polls,” he reported, “regional Australia has gone very cold on the idea of a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament.”

Perhaps Bongiorno also had in mind a poll published a couple of weeks earlier by the Canberra Times, not referenced by the Australian. The poll was conducted online by Chi Squared (the research arm of the Canberra Times’s owner, Australian Community Media) among readers of fourteen daily newspapers “serving Canberra and key regional population centres such as Newcastle, Wollongong, Tamworth, Orange, Albury and Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Ballarat, Bendigo and Warrnambool in Victoria, and Launceston and Burnie in northern Tasmania,” to which 10,131 readers had responded.

Chi Squared purported to show that “in the regions” the level of support for establishing the Voice (the question was not disclosed) stood at just 35 per cent. While this figure was not very different from Newspoll’s estimate, the “poll” was conducted from 16 to 26 June — at a time when Newspoll, using sampling techniques better suited to the task, not simply self-selection, was reporting a 40–51 split in the regions rather than Chi Squared’s 35–57. If regional opinion had shifted between June and July in the way Newspoll suggests, why might it have shifted? Benson doesn’t venture an answer; nor does Bongiorno.

“The bottom line,” says Benson, “is that the trend towards a No vote is increasing and it is expanding in the wrong demographics for the yes camp.” What the “right demographics” might be, he doesn’t say. The Yes camp needs a majority of the national vote and would be happy, one assumes, to accept contributions from all demographics. No demographic — certainly not women rather than men, or regional rather than metro voters — is “right” or “wrong”; if support is slipping, it is slipping largely across the board. To win, Yes also needs majorities in the majority of states; any four will do, though a victory in one or more of the bigger states will do more to secure a national majority vote than a victory in one or more of the smaller states.

To see whether the latest Newspoll has got things horribly wrong on the Voice — or whether, on the contrary, it should be recognised for being the first to detect an extraordinary change in the gender gap and a substantial expansion of the metro–regional divide — we will need to wait for the next polls, whether from Newspoll itself or from Resolve, Freshwater or Morgan.

Finally, a word about an unreported upheaval at YouGov. Between the June poll and the one conducted in July, virtually all of those working in the public affairs and polling unit at YouGov left; the departures included the head of the unit (and chair of the Australian Polling Council), Campbell White.

Did the number and quality of the personnel heading out the door have an impact on the analysis of the more recent poll? If the changes at YouGov have affected data quality or the quality of the analysis, and aren’t corrected, then — much like support for Labor or support for the Voice — Newspoll’s status in Canberra might slide as well. •

The post The “end” of Labor’s honeymoon and the “collapse” of women’s support for the Voice appeared first on Inside Story.

The crowd was there to bid farewell to more than 500 excited and slightly trepidatious passengers — 306 young men, fifty-seven young women, and 133 adults who were combining travel with education — and the sixty-three lecturers and staff who had signed up to join the Floating University: an around-the-world educational experiment in which travel abroad would count towards a university degree at home.

Over the next eight months they would meet some of the twentieth century’s major figures, including Benito Mussolini, King Rama VII of Thailand, Mahatma Gandhi and Pope Pius XI, and visit countries in the midst of change: Japan in the process of industrialisation, China on the cusp of revolution, the Philippines agitating against US rule, and Portugal in the aftermath of a coup.

In an era of internationalism and expanding American power, the leaders of this Floating University believed travel and study at sea would deliver an education in international affairs not available in the land-based classroom. It was through direct experience in and of the world rather than passive, indirect engagement via textbooks and lectures that they thought students could learn to be “world-minded.” The trip was promoted as an “experiment in democratic theories of education,” and New York University lent the venture its official sponsorship.

In championing the merits of direct, personal experience as a way to know the world, the Floating University was joining a set of public as well as scholarly debates taking place in 1920s United States about the relationship between professional expertise and democratic citizenship in increasingly complex industrial capitalist societies.

On the one hand, protagonists including secretary of state and future president Herbert Hoover and journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann argued for the principles of scientific management and technocratic governance, and emphasised the importance of well-informed and expert elites. It was specialised knowledge, they believed, that was needed to address the challenges presented by rapidly changing economies and societies.

On the other hand, popular technologies such as photography, film, radio, inexpensive novels and newspapers, as well as cheaper transatlantic travel, jazz and the latest improvised forms of dance, seemed to offer direct, embodied and experiential ways of knowing that were at once deeply personal and widely accessible. Questioning the concentration of power in the hands of experts, labour, social and civil rights activists as well as populist and agrarian groups advocated for more participatory forms of democracy.

Although their differences are often exaggerated, the debates in the 1920s and 1930s between Lippmann and the educational reformer and philosopher John Dewey are often taken to be emblematic of this apparent opposition between technocratic expertise and democratic knowledge and deliberation.

Dewey’s thinking had a huge influence on the founder of the Floating University cruise, New York University’s professor of psychology, James E. Lough. Fascinated by education and the learning process, Dewey argued that knowledge does not flow from experience, but rather is made through experience; it was by doing things in and with the world that students would best learn. As a psychology student at Harvard in the 1890s, Lough was attracted to these ideas and, following his appointment as director of the Extramural Division at New York University, had a chance to put them into action.

Education at university — as at the primary levels of schooling — should be connected to the environment, experiences, and interests of students, Lough argued. From 1913 onwards his Extramural Division began offering credit-bearing courses at a variety of locations across New York City: onsite commercial, investment and finance courses on Wall Street, courses in government in the Municipal Building, art appreciation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and engineering courses at Grand Central Station.

Extending this logic, NYU also began offering summer travel courses to Europe to study economic conditions and industrial organisation in Britain and municipal planning in Germany. These courses resumed after the first world war and then — towards the end of 1923 — Lough took his ideas one step further. If summer travel courses could work, why not a whole year at sea? As he told the audience assembled at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel the night before the Floating University’s departure, those aboard the ship would experience “a method of study which actually brings the student into living contact with the world’s problems about to be realised.” The difference between it and what was ordinarily served up to students was, as he put it, the difference “between reading a menu and eating the full course meal.”

Putting this educational vision into practice, however, was harder than Professor Lough had anticipated. Despite some hiccups, the formal part of the undertaking was relatively successful. Students took formal classes while the ship was at sea. When it was stopped in port they participated in a variety of activities that included officially arranged shore excursions, visits to host universities and free time.

Although some professors were more diligent than others, the best among them linked their curriculum on the ship to the experiences students were having onshore. Undoubtedly a good number of students didn’t attend to their studies, but the official Report of Scholastic Work on the University Cruise around the World stated that during the cruise, 400 college-level students had attended classes (79 per cent of whom sought university credit). Their aggregated marks were mapped onto a bell curve: 16 per cent of grades were As; 38 per cent Bs; 28 per cent Cs; 9 per cent Ds; 3 per cent incomplete; and 3 per cent fails. Those who were “negligent in their work on board” were, concluded the Floating University’s academic dean, George Howes, no doubt also negligent in their college studies onshore.

It was the behaviour of the students in port that proved the biggest problem. Reports of sex, alcohol and jazz made their way back to an American press hungry for scandal, and the Floating University became a byword for what could go wrong with educational travel. “Sea Collegians Startle Japan with Rum Orgy” read one newspaper headline. “More than a hundred students, among whom six girls were to be noticed, were doing intensive laboratory work this evening, in the bar of the Imperial Hotel” continued the article.

And there were plenty of unfavourable stories to follow: more trouble with alcohol, rumours of romantic relationships and sexual relations between the students, accounts of a split between the cruise leaders, and even reports of an outbreak of bubonic plague. These accounts proved such catnip to American editors that it is hard to read the newspapers of 1926 and 1927 and not come across the story.

It didn’t matter to the newspapers that unruly student behaviour was a common aspect of life on college campuses across the United States in the 1920s. “There was a certain amount of necking on board,” was how one of the students, George T. McClure, put it, “but not more than I saw at the University of Colorado last year.” Playing on the popular image of the frolicsome college student — the smoking by women, the drinking by men, and the sexual promiscuity of both — was a guaranteed way to sell papers. But not far beneath such discussions of the misconduct of American youth lurked a fear that ungoverned youthful bodies might threaten the foundations of civility at home, while also betraying a lack of national readiness for the new global role the United States was rapidly assuming abroad.

By the end of the 1920s, huge numbers of Americans were travelling abroad. Many of them were students taking advantage of new and cheap “tourist class” transatlantic fares. And while they were away, many enrolled in one of the “educational courses” frequently offered by the shipping companies. During their voyages these travellers were undoubtedly learning something about international affairs and spending huge amounts of money in the process.

In fact, a report of the time suggests that in 1930 more than 127,800 Americans travelled “tourist class” to Europe: that is 5000 more people than were awarded a BA degree in the United States that same year. This was big business. With the Floating University and his other summer travel courses, Professor Lough had recognised the potential of this market for what was already beginning to be called “international education.”

But on the whole American universities wanted to have nothing to do with it. Although the trend had begun earlier, the 1920s was the decade in which they really marked out the boundaries of their empire of expertise. With newly established schools in a whole range of fields — from business administration and retailing to journalism and education — they asserted their claim to authority over both how knowledge could be acquired and whose knowledge claims should be trusted.

Rather than crediting educational travel programs, universities set about establishing what the League of Nations’ International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation called the “scientific study of international relations.” While for graduates and academic scholars who were undertaking research this might necessarily have entailed travel, for the much larger American undergraduate population it meant enrolling in credit-bearing courses and degree programs taught on home campuses, with syllabi, reading lists and assessments.

And for universities, it meant an entirely new discipline of teaching and study. It meant journals, conferences, summer institutes, government consultancies, and new paying audiences for university-sanctioned expertise.

None of this was compatible with educational travel of the kind Professor Lough envisaged. It was the university and its qualified faculty members that stood as the source of authoritative knowledge about the world, not the experiences of sundry travellers. In 1926 NYU pulled out of its sponsorship of the Floating University and over the course of the next few years abolished all its other study abroad programs. Although in 1930 the university did offer a course called Literary Tour of Great Britain, it took place entirely in a classroom in Washington Square, with readings supplied. In this 1920s contest between different ways of knowing the world, it was academically authorised expertise that triumphed, and it has undergirded the claims of universities — in Australia as in the United States — ever since.

Why does this matter?

For the last century or more, universities have derived their social standing (not to mention their income) from their claim to have authority over knowledge. They are the institutions that undertake the research, distil the learning, and provide the training so crucial to our economies and societies — or so the generally accepted story runs. Within their walls students learn from experts about the world and each other, developing both general and specialised disciplinary knowledge that prepares them not only for careers but also to be active and informed members of society.

But as anyone paying even a little bit of attention to politics and current affairs over the last decade will be aware, the university’s authority over knowledge is by no means uncontested. On the one hand, a new politics has emerged that challenges experts and their long-privileged authority, and instead prioritises personal, embodied and experiential ways of knowing. On the other hand, the proliferation of highly granulated, linked and disembodied big data, and the artificial intelligence algorithms that process it threaten to make obsolete many of the tasks that experts and knowledge workers have traditionally undertaken. Who gets to know in this new world?

There are many ways of warranting or justifying knowledge claims. In 1926 Professor Lough argued for the legitimacy of personal experience, but doing so brought him into conflict with the universities’ assertion of the authority of academic experts and “book knowledge.” But there are also other warrants for knowledge — authority, testimony, culture, tradition, or even divine revelation; all these can be invoked to support a claim to truth, and frequently they come into conflict with each other. Thinking about these conflicts can tell us a lot about how power and knowledge work in a society, especially in moments of change.

In their book Leviathan and the Air-pump, science historians Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer examine one such moment of conflict: the historical controversy surrounding the experimental demonstrations of the vacuum pump conducted by Robert Boyle and his assistant Robert Hooke in the seventeenth century. Boyle’s approach, which emphasised systematic observation, measurement and repeatability, represented a new way of producing knowledge that conflicted with Thomas Hobbes’s emphasis on deductive reasoning and mathematical principles. But crucially, as Shapin and Schaffer show, Boyle’s effort to establish the credibility of this new, scientific form of knowledge relied heavily on the social status and reputation of those men who were performing experiments and observing them.

We might think today that scientific experiment and academic expertise are self-evident means of arriving at the truth. But as various people (from feminist, Black and anti-colonial thinkers to Trump supporters) have pointed out, they are underwritten by social conventions and forms of power. Or, to put it another way, the social recognition Robert Boyle was able to mobilise was something Professor Lough failed to muster.

Too often, expertise is cast as a neutral or natural phenomenon, but expertise also has a history, one that is intimately connected to shifts in the nature and mode of power and rule. Thinking about why the Floating University was deemed a failure in the 1920s matters because it highlights the failure in our own times to ground knowledge claims in ways that are recognisable to those outside the community of academically authorised experts.

Experience and academic learning may now not seem so far apart. Internships, service learning, study abroad programs, field studies, work-integrated and simulation-based learning, collaborative research, and capstone projects are all part of the way most universities today deliver their degrees. In the United States, the Semester at Sea program, which claims the 1926 voyage as its progenitor, even allows students to credit time at sea towards their college degree.

But these initiatives don’t really settle the questions the story of the Floating University’s 1926 world cruise ultimately provoke: Who gets to know in our society? What forms of status determine what knowledge counts as legitimate?

These are pressing questions for democracies seeking to navigate change, and they are as relevant for twenty-first-century Australia as they were for Lough and Dewey and Lippmann in the 1920s and 30s United States. •

The post What is a university? appeared first on Inside Story.

In key fields — childcare, aged care, employment services and the NDIS — what we have is not a quality system of care but a disordered ecology of self-directed providers and distant regulators. Governments write complex contracts and rain down new rules when things go wrong, but they haven’t improved the systems themselves. We pay a high price for poor quality and often fraud-ridden services.

Royal commissions, parliamentary reviews, Productivity Commission reports and dozens of independent studies show the same pattern. Successive federal governments have dealt with rising demand for social services by encouraging private companies to form a quasi-market and then encouraging citizens to search for services that suit them.

The new vocabulary of social service reform became the offer of greater choice, with the power that might create for each individual to get what they want and for services to thus become highly responsive. The engine driving this imagined process was the failed idea that unhappy customers will simply exit a bad service and thus “signal” to producers that they must lift their game.

The problem with this “choice” model is twofold.

First, new service markets don’t suddenly spring into life across the social spectrum, waiting for customers to stroll in and make their selections. They are completely different from products: they can’t be produced in advance or shipped in the post or compared on a supermarket shelf. They are created at the same moment they are consumed. They require personal delivery and careful connection to the communities they seek to serve.

Second, these services are extremely difficult to regulate from a distance. We only know how good a service is when we experience it or when we observe, up close, someone else experiencing it.

What current services offer is a “buyer beware” warning and a distant form of regulation that catches the occasional rogue but misses the day-to-day defects across the system. That’s the reason the aged care royal commission found that the majority of people in our old folks’ homes were malnourished. That’s the reason thousands of people were duped by vocational education providers signing them up to ghost courses.

The “choice” idea turns out to be a stalking horse for something else altogether. It enables governments to withdraw from social services. Top public servants now like to say they are “steering, not rowing,” which has come to mean that they lack knowledge of how services are actually produced and experienced. The choice revolution has become a means of risk shifting.

Of course, choice itself is no bad thing. Everyone likes to have a choice when it comes to the important things they have to do. But that raises critical questions. What kinds of options can clients choose? And do they want to be left to figure all that out themselves? When US researchers asked a sample of the general American population if they want to choose their own cancer treatments, a strong majority answered yes. But when they asked people who actually had cancer, only a small number said yes. What they wanted was access to quality medical advice and a chance to be fully involved in decisions. That’s not choice, that’s voice.

The services in Australia’s service “markets” are a wide mix of the great and the ghastly — which is exactly what we would predict. Not all private providers are rogues, but it is also true that they all put shareholder value first; that’s the whole point of the market model. And once fraud becomes a regular event, heavier regulation and reputational damage become common.

This system produces a low-average model with some core characteristics. The owners of the services seek to increase their margins by de-professionalising the service and stocking it instead with poorly paid and untrained staff. Because they all do it and because they are all paid the same rate by the government, they face no market risk if they run a service that conforms to a poor minimum standard. Only the truly dreadful get noticed by the regulators.

Where a star-rating system is used to show consumers how the different providers are doing, the low-average system means that the best service only has to be slightly better than its terrible comparators in order to score points.

With weak oversight of the service itself, providers are tempted to put their best effort into marketing their service to would-be clients. If you browse the websites of aged care homes you will see that most offer “home-cooked meals” and a “place like home.” But no one knows exactly what that means until they move into a centre, which may be too late. Childcare centres promise educational activity, but there is no way to know if that ever happens or for how long in the average day.

Service providers also work very hard to get the maximum subsidy they can from the government. Many seek to reclassify their clients as more needy than they really are, or delay helping them solve smaller problems so the bigger issues will generate greater subsidies. Charges meanwhile rise faster than the average in the broader community because users receive government money to cushion the blow. These dynamics help explain one of the great paradoxes of these service markets: they can become more expensive at the same time as they deliver worse services.

These tragic conditions are well known inside each of the sectors. Sadly, the better operators get tarred with the same brush as the worst. “It is a matter of luck whether our most vulnerable and forgotten citizens end up in one of these shitholes or living a good life” is how one market player described rogue operators in the disability sector.

In that contrast is the clue to the way out of this terrible mess. Instead of a chaotic world of high-risk choices, we need to redesign these services with high, transparent standards of care built in. And we need those receiving the services and those supporting them to have a strong voice in their development and delivery. Throwing more money at the problem won’t make a jot of difference until a more systemic approach kicks in.

The good news is that many of the changes needed aren’t expensive, and some will actually save money. Services need to be better grounded in communities, which will require a more imaginative social investment strategy than has been evident to date. And shared expertise will need to play a bigger role within these services so we can promote the best solutions and share the best methods.

Each of these services has its own dynamics and will require specific reform. But common problems also need to be tackled. The first and most dramatic challenge is to make services more transparent by defining the core activities and standards of all service providers and building in the peer reviewing and evidence sharing that make real-time improvements possible. An agreed model of delivery must combine the best interests of clients with an efficient and responsive approach to current users and future demand.

With transparent models of service will come a greater capacity to share useful adaptations and innovations and use resources creatively. Regulation will also be cheaper and less time-wasting. A common service model would also give employees access to training to increase their skills and to participate in sector-wide benchmarking and self-improvement.

A second area for structural change involves the necessary shift from choice to voice. By all means, let’s keep systems that involve multiple agencies. Nothing is improved by going back to a single bureaucratic supply model — if ever such a thing existed. But let’s move past the myth that these systems will improve because consumers can simply move to the better option and thus drive out poor performers. Multiple suppliers are useful when they offer specialisation and community-specific capability, not when they seek to out-compete some carbon-copy agency down the street.

What really drives improvement is a stronger voice for clients and their families. More mechanisms are needed to help these “experts of experience” make a positive contribution to agencies’ performances. For example, public funds should come with the requirement that the agency has a client board that is consulted about all the key issues.

The third area where change would generate significant benefit is in infrastructure. By over-relying on private markets for core social services we have drifted away from public assets and weakened our planning capacity. Public payments for individual users include contributions to service infrastructure, but these assets reside in private hands and can’t therefore be used for maximum benefit. New models for private–public partnership are needed to build services for the future.

Local governments often provide the planning approval for such facilities but cannot manage them over their lifespan. As a result, aged care, childcare and training facilities are often built to optimise real estate value rather than to develop joined-up services such as joint childcare and aged care facilities.

Finally, we need to re-establish the role of public service providers within the broader mix of agencies. The public service can’t improve a service it doesn’t understand using staff who have no frontline capability. Public service delivery should always drive for high standards, test new methods and activate the “flanking services” — including counselling, rehabilitation and housing assistance — needed to make complex services work. And a “provider of last resort” should always be ready to move to places where market players won’t accept risks associated with long-term investments in clients.

There’s an alternative, of course: we can keep doing what we have been doing for twenty years and watch the most vulnerable in our community get ripped off and done down. It’s not a great choice. •

The post Choice versus voice appeared first on Inside Story.

A key question for campaigners is whether voters are switching from “undecided” to No or from Yes to No. “What worries the government,” says columnist George Megalogenis, “is the recent narrowing of the gap between committed Yes and No voters, which reflects a greater shift from the undecided to the No column than from Yes to No.” Another columnist, Janet Albrechtsen, calls Noel Pearson’s highly personal attacks on those disagreeing with him a boon to the No side because “more undecided voters might ask themselves ‘would I want this man running the Voice?’ and shift into the No side of the ledger.”

Is the rise in No being driven by “undecided” voters coming off the fence or by less “committed” Yes voters jumping the fence? That could depend on how “undecided” is defined. In talking about the “undecided,” Albrechtsen and Megalogenis may be focusing on quite different sets of voters.

In any poll, the “undecided” are defined not by the poll’s question but by the question’s “choice architecture” — the range of possible responses the pollster offers respondents. On the Voice, the polls have attempted to measure the “undecided” in at least three different ways. Some polls have offered respondents the opportunity to indicate they have no clear opinion; hence, the “Don’t know” option, or something similar. Some polls have encouraged respondents to express an opinion that has more nuance than Yes or No, enjoining them to indicate whether their views are held “strongly” or “not strongly”; views not strongly held, arguably, are another form of indecision. And some polls have presented respondents with a similar range of responses, but with another possible response — “Neither support nor oppose” — in the middle.

These don’t exhaust the range of possibilities. Some polls have asked respondents, directly, how likely they are to change their positions — “somewhat” or “very” likely — which is another way of indicating that while they appear to have made a choice, their decision is not final. Others have asked respondents who have indicated support for Yes or No how likely they are to turn out and vote.

Still other architectures remove the “undecided” option altogether. Both the most favourable and the least favourable polls for the Yes and No sides are polls of this kind: the latest Resolve poll, which has Yes trailing No, and the latest Essential poll, which has support for Yes a long way ahead of support for No (60–40); each restricted respondents to a Yes or No.

Not to distinguish among these response architectures — some of which allow for further variations — is to risk drawing comparisons between polls that can’t readily be compared, even where the questions asked are similar. It is also to risk inferring trends based on polls that offer respondents very different choices: none of the graphs tracking the narrowing of the gap between Yes and No appears to take any account of the various choice architectures involved in generating the numbers. Not to be aware of these different architectures also risks focusing on only one version of what is going on. Thus, the attention paid to the latest forced-choice Resolve poll or the latest Essential poll is disproportionate.

Depending on the chosen architecture, the “undecided” vote can vary enormously — from more than half, when respondents are invited to consider a middle option in a five-point scale, to zero, when being “undecided” is designed out of the choices on offer. In other words, the contribution to the No vote of the “undecided” is a function, in part, of the choice architecture. Nonetheless, across all choice architectures, the boost to the No vote by the “undecided” appears to have been much smaller than the contribution of those who switched from Yes.

Three types of response architecture: In the standard architecture — following the kinds of questions pollster George Gallup promoted in the 1940s as a “sampling referendum” — respondents are presented with two options (Yes/No, Support/Oppose, and so on) plus a third, for those who don’t want to choose either.

On whether to put a Voice into the Constitution, the standard architecture offers various choices: Yes/No/Don’t know (Newspoll’s most recent polling for the Australian; YouGov for the Daily Telegraph); Yes/No/Undecided–Prefer not to say (Freshwater Strategy for the Australian Financial Review); Yes/No/Undecided (Roy Morgan Research); Yes/No/Unsure (Dynata for the Institute of Public Affairs); Support/Oppose/Don’t know–Not sure (Dynata for the Australia Institute); Yes/No/Need more information–Can’t say” (JWS).

Three things are worth noting. One is that these polls don’t imagine respondents having no opinion. The third choice they offer allows for respondents who have conflicting opinions that leave them “undecided,” qualified opinions that don’t readily fit a straight Yes or No, or Yes/No opinions that reticent respondents may prefer not to declare (a possibility acknowledged explicitly only by Freshwater).

A second point to note is the near-universal assumption that anyone who ticks Yes/No (Support/Oppose) has decided where they stand, at least for the moment. Those who haven’t decided are captured under a residual term: Undecided, Unsure, Don’t know, Can’t say. If some of those — perhaps most of those — who tick Yes/No (Support/Oppose) are still not entirely decided, this particular architecture provides no way of indicating it.

Third, some pollsters (JWS; Resolve Strategic, below) have offered respondents a residual category that conflates two quite different things: not wanting to align one’s views with Yes/No (Support/Oppose) and having a particular reason (“lack of information”) for not wanting to do so. Not only might those in the residual category place themselves there for reasons other than wanting more information, respondents who answer Yes/No (Support/Oppose) might welcome more information too.

In Gallup’s day, a response other than Yes/No, Support/Oppose and so on was usually left to respondents to volunteer. Pollsters have always been keen to promote the idea that the public’s views fit whatever categories the pollsters choose; a choice outside these categories is not something they are generally keen to encourage. With online polling, which means almost all polls these days, respondents can only be offered a residual option — as they should be — as an explicit alternative.

In what we might call the non-standard architecture, pollsters offer a set of response categories designed to distinguish respondents who hold their views (in favour/against) strongly from those who don’t hold their views strongly — the latter sometimes described as being “softly” in favour or “softly” against.

This is one of the two architectures Resolve has used. Since August 2022, it has asked whether respondents support a Voice in the Constitution and, it seems, offered these alternatives: Yes, definitely; Yes, probably; No, probably not; No, definitely not; Undecided/Not enough information. Since April, though, and possibly earlier, the final alternative has read Undecided/Not enough information/May not vote, a category that mixes up the one thing that necessarily distinguishes these respondents from the other respondents (Undecided in the sense of “none of the above”) from other things that may not (Not enough information and/or May not vote).

Before switching to a standard format at the end of May 2023, Newspoll used a similar non-standard response set — something that has been a hallmark of its issue polling over nearly forty years. On three occasions, Newspoll sought to identify those “strongly in favour,” “partly in favour,” “partly against” and “strongly against,” offering “Don’t know” as a residual category. (In principle, there is no reason why one could not also distinguish a strong “Don’t know” from a somewhat “Don’t know,” but that is a distinction that pollsters never draw.)

In the third choice of architecture — one that resembles the non-standard architecture but needs to be distinguished from it — response options take the form of a five-point scale with “Neither support nor oppose” (or some neutral equivalent) in the middle. These scales are known in the trade as Likert items, after the American survey researcher Rensis Likert. The use of “Neither support nor oppose” distinguishes a Likert item from the non-standard architecture,  which has a “don’t know” at the end but no middle option.

SEC Newgate has asked respondents regularly whether they “Strongly support,” “Somewhat support,” “Neither support nor oppose,” “Somewhat oppose,” or “Strongly oppose” the “creation of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.” The Scanlon Foundation has adopted a similar approach. So, too, has Essential — but only once, with another option, “Unsure,” added at the end of the scale.

Accepting versus squeezing: architectures that make the “undecided” visible: Do the various choice architectures affect the proportion of respondents who are “undecided”? If we compare the “undecided” in the standard architecture (Yes/No/Don’t know) with those who tick “Neither support nor oppose” on the Likert items, the answer may be no. In the standard format, the proportion “undecided” about a constitutionally enshrined Voice averaged as follows: 27 per cent (across three questions) between May and September 2022; 19.5 per cent (two questions) between October 2022 and January 2023; and 22 per cent (five questions) between February and May 2023. Given other variations among questions, these are not very different from the proportions ticking “Neither support nor oppose” in the Likert items: 23 per cent between May and September 2022 (four items); 25 per cent between October 2022 and January 2023 (one item); and 23 per cent between February and May 2023 (two items).

Eliminating the “undecided” — architectures of denial and removal: Pollsters have developed ways not only of reducing the “undecided” votes but of making them disappear. The most extreme of these methods is a binary response architecture that imposes a strict two-way choice: Yes/No, Support/Oppose, and so on. These polls give no other option. If we ask whether the choice architecture affects the proportion that shows up as “undecided,” nowhere is the answer clearer than here.

How many respondents have refused to answer when the question is asked in this way is nowhere disclosed; Essential Research, whose polls are published in the Guardian, says it doesn’t know the number. What happens to respondents who refuse to answer is not something pollsters are keen to disclose either. Resolve, which has used the binary format in relation to the Voice since August 2022, appears not to block these respondents from taking any further part in the poll. But in the Essential poll, respondents who baulk at the binary are removed from the sample.

What the process of deleting respondents does to the representativeness of a sample is something pollsters don’t openly address. In an industry that encourages the belief that sampling error is the only kind of error that matters, this is not entirely surprising.

In estimating support for a constitutional Voice, a number of pollsters have resorted to the binary format either wholly (Essential, Compass, and Painted Dog in Western Australia) or in part (Resolve). Their justification for offering respondents just two options is that at the referendum these are the two choices that voters will face. This is misleading. Voters will have other choices: not to turn out (acknowledged by Resolve in the response options it offers in the preceding question) or to turn out but not cast a valid vote. On the ABC’s Insiders, independent senator Lidia Thorpe said she was contemplating turning out but writing “sovereignty” on the ballot.

Binaries are not favoured by the market research industry. In Britain, the Market Research Society Code of Conduct states that “members must take reasonable action when undertaking data collection to ensure… that participants are able to provide information in a way that reflects the view they want to express, including don’t know/prefer not to say.” This code covers all members, including those whose global reach extends from Britain to Australia (YouGov, Ipsos and Dynata).

In Australia, a similar guideline published by the Research Society (formerly the Market Research Society of Australia) advises members to “make sure participants are able to provide information in a way that reflects the view they want to express” — a guideline almost identical with that of the MRS, even if it stops short of noting that this should allow for a “don’t know/prefer not to say.” Whether such guidelines make a difference to how members actually conduct polls is another matter; of the firms that have offered binary choices on the Voice, some (Essential) are members of the Research Society, others are not (Compass, Resolve).

But a binary is not the only way to make the “undecided” disappear. Some pollsters publish a set of figures, based on the standard architecture, from which respondents registered as “undecided” have been removed using a quite different technique. In its latest release, for example, Morgan publishes one set of figures (Yes, 46 per cent; No, 36 per cent; Undecided, 18 per cent) followed by another (Yes, 56 per cent; No, 44 per cent), the latter derived from ignoring the “undecided” and repercentaging the rest to a base of 82 (46+36). This is equivalent to assuming the “undecided” will ultimately split along the same lines as those who expressed a choice. In publishing its figures, with the “undecided” removed, Freshwater appears to do something similar.

Whether the basis on which Morgan (or Freshwater) reallocates the “undecided” is correct is open to doubt. Morgan acknowledges this: “past experience,” it cautions, “shows that ‘undecided’ voters are far more likely to end up as a ‘No’ rather than a ‘Yes’ vote.” Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney, who is said to be “completely confident the Yes campaign will convince undecided voters to back the Voice,” expresses the opposite view.

In considering the narrowing lead of Yes over No, we should ask how the “undecided” have been acknowledged, defined and dealt with in each poll’s response architecture.

What the standard architecture (Yes/No/Don’t Know) shows: Between June and September 2022, the three polls that used a “Yes/No/Don’t Know” response architecture (two by Dynata for the Australia Institute, one by JWS) reported that an average of 55 per cent of respondents said they would have voted Yes, 18 per cent would have voted No, and 27 per cent would not have put their hand up for either.

Across the following four months, the corresponding averages (for the two questions asked by Freshwater and Morgan) were 51.5 per cent, 28.5 per cent, and 20 per cent. (Omitted is a poorly constructed question conducted by Dynata for the Institute of Public Affairs.) From February 2023 to the end of May, when Freshwater, Morgan, and JWS  asked five questions between them, support for a Voice in the Constitution averaged 43 per cent, opposition 34.5 per cent, and the “undecided” 22 per cent.

Since May 2022, support for Yes has declined (from 55 per cent in the first four months to 43 per cent in the most recent quarter) and support for No has risen (from 18 to 34.5 per cent), quarter by quarter, but the decline in the proportion supporting neither Yes nor No (from 27 to 22 per cent) has been relatively small. So, while the 16.5 percentage point rise in the No vote is not entirely accounted for by the 12 percentage point fall in the Yes vote, the contribution to the No vote of the “undecided” appears to have been much smaller than the contribution of those who switched from Yes.

In some cases, pollsters have tried to reduce the number of “don’t knows” by asking these respondents a follow-up question — known in the trade as a “leaner” — designed to get them to reconsider; this might be seen as a way of distinguishing “soft” don’t knows from “hard” don’t knows.

Some of these pollsters have published the figures both before and after the leaner (JWS) or made them available (Freshwater). On these figures (one set from JWS; three sets from Freshwater), the proportion of “undecided” respondents was 8 percentage points smaller, on average, after the leaner than before. Except for one occasion when they split evenly, more chose the Yes side than chose the No side. So, far from contributing to a narrowing of the gap between Yes and No, squeezing the undecided widened the gap.

What the non-standard architecture (Yes, strong/weak; No, strong weak; Undecided) shows: In the first four months after the 2022 election, none of the pollsters who asked questions about support for the Voice used the non-standard architecture. That was to change, first through Resolve, then through Newspoll.

Between September 2022 and January 2023, Resolve adopted this architecture twice. Averaging the two polls, support stood at 50 per cent, opposition 29.5 per cent, Undecided/Not enough information 21 per cent. Between February and May, across three more polls, the corresponding figures were 45 per cent Yes; 34 per cent No; 20 per cent Undecided/Not enough information/May not vote. So, over the two periods, Yes dropped by 5 points, No rose by 4.5, and those opting for the residual category dropped by just 1 point. The rise in opposition is almost entirely accounted for by the fall in support.

Taken at face value, the three Newspoll surveys, conducted in the last quarter, tell a rather different story: 54 per cent Yes; 38 per cent No; 8 per cent Don’t know. But they can throw no light on the shift from quarter to quarter because Newspoll’s figures indicates the size of the “don’t knows” after the leaner; asked to divulge the proportion before the leaner, Newspoll declined.

Could the leaner — or the “squeeze’,” as Freshwater prefers to call it — explain the difference between the size of the “don’t know” response with the standard architecture and the size of the “don’t know” response in the non-standard architecture? In the standard (Freshwater) format, the “don’t knows” averaged 15 per cent, squeezed; in the non-standard (Newspoll) format, the “don’t knows” averaged just 8 per cent, squeezed. (Resolve’s data is not squeezed.) This suggests that, compared with the standard architecture, asking about the Voice while offering a non-standard set of response options makes a difference to the number that finish in the “undecided” column; the non-standard architecture lowers the number markedly.

What the Likert items (Yes, strong/weak; Neither…nor; No, strong/weak) show: The Likert items confirm these shifts. In the first four months, when four Likert items (from Essential, SEC Newgate and the Scanlon Foundation) featured in the polls, the level of support for the Voice (“strongly support” plus “somewhat support”) averaged 57 per cent; the level of opposition (“somewhat oppose” plus “strongly oppose”), 17.5 per cent; those inclined neither one way nor the other, 34.5 per cent. In the next quarter, SEC Newgate produced the only Likert item: 55 per cent supported the Voice, 19 per cent opposed, and 25 per cent neither supported nor opposed. In the most recent period, which saw two (SEC Newgate) items, support averaged 52.5 per cent, opposition 24 per cent, and 23 per cent were neither for nor against.

While the proportion of respondents only partly in support appears to have declined (from 24.5 to 21 per cent) the proportion strongly opposed appears to have increased (from 17.5 to 24 per cent). But the proportions strongly in support or partly opposed have barely shifted. This lends some support to Dennis Shanahan’s remark, seemingly based on private polling, about the “start” of a “drift from soft Yes to hard No.” But on whether this is due to “young people and Labor supporters,” as Shanahan believes, there is room for doubt; although SEC Newgate does not report separately on the demographics of those who are partly in support or strongly in support, the drift away from the Voice has been much more marked among older than among younger voters and much more marked among Coalition than among Labor voters, in their polling.

Compared with results obtained with the standard set of responses, the Likert items point to much smaller shifts away from support and towards opposition: a drop in the level of support for the Voice of just 4 percentage points, not 12; a rise in the level of opposition of just 6.5 points, not 16.5; and a falling away of the “undecided” vote — here, the proportion neither in favour nor opposed — of just 1.5 percentage points, not 5. As with the standard architecture, most of the additional No vote appears to have come from those who supported (strongly or somewhat) the Voice in earlier polls, with the decline in the “Neither… nor” group appearing to contribute much less to the growth in the No vote.

What the binary architecture (Yes/No) shows: Binaries are designed to eliminate the “undecided.” But when they are asked in the wake of response architectures that recognise the undecided, they can tell us one important thing: what happens to the “undecided” when they are forced to choose.

If we compare the results Resolve produced when it used the non-standard architecture and followed up with a binary, it is clear that the Yes side enjoyed a greater boost than the No side when the “undecided” were forced to choose. In other words, far from contributing to a narrowing of the gap between Yes and No, eliminating the undecided widened the Yes vote’s lead; this is consistent with the picture that emerges from other architectures when the “undecided” are squeezed. The one exception was Resolve’s June poll, its most recent, where the “don’t knows,” given a binary choice, appear to have split in favour of the No side (7 Yes, 11 No), causing the overall balance to shift to the No side (49–51).

“Undecided” — differences across the complete catalogue of measures: Across the pollsters’ questions, “Undecided” is hardly a fixed category. Typically, moreover, the “undecided” vote varies with the choice architecture.

Some commentators base their discussion of the “undecided” on the standard response format: Yes/No/Don’t know, “can’t say,” “not sure,” and so on. Megalogenis is one; constitutional lawyer and columnist Greg Craven is another. Each estimates the “undecided” vote to be “around 20 per cent” — a number clearly based on the (unsqueezed) numbers published in relation to questions that offered the standard response options. This proportion was lower in polls that used a leaner: 20–22 per cent before the leaner, quarter-by-quarter; around 15 per cent, it seems, after the leaner.

What of the non-standard format? Though the Resolve poll asks respondents to classify themselves as either “definitely” or “probably” (Yes/No), the Sydney Morning Herald and Age have never published a set of results for any of the samples that separates the “definitely” from the “probably.” Looking at the figures, and the limited detail about the polls that the papers choose to publish, a reader could be excused for thinking that Resolve used the standard rather a non-standard response architecture. A reader could certainly conclude that its publisher didn’t think the distinction mattered.

In Newspoll, those who described themselves as “partly” in favour (28 per cent) or “partly” against (13 per cent) represented a much bigger proportion of the electorate than is represented by the “undecided” (even before the leaner) in polls that used the standard format. If we add those who answered “Don’t know” (8 per cent), we get a combined figure of 49 per cent — half the electorate — who are neither strongly Yes nor strongly No.

Craven speculates that “Once someone congeals [sic] to No” — after shifting from “Don’t know,” presumably — “they will not be shifted.” This implies that even someone only partly against the Voice should not be considered “undecided.” But in support of his opinion, he offers no evidence.

The use of Likert items lifts the proportion of the electorate we might regard as “undecided” to a slightly higher level still. Adding in those only somewhat in support (21 per cent), those neither in support nor opposed (23 per cent) and those only somewhat against (9 per cent), we reach a number of 53 per cent for the most recent four months; that is, over half.

“Undecided”: Further questions, different answers: Some questions in the polls have sought to establish how many respondents are “undecided” about the Voice not in any of these ways but by asking respondents how sure they are that their preferences won’t change. In response to a question Freshwater asked in December 2022, and repeated in April and in May 2023, only 39 per cent (on average) of those who favoured a constitutional change were “certain” they would “vote this way”; among those opposed to a constitutional change, the average was 61 per cent; these are figures not previously published.

Nonetheless, the proportions that said they “could change” their mind or were “currently undecided” remained substantial: 34 per cent (December), 31 per cent (April), 31 per cent (May). Of these, about a third could change their mind, the other two-thirds being currently “undecided.” Among those who could change their mind, the proportion was consistently higher among those who intended to vote Yes than among those who intended to vote No: 17–11 per cent (December), 12–6 per cent (April), and 10–7 per cent (May).

The number of voters who are persuadable could be even greater. Common Cause is reported to have “identified” 20 per cent of the non-Indigenous population as “strong Voice supporters,” 15 per cent as “opponents,” with the other 65 per cent “open to being persuaded either way.”

Two polls also asked respondents how likely they were to actually turn out and vote. Here, too, the response architecture mattered, with JWS using the non-standard response architecture and Resolve using the standard architecture. In February, when JWS asked how likely respondents were “to attend a polling booth (or source a postal vote) and cast a formal vote in this referendum,” more than a third of its respondents said “somewhat likely” (17 per cent), “unlikely” (8 per cent) or “can’t say” (10 per cent). In April, when Resolve asked how likely it was that respondents would “be registered to vote” and would “turn out to cast a vote in this referendum about the Voice,” similar proportions said they were unlikely to cast a vote (10 per cent) or were “undecided” (9 per cent); in the absence of the other JWS categories — extremely likely, very likely and somewhat likely — the rest of the sample (81 per cent) could only say that they were likely to cast a vote.

How different were the likelihoods of Yes and No supporters actually turning out? In the JWS poll, fewer of the Yes (48 per cent) than the No supporters (56 per cent) said they were extremely likely to cast a formal vote — though the gap narrowed (72–69) when those very likely to do so were added. Between those in the Resolve poll who intended to vote Yes (89 per cent of whom said they were likely to turn out) and those who intended to vote No (87 per cent of whom said they were likely to turn out), there was hardly any difference. In both polls, more No supporters than Yes supporters said they were unlikely to turn out. In the JWS poll, 11 per cent of No supporters compared with 4 per cent of Yes supporters said they were unlikely to turn out; in the Resolve poll, the corresponding figures were 10 and 8.

More striking than either of these sets of figures were Resolve’s figures for those “undecided” about whether they favoured Yes or No: 44 per cent of these respondents said they were either unlikely to vote (14 per cent) or were “undecided” about whether they would vote (30 per cent). If nearly half of the “undecided” (on the standard measure) were not to vote (JWS did not publish its figures), allocating the “undecided” to either the Yes or No side would be defensible only if the allocation didn’t assume that these respondents would cast their lot with the No side (Morgan’s hunch) or with the Yes side (Burney’s hope).

The government’s explanation for the “narrowing of the gap between committed Yes and No voters,” as reported by George Megalogenis, is not borne out by any of our measures. On the standard format, the “narrowing of the gap” between May 2022 and May 2023 appears to have been due to respondents moving from Yes (down 12 percentage points) to No (up 16.5); the shift to No from among the “undecided” (down 5) appears to explain much less of what has happened. In the non-standard architecture, the combined support for Yes has slipped (down 5) over the last eight months while the combined support for No has grown (up 4.5), the “undecided” (down 1) having hardly moved.

Moreover, any narrowing of the gap between those “strongly” committed to a Yes vote and those “strongly” committed to a No vote has been due to the number “strongly” Yes shrinking and the number “strongly” No expanding; it has not been due to a reduction in the proportion that “neither supports nor opposes” having the Voice inscribed in the Constitution. Responses to the Likert items over the last year also suggest a decline in support (down 4) and a rise in opposition (up 6.5) without a marked reduction in the proportion registered as “neither… nor” (down 1.5). Binaries, posed hot on the tail of questions that have offered a non-standard set of responses, have not narrowed the gap between Yes and No; except for the most recent of these questions, they have widened it.

Every measure leads to the same conclusion: the gap has narrowed because the Yes side has lost support and the No side has gained support. Each of these measures, it has to be conceded, is based on cross-sectional data — data derived from polls conducted at a particular time that reveal only the net movement across categories. Since the gross movement is certain to have been bigger, panel data — data derived by interviewing the same respondents at different times — might tell a different story. But every claim about how opinions have moved has appealed, if only implicitly, to the evidence provided by the cross-sectional data; panel data have not rated a mention. (So far as we know, no panel data exist.)

The choice architecture makes no difference in establishing that the gap between the Yes and No has narrowed. It makes some difference in showing whether the narrowing is due to a gain of support on the No side rather than a loss of support on the Yes side (suggested by the standard architecture and by the non-standard architecture) or a loss of support in almost equal measure on both the Yes and the No sides (the Likert items). And it makes a big difference in determining the size of the Yes and No vote (the binary architecture being particularly powerful), in estimating the proportion of respondents’ undecided (less so with the standard architecture compared with Likert items), and in identifying the proportion that might be persuaded to change their minds.

To say that the choice architecture makes a difference is also to say that it may not be possible to express one form of the architecture in terms of another; when Newspoll switched from the non-standard to the standard form of response, the previous results could not be converted into the standard form. It follows that changes in support may be difficult to track when the choice architecture changes.

This should not be read as an argument against changing architectures; the more closely the response architecture mimics a referendum, the better it is likely to be. Gallup’s  standard architecture — with or without a leaner — is to be preferred to a binary, a form that offers too restricted a range of choice. The standard architecture is also to be preferred to the non-standard architecture or to a Likert item, forms that offer too wide a choice.

This analysis also does not mean that other, more direct measures of uncertainty should be discarded or not introduced. On the contrary, different measures may serve well as forms of validation and as sources of insight. •

The post “Undecided” on the Voice appeared first on Inside Story.

Here is how chief judge Robert Beech-Jones finished: “I doubt that the imposition of sentence on the offender for the second and hopefully last time will bring closure in respect of the terrible events surrounding his death and their aftermath. However, it is be hoped that it at least represents progress towards that end.”

How could a man’s punishment for “terrible events,” albeit thirty-five years late, not bring closure? Why is even “progress towards that end” a mere “hope”? And, given that the offender had pled guilty, why is this only “hopefully” the last time he would be sentenced?

The judge’s doubt may be a case of déjà vu. This sequence of events — a guilty plea and a sentence — has happened before in this case. Indeed, Beech-Jones is the fifth judge to make a finding about Johnson’s death. Every finding has been different, and none of the previous four stood the test of time.

Will the fifth? I’m not sure what I hope will happen.

“The procedural history of this case is a story in its own right,” the chief judge observed. It began on 10 December 1988 when a thirteen-year-old spear fisher spied a body lying on rocks under Blue Fish Point on the ocean side of Sydney’s North Head. Scott Johnson was naked, but the police soon found his clothes, neatly folded, near the clifftop. When an autopsy confirmed that the American had fallen from height a day or two earlier, the police and a coroner quickly concluded that he intentionally jumped. Last week, though, Beech-Jones said this “appears to be an absurd suggestion.”

The first finding about Johnson’s death was based at least partly on absurdity. His coroner cited the fact that he was “an extremely brilliant mathematician who was reserved and introverted” as a risk factor. But Johnson’s long-term partner also assumed that he had jumped. Four years earlier, Johnson had phoned to tell him that fear of exposure to AIDS had driven him to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. “But when he got there, he found that his muscles froze over.”

The suicide finding lasted twenty-three years, a period in which a different coroner found that three men who died or disappeared on Sydney cliffs in the late 1980s may have been the victims of gangs targeting gay beats. In 2012, a second inquest into Johnson’s death heard that Blue Fish Point was also a beat. The second coroner found that the cause of Johnson’s fall couldn’t be determined and recommended a fresh police investigation.

This open finding lasted just over five years, until a third inquest reviewed the police’s discoveries. The third coroner was told of the “Narrabeen skinheads” who targeted various gay beats in Sydney’s north in the mid 1980s. One informant testified that a pair from the gang had boasted that they once “bashed an American faggot” in Manly who then “ran away.” A “community source” explained that other gang members sometimes targeted beats at North Head in the late 1980s. But the third coroner dismissed these new clues as too slight and unreliable to cast any light on Johnson’s death.

That coroner nevertheless thought other evidence revealed what happened on 8 December 1988. A “psychological autopsy” of Johnson (who had recently made major progress on his doctorate, which was awarded posthumously) made the initial suicide theory “very unlikely.” Evidence from Johnson’s brother Steve of the pair’s many hikes made an accidental fall equally unlikely. And the American’s seemingly missing wallet suggested the malign involvement of a stranger. This became the first judge to find that a crime had occurred: “I readily conclude that homicide is more likely than either of the other scenarios.”

But he also sorrowfully rejected Steve Johnson’s request for a fresh investigation independent of the police. The initial poor policing and passage of time left little hope, he said, of finding the culprits. (He thought it “likely” that the student, who was “strong and young and fit,” had been attacked by two or more people.) Nevertheless, citing harrowing accounts from past beat users of recurrent violence at Blue Fish Point, he found that “Scott died as a result of a gay hate attack.” That finding lasted less than five years.

“I did have a dream about, ’bout him… a couple of nights ago, I don’t know, it was just a weird dream in the bush, something to do with the bush… I was with him up the, up at North Head.”

“Was the gay the kid who died?” someone asked.

“Yeah,” said Scott White. It was 19 March 2020 and White was talking to “two witnesses.”

Scott Johnson and Scott White shared more than a first name. They were both the middle of five siblings. They each grew up in grim circumstances with a single parent. Both were gay. Each had thoughts of suicide. But that’s where the similarities ended. White had little to live for and no chance at all of getting a doctorate or a soul mate. He was drinking by the age of thirteen, homeless by fifteen, and in and out of fights, boys’ homes and prisons into his twenties. He was eighteen when Johnson died, married at twenty-three, and thirty-eight when his wife left with their six kids. He then cared for his alcoholic mother until she died in 2018. In March 2020 he was living alone and friendless.

Who were the “two witnesses” White was revealed to have spoken with just as Sydney locked down? Nearly every court that described their chats studiously avoided saying, but one let it slip: they were “undercover police operatives.”

“See back in them days gay wasn’t like it is now,” one cop said.

“Like we used to go poofter bashing,” White replied, before adding, “Yeah, my brother did.” His brother was why he never came out.

“Ah well you need never tell him, mate,” the cop soothed.

The cops drove White to Blue Fish Point and must have been disappointed when he walked a lengthy bush trail towards Manly and identified the Upper Shelley Headland lookout as the spot where the man with “a bit of an American accent” and a “good build” had undressed in his “dream.” Becoming emotional, he said the pair had walked there from a local hotel and talked for hours. Pressed for details, White couldn’t recall if they were “intimate.” But then he remembered something: “I think we had a fight. That’s all I can remember… he fell. I took off.” White was arrested two months after he uttered those words.

All this seemingly followed a single police interview a year earlier, in which White denied attacking any gay men, let alone Johnson, and two home visits from the operatives the previous week. Just before those visits, the police obtained a warrant to make covert recordings and asked Steve Johnson to generate interest by pledging to personally double the police’s reward. But no one has revealed what the cops did to prompt a fifty-year-old loner to confide “his biggest secret” — that he’d known he was gay since he was fifteen — much less detail that week’s “dream.”

Some overseas courts frown on the use of stings to prompt admissions from vulnerable people. In 1993, an English trial judge threw out admissions that an undercover officer had extracted after answering a suspect’s “lonely hearts” ad and insisting on a murder confession as a condition for a relationship. The public pilloried the judge, but he was later vindicated when an unrelated man was convicted of the killing.

In Canada, the police have long cracked cold cases by posing as criminal gangs who insist on true confessions from their “recruits.” But the nation’s Supreme Court drew the line at undercover cops offering illusory friendships to mentally challenged, socially isolated men in exchange for unverifiable confessions. In 2014, it acquitted a man whose new “best friend” had taken him to the lake where his children drowned so he could demonstrate how he pushed them off a wharf.

Not so in Australia. When Australian police adopted their Canadian counterparts’ methods they were swiftly endorsed by the High Court and by parliaments, who exempted undercover stings from the rules that require police seeking admissions to use methods conducive to their reliability. In 2007, chief justice Murray Gleeson and his fellow judge Dyson Heydon upheld the use of a teen’s admissions to police who assured him they were speaking off the record, infamously observing that “every day police officers take advantage of the ignorance or stupidity of persons whom they eventually prosecute.”

White told his arresting officers he had been “full of shit” and just wanted to “get these guys” — the undercover cops — “off me back.” He spent the pandemic in prison being assessed by a succession of psychiatrists, who declared him fit to be tried but differed on their diagnoses. They all agreed that his childhood and heavy alcohol use had left him with cognitive defects. Ahead of a trial planned for the second anniversary of his arrest, the court set aside a week to resolve whether his jury could be told of his “dream.” That finding never came.

“How are you Scott?” his lawyer asked. “Terrible,” White told her. He’d been up since 4am, hadn’t eaten, and had lost his glasses. It was 9.40am on the first day of the pre-trial hearing in January 2022, and his lawyers warned him that his sexuality would be publicly aired. White said he was fine with his brother dialling in, but he wanted to know “what is all this about something I said to Helen [his ex-wife]?” His lawyers’ explanation left him more confused, but they also told him that the week’s hearings were just for legal arguments. When they reminded him that he would be asked to make a plea that day, White confirmed that he would say “not guilty.”

Just after 11am, a court officer read out the charge that, in 1988 in Manly, White “did murder…” “Guilty,” White interrupted. The officer continued: “… Scott Johnson.” “Guilty,” White repeated. How did he plead? “Guilty,” he said a third time, while his barrister shot to her feet. White added a fourth while the judge asked what his barrister wanted. She wanted to talk to her client.

Twenty minutes later, she told the judge that White no longer maintained his guilty plea. The judge could have simply re-arraigned White then and there. Instead, noting that his plea had been “loud” and “clear,” and that he obviously didn’t misspeak, she declared him guilty of murder. That finding, the fourth about Johnson’s death, was to last for just over a year.

Two days later, the judge rejected White’s formal request to withdraw his plea. White’s lawyers, who had planned to spend the week arguing that their client’s “dream” was the product of suggestion by undercover agents he was trying to please, were now openly accused by White’s prosecutor of “persuading” him to reverse his guilty plea. The judge duly dismissed the 9.40am conversation as White hiding his real intentions from his lawyers, and read the notes of the hasty post-plea conferral as his lawyers “cajoling” him into telling them “I didn’t do it, but I’m saying I did it.”

As for his reasons recorded in those notes — he told his lawyers he was scared of his ex-wife, he was safer in prison, he’d “take” ten years imprisonment, he wanted “it to be put to rest, for Scott, for the brother” — those were all consistent with his remorse for murdering Johnson as a teen. Moreover, the lawyers’ notes revealed that a change of plea had come up on four earlier occasions. The result was that White’s murder plea stood and so did the “dream” of the killing he had relayed two years earlier.

The only additional evidence the prosecution offered at his sentencing in May last year was from his ex-wife. Helen White revealed that she was the one who sparked the whole investigation by writing anonymously to the police after she saw a documentary on Johnson’s death. She recalled her then husband admitting that he used to “bash poofters” and said that, years ago, she had twice showed him Johnson’s picture from the newspaper, prompting him to say “that girly looking poofter” and “the only good poofter is a dead poofter.” Asked “So you threw him off the cliff?” he replied that it wasn’t his fault if “the dumb cunt ran off the cliff.”

The judge rebuffed White’s lawyers’ argument that no one could find the newspaper articles his ex-wife mentioned, as well as their suggestion that she had implicated her husband vindictively or for the $1 million reward. But, faced with the entirely different “dream” White had described to the undercover operatives, the judge baulked at confirming the third coroner’s finding that Johnson was the victim of a “gay hate attack.”

“There is no logical or rational reason,” she said, “to accept what the offender said about striking Dr Johnson, but reject what he said about going with him to North Head, without any apparent rancour, possibly for a sexual encounter to take place.” All that was certain, she said, was that White knew that hitting Johnson near a clifftop would probably kill him. That finding would last less than a year.

The murder finding unravelled bit by bit. Three appeal judges held that the judge should have been more open to White’s withdrawing a plea just twenty minutes after it was made. Indeed, they observed, White simply couldn’t have known the difference between murder and manslaughter. He hadn’t been advised by his lawyers on that, and even his prosecutor was yet to explain why White’s crime was the former. The judges sent the plea to be sorted out by chief judge Robert Beech-Jones.

White’s prosecutor tried to keep White to his murder plea, and even lodged a High Court challenge to the appeal decision. But he also agreed to discuss a compromise with White’s lawyers. Three months later, he simultaneously dropped his High Court challenge, his opposition to withdrawing the murder plea, and the murder charge itself. In return, White pled guilty to Johnson’s manslaughter.

It was all over bar White’s (second) sentencing, which proceeded on different evidence from the first. The parties’ “agreed facts” now covered only events in 1988 and from 2019, skipping White’s ex-wife altogether. But they included a new development: while he was still a convicted murderer, White was recorded on a prison phone call to a “relative” admitting “to hitting Dr Johnson at the cliff in terms consistent with what has already been recounted.” Like so much else in this case, no details are provided about what exactly was said in this call.

The chief judge rejected the only additional details White’s previous “dream” had revealed about his encounter with Johnson — “I hit him. He hit me. He stumbled back. I went to grab him and he… just stumbled back” — but also put to rest his predecessor’s finding that White knew his punch would likely cause a fatal fall. This time, no one argued that Johnson died of a gay hate attack.

And so, Beech-Jones set out the fifth, and current, official account of Scott Johnson’s death: “The end result is that not much is known about the killing of Dr Johnson beyond a punch near a cliff, a vulnerable victim, a fall over the cliff, a death, an absence of taking even the simplest step to render help after the fall and decades of pain and grief that followed.”

Is this closure for Scott Johnson and his loved ones? Five years ago, and nearly thirty years too late, a coroner put an official name to why Scott Johnson died (“a gay hate attack”) but couldn’t name his killer. Last week, a chief judge put an official name to the killer (“Scott”) but couldn’t say why he killed. “I think our family has got some peace and I would even say closure,” Steve Johnson said on the court’s doorstep. “We’re one of the lucky families.” No one can or should second-guess him. (A special commission will report on the police’s handling of hate crimes, including Johnson’s case, in coming months.)

Is this closure for Scott White too? He has now “specifically confirmed to the Court that he accepted legal responsibility for the death of Dr Johnson but not for murdering him,” and been sentenced accordingly. Beech-Jones found that the eighteen-year-old White “was clearly a damaged, albeit physically powerful, young man. However, he was not broken as he is now.” How much more should the courts break him at age fifty-two? Beech-Jones settled on a minimum of three more years in prison, and neither he nor White should be second-guessed either.

But should the rest of us accept closure in this case? Doing so is certainly in vogue. Even the Scots, who famously allow their criminal juries the option of a third, “not proven,” verdict, are contemplating a switch to the binary of guilty or not, lest they be too tempted (perhaps like Johnson’s second coroner) to throw up their hands in difficult cases and let villains go scot-free. But closure is seemingly what motivated the initial police and coroner (who were too quick to conclude that Johnson jumped), the third coroner (who was too sure he was chased), and the prosecutor and first judge (who were too determined to find that he was pushed).

Beech-Jones, the most careful of the case’s five judges, had the luxury of being bound by a manslaughter plea, and found nothing more than that. But the rest of us aren’t required to accept White at his word and should hesitate to do so. He has said that he is many other things — a “poofter basher,” a dreamer, “full of shit,” a murderer — and he may be all of those, or none. What everyone agrees is that he says whatever pleases whomever he’s near, be that his brother, his wife, complete strangers or his own lawyers. And nothing White has said about Johnson’s case went beyond what everyone around him knew or assumed had happened.

The case gives me déjà vu. White’s dream reminds me of Andrew Mallard, whose supposed murder confession to the Western Australian police consisted of what he said was “my version, my conjecture” of what the murderer would have done, described in the third person. It turned out that he was just parroting what the police had told him, including their own (wrong) assumptions about how the crime happened. A fingerprint identified the true killer, but only after Mallard spent twelve years in jail.

White’s guilty plea reminds me of George Heron, whose confession to killing a seven-year-old after days of oppressive questioning was thrown out of court decades ago, to the anger of the girl’s mother, the police and the British public. Heron was sued, hounded, outed and even stabbed, but that wasn’t the worst of it. “There were times I wondered if I had killed Nikki. So many people said I had that I started to doubt myself.” Her real killer was convicted last month.

Like Johnson’s third coroner, I’m pessimistic now — given poor policing, official tunnel vision and the passage of time — that we’ll ever learn more about Scott Johnson’s death. But the real, repeated lesson of these events is that this sort of case is never truly closed. Maybe there’s more evidence implicating White in the events of December 1988 than just his inconstant, vague, derivative say-so, and for some reason we just haven’t been told. I truly hope there is. But, if not, then I’m not willing to merely hope that this is fifth time lucky. •

The post Scott’s justice appeared first on Inside Story.

But while others were revelling in their favourite memories of Edna Everage, Les Patterson or Barry McKenzie, I took myself off in a different, quieter direction: to 36 Gallipoli Crescent, in fact, a street fictitiously located in the real Melbourne suburb of Glen Iris. This was the home of Sandy Stone, the most subtly drawn of all Humphries’s characters. I had no strife finding a “pozzie for the vehicle,” as Sandy often said of his own parking misadventures, because comparatively few people remember this boring old beggar (a polite euphemism for bugger in Sandy’s day).

Humphries, born in 1934, grew up in nearby Camberwell, where his father became a prosperous master builder. Eric Humphries built three houses for his family in Christowel Street, numbers 30, 38 and 36; the last was where they settled for good in 1937. Sandy and Beryl Stone’s imaginary house at 36 Gallipoli Crescent was built on these memories, although whether the style was mock Tudor, mock Elizabethan, neo-Georgian, Spanish mission or Californian bungalow Sandy doesn’t say. Eric Humphries could build them all. There was a driveway for the vehicle, a shady porch, and a tradesman’s hatch at the side. Sandy and Beryl called it “Kia Ora,” a Māori phrase for “hello.”

The Stones’ life together began just as the Depression was easing. On Sunday afternoons, while Kia Ora was being built, they would come and sit on the joists with a thermos and a pile of Australian Home Beautifuls. It’s never clear what sort of job Sandy had, but the couple were comfortably off and could afford the sorts of conveniences much prized by Humphries’s desperately aspirational parents. They had an electric refrigerator instead of an ice box, an electric stove and oven instead of an Early Kooka, and an indoor toilet instead of an outdoor dunny covered in morning glory.

In Sandy and Beryl’s garden there were “rhodies” and “hyderanges” (rhododendrons and hydrangeas), a silver birch and maybe a “jaca” (jacaranda), but probably no roses (Humphries’s mother thought them “a bit old-fashioned”) and certainly no shaggy eucalypts. Eucalypts, as well as paling fences, chicken coops and any structure with a corrugated iron roof, were considered emblems of the working-class existence Humphries’s parents had managed to escape. After their wedding, Eric and Louisa Humphries had moved from the less respectable suburb of Thornbury, but, as it turned out, only a bluestone lane separated the houses in Christowel Street from a remnant pocket of poverty in old Camberwell.

“We stared at each other sometimes, the poor and I,” Humphries later remembered, he on a ladder propped against the back fence, the poor children, with their bloodied knees and runny noses, staring back from their derelict backyards.

The Sandy Stone monologues were written either for sound recordings or as the “adagio act” in Humphries’s live touring shows. He published the collected scripts in 1990 under the title The Life and Death of Sandy Stone, edited by his friend Collin O’Brien. A television series of the same name was broadcast that year by the ABC, recorded in front of a studio audience whom Sandy addresses from his patterned velvet armchair. He is always styled as a middle-aged-to-elderly man, in a dressing gown and slippers, cradling a hot water bottle.

Often Sandy pauses an anecdote to note with deep approval that someone was a “Returned Man,” once a common term for someone who had fought abroad in one or both of the world wars. There was his friend Pat Hennessy, who’d recently had occasion to bury his wife and who was so lost without her that in three years he’d not cleaned the S-bend in his toilet. He was a returned man. So was their local postie, and so was the specialist who broke the news to Sandy and Beryl that they could never have children. As for the vestryman up at Holy Trinity church whose son was a hippie: although not actually a returned man, he was “one of the nicest people you could ever wish to meet.”

My parents and I never missed an episode of the ABC series and my father delighted to imitate the exact note of serene reverence in Sandy’s voice when referring to a “returned man.” Dad’s father George really had been a returned man, a quiet sort of chappie, Sandy would have said, and to look at George nobody would have thought he’d been a prankster and a scallywag before enlistment. But after service on Gallipoli and Pozières he returned silent and deeply introverted, happy to accept an office job and a peaceful life in the suburbs. But he did retain the impish sense of humour that has become a family trait, hence my father’s rich appreciation of Sandy Stone.

With Barry Humphries’s death I thought back to those evenings in front of the telly with my parents and became curious about Sandy’s actual returned status. I found it surprisingly ambiguous. Sandy is a regular at his local RSL, and when he needs to have a surgical operation — a “little op” — he is entitled to have it done at “the Repat,” which as his Melbourne audiences would have known was the Repatriation General Hospital in Heidelberg. (The general term “repatriation” has fallen into disuse but was once a uniquely Australian descriptor for the return of Australian men and women after war service, and their further support through pensions and benefits.)

Sandy has obviously served in some capacity, but what? He first appeared in 1958 in a sound recording, “Days of the Week,” written as the B-side for a 45rpm record. (Mrs Everage took the A-side.) Also in 1958 Humphries published a short story entitled “Sandy Stone’s Big Week” in the Canberra student magazine Prometheus. Nothing happens in Sandy’s “big week.” A pot-bellied Sandy is discovered in his garden in the early evening watering his shrubs. As the light dims, all that is visible of him is his white shirt “and the white arc of water from his garden hose.” Called inside by Beryl, he goes in, switches on the wireless, seats himself in the patterned velvet armchair, rolls a cigarette (later he is a non-smoker) and thinks about the events of the coming week. The highlight will be an RSL meeting on the Friday night at Gallipoli Hall. That’s it.

Nothing much ever does happen to this emasculated Anzac. He makes a trip back to Gallipoli in 1968 with a group of cobbers and a Turkish guide (who spoke “perfect Australian”) and writes a painfully dull letter from the “Istanbul Hilton” to Beryl about the few hours they’d spent stumbling around the peninsula getting souvenir snaps. Perhaps this monologue was prompted by historian Ken Inglis’s reports for the Canberra Times of the 1965 RSL pilgrimage to Gallipoli, but Humphries ultimately rejected the idea of making Sandy a first world war man, and this piece, “Anzac Sandy,” was never performed.

Instead, the second world war became Sandy’s war, although, as Humphries himself admitted, Sandy’s military status was still nebulous. The development of the character coincided with growing scepticism among some Australians, bordering on hostility, towards all things Anzac in the 1960s, but Humphries avoided using Sandy as a vehicle for the kind of biting critique that Alan Seymour explored in his play The One Day of the Year, first performed in 1958. Nor was Sandy a violent, war-damaged tyrant like the father in George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964). And again, Humphries was uninterested in the public debate over the system of repatriation that was satirised in John Whiting’s polemical novel Be in It, Mate! (1969).

Sandy was never about any of that. The point of Sandy was to be boring. His creator’s declared aim was to see how far he could bore audiences before they rose up in revolt. Acknowledging the influence of Samuel Beckett and the avant-garde art movement known as Dadaism, with its explorations of nonsense and irrationality, Humphries wanted not to please his audiences but to provoke and shock. Gradually he alighted on the idea of boredom as the way to do it and, turning inwards, found all the material he needed within the suburban wasteland, as he saw it, of his youth.

Hence Sandy’s maddening, circumlocutory monologues punctuated by pointless pauses, digressions and repetitions. His attention will get snagged on a point of inconsequential detail and audiences watch, transfixed, as he struggles to free himself. This, for instance, from “Shades of Sandy” (1981):

Little Gwennie’s husband, Jack, went to his Reward about two years ago. Yes, it would be two years since Jack went to his Reward. It would be a good two years. It would be all of a good two years.

Also in that monologue is Sandy’s immortal critique of the domestic pop-up toaster, specifically the Morphy Richards model that threw Beryl across the room one day when she tried to dig a crumpet out with a fork. No matter the brand of toaster, the crumpet is never taken into account. “You slip one in and half an hour later, if you are lucky, it glides to the surface, as white as a lily.” But sometimes the opposite happens:

Flames leap out of the toaster. You’ve got to bash it underneath with a broomstick, and then you’re on the kitchen floor trying to find it, and over the sink, scraping off the black fur till there’s nothing left but a couple of crumpet holes. A black crumpet hole is no use to man nor beast.

There is a little knob on the side of the toaster, Sandy continues, to indicate light to dark. Easy to miss. Beryl missed it for years and then, when she found it, she couldn’t leave it alone. But the interesting thing, he concludes, is that “it’s not connected to anything” (Sandy’s emphasis). “It’s got a mind of its own.”

Ruminating in 1990 on the origins of Sandy, Humphries recalled how, after having dropped out of university, he succumbed to parental pressure and took a “real” job in the city with the EMI record label. On his morning commute, always running late, he often met his neighbour Mr Whittle, a childless man of his parents’ age who would invariably greet young Barry with “a polite and old-fashioned little squeeze” of his grey trilby hat. For Humphries, this man came to epitomise not just his parents’ generation, but “Respectability Itself”: punctuality, industry, courtesy, thrift, temperance, niceness. “I despised him.”

In 1956, desperate to escape, Humphries got married and snatched an acting job in Sydney. He was unhappy there too, especially in the depressing old boarding house near Centennial Park where he and his wife Brenda were staying. Breakfast was had in a shared kitchen with other tenants, mostly aged and itinerant men, all lonely. Walking along Bondi Beach one blustery winter’s afternoon, Humphries encountered a wiry old fellow of about sixty-five with thin sandy hair, finely capillaried cheeks, a two-tone cardigan and “freckled, marsupial paws.” When Humphries asked the time, he was told: “Approximately in the vicinity of half past five.”

In that moment, he had the last pieces in place to create Sandy Stone, including the sibilant “S’s” caused by ill-fitting dentures, and the thin, dry voice Humphries recognised as “the antithesis of the rugged Australian stereotype.”

What unified these men in Humphries’s mind, I think, was not their ex-digger status but his perception of them as lonely, ageing men. Confused and anxious about his future, perhaps his greatest fear was that he would end up like them. True, Mr Whittle did wear a returned serviceman’s badge on his lapel, but Humphries was careful not to overplay that. Sandy could not be a war bore because he would have had to bore audiences on subjects about which Humphries knew little.

Instead, Humphries turned to a subject on which he was an expert, life in the Australian suburbs. To express his rage and frustration at the tedium imposed upon him in his youth, he needed a technique that would be, he said, “monumentally, grindingly prosaic.”

The most interesting occurrence in Sandy’s life is his death, which occurs in his sleep while Beryl is absent on the Women’s Weekly World Discovery Tour that she had been hankering to do for years. Death frees him to return as a ghost.

He enjoys watching his own funeral and the wake afterwards back at Kia Ora. He watches as Beryl puts the house up for sale and disposes of his effects, assisted by their neighbour Clarrie Lockwood from 43 Gallipoli Crescent. Clarrie heaves Sandy’s armchair into his Vanguard ute along with various other bygones of Sandy and Beryl’s life together, and takes them to the Holy Trinity opportunity shop. It is obvious to everyone except Sandy that Beryl is more gleeful than grief-stricken, and after the house sells she moves to Queensland, where she and Clarrie later marry.

Kia Ora is bought by Mr and Mrs Cosmopolis, “a delightful multicultural ethnic minority Greek couple,” who are expecting a baby. Mrs Cosmopolis notices Sandy’s armchair in the op shop and buys it, and so, in Sandy’s final monologue, “Sandy Comes Home” (1985), we find him back at 36 Gallipoli Crescent, still in his old armchair, watching his house being renovated.

This monologue cracks open the racism that Sandy has been putting down in layers since the 1930s, when fruit and vegetables were delivered to Kia Ora through the tradesman’s hatch by the “yellow hand” of the “little smiling Chinaman,” Charlie O’Hoy. Sandy could bestow a tolerant glow over Charlie, and the Greek couple who operated the local fish and chip shop, and even the Angelo brothers, Italians who as terrazzo specialists did most of the porches in the street.

But when in 1938 an “Israelite” couple named Eckstein moved into the first block of flats in Glen Iris: they were the “thin end of the wedge” as far as Sandy was concerned. They opened the floodgates and then it was “Come One, Come All.”

The Stubbings’ beautiful home at number 52, for instance, was bought recently and remodelled by a Vietnamese couple called Ng. That’s their name, Sandy tells us, incredulous, and “you could smell their cooking on the bowling green.” Number 37, the home of Vi and Alan Chapman, was bought by Bruno Agostino and his family of eleven.

Once they moved in, that once-lovely home was swarming with dagos night and day. Talk about build. They built on the back, they built on the front, they built on the left, they built on the right… they built a balustrade right across the front of the home, with fountains and statues and lions everywhere. It was like a cement safari.

The Agostinos dug up all of Vi’s “magnificent” garden, including the pin oak Vi bought as a seedling years before from the Methodist Church fete. It resisted the bulldozer for the best part of a day, until the “Eye-ties” got a block and tackle to it and finally it came down “with a groan you could hear up and down the crescent.”

Only as they chopped it up did the Agostinos discover a bit of rotten wood nailed on to one of the branches, which was all that was left of the treehouse little Neil Chapman had played in before the war.

Of course, little Neil was beheaded in Borneo. Some Jap with a sword said “Neil!” [kneel] and he did, and that was that. It’s terrible to think that your destiny can be in your own name.

Sandy gives no pause here, but rambles on remorselessly as he always does, leaving audiences, I’m sure, wide-eyed and silent. The monologue ends with Mrs Cosmopolis bustling in to clear away the last of the things that Beryl hadn’t bothered with, including Beryl and Sandy’s wedding photo and a lock of his mother’s hair, which he’d been keeping in a cigarette tin.

“Sandy Comes Home” appears to be the last Sandy monologue Humphries wrote, and was the longest. By then audiences had been allowed to develop a certain affectionate sympathy for Sandy, which made his racism even more shocking. Humphries always enjoyed the deep hush that greeted Sandy’s anti-Semitism. “Perhaps,” he mused in 1990, “we had not until then fully apprehended that we, who had invented Niceness, could also be very nicely anti-Semitic. It was a salutary discovery.”

Sandy’s ex-service status was just a device to tie him to the past and associate him with the most conservative element in Australia at the time, the RSL. The young Barry Humphries had spotted a much older man — his neighbour Mr Whittle — and despised him for his “respectability.” For comedic purposes he was uninterested in the idea that people of Mr Whittle’s generation had lived through and suffered much. But after two economic depressions (1890s and 1930s), two world wars and a cold war, small wonder that they took refuge in suburban routine and hard-won material comforts.

Humphries himself became rusted on to his long-held desire to shock, and over many years must have developed an ability to avert his gaze from the real pain he could inflict. His transphobic comments in 2016 seem to bear this out.

A word about Mr Whittle. Kenneth Roy Whittle was born in 1897, trained as a surveyor and became a public servant. He and his wife Alice moved into 42 Christowel Street, Camberwell in the early 1930s. He was not an ex-serviceman; there is no evidence he enlisted or attempted to enlist in either world war. Nor were the Whittles childless. Their only child, June Elizabeth, died in 1933, aged two, the year before Barry was born. Had she lived they might have been playmates. •

The post What did you do in the war, Sandy? appeared first on Inside Story.

That fragment of a story began its evolution when the well-known Melbourne Aboriginal activist Gary Foley came across a brief report about the event in a newspaper of the time. In an essay published in 1997 he drew a connection between the League’s protest and the event now widely known as Kristallnacht, a Nazi-sponsored pogrom against Jewish people. Foley believed the League was the first group in Australia to try to formally protest against the German government’s persecution of Jewish people, but his main aim was to draw attention to Australia’s persecution of Aboriginal people by noting the comparison with the Nazis.

The story Foley told about the League’s protest piqued the interest of staff at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre (known widely at the time as the Jewish Holocaust Centre). It no doubt struck them as a good example of a people seeking to combat racism, and especially anti-Semitism. Telling a story about it would be a means of advancing the centre’s educational goal.

In the years that followed, the thread of the story told by Jewish institutions and organisations, here and in Israel, solidified into the account we know today. The protest at the consulate was the heroic work of one man, William Cooper, rather than the political organisation he represented, let alone any broader political movement of which it was a part.

According to this account, Cooper’s was the only non-governmental protest made in Australia, or even the world, against the Nazi persecution of Jews. In raising his voice, Cooper was bearing witness to the Nazi genocide of European Jews. His act sprang from his courage, humanity and compassion, and his empathy with the Jewish people, rather than any intention to advance his own people’s interests. It was all the more remarkable and worthy because he was standing up for the rights of Jewish people despite having no rights himself.

How did the story come to take on mythological qualities in this way? When they learned of Foley’s discovery, leading figures at the Holocaust Centre may well have also been influenced by two other narratives: that Kristallnacht was a turning point in the history of Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jewish people, which culminated in the Holocaust, and that tens of millions of gentiles had stood by while the Holocaust took place.

Foley’s argument that the League had been the first Australian organisation to raise its voice against the pogrom provided a striking counterpoint to the behaviour of other bystanders, or so it was believed. Just a few years earlier, Steven Spielberg’s remarkably popular Hollywood movie Schindler’s List had told a similarly uplifting story about an unlikely figure who rescued hundreds of Jews from the Nazi genocide.

I imagine the Holocaust Centre — and Melbourne’s Jewish community more generally — would also have been attracted to the story of the League’s protest because a particular kind of politics had become increasingly influential in Australia and many other Western societies — the politics of recognition, whose key words included remembrance, rights and reparation. Many non-Aboriginal people, or at least Anglo-Australians, now felt moved to tackle what was called “the great Australian silence” about Australia’s history of Aboriginal dispossession, displacement, destruction and discrimination. Increasingly, some were characterising this history as genocide — most recently in a report for the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission about the stolen generations.

The Holocaust Centre’s key figures would likely have been influenced, too, by a shift in how the past was being recounted and how people were relating to it, namely the rise in both scholarly and public circles of what was called “memory,” especially in the form of testimony, which had occurred most notably in accounts of the Holocaust. Those who had experienced a historical event had come to be seen as the most authoritative bearers of the truth about the past, so much so that “memory” was increasingly regarded in the media, and even by some scholars, as a substitute for history as told by academic historians, rather than just a supplement to those accounts.

An emerging scholarly and popular discourse also encouraged dividing those present in difficult historical circumstances into perpetrators, victims, collaborators, bystanders and resisters. In the case of settler societies, Indigenous people were called on to recall the past as victims; and non-Indigenous people were urged to listen to their testimony, acknowledge the truths they uttered, recognise the pain they had suffered, repudiate a past in which European ancestors were held to have been perpetrators, collaborators or bystanders (though sometimes resisters), and make amends for its legacies.

Over many years, this story has been told repeatedly in myriad forms outside the Jewish community: in commemorations, memorials, exhibitions, re-enactments, naming ceremonies, news reports, radio programs, books, magazine articles, essays, plays, paintings, musical compositions, blogs, videos and podcasts. It has been taken up by numerous government institutions and embraced by many sympathetic Anglo-Australians.

In December 2010 the largest and most senior Australian parliamentary delegation ever to visit Israel travelled to Jerusalem to participate in a series of events commemorating the League’s protest. In November 2017 a representative of the German government responsible for relations with Jewish organisations and issues relating to anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, accepted a document purporting to be the petition in Berlin, and in December 2020 he issued a formal apology for the German consul’s refusal to accept the petition some eighty years earlier.

In Australia, government bodies decided to name places in Melbourne in Cooper’s honour — a federal electorate, a building that houses several law courts and legal tribunals, an institute at a university, and a footbridge at a train station — and in each instance reference was made to the protest to the German consulate. The Aboriginal filmmakers Rachel Perkins and Beck Cole saw no reason to discuss the protest in their 2008 documentary First Australians; in 2020 the Aboriginal radio broadcaster Daniel Browning commissioned an episode of the ABC’s AWAYE! about Cooper that was framed by the story.

Cultural institutions have followed suit. The National Museum of Australia’s website feature “Defining Moments in Australian History” includes the story. Heritage Victoria has taken an interest in two of the houses in which Cooper lived, each of which displays an account of the story. The Victorian government department of education and training has included the story in its curriculum. And a historical society in Cooper’s traditional country has created an online exhibit about Cooper that focuses on the protest to the German consulate.

In the account of the protest I give in my life history of William Cooper, key historical facts are different. For example, the deputation to the German consulate can’t be attributed to Cooper alone, for while he was the Australian Aborigines’ League’s principal figure, League members (who included a whitefella by the name of Arthur Burdeu) played a major role; and the League, let alone Cooper, was by no means the first in Australia to formally protest against the Nazi German persecution of Jews after Kristallnacht, for two left-wing organisations had already tried to deliver a protest to the consulate in Melbourne. Nor can we be sure that Cooper was present when the attempt was made to hand over the petition — indeed, it is quite likely that he was not, as his health had declined considerably by this time.

More importantly, in the story that I tell, the meaning of this event is different. My point of departure is that the League was quintessentially a political organisation — and an Aboriginal one at that — and that it consequently went about its work in a strategic fashion, always considering what might be the best possible ways to fashion a case that could persuade white Australians to support its struggle to improve the lot of its people.

In the month prior to drawing up its petition, the League had evidently been conducting much of its political work by drawing parallels between Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jewish people and more than one Australian government’s treatment of Aboriginal people. It pointed out that the persecution of Indigenous people in Australia was akin to that experienced by racial minorities in Europe, and asserted that Australia should be as concerned about the rights of its people as it was about the rights of those other minorities.

One sentence in particular in the League’s petition — or what has survived of it — provides evidence that this was the point of its protest: “Like the Jews, our people have suffered much cruelty, exploitation and misunderstanding as a minority at the hands of another race.”

Other parts of the historical record also suggest that the League’s protest sought to draw attention to similarities between the treatment of the Jewish minority by the Nazi German government and the treatment of the Aboriginal minority by Australian governments.

Barely ten days after the League left its petition at the German consulate, a letter in Cooper’s name sent by the League to a federal minister said, “We feel that while we [Australians] are all indignant over Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, we [Aboriginal people] are getting the same treatment here and we would like this fact duly considered.” Several months later, in a letter now held in the National Archives, Cooper told prime minister Robert Menzies, “I do trust that care for a suffering minority will… not allow Australia’s minority problem to be as undesirable as the European minorities of which we read so much in the press.”

Shortly afterwards, following the outbreak of war, Cooper spelled out the kind of connection he and the League were trying to make in protesting against the Nazi persecution of German Jews. “Australia is linked with the Empire in a fight for the rights of minorities…” he told Menzies. “Yet we are a minority with just as real oppression.” A year later, Cooper’s protégé Doug Nicholls posed this rhetorical question to a congregation in a Melbourne church: “Australians were raving about persecuted minorities in other parts of the world, but were they ready to voice their support for the unjustly treated Aboriginal minority in Australia?”

My interpretation of the League’s protest rests not only on these written historical records but also on a source that can be seen as the product of collective memory or tradition. About a year before the League’s deputation to the German consulate, Cooper, in the course of speaking at length to a white journalist, referred to his people’s “horror and fear of extermination,” saying: “It is in the blood, the racial memory, which recalls the terrible things done to them in years gone by.” (His most important political act, a petition to the British king, also expressed a fear of extermination by speaking of the need to “prevent the extinction of the Aboriginal race.”)

These statements give a sense that the League was drawn to make its protest to the German consulate because, consciously or unconsciously, its members identified themselves with German Jews as a result of their own people’s experience of violence.

The story I have told of the League’s protest makes clear that the story of Cooper as the man who stood up to Hitler has leached the event of the meaning it had at the time for those responsible for it, and the meaning it could have today.

In everyday parlance, “myth” refers to a statement that is widely considered to be false. In using this word to describe the story of Cooper as the man who stood up to Hitler I don’t want to exclude this connotation, but I have something more ambiguous in mind.

Most myths have a genuine link to a genuine past. To be considered plausible, an account of the past must have at least a partial relationship to past reality, and thus to what is regarded as historically truthful. In this instance, it is a historical fact that the Australian Aborigines’ League sent a deputation to the German consulate in Melbourne in December 1938 to present a petition in which it protested against the persecution of the Jewish people.

But the rest of the story is a good example of what the great British historian Eric Hobsbawm once called “the invention of tradition.” It has been created by projecting onto Cooper a purpose and a character that the storytellers wish him to have had. The historical fact of the deputation aside, none of the story has been formed on the basis of the historical record.

Like most myths, this story achieves its most powerful effects not by falsifying historical material — though one of the organisations that has played a leading role in producing the story has fabricated the petition the League presented to the German consulate — but through omission, distortion and oversimplification.

Consequently, Cooper is recognised not because of his people’s loss, pain and suffering, but because he recognised the Jewish people’s loss, pain and suffering. This is the point of the storytelling. As a result, the popular account deflects attention from the devastating impact of racism and colonialism on this country’s Aboriginal people, and their struggle to lay bare its legacies and get them redressed. Such can be the cunning of recognition. What might purport to recognise the history of Aboriginal people misrecognises it.

The degree to which this myth has distorted how Cooper should be remembered — and the costs of that distortion — is highlighted by comparing it with what Gary Foley was doing. He was practising history in keeping with the discipline’s protocols, which include the recovery of the relevant historical texts and historical contexts, and was also adopting the techniques of Aboriginal history, a subdiscipline that seeks to make sense of the past and its presence by engaging with Aboriginal historical sources, subjects, agency and perspectives. The evolving story of Cooper’s protest ignored Foley’s main aim: he was seeking to draw attention to parallels between the murderous Nazi German campaign against the Jews of Europe and what had happened and was still happening to Aboriginal people in Australia.

In Australia, as elsewhere, history as a way of knowing and understanding the past threatens to be displaced by myth and memory (or what is deemed to be memory) that make claims about the past that are seldom tested and provide little explanation for what happened and why. Yet, as historian Allan Megill has suggested, “truth and justice, or whatever simulacra of them remain to us, require at least the ghost of History if they are to have any claim on people at all. What is left otherwise is only what feels good (or satisfyingly bad) at the moment.” •

The post The evolution of a myth appeared first on Inside Story.

The task is complicated by a paradox. As well as having a great gift for friendship Robert was in many ways a very private person. So I’ll leave it mainly to the extract below — from a short family history he was working on — to give a sense of the forces that created a gifted reporter who published thousands of carefully crafted pieces over a more than fifty-year career.

Robert spent his childhood in Wingham, a NSW town on the Manning River, where his parents ran a residential hotel. Those years left him with warm memories of the character and pace of postwar country life, tempered by a growing sense that change was inevitable. More importantly, life at the Wingham Hotel — a microcosm of rural Australia — fuelled in him an intense curiosity. Journalism seems always to have been the logical end point of those early influences.

After studying politics at the University of New South Wales he took up a cadetship with the Sydney Morning Herald, where his reporting skills were soon apparent. He became known to readers outside Sydney after he moved to another Fairfax paper, the National Times, to write and edit features.

He was also contributing Australian news to the Guardian in London, and it was probably those pieces that attracted the attention of the Independent, the exciting new paper launched by a trio of journalists in London in 1986. One of his first assignments as the paper’s Australian correspondent was the legally delicate job of covering the Spycatcher trial. Reporting on this attempt by the British government to suppress the Australian publication of a controversial MI5 memoir was complicated by a ruling by the Law Lords back in London, who had declared any mention of the book’s contents off limits for the British media.

After more than a decade with the Independent Robert was appointed Australian correspondent for the Economist, to which he continued contributing — regularly then occasionally — until quite recently. Throughout those years he also contributed to Australian magazines including Australian Society, Anne Summers Reports, the Good Weekend and, from 2009, Inside Story. For a time he wrote editorials for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Somehow during these years he found time to write a history of British nuclear testing in Australia, a book about rural Australia’s social and economic upheaval and a biography (extracted here) of the pioneering rock journalist Lillian Roxon.

Among his articles for Australian Society were two on the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. That interest in Indigenous affairs carried over into two outstanding pieces for Inside Story based on visits to Bourke and Moree to see innovative justice projects in action. Among his other features for Inside Story was a profile of the maverick western Sydney Liberal Craig Laundy, an account of the migration-led revival of Dubbo, and a report on the unveiling of a new statue, also in Dubbo, of Aboriginal rights leader William Ferguson.

He was a fierce critic of Australia’s treatment of refugees and an equally fierce advocate of an Australian republic. He wrote meticulously but responded amiably to editorial meddling. His circle of friends and acquaintances was wide, and he was invariably a welcoming presence during my visits to Sydney. I am among the many who will miss him enormously.

Here, then, is a short extract from Robert’s last writing project…

On Friday 20 September 1946 the Wingham Chronicle carried a small item near the top of its “Personal” column: “Mr and Mrs Dave Milliken, of the Wingham Hotel, are being congratulated on the birth last weekend of a son and heir.”

The son and heir was me. My sister and only sibling, Sue, had been born six and a half years earlier, but no one ever called her a daughter and heiress. My birth came in the first year of the baby boomers, the post–second world war generation whose arrival presaged big social change. But old attitudes on women’s role in society, and much else, still died hard.

Heir to what? My grandfathers, Harry Cross and James Milliken, had separately built enterprises of the kind around which life on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, and in many other rural regions, revolved: a country hotel and a dairy farm. The worlds these tow institutions encompassed had barely changed in at least fifty years. But they were about to do so, not least for their baby-boom grandchildren.

It was probably 1950 when the first of us boomers became aware of the world around us. Shorn of the privations of economic depression and war, we were defined by youth and renewal: the opening up of education, the postwar rebuilding, the arrival of different sorts of people from the mono-Anglo immigrants of our parents’ generation, and a new popular culture captured largely by the biggest glamour figures of all time, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. All this spelled confidence. How could we not be different?

I’ve long wanted to write about my childhood in an Australia that has largely passed, where people in New South Wales, at least, lived according to simpler patterns and precepts. Political trends and social mores seemed set in stone; few, if any, questioned them. There were no movements to advance the interests of women, immigrants, First Australians, gay people and others outside society’s masculine conformity because they barely seemed to exist.

Inevitably, my two grandfathers — whose businesses defined much about the rural Australia I entered — provided the stepping-off points. The first baby boomers were born during a crucial transition, from the tail end of the era of European expansion to the opening up of new cultural frontiers.

The Wingham Hotel, also known as Cross’s Hotel, stood confidently and invitingly at the entrance to Wingham, a town of perhaps 3000 people on the Manning River, about 320 kilometres north of Sydney. The Milliken farm, “Magheramorne,” faced the Wallamba River at Darawank, a hamlet near the Pacific Ocean about thirty-six kilometres southeast of Wingham.

Before the days of motels and licensed clubs, country hotels like ours played key roles in country life. They were the places where people stayed, ate, met, did business and, at the Wingham Hotel at least, lived. The residents weren’t people just looking for somewhere cheap to doss. They were what today would be called young professionals, for whom the hotel offered comfort and security.

In my first few years, residents included a pharmacist, a doctor, an ex–prisoner of war from Changi, and the venerable Miss Paterson, who became Wingham’s first female health inspector in 1949. They were the “permanents” who, in some ways, became part of the family.

Yet social mores kept familiarity at a distance. We called them Mr, Mrs or Miss, never by their first names (the honorific Ms hadn’t been coined). When I met her again fifty years later in her retirement in a mid-north coast beach town, Miss Paterson gave a sense of how these rigidities were starting to break down when she landed in Wingham after the war.

“There was a first-name basis largely, and I didn’t think that was right,” she told me. “You weren’t going to have a disciplined staff if they were going to call you Bill and Joe and whatever. So I was trying to educate them, but I don’t think I had any success at all. In the office itself, the girls all called one another by their first names, but maybe I just looked difficult. The town clerk always called me Miss Paterson. Some of the labourers would come in and say, “Is Jim in?” meaning the town clerk. I’d give them a lecture, and say Mr-whoever-was-the-town-clerk was in.”

Social life was more relaxed, with people expressing their feelings in sayings that have largely fallen out of use. Instead of swearing, publicly at least, they said “Strike a light,” “Spare me days,” “God strewth” or just “Strewth” to convey shock or exasperation, and “God give me strength” for outright disapproval.

I didn’t inherit either the hotel or the dairy farm, but each of them has remained embedded in my imagination. That’s because the hotel in particular, but even the farm, were such vibrant places where people, not machines, computers and algorithms, were the drivers of daily life.

By the time I was born, both grandfathers were dead. My parents, Thelma (known as Thel), Harry Cross’s elder daughter, and David (known as Dave), James Milliken’s youngest son, had married in 1939 and, the following year, taken over the Wingham Hotel in partnership with Thel’s younger sister, Jennie. We lived as a family in a sprawling flat upstairs, and while Thel, Dave and Jennie were running the business downstairs Sue and I were endlessly fascinated by the colourful cast of characters — staff, patrons, diners, drinkers, travelling salesmen and visitors of all kinds — who thronged the hotel’s kitchen, dining room, bars and lounges.

In some ways, it was like living in a frontier town of the kind depicted in the Westerns that featured in Wingham’s two cinemas (then known as picture theatres) in the 1940s and 50s. One artist’s depiction of the approach to Wingham — looking across the Cedar Party Creek bridge and up the rise of Wynter Street to the Wingham Hotel — evokes the town entrance of my childhood, unchanged as it must have been for decades. I imagine coaches bringing people along the dirt road and bullock trains taking freshly sawn native cedar and eucalyptus logs from forests in the hills around Wingham, down Isabella Street to the wharf, where they were shipped to Sydney and the wider world.

Wingham’s own world was a self-sufficient one. There were no supermarkets, no clothing or hardware chain stores owned by distant conglomerates. Local families — the Moxeys, the Gleesons, the Maitlands, the Mellicks and others — owned and ran the local businesses that provided food, groceries, clothes, farm equipment and almost every provision townsfolk needed.

This self-sufficiency helped to give Wingham and its district’s tight-knit population a strong sense of identity. So did the local economy, which revolved around dairy and beef farming and timber. It belonged to a world in which most of Australia’s exports came from the bush. That, too, was about to change, as hardships from the past faded away and the new golden age, born with the baby boomers, began.

Thel, Dave, Jennie and their generation had lived through two of the worst events of the twentieth century: the Depression of the 1930s and the second world war. The war had come to the Wingham Hotel in various ways. Family friends went, or were sent, to live there, seeking sanctuary from isolation and attack. And Dave fought battles of a different sort with government authorities over the rationing of beer.

Although the war had ended just a year before I was born, through my childhood eyes it was as if it had never happened. A new world of abundance and prosperity was unfolding.

A fortnight after I was born Ben Chifley won the 1946 election for the Labor Party, claiming Australia was “about to enter upon the greatest era in her history.” The start of the baby boom fuelled demand for housing and consumer goods, and a big rise in immigration helped to underpin postwar economic expansion. As the historian Stuart Macintyre observed, “The third quarter of the twentieth century was an era of growth unmatched since the second half of the nineteenth century.”

Along with growth and prosperity, three events in 1949, three years after I was born, roughly defined the world I was entering. Mao Zedong led the Chinese Communist Party to power, founding the People’s Republic of China. The Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic weapon, ending America’s monopoly as a nuclear power. Those two events consolidated the cold war: a strategic rivalry between the West and the Soviet Union and its allies, including the fear of nuclear war, that was a fundamental feature of the 1950s.

The third significant event of 1949 that helped fix Australia’s political world happened closer to home. Bob Menzies, founder of the Liberal Party, won the 1949 federal election, and remained Australia’s prime minister for a record seventeen years. Menzies was a consummate politician for whom the economic boom at home and the cold war’s uncertainties abroad facilitated a hold on power. The government’s anti-communist rhetoric pervaded the 1950s, with Menzies warning of Australia falling victim to a “thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.”

There was little sense of a new form of postwar Australian nationalism emerging. Another twenty years had to pass for that to happen. Menzies, the ultimate Anglophile and monarchist, folded Australia’s identity into its British colonial heritage just as that world was growing rapidly out of date. In a speech to the US House of Representatives in 1950, he declared: “The world needs the United States of America. The world needs the British peoples of the world.” He made no mention of his own land as a separate sovereign entity.

As a child at Wingham public school, opposite our family’s hotel, I attended Empire Day, a curious annual celebration of the British Empire, with bonfires and fireworks, that ceased only in 1958. The Biripi Aboriginal community, who’d lived in the Manning Valley for tens of thousands of years before the Crosses, Millikens and other settlers arrived, were not included. The empire had robbed them of their lands and much of their cultural heritage. They were not seen, and nor did the school mention their names or story. As a child, I didn’t know they existed; to my knowledge, I never saw an Aboriginal person in Wingham.

In the first years of the baby boomers, Aboriginal Australians were kept in their colonial-era places, the missions and settlements, usually in squalor. Purfleet, near the Manning town of Taree, and a settlement in Forster, at the mouth of the Wallamba River, offered my first childhood glimpses of Aboriginal people, but only as we drove past, and with no discussion of who they were or how they got there. Righting injustices was not part of Australia’s immediate postwar agenda.

Too much else was happening to redefine postwar Australia as a land of wealth, confidence and leisure. The first Sydney–Hobart yacht race was held in 1945. Australia started making cars in 1948. Construction of the most ambitious public enterprise — the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme — started in 1949. Many of the workers who built that project, who comprised the first wave of immigrants drawn from European countries other than Britain, were trailblazers of the multicultural profile that eventually changed the country’s human face.

The changes didn’t stop at home. Overseas, Australia was joining the American Century. To replace our old dependence on Britain, we looked across the Pacific to form security alliances with our new “great and powerful friend,” as Menzies called the United States, which had led us to victory in the Pacific war. America’s cultural influence reached a zenith during the 1950s, when the first wave of baby boomers came into childhood. The surge of popular culture from America included the birth of rock-and-roll, resonating among a new generation in an Australia that had given barely any encouragement to local voices in film, drama or music.

All this gave a young baby boomer the sense of an exciting and prosperous, yet secure world. Menzies’s reassuring tones on the radio and in newsreels (television didn’t come to Australia until 1956) helped see to that. The rhythm of life in the sheltered worlds of the Wingham Hotel and the Magheramorne farm, and elsewhere, hardly varied from one year to the next.

And yet it was about to change. In the mid 1950s, Thel and Dave sold the Wingham Hotel, bringing to an end a family ownership of three generations. We moved to Glory Vale, a beautiful farm near Gloucester, also on the Manning River. I rode a horse every day to a one-room bush school. In this unlikely place, we had a brush with Hollywood glamour when the star Anne Baxter settled incongruously for a time further along the Manning. A way of life for rural Australians would soon pass forever. •

The post Boomer time appeared first on Inside Story.

Those words are a measure of how quickly the media landscape in Australia has changed. Today, such a thud would puzzle most of the target audience. For the remainder it would have a slightly embarrassing whiff of nostalgia.

Web-based news media has become the norm. The death of print has been predicted so often it has almost become a joke, but nobody doubts that hard-copy newspapers will end the second they stop turning a profit. That day grows closer as the generation that understood the significance of the thud on the veranda dies out.

Crikey, meanwhile, is in modest good health. It drew international attention late last year after Lachlan Murdoch sued over an opinion piece that described the Murdochs as “unindicted co-conspirators” in Washington’s Capitol riots. Murdoch abruptly dropped that action last month after News Corp’s depositions in Dominion’s case against Fox News attracted adverse publicity. Crikey claimed it as a win — not only for it, but for free speech.

Just three weeks earlier, Crikey had gone back to the future, appointing Sophie Black as editor-in-chief. Black is among the first journalists to have had a journalistic career entirely in online media — and mostly with Crikey. She worked there for ten years between 2004 and 2015, first as deputy editor, then as editor and editor-in-chief.

This time she replaces former Sydney Morning Herald editor Peter Fray, who exited the Crikey job after, somewhat worse for wear, he heckled ABC award winners at the Walkleys, suggesting that Crikey had broken their story first. He followed that up with a tweet describing the ABC as a fraud, but later apologised for his conduct.

It was a striking display of a characteristic that Black acknowledges is “baked in” to the Crikey personality — its self-image as a perpetual larrikin outsider, of the media yet outside the media.

And yet, despite the successive waves of change that have devastated many newsrooms, and despite the flat spots, missteps and not-infrequent self-indulgence, Crikey is still with us — the idiosyncratic survivor of the new media age.

Why? And what happens next under its new editor-in-chief?

Mayne, a former media adviser to the colourful Victorian Liberal premier Jeff Kennett, founded Crikey in late 1999. The weekday newsletter had already become part of the undertow of public life when Beecher took over, serving a niche audience of politicians, investors, journalists and news junkies with a mix of insider gossip, comment, analysis and speculation.

Although most media outlets were making their content available online for free, viewing the web as little more than a promotional opportunity, Mayne had charged a subscription from the very beginning. Today that looks like a stroke of genius.

Beecher’s Private Media Partners paid just $1 million for the business: a small amount but a significant milestone, for this was the first time an internet-based news service had changed hands for real money. Google had only just established itself as the world’s dominant search engine. Nobody had heard of social media. Facebook and Twitter only became accessible to the public the following year.

This was the time of the brave little blog-based startups, many of them not-for-profits run on a wing and a prayer and the enthusiasm of their founders. There was On Line Opinion, New Matilda, Tim Dunlop’s Road to Surfdom and group blogs including Club Troppo and Catallaxy.

A rhetorical battle of “bloggers v. journalists” was raging, with some suggesting that web-based citizen journalism would make professionals redundant. Few foresaw that the live blog would instead be taken over by mainstream media and become a staple, reinforcing the place of established mastheads at the centre of public dialogue. Independent bloggers mostly faded away, were recruited by the mainstream or switched to Twitter. Crikey lived on.

So what has changed since Black last worked for Crikey in 2015? “Less than you’d think,” she tells me. Some contributors — Guy Rundle and Bernard Keane among them — have been at Crikey for all of that time. Their combined output would, if grouped together, make several thick books.

As for the Lachlan Murdoch imbroglio, both Keane’s column that provoked the writ, and the way the publication handled it were “emblematic of what Crikey is about,” says Black. “A great cracking story for us is one that reveals the way power works in this country, and this was a story we were at the centre of.”

Murdoch accused Crikey of using the case to get publicity and subscribers. Private Media’s chief executive, Will Hayward, puts a different slant on it. “I thought the worst thing that could ever happen was that he sued us, we lose and no one cares.” Once the company decided to stand up to Murdoch and refuse to take the column down, he thought it was essential to “go big.”

Crikey took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times urging Lachlan to follow through on his threats and issue a writ. The battle immediately became international news, and the Australian media — which prefers to ignore Crikey — had to report it too.

Black acknowledges a “Lachlan bump” in subscriptions but says they had already been growing over the previous three years. That’s the amazing thing: Crikey is actually doing quite well, in a niche kind of way. It has been doing quite well for some time.

When Black left in 2015, subscriptions seemed to have hit a ceiling of around 12,000. Nothing the team did resulted in any further growth. Today, though, around 26,000 people pay $199 a year (with some getting discounts on that) to access the email newsletter and website.

Hayward won’t disclose profit figures but agrees that a back-of-the-envelope calculation of around $5 million annual revenue is in the ballpark. “A bit less than that because some subscriptions are discounted.”

But the dream of selling advertising on the basis of a small but influential audience has receded. Today, more than 95 per cent of Crikey’s revenue comes from subscriptions. Advertising is almost non-existent.

And the “Lachlan bump”? Around 5000 more people have subscribed since Murdoch sued. On top of that, a GoFundMe appeal to help cover legal costs raised $588,735 from 6700 donations. The court is now deciding whether that amount should be deducted from Crikey’s costs before Lachlan has to pay its bill. Crikey would prefer the money go to the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, and for Lachlan to pay full tote odds.

Financially, in other words, the bump was substantial but not game-changing. More important, perhaps, was the reinforcement the case gave to what Crikey likes to think of as its unique cultural position.

As a result of the growing subscriber numbers, says Black, Crikey is better resourced than it was when she was last editor. She reckons she has at least two more staff reporters to work with, bringing the editorial staff — including Black and Gina Rushton, who edits day to day — to seventeen. There is also a healthy budget for freelance contributors, though Black won’t say exactly what they pay. (Apparently not everyone gets the same rate.)

Since 2015 the wider world has changed too — as has social media. Staff reporter Cam Wilson “can write almost full-time on the phenomenon of fringe groups and conspiracy theories online,” says Black. “That has really struck me in terms of a marker of time and how much things have accelerated and changed.”

Day to day, the Crikey content is still divided between analysis, news reporting and obstreperous — and often long-winded — opinion. There is certainly more original content these days. Investigations editor David Hardaker has broken stories about Scott Morrison’s QAnon mate — before Four Corners covered the same ground — and Hillsong’s finances.

This week, climate editor Emma Elsworthy has explained the extent to which environment minister Tanya Plibersek is constrained by legislation in approving coalmines. In previous weeks, reporter Maeve McGregor has given a very different slant to reporting on the inquiry into the prosecution of Bruce Lehrmann.

Last year, Guy Rundle’s take on the death of Labor senator Kimberley Kitching was not only a tour de force of lyrical reporting but also the media’s only attempt to thoroughly explain the factional background to allegations she had been bullied.

All this is content you wouldn’t read anywhere else. And yes, there has also been gratuitous and overly long pontificating and over-hyped stories. But those are hardly unique faults.

And yet Crikey could so easily have failed. Before Black left in 2015, she was editor-in-chief not only of Crikey but also of a raft of small, online-only specialist publications started by Beecher in what Black today describes as a “fail fast, throw it up and see what works model.” There was a property newsletter, a daily arts review, a women’s issues newsletter and more. Most of them comprehensively failed.

The only survivors are Crikey itself, the Mandarin, which specialises in public service news, and SmartCompany, which targets entrepreneurs. According to Hayward, the three titles each account for about a third of Private Media’s profit/loss result, but Crikey is by far the biggest employer of journalists.

Perhaps the highest cost of the failed ventures was in opportunity. When they launched, Crikey had online-only news publishing to itself, and a subscription model the mainstream outlets were only just coming to terms with. The Guardian soon arrived in Australia, as did the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, the Daily Mail and youth-oriented Vice Media, which licensed its Australian web operation to Nine and a television channel to SBS.

If Beecher had invested in Crikey at that time rather than diverted energy into short-lived niche publications, it might have mounted more serious competition to the newcomers. Instead, for a long period, Crikey languished while the Guardian established itself and went from strength to strength. “I think that folding some of [the niche outlets] was an acknowledgement that Private Media needed to be more focused on the things that worked,” says Black. “I think it was stretched too thin.”

And yet BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post are now gone from the Australian scene. Vice Media filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States earlier this month, having made almost all of its Australian staff redundant in 2020. And Crikey is still with us.

These days, Private Media Partners is owned by a spider’s web of small shareholdings, including former employees, the publishing company Allen & Unwin, and the family of Beecher’s co-founder in Private Media, the late Di Gribble. The biggest investors include John B. Fairfax, once the proprietor of the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and Cameron O’Reilly, son of media magnate Tony O’Reilly. Beecher is the largest shareholder with about 40 per cent, owned directly and through family companies.

Beecher is, in Black’s words, “very much chairman of the board” and not a visible presence in the newsroom most days. Stephen Mayne, best known these days as a shareholder activist, is no more than an occasional contributor.

On the day Murdoch dropped the case against Crikey, says Black, the most powerful feeling in the newsroom was relief. “It had been a lot for the reporters and those involved to carry.” Now she wants to capitalise on the experience. She sees “a real opportunity coming off the back of what’s happened with Murdoch to crystallise a sense of independence.”

She won’t be drawn on differences in style between her and her predecessor, Peter Fray — nor on the circumstances of his departure. But others observe that she lacks the braggadocio of old-school editors. “She is born of new media,” says one. “And that’s a very different vibe. It’s a more democratic vibe.”

She conceives Crikey as “almost like an old-fashioned campaigning newspaper, sitting outside media and observing it. I think that’s a pretty invaluable space that we’ve carved out over twenty years. It has been there since Mayne started it, and it means you kind of get to have your cake and eat it too.”

Years ago, Crikey was refused permission to go into the budget lock-up because it was not “real media.” It was there this year, but still treated very much as a poor relation. Crikey doesn’t get the “drops” of news stories and documents from the powerful, says Black.

“But I don’t think that’s a bad thing for the most part. It means we do things like the Murdoch campaign, like the fantastic campaign that Crikey ran on Scott Morrison’s lies. There’s an edge there. There’s a freedom where we are unimpeded in so many ways. And I think that lies at the heart of what makes Crikey unique and invaluable and what makes it so much fun.”

So what lies ahead? “We’ve got a subscription base who are invested, literally, in our independence and in supporting stances like the Murdoch case,” says Black, “and we want to feed that interest by continuing to cover issues around the public interest, free speech, freedom of information, and the way defamation law is weaponised in this country consistently and rigorously.” •

The post New media’s idiosyncratic survivor appeared first on Inside Story.

If the Yes campaign continues to frame voters’ choice as one between recognising and not recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, and if the attempt gains public traction, then the debate about how the proposed amendment refers to the Voice will become less significant.

But the words of the amendment — minutely examined and debated by Australia’s finest legal minds and endorsed on Friday by a joint select parliamentary committee — matter little to Yes23’s judgement about how the referendum should be presented. Its ad, running mainly on social media, attempts to persuade voters that the campaign is “really” about “recognition.”

Between February 2012 and early 2017 the Australian government funded Reconciliation Australia to promote “recognition.” What form it would take was not specified, but the campaign helped “recognition” gain wide acceptance — but only if it is detached from some of the forms that recognition could take.

Meanwhile, the debate about alternative forms of constitutional recognition had failed to reach any agreement. Then, after the Referendum Council’s report to the Turnbull government in July 2017, “the Voice” entered the debate and quickly became the only form of constitutional recognition under consideration. For their part, Coalition governments under Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison argued that the Voice was not the right form for constitutional recognition to take.

Five years later, in an address to the Garma Festival in July last year, prime minister Anthony Albanese committed his government to a referendum on an Indigenous Voice “in this term of parliament.” His speech began by recognising “all the elders, leaders and families” who had “made great contributions to our nation,” but “recognition” was not among the seventy words the prime minister wanted added to the Constitution.

Now that the campaign has stepped up a notch, however, “recognition” is back — in fact, for Yes23, it has moved to the centre. Pushed into the background is the fact that recognition will take the form of the Voice.

In the first of the Yes campaign’s online ads, rolled out on 26 April, the emphasis was on recognition. Its thirty seconds contrasted Indigenous occupation (65,000 years) with the period in which Australia has had a Constitution (122 years) and played with the notion of coming together and making the nation complete. Viewers were invited to “join us” — the “us” being Indigenous Australians, the viewers being overwhelmingly non-Indigenous Australians.

The ad’s theme of Indigenous exclusion implicitly recalled the 1967 referendum, when over 90 per cent of the formal vote endorsed the idea that “Aboriginals” should be “counted.” The closest the advertisement came to mentioning the Voice was in calling for Indigenous Australians to be able to have “a real say,” something that surely was “fair enough.” “#Voice” appeared in small type at the end.

Perhaps the emphasis on recognition reflected nothing more than the fact that the ad was sponsored by Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition, or AICR, just one of several organisations that have come together under the banner of Yes23. But in the run-up to a referendum that has seen much more emphasis on the “practical” implications of the Voice than on the “symbolic” act of recognition, even the AICR might have been expected to argue, above all, for the Voice.

Then, a few days after the ad’s release, the prime minister issued a statement to say that the national cabinet had “reaffirmed” its “commitment to recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in our Constitution.” Not a word about national cabinet (re)affirming its commitment to the Voice — though the prime minister and all the premiers are committed to it — and not even a commitment to Indigenous Australians having “a real say.”

Has the Yes campaign just wrong-footed the No side? A letter to the Australian Electoral Commission from Advance Australia, one of the organisations campaigning for a No vote, suggests it has. The AICR ad, Advance Australia complained, omitted “any reference to the Aboriginal and Torres Islander Voice to parliament” — an element “so integral that it is the title of the bill.” This meant that “Yes23 may be intentionally misleading the Australian public on the nature of the referendum.” Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price — the Coalition’s newly appointed shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, the Country Liberal Party’s senator for the Northern Territory, and the most prominent No campaigner in the National Party–CLP alliance — attacked the ad as “deceptive” shortly after it went to air.

Responding to the complaint, Yes23 reportedly said that it welcomed Advance Australia “drawing attention” to its campaign. That it feared an adverse finding from the Electoral Commission is to be doubted. As the AEC’s website shows, its remit appears not to stretch to the kind of complaint Advance Australia has made.

If that is the case, the AEC won’t feel bound to consider a complaint from Yes23 that an advertisement attacking the Voice — produced by Fair Australia for the No campaign and focused on Senator Price and her family — omitted any reference to “recognition” other than Price’s remark about her “recognising what we have in common.” But perhaps, in the name of publicity, the No side is as happy to welcome any comments on its campaign as the Yes side is to make them.

While the Voice is “integral” to the bill to amend the Constitution, so is “recognition.” Indeed, the heading of the Constitution’s proposed Chapter IX (within which falls section 129, “Aboriginal and Torres Islander Voice”) reads “Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Islander Peoples.” Advance Australia is not contesting that; what worries it is the Yes campaign’s omission of one element in order to emphasise the other.

The No campaign has reason to be worried. “Recognition” offers Yes23 a stronger way of framing the referendum than does the Voice. It does this because the Indigenous demand for “recognition” is more widely known and a good deal more widely supported than the Indigenous demand for the Voice.

Polling conducted online last September by Resolve Strategic for the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald estimated that 85 per cent of the electorate were “definitely aware or knew at least some detail” of a “campaign for Indigenous recognition in the Constitution.” Awareness of a referendum to “enshrine the Voice in the Constitution” was much lower, at 65 per cent.

Since then, the gap is likely to have narrowed but not necessarily closed. In a poll conducted by Resolve in January, no more than 77 per cent indicated that they had “heard of the ‘Indigenous Voice’” — and even fewer, presumably, had heard of the referendum on the Voice. In another online poll, conducted as recently as last month (9–12 April) by Freshwater Strategy, 75 per cent of those who responded — up from 63 per cent in December — indicated that they were “aware that there will be a referendum on whether Australia should change its constitution to allow for a body, called a Voice to parliament, to have the right to advise the Australian Government on matters of significance to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.”

Awareness of the push for recognition is unlikely to have declined in the past six months or so, though we can’t be sure how it has moved because questions in the public opinion polls about recognition (rather than the Voice) have come to a stop.

More important than levels of awareness are levels of support. The last time any of the polls gathered data on support for constitutional recognition, estimated support outran opposition by at least three to one. Asked whether they would vote “for or against” if a referendum “was held to include recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Australian Constitution,” 57 per cent of those who were polled online in June–July 2021 by Essential Media said they would vote “for” and no more than 17 per cent said they would vote “against.”

In the Australian Election Study, meanwhile, conducted between 24 May and 30 September 2022, no fewer than 80 per cent of the respondents who expressed a view on the matter said that “If a referendum were held to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution” they would “support… such a change”; only 20 per cent said they would “oppose” it.

Recognition is supported not only by Labor but also by some, if not all, of the parties that constitute the parliamentary opposition. A referendum on recognition (without the Voice) is something the opposition leader Peter Dutton (Liberal National Party) has said he would support. Nationals’ leader David Littleproud has said his party would “help print the ballots” for a referendum purely on constitutional recognition.

Senator Price took a slightly different line at the media conference the Nationals called to announce their opposition to the Voice. She was quoted as saying that “Indigenous Australians are recognised,” an indication of her sense that the matter was relatively unimportant compared with taking “practical measures,” and that the matter was already settled. (Earle Page, leader of the Country Party from 1921 to 1939, believed that for a referendum proposal to pass it should do no more than enshrine a set of practices in place and accepted already.)

The ratio of support to opposition for the Voice — three to two — is no more than half the corresponding ratio in favour of “recognition.” In the polls conducted in April 2023, levels of support for inscribing a Voice in the Constitution outran levels of opposition by margins that were generally even smaller than that: 42–34 (Freshwater, online); roughly 46–31 (Resolve, online, numbers derived from its graph); and 46–39 (Morgan, SMS). The two polls that forced respondents to choose between Yes and No, both online, also produced a distribution in which Yes outran No by no more than three to two: 58–42 (Resolve) and 60–40 (Essential).

Since Labor came to office in May last year promising to “embrace the Uluru Statement from the Heart” and “answer its patient, gracious call for a Voice enshrined in our Constitution,” support for the Voice has not remained steady, as one polling analyst is reported to have said. Nor has it increased, as another has claimed. Support for the Voice has decreased.

On the polls’ standard approach — with respondents asked whether they favour or oppose putting the Voice into the Constitution but given the opportunity to say they “don’t know” or are “undecided” — the fall has been quite sharp; so, too, has the rise of opposition. In the three polls taken in the first four months after Labor’s victory (between June and September last year) support averaged 59 per cent, and opposition 16 per cent; in the two polls taken in December (the only such polls conducted in the next four months) the support average had declined to 51.5 per cent (opposition 28.5 per cent); and in the five polls taken since February 2023, the average in favour dropped to just 44.5 per cent (opposition 33 per cent). (These calculations are based on reported results before those without an opinion were asked — as they occasionally were — to which side they were “leaning.”)

Binary questions — with respondents restricted to answering Yes or No — produced a less dramatic decline. In the three questions asked from August to September, support was 65 per cent (35 per cent opposed); in the four from October to January, it was 61 per cent (39 per cent opposed); and in the six asked since February, it has been 59.5 per cent (40.5 per cent opposed). How many respondents baulked at this forced choice, none of the pollsters say.

Where polls have presented respondents with response options arranged in what survey researchers call a Likert scale — typically from “strongly support” and “somewhat support,” through “neither support nor oppose,” to “somewhat oppose” and “strongly oppose” — the decline in support for constitutional change was more modest and less even. In the four questions of this kind asked from May to September 2022, support (“strongly support” plus “somewhat support”) was 57 per cent (with 17.5 per cent either “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed); in the two between October 2022 and January 2023, 51 per cent (24.5 per cent either “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed); and in the five asked since, 53 per cent (32.5 per cent being either “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed).

With these different measures of public opinion showing that support for the Voice is slipping and opposition rising, the gap between support for “recognition” and support for the Voice is likely to have widened. If it has, Yes23’s framing of the referendum as a decision about recognising Indigenous Australians makes sense.

About the trend in support for “recognition” we can only speculate. Not only have standalone questions about awareness of recognition disappeared from the polls, but so too, until very recently, have questions that mention “recognition” in the context of the Voice.

Since May 2022, thirty-three national public polls have been conducted: twelve of the binary kind, eleven of the Likert kind and ten of the standard kind (including two polls our analysis has put to one side as flawed). Yet of all the questions polls have asked about the Voice, only the three most recently taken by Essential and Resolve have included a statement about the referendum as a proposal to “alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice” (emphasis added). In none of the others does the word “recognise” even appear. Clearly, the No campaigners are not the only ones to have let the question of Indigenous recognition disappear.

Most of the polls have been unhelpful in other ways, too. Considering how much debate there has been about the whether to include the word “Executive” in the second sentence of Albanese’s draft, it is surprising that, when explaining to the respondents what the Voice would do, few polls have referred to either “the executive government” (the exceptions being Resolve’s polls and those taken by JWS in August and February) or the “government” (apart from the two Freshwater polls taken in December and April). Keeping questions reasonably short while hoping that respondents share a common understanding of the key terms is a difficult challenge to meet.

One strength of the No campaign ad featuring Senator Price is that it includes the names and faces of prominent Indigenous individuals. According to a YouGov study conducted in March for the Uluru Dialogue, only 40 per cent of voters believe the majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people support the Voice.

Dee Madigan, who ran Labor’s 2022 election advertising campaign, saw the inclusion of Indigenous figures in the Yes23 ad as a “good strategic start by the Yes camp,” according to the Australian. The ad was “about inoculating against accusations that [the Voice is] Canberra-centric and foisted on Indigenous people and that Indigenous people aren’t supportive,” she was quoted as saying. But Madigan’s observations, almost certainly correct, may not capture what is most significant about the ad. For Toby Ralph, who worked on John Howard’s election campaigns, it was a “reasonable opening shot” that avoided “the contentious stuff.” Assuming “the contentious stuff” is a reference to the Voice, his observation seems closer to the mark.

Whether a focus on “recognition” is the opening shot or the shot that keeps being repeated remains to be seen. But this framing appears to have wide appeal among the key players attempting to mobilise a Yes vote. Lawyer Danny Gilbert, an adviser to From the Heart and co-chair of AICR, suggests that the campaign should avoid legal questions about the wording of the Voice and concerns about whether “it’s constitutionally unsafe.” He wants to focus instead on the idea that “it’s about time we recognise the First Peoples of this country,” that what has “happened to date has not worked” and that “it’s time to give them the opportunity to have a say in the future of their lives.”

If support for recognition is high, so too is support for allowing Indigenous Australians to have “a say.” Asked in July–August 2022 whether it was “important or not for First Nations people to have a voice/say in matters that affect them,” almost everyone interviewed for Reconciliation Australia by Polity Research considered it “fairly important” (33 per cent) if not “very important” (60 per cent).

If Yes23 can persuade voters that the referendum is about “recognition” and Indigenous Australians having “a say” rather than about an Indigenous Voice, the polls might be at risk of asking the wrong questions or of not asking enough questions.

What, then, are the sorts of questions pollsters could ask if they wanted to better understand voters? Perhaps something along these lines, with “Voice” and “say” offered to different respondents in questions two and three to test their relative impact:

1. At a referendum on whether to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Constitution, would you vote in favour or against?

2. At a referendum on whether to have an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ [Voice or say] in the Constitution to advise the national parliament and the Australian government on matters to do with Indigenous Australians, would you vote in favour or against?

3. At a referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, would you be more likely or less likely to vote in favour of recognition if recognition meant adding to the Constitution an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ [Voice or say] to advise the national parliament and the Australian government on matters to do with Indigenous Australians?

Differences in the levels of support elicited by these questions would go some way to telling us how attractive “recognition” is compared with either the Voice or “a say”; hence, how much there is for the Yes campaign to leverage and the No campaign to fear.

To understand what voters themselves think the referendum is about, pollsters could also ask respondents whether they think it is about (a) Indigenous recognition, (b) having an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ [Voice or say] in the Constitution to advise the national parliament and government, or (c) both Indigenous recognition and having an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ [Voice or say] in the Constitution to advise the national parliament and government.

Polls could also ask an open-ended question along the lines of the one Roy Morgan asked in 1967: “What would you say the chief effect will be if the referendum on Aboriginals receives a ‘Yes’ vote and is carried?”

If Yes23 thinks its best chance of persuading waverers is to keep the campaign as low-key and unthreatening as possible — a matter of being civil and accepting an “invitation” — then it might well present voters at polling places with a slogan like “Vote YES for Recognition” or “Vote YES for a Say.” Since it pitches itself as a campaign “talking to everyday Australians about the opportunity to be part of a successful referendum,” then giving “everyday Australians” a sense that they are on to a winner — with luck, creating a bandwagon — could be very much part of its play.

The No side couldn’t try to mobilise last-minute deciders with a slogan remotely like “Vote NO to Recognition” or “Vote NO to a Say”; it would need to come up with something that didn’t refer to “recognition” or “a say” at all.

Many more ads are yet to come. But these opening shots might well have set the tone of both campaigns. •

The post From Indigenous recognition to the Voice, and back again appeared first on Inside Story.

solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, [my] other Realms and the Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs.

Having inherited the throne the instant his mother died eight months ago, Charles is not a new king. Decoded, the oath involved him pledging to abide by the most fundamental principle of the rule of law under a constitutional monarchy like Australia’s or Britain’s. It was a “crucial” moment of “commitment.”

If anyone paused during the elaborate forty-page liturgy they may have thought: “Hang on, we’ve had a king for eight months and he’s only now agreed to the rule of law?” Did it matter that Charles waited that long to solemnly pledge not to reassert the Crown’s once limitless powers? The answer is no, and yes. Unpacking this ritual and performance is a lesson itself.

As millions saw at the weekend, a crown (which must sometimes have felt Damoclean to the man formerly known as Charles Philip Arthur George) finally came to rest on a fresh, if greying, head. That lowering of what the Historic Royal Palaces trust calls the “most important and sacred of all the [British] crowns” was the ultimate visual symbol of the ceremony.

Amid all the pomp and pomposity, there was plenty of legal magic and palaver too. In its current meaning, the oath dates back to 1688 — a momentous year in a momentous century, not just for Britain but also for the system of government that Empire brought to this continent.

The Coronation Oath Act of 1688 was passed in the wake of a civil war that had culminated in the first King Charles losing not just his crown but also his head. The act reinforced a Protestant ascendancy whose sectarian ripples irk Charles III and are felt in Northern Ireland to this day.

For the secular world, the Oath Act reinforced the claim of parliament to be not just the ultimate lawmaker but also sovereign over the Sovereign. Charles gets to be King because parliament allows it, not because God ordained his bloodline.

As the monarch, Charles is not subject to legal proceedings. Like his mum, he has deigned to pay taxes on the income from his vast wealth; unlike his local subjects, he has inherited yet more wealth free of estate duties. But his bejewelled crown is a titular symbol: “the Crown” is a virtual space in which the law of the three branches of government reign.

The long delay in holding the coronation seems partly due to Charles’s desire to settle in: to be seen out and about in a job held by his mother since 1953. Partly, also, he wanted to rejig the ceremony and oil the rusty cogs of a logistically complex show not performed for seventy years.

Besides shaking hands and opening fetes, what had Charles done formally to signify and “accede” to his kingship since the Queen’s death on 8 September last? The Westminster parliament happened to be sitting that week, so when it met the next day a kind of mutual obeisance took place. MPs all swore allegiance to Charles and, for his part, he gave his first, brief, King’s Address. In it, he paid tribute to “darling Mama” and said he would “uphold the constitutional principles at the heart of our nation.”

Although parliament must, by law, keep sitting on the “demise” of a monarch, it filled eleven hours’ worth of Hansard with further tributes before adjourning for an extended mourning period. A day later, Charles appeared with “his” Privy Council, whose members publicly proclaimed him King. Before them, he repeated the sentiment that he’d “strive to follow” his mother’s example “in upholding constitutional government” across his realms.

None of those words were a binding oath. An oath is a kind of visible, audible and public contracting. As a University College London report puts it, the coronation oath

requires the sovereign to declare and identify with the effect of the law at a public moment of great solemnity… [It is] performative and affirmative rather than legislative… The weight of the oaths lies overwhelmingly in their symbolic significance and, moreover, in making that symbolism intelligible, acceptable and inspiring to a modern population.

As Prince of Wales, Charles became well known for his public pronouncements on everything from the built environment to the natural environment. He couldn’t help sharing his opinions with the British government as well, via letters he handwrote to ministers in spidery black ink. As a friend, a retired miner, quipped, “Let’s hope he keeps his oath better than his wedding vows.” To be fair, he has been more circumspect as King: a folksier but no less bland version of his mother.

The coronation oath is hardly the only source of the principle of sovereignty under the law. The highest courts in the United Kingdom and Australia have reiterated and applied the idea in various cases. Despite the possibility being imagined in an award-winning 2014 play, if Charles did ever lose his (mental) head and begin directing affairs, governments would pay as much heed to him as plants do when he talks to them.

For Australia’s part, the King’s men in Canberra — the governor-general, flanked by our prime minister — proclaimed him King of Australia on 12 September. Similarly circular instances of viceroys proclaiming the “Roy” occurred at state level too. The “King of Australia” title dates to Whitlam-era legislation, and he is concreted into our 1901 Constitution as our head of state.

Nowhere does Australia’s Constitution explicitly recognise that our sovereign is not our dictator, except in occasional cryptic references to his agent, the governor-general, “acting in Council.” In other words, acting after formally receiving advice from the ministers he appoints. Given that the Constitution doesn’t even mention the office of the prime minister, those appointments are seemingly at his discretion.

We are neither a dictatorship nor a republic, of course, but a constitutional monarchy. The Constitution makes little sense without a brace of unwritten but deeply held conventions. Australians usually feel we are not just less class-bound than Britain but also more modern. At least our governor-general can be of any or no religion. But when it comes to issues of sovereignty we are not always ahead of the Brits.

They may still have a Coronation Oath Act of 1688 that spells its legislature “Parlyament,” but they have several times modernised the words of the ceremony. Flexible convention can even nuance legislation.

In 1688 the United Kingdom was a unitary state, ruled solely from London. Now it has three sub-national assemblies with significant power over the more Celtic countries of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Indigenous Australia may only later this year gain a merely advisory Voice to Parliament if we embrace the idea by referendum. In 2016 Britain elected to leave Europe; in 1999 we voted to stay in the arms of a distant Crown.

What then is the point of an event like the weekend’s crowning? For many Brits it was an excuse for cheers — for others, boos and jeers — at a fraught time politically and economically. For most Australians it was a sideshow, even a yawn. Yet even a few republicans responded less with curmudgeon than curiosity. Rituals catch something in the spirit. They punctuate and help us measure and remember the passing years.

So, too, do assassinations and wars. This means that rituals have to be more than events, and must embody positive meaning. Simon Schama in the Financial Times mused on whether the coronation spoke to modern Britain. He assayed the colourful (literally and euphemistically), millennium-old traditions surrounding the comings-and-goings of kings and queens. When most surviving monarchies have trimmed down to be more “of” the democratic state than above or apart from it, “our” monarchy looks distinctly odd.

During seventy coronationless years, Queen Elizabeth watched her “family firm” straddle dysfunctional celebrity status and gilded, performative rituals whose traditions are meant to bind. It would have been a wee bit more coherent had Charles not waited so long to bind himself to the democratic principle embodied in his oath.

Yet the demos wants more than promises or traditions, it wants clickbait. Hello! magazine recently featured Charles’s daughter-in-law Kate on twenty-one consecutive covers, all in flattering poses. Its rivals in the media chase his other daughter-in-law, Meghan, like bloodhounds. As the King returns to more mundane duties in the shadow of the rising brood of royals he begat, he might reflect on traditions old and new. •

The post ’King oath appeared first on Inside Story.

Tina went on editing Filmnews until late 1994 and then began writing for Metro, ScreenHub and other film publications (and on one occasion for Inside Story). She was a board member of the Sydney Film Festival for twenty-five years and a founding member of the Film Critics Circle of Australia, and became an honorary life member of both. Her book about the controversial 1971 film Wake in Fright, based on Kenneth Cook’s novel of the same name, was published in the Australian Screen Classics series by Currency Press in 2010.

“She continuously had her finger on the pulse of the filmmaking community,” writes film historian Graham Shirley, “paying particular attention to the news, events, challenges and achievements of experimental, alternative, documentary, non-mainstream, short-subject as well as feature-length filmmakers. Tina had a clear understanding of the ‘industrial’ as well as political context in which all of them operated and was a familiar face at film community meetings and screenings of all kinds.”

We were saddened to learn of Tina’s death in Sydney last month. As some small recognition of her contribution to Australian film culture over many years, we republish the vivid account of the state of the film industry as director Ted Kotcheff was preparing to make Wake in Fright.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were the years of what came to be called the “rebirth” of the Australian film industry, although at the time nobody could have imagined how much that industry would grow over the next forty years and what films would come to be made. It’s fascinating that in 1971 both Wake in Fright and Walkabout screened at the Cannes Film Festival: two films in Australia made by outsiders — a Canadian and a Brit — that have come to be seen as enormously important in that rebirthing process.

Both films are unlike anything that had previously been made in Australia, but of the two, Wake in Fright is perhaps the stronger, more savage and harder-hitting film. The more I discover about it, the more intrigued I am by how such a film got made, at that time and in such an unlikely fashion.

In his book about Nicolas Roeg’s film Walkabout, Louis Nowra talks about the barren cultural landscape out of which the two films emerged. But even if it appeared barren, there must have been something there to provide the fertility for such an energetic, striving plant to germinate and eventually to thrive. Was that barrenness an illusion? Were there little patches of vegetation and, underneath, many young shoots getting ready to sprout? Was there dormant and emerging filmmaking life in what would appear to future commentators as a wasteland?

Australia had been making films (it could only occasionally have been called an industry) since almost the beginning of cinema in the 1890s, but it had always been a very stop-start affair. In the heyday of production in the 1920s and 1930s, between ten and fifteen features were made a year, but in the years leading up to 1970 production had slowed to something less than a trickle,­ more an occasional splutter.

Of course, there were the overseas productions. In fact, 1959 saw a veritable flurry of activity, with Stanley Kramer making On the Beach in Melbourne, Harry Watt directing The Siege of Pinchgut in Sydney, and Leslie Norman making Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, also in Sydney. And in 1960 Fred Zinnemann made The Sundowners with Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum. But not one of these directors was Australian; indeed, as critic and former Sydney Film Festival director David Stratton says in his afterword to the new edition of Kenneth Cook’s novel Wake in Fright:

The high-profile “Australian” films made during this period weren’t Australian productions at all. Most of them, including The Overlanders, Eureka Stockade, Bush Christmas, The Shiralee, Smiley, The Siege of Pinchgut and the 1957 version of Robbery under Arms, were British films, often shot in studios in the UK with Australia used only for the location work; others, including Kangaroo, On the Beach and The Sundowners, were mainstream Hollywood productions made on location here.

And, as Stratton also comments in his book The Last New Wave, “Australian stories were being filtered through foreign eyes, and a strange variety of foreign actors were pretending to be Australians.”

But if very few Australian features were being made, by the mid 1960s an active production sector was making newsreels, television programs and television commercials, while government-funded films were being produced at the Commonwealth Film Unit. Newer, lighter cameras helped the filmmakers who were making surfing, travel and adventure documentaries to go up the coast and into the bush and the outback in search of stories. There were six small studios with sound stages in Sydney, another in Melbourne, and about a dozen laboratories to do the processing and post-production.

In Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, film historians Graham Shirley and Brian Adams refer to “more than fifty film production companies employing from five to over a hundred people each” and comment that “among these various film production bodies, along with the television studios, underground filmmakers, filmmakers returning from abroad, and individual film critics, the desire for a reborn film industry grew.”

In fact, as legendary filmmaker Ken G. Hall wrote in 1967 in the short-lived theatre and film journal Masque:

There is an Australian film industry at this moment and it is keeping more people in regular employment than ever before. There are available to prospective producers ten times the facilities — studio space, modern equipment — than was available to, say, Charles Chauvel and myself in the 30s and 40s. The days of one camera and, at best, two microphones, together with some equipment made out of Meccano parts and literally tied up with wire, are no more. Much more footage is being shot than in that production heyday and there are more laboratories, including many excellent colour laboratories, than were ever dreamed of then. The trouble is that these people, this studio space and facilities, are not being used to make what most interested people would want them to be used for — feature film production.

Of course, this supposes that the production of feature films is the ultimate goal of any film industry, an issue raised by Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka in The Screening of Australia (Vol. 1). “Why is feature film production assumed to be the real point of an industry?” they ask, and continue:

The assumption goes back to the phase of film history, from the silent period to the peak audiences of 1946, when movies were the dominant popular art, when people “went,” on average, two to three times a week, when the industry was the third or fourth biggest revenue-earner in the United States, and there was no television. That’s part of the answer. Another part is that the marketing of films (to paying audiences, rather than to client groups, as is the case with educational films or broadcasting interests) is organised around the event of the feature, which must be large, emphatic and powerful enough to warrant travel, ticket-price and several hours of voluntary attendance in the dark.

While it is the feature film that attracts that paying audience, its production is also what many filmmakers see as their ultimate goal, and even in these bleak years some determined filmmakers did manage to make features.

One was Tim Burstall, who in 1969 made 2000 Weeks, a semi-autobiographical tale about the frustration and isolation of an artist in the Australian wasteland. Actor and writer Graeme Blundell, who was in the film, writes about the experience in his very entertaining memoir of those early years, The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts, describing it as “a subjective view of a writer’s crisis when he calculates he only has 2000 weeks in which to express himself.” It was, as David Stratton (who programmed it in that year’s Sydney Film Festival) says in The Last New Wave, “a remarkably ambitious film.”

Tim Burstall had made a short children’s film, The Prize, which won an award at the Venice Film Festival in 1960. He’d then made some documentaries and a children’s TV series, had been working in the US film industry for two years on a Harkness Fellowship, and thought he was ready for his first feature. Released in Melbourne in March 1969 with high (probably too high) expectations, it was reviewed badly and taken off after eleven days, while the Sydney Film Festival screening some months later was a disaster. “Burstall was devastated,” reported Graeme Blundell, “and developed a deep hatred for what he called ‘the intelligentsia.’ They were ‘highbrows and ABC types’ and they seemed affronted by the simple decency of the film.”

In 1971 Burstall made Stork and he had to pay for the first screening in Melbourne. It did so well that it got picked up by mainstream distributors Roadshow, not only becoming the new Australian cinema’s first box office success but also reinvigorating Burstall’s career and scooping the pool at the 1973 AFI Awards, the year he made the highly successful Alvin Purple. In that film Blundell let everything hang out, shocking some of the more straitlaced critics but nevertheless delighting the cinema-going public and delivering a very large profit. But Burstall never forgot or forgave the treatment given to 2000 Weeks.

Behind the scenes, many of those working in film and television had been lobbying the government for years for some form of government support for production; broadcaster Phillip Adams, then both a successful advertising man and prospective filmmaker, and his friend, historian and Labor Party stalwart Barry Jones (who had been unofficially advising then Liberal prime minister John Gorton on cultural issues) proposed to Gorton the setting up of a national film school. In 1969 a screening for federal parliamentarians of Anthony (Tony) Buckley’s documentary Forgotten Cinema, an account of the rise and fall of the Australian feature film pioneers, was given some credit for persuading Gorton to finally give some assistance to the industry.

In 1969 the Commonwealth government announced a three-part program of assistance: an investment corporation to support feature films and television programs, a national film school, and an experimental film fund to assist in the making of low-budget films and encourage emerging filmmakers. While the film school didn’t come into being until 1973, the Australian Film Development Corporation was set up in 1970, as was the Experimental Film and TV Fund, initially administered by the Australian Film Institute.

For many of those who have since written about the period prior to government support, it may have seemed a very insular, bleak and unrewarding time. For those who were there, however, it was different: their memories reveal a screen culture buzzing with activity and ideas, infused by commercial enterprise, by television and commercials, and energised by popular, classic and foreign films. Nor was it a one-way street: just as the Australian industry was open to ideas from overseas, Australian ideas, energies and talent also flowed abroad.

Take producer Richard Brennan, for example. As he wrote in early 2009 just after his retirement as a project officer for the federal government funding body Screen Australia, he has been in love with cinema since he was ten: “I have read about films, watched them, and studied them. And since I was seventeen I have worked on them.” That all started when he met Bruce Beresford at Sydney University in 1960, “both dreaming of being filmmakers,” and they made a short film called The Devil to Pay. Richard then made several other short films and, upon graduating, went on to work first as a production assistant at the ABC, and then at the Commonwealth Film Unit (later Film Australia). In 1970 he produced and directed a documentary in support of the May moratorium which launched the anti–Vietnam war movement in Australia, Or Forever Hold Your Peace, which was the first film financed by the newly created Experimental Film and TV Fund. He then produced Peter Weir’s short drama Homesdale, which won the rarely given Grand Prix at the Australian Film Institute Awards.

So, for Richard and others like him, it was a time of terrific optimism. He recalls vividly how cinema opened up the rest of the world for him, telling me:

We’d just seen two locally made features in release, The Naked Bunyip and Nickel Queen, and at Film Australia we were working on two more, Brian Hannant’s Flashpoint and Cecil Holmes’s Gentle Strangers. We actually saw a future in filmmaking. And we were inspired by the films we were seeing; that year, at the Sydney Film Festival, I’d seen Truffaut’s Bed and Board, Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park, Pasolini’s Teorema, Bunuel’s Tristana, Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.

Richard’s immaculately kept diaries, which have become a great source of information for friends whose memories or record-keeping aren’t nearly as reliable, record that he thought Wake in Fright “outstanding” and Donald Pleasence’s performance very impressive, and he noted “what a star Jack Thompson is going to be.” They also record what novelist Frank Moorhouse told him on 3 November 1971 — that Wake in Fright “gave him a thirst, an interest in homosexuality and an itchy ‘trigger finger.’”

The next month Richard was off to London to work as production manager on The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, written by Barry Humphries and directed by his old friend Bruce Beresford. Thirty or so films later, some as production manager, many more as producer (and occasionally as actor), Richard remembers this as “one of the highlights of my life; it was my first feature and my first time overseas.”

Howard Rubie, who would be the first assistant director on Wake in Fright, is another who remembers the early years of the Australian film renaissance — and even those before, in the 1950s and 1960s — as a highly productive period. In 1954, aged sixteen, he had started at Cinesound as a camera assistant, working on newsreels, short documentaries for cinemas, corporate documentaries and, later, news footage for Channel Nine. He started about the same time as a young editing assistant, Tony Buckley, and by 1967 they were both working for Ajax Films. “We were making a lot of TV commercials, especially cigarette commercials,” Rubie told me, continuing:

There was an incredible amount of activity in the non-feature area, and commercial production was the cornerstone of that activity. Even in the mid-sixties everyone was aspiring to features. We talked about the UK productions that were being made here by Harry Watt and Ealing Studios. And we talked about Charles Chauvel’s Sons of Matthew and about Lee Robinson and Chips Rafferty’s films as showing the way. There was a feeling of disappointment that the Australian industry had declined so much, but there was always a hope that it could be revived.

Involved in that possible revival was the company that would co-produce Wake in Fright, NLT Productions, so named after its entrepreneurial partners, Jack Neary, Bobby Limb and Les Tinker.

The company had been making “family” shows for television since the early 1960s, centred around the successful weekly variety show The Bobby Limb Show, featuring Limb, who was at the time a popular personality, singer and comedian who’d made his name and reputation on radio and in the clubs. Jack Neary, his manager and agent, also owned nightclubs, while Les Tinker was a Leagues Club manager who had financed the company.

In 1968 this small Australian company got involved with the US company Group W, a division of the major US multinational Westinghouse, which at the time operated a small US television network, and signed a co-production deal to make ten features in five years. This was an incredibly ambitious undertaking even for an experienced production team. There is some uncertainty about how these two companies got into bed with each other, but Howard Rubie thinks it had something to do with the Channel Nine connection.

As explained by film historians Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper in their book Australian Film 1900–1977, “NLT was supported in the venture by Motion Picture Investments, a company directed by prominent Australian businessmen, including Sir Reginald Ansett. Investment was on a major scale and the budget for the first film was $750,000.”

That first feature, Squeeze a Flower, was a comedy about a secret recipe for a liqueur known only to an Italian monk, played by Italian actor Walter Chiari, who comes to Australia to work at a Hunter Valley vineyard. The film was made quickly, with the principal members of cast and crew imported and everyone else Australian. The director, Mark Daniels, was American. Released in February 1970, the reviews weren’t good and it flopped.

But by this time NLT was getting ready to make their second feature — Wake in Fright. •

This is an extract from Tina Kaufman’s Wake in Fright, published in the Australian Screen Classics series, edited by Jane Mills, by Currency Press and the National Film and Sound Archive.

The post An industry awakens appeared first on Inside Story.

The exercise was presumably designed to make Canberrans feel good about the controversial $550 million project. Cranes hovering overhead and massive earthworks front and rear will invite many uneasy glances at a building that has nestled for decades at the foot of Mount Ainslie as if it grew of its own accord out of the ancient earth.

Of course it did not. As Michael McKernan showed in his history of the memorial, Here Is Their Spirit (1991), between the official announcement of the site in 1923 and the opening of the building by prime minister John Curtin in 1941, hurdles and setbacks tested the faith of its most ardent supporters. Even in 1941, the building was incomplete: the exhibition galleries were opened to the public but the grounds and commemorative areas, including the Roll of Honour and the Hall of Memory, took several more decades to finish.

All those struggles might be forgotten, but the project was once regarded with such trepidation by federal authorities that it was held to a budget — £250,000 — that was manifestly inadequate even for the modest, restrained building that Charles Bean, one of the memorial’s founders, had dreamed of. He had imagined a memorial on a hilltop: “still, beautiful, gleaming white and silent.”

Politicians, though, were more interested in memorials in their local districts than a national memorial most of their constituents would never see. After a vexed and abortive architectural competition, a design for the national memorial was agreed upon in 1929, but with the onset of the Depression the project had to be shelved. Finally, in February 1934, the building contract was awarded to Simmie & Co., a firm that built many of Canberra’s early public and commercial buildings.

It’s long been a fancy of mine that the land itself tried to reject the building being raised upon it, calling up malevolent spirits to cast spells over it. For starters, the winter of 1934 was the wettest then on record. Next, the foundations took much longer to excavate than expected because the trial holes dug during the tender period had not revealed how hard and rocky the site really was. Quizzed over delays in the project, Simmie’s principals complained that they had been “grossly misled” in this regard.

The building was declared weathertight and ready for occupation in November 1935, but after all that effort the result — a long, low construction of garish red bricks from the local brickworks — was embarrassingly basic. The beautiful Hawkesbury sandstone cladding that lends so much quiet beauty to the building had not yet been applied, and influential observers complained it looked “squat” and “prison-like.” Building plans were hastily altered to raise the height of the walls, and later the dome, causing more headaches for Simmie.

Despite these inauspicious circumstances, a doughty bunch of about twenty-five staff began preparing to move themselves and their families from Melbourne to the infant capital, along with 770 tons of objects, paintings, photographs, books, archival records and stores. These had been stored and exhibited in leased premises in Sydney and Melbourne.

Staff arrived in November 1935. While deputy director Tasman (Tas) Heyes moved into a house provided in Forrest, south of the Molonglo river, director John Treloar made what he called a “private arrangement.” After several previous stints living in Canberra, his wife Clarissa had refused to move this time and remained in Melbourne with their four school-age children. Treloar set himself up in the memorial with his suitcases, a wardrobe and a single stretcher. He was not a man with elaborate personal wants; as a staff clerk on Gallipoli in 1915 Treloar had slept and worked in the same dugout and took advantage of the short commute to work punishing hours. This he now proceeded to do again. Although not a cold or humourless man, austerity suited him.

It had been a wet weekend, and from his house in Forrest late on that Sunday afternoon, 12 January 1936, Tas Heyes was keeping an uneasy eye on the sky. In those near-treeless days you could see far across Canberra, and it was obvious that a storm was gathering over Mount Ainslie. He and Treloar had inspected the memorial building on the previous Friday evening after heavy rain and found water seeping in through an unfaced brick wall on the lower-ground floor where the library would be. Cases of collection material stood nearby, ready for shelving. The water seepage had not been serious then, but now, when Heyes found that the storm had blotted out all sight of the memorial from his home, he got into his car.

In January 1936, just as everyone was settling in, those evil spirits decided as a final gesture to turn on one of Canberra’s cataclysmic summer storms. Today, staff in Canberra’s cultural institutions fully comprehend the power of these events, but in 1936 the memorial’s building was piteously vulnerable and the newly arrived Melburnians quite innocent of the harsh extremes and occasional violence of the weather on the high plains south of the Brindabellas.

John Treloar was already there, of course, along with two watchmen, Thomas Aldridge and George Wells, at their change of shift. Mount Ainslie was the centre of a terrific cloudburst, and from its slopes torrents of water were descending. The stormwater drain on its lower slopes had overflowed and water was washing silt and debris down to Ainslie, Reid and Braddon, and becoming trapped in the excavation around the memorial. The building’s lower-ground floor was below the watercourse and water was advancing into the building, sweeping down passages and up to the cases containing precious war records.

Another war: the AWM’s first director, John Treloar, shown here shortly before his secondment to the military in 1941. Ted Cranstone/Australian War Memorial

Many of the cases were raised from the floor on timber baulks, but this precaution had ceased when the building had been declared weathertight, and now several hundred cases were in immediate danger. The three men on site needed help, but none of the staff at that time had home telephones, so Aldridge drove off to gather them from their homes, leaving Treloar and Wells to scavenge timber to make platforms for the cases.

Scarcely had they begun this task when Aldridge returned, having abandoned his car where it had become bogged even before he got out of the grounds. By now, more water was sweeping into the building across a landing that had been built at a rear entrance to help bring in large objects. Treloar and Aldridge tried to dig a ditch to divert the water, but, as Treloar later reported, “the rocky ground defied the shovels which were the only tools we had.” They tried to wreck the landing but it was too well built.

Leaving his men to struggle with the records cases, Treloar phoned the fire brigade and was told that the chief fire officer could send men to pump water out of the building but only if it reached six inches, and they could not help move records or exhibits. Soon after, the telephone service broke down, leaving the three drenched and desperate men isolated. At this point, Tas Heyes finally made it through.

It was growing dark and the building in its primitive state had hardly any lights. Water was washing under doors and through unfinished sections of the roof. The waste pipes of wash basins and drinking fountains, as Treloar said later, “threw into the air jets of water several feet high.” Water was about to enter the room where the works of art were stored. It was impossible to move the cases in time, and improvised squeegees proved to be hopeless. Using chisels and their bare hands, Treloar and his staff tore up the floorboards at the entrance to the room, and the water, which was now creeping around the edges of the art cases, escaped beneath the building. Heyes set out in his car in another attempt to round up more staff to help; by 8pm about a dozen men were on the site and a few oil lamps had been obtained.

The worst was over. Manholes over drains were opened and water swept into them. Staff continued to clear the building of as much water as was possible, working in the dark with only improvised tools. By 1am Treloar decided to suspend work. The men were exhausted and most had been wet through for hours.

Treloar later told a colleague that the suit he had been wearing that day was ruined, a rare reference to himself and his personal comfort. Where he slept for the rest of that night isn’t known, but Heyes, a friend and colleague for many years, probably took him back to his house. Forrest had received no more than an ordinary shower of rain.

The next day the Canberra Times carried long reports of the flood. Six inches (more than 150 millimetres) of rain had fallen on Civic and the inner north in ninety-five minutes. The paper had rarely had such a dramatic local event to cover.

The memorial’s misfortunes were ignored at first in favour of the dramatic rescue of motorists stranded on Constitution Avenue, the many roads that were scoured or washed away, the five feet of water in the basement of Beauchamp House (a hotel in Acton), the “pitiful” state of Miss Mabbott’s frock shop in Civic, and the washed-out gardens and drowned chickens in Ainslie. These local calamities mattered more than what had happened at the memorial, of which the paper finally gave a brief report the next day. Few people really knew what went on in this strange new building anyway.

Monday 13 January at the memorial was a heavy, depressing day of mopping up, opening hundreds of cases and separating the wet from the dry. Two to three inches of water had entered the building. Some 2648 books were damaged and 719 had to be rebound. Among the most valuable was a large collection of histories of first world war German military units, which Treloar described to a newspaper reporter as “irreplaceable.” More than 700 cases of archival records were damaged, as were 10,327 photographic negatives. Thankfully paintings had been stored on their edges in crates so that only the frames were soiled, but 389 were damaged and 300 had to be remounted.

In the end, the damage was not so bad. The museum objects, stored on the upper floor, were untouched. Some of the damaged records were duplicates and, as Treloar reassured his board of management, water-stained books would not be less valuable as records, and the pictures when remounted would be “as attractive as formerly.”

Prints existed of some of the negatives, and the emulsified surfaces of the negatives had fortunately been fitted with cover glasses to protect them. Most of the records cases had been stored on timber two or three inches above the floor, although Treloar bitterly regretted his decision to abandon this practice shortly before the flood.

The salvage operation was instructive and useful in many ways. Treloar was enormously capable, but he liked to consult experts and tried to keep himself abreast of practices in museums, galleries and libraries in Australia and overseas. Here was a chance to call in some help and renew important associations. Leslie Bowles, a sculptor who often worked with the memorial, travelled from Melbourne to advise on the treatment of some battlefield models affected by the flood. Although Kodak and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research were contacted for advice on the treatment of the negatives, Treloar soon turned to an expert from the Photographic Branch of the Department of Commerce in Melbourne.

The paper items needed the most treatment. A hot-air blower was obtained for the soaked documents, and eight local teenage girls arrived with their mothers’ electric irons on the Thursday after the flood. Treloar had been advised that the best way to fully dry and flatten the documents, newspapers and pages of books was to iron them, presumably with a piece of cloth over the paper. This was to be the job for the next few weeks for Enid, Ivy, Agnes, Betty, Jean, Thelma, Stella and Gwen.

The eight had been recruited through the Canberra YWCA, whose secretary had had many applications for the curious engagement. They were paid under the award for government-employed servants and laundresses, but surely never was a laundress entrusted with such a strange and delicate task. How anxiously Treloar must have watched them go about their work.

Some of the damp documents were part of the memorial’s collection of unit war diaries — not soldiers’ private diaries (although the memorial had a fine collection of those as well) but official records kept by each military unit. For Treloar, they were probably the most important part of the collection and he knew them intimately. They were mostly created on the battlefront, and it would have been agonising to imagine them engulfed by muddy water in the very building created to house and protect them.

Support and commiserations poured in. Arthur Bazley, assistant to official historian Charles Bean, phoned Treloar from Sydney to offer any help he could, using his Sydney contacts. Bean, on holiday in Austinmer, wrote to Treloar that he and Heyes “must have this comfort, that you know that all concerned are so aware of your carefulness and forethought, that their only feeling will be one of sympathy.” Federal interior minister Thomas Paterson, who had responsibility for the memorial, telephoned to find Treloar still lamenting the cases stacked directly on the floor; “an officer could not expect to be a prophet” was his kindly advice to the director.

After all the years of work and worry, Treloar was not present at the opening of the memorial on Armistice Day, 1941. He was in uniform again, based in Cairo managing the collecting effort for yet another war, leaving Tas Heyes to organise the ceremony.

The first Anzac Day at the memorial was held in 1942, the national ceremony having previously been held at Parliament House. With so many Australians fighting abroad and with the enemy at the nation’s doorstep, Anzac Day in the nation’s capital had never been so sombre (and wouldn’t be again until 2020, when Covid-19 restrictions forced the cancellation of traditional commemorations).

No veterans’ march was held that year, and Anzac Day sports were cancelled. The Canberra Times editorialised that the day found Australia a “battle station.” Anzacs “now stood guard on their own land” and any honour owed them was never so much due as on that day. It was to be a day “not of works but abiding faith.”

At the memorial a twenty-minute ceremony held in the commemorative courtyard was attended by a mere 600 people. Around them were bare walls: no Roll of Honour yet, and an empty Hall of Memorial. A single aircraft flew low overhead. Weatherwise, the morning was cool and overcast but there was no rain. •

The post Rock, water, paper appeared first on Inside Story.

Petty in the Australian, 25 March 1967. Flinders University Museum of Art

In a cross made of newsprint, the words on the upright are Ho Chi Minh’s and those on the crosspiece are Lyndon Johnson’s. You can imagine the indigestion at the breakfast tables of a still very white Australia when politicians’ words burdened a shockingly Vietnamese Christ on a modern via dolorosa. It isn’t pretty or funny, but it is morally and intellectually arresting. It has historical and symbolic depth as well as contemporary bite.

If you’re looking for ground zero of the idea that cartoonists are “of the left” in Australia, Petty’s stint at the Australian during its first decade is it. He sided with the little guy, then asked how the system worked to keep him little and the usual suspects (captains of industry, financiers, the military industrial complex) big. His cartoons can be busy because he thinks in systems and mechanisms and wants to make them operate more fairly and generously.

Petty was always inclined to treat politicians more as lackeys of vested interests and playthings of historical processes than as proper villains in their own right. This, I think, made him deeper than most other cartoonists or, indeed, most other satirists. I put no statute of limitations on this view. Juvenal looks like a grumpy whinger with a brilliant turn of phrase by comparison. Bill Leak could play the man superbly in his caricatures and punchlines, but the shafts of lightning didn’t shed consistent light on Australia as it is, and as it could be.

Petty’s cartoons did just that. The critique changed with the times, as the times demanded, but the golden thread of wanting a better, fairer, more intelligent and independent nation never disappeared into the fabric of daily affairs. On my first visit to interview him in the late nineties, he pointed me to a cupboard where there were “a few pictures of mine.” It was less than a dozen — Petty visited the past often to learn lessons, but never to dwell there. He lived for tomorrow’s paper, and the current art project.

He came a long way from a fruit farm in Doncaster as a child of the Depression, but he never lost the practical attitude to problems and sense of guiding purpose. Every cartoon asks something like “How do you fix this bloody thing, and get it to do what we want?” More or less sequentially, his satire had four great themes.

I have already illustrated the first — the horror and stupidity of war, particularly the Vietnam war. He had been to London and witnessed the collapse of Empire made explicit in decolonisation and the Suez Crisis of 1956. He returned to Australia via Southeast Asia in time to be cartooning during the death of Kennedy, the resignation of Menzies and, most importantly, the incremental decision to join the United States in Vietnam.

Rupert Murdoch’s adventure in national influence, the Australian, was in its initial (wildly) progressive phase, and Petty was its standard-bearer. He was half a generation older than baby boomers threatened with conscription and increasingly inclined to flood the street with moratoria. He also blew up the pomposity of Anzac Day in 1969 with a dismembered soldier’s corpse from the actual war diverting a pious procession of “lest we forget.”

Meanwhile, the Coalition governments were deteriorating comically, and Petty especially “owned” the image of Billy McMahon as a hapless, vainglorious fool with very big ears:

Broadsheet, November 1972. National Gallery of Victoria

It’s funny, in a bitter kind of way, how often people have had recourse to the “worst PM since McMahon” trope in recent years. I wonder if Morrison has reset the clock on that one.

In a series of cartoon books as well as at the Australian, he sought to shape the rebirth of interest in national character and destiny in the dawning post-British age. In the heroic age of this project, the hero — and the exemplar of Petty’s second theme — was Gough Whitlam:

The Australian, 14 November 1972.

The fulfilment of the dream of an open, egalitarian and cosmopolitan Australia under Whitlam was messy and exciting — Petty even donated a logo to the 1974 election campaign. The big hump in his career was when the dream collided with the first of several stages of reaction to the dismissal at the end of 1975. Malcolm Fraser wrongly assumed that normal postwar boom conditions would return with sensible chaps back in the big white cars, a trick Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison tried in recent years with even less success.

Petty spent the second half of his life exploring his third and fourth themes, a long, intelligent dissent from this “Lucky Country” mentality and from the Reaganite confidence in market forces that came in its train. He never tired of showing how and why the economy should serve human needs and desires rather than its own geometry of indices. And he was farmer’s son enough to recognise that you have to protect long-term interests from human rapacity. Two cartoons, from 1977 and 2015 respectively, show that you can be right a long time as a satirist and not necessarily be attended to:

The Age, 30 April 1977.

The Age, 17 August 2015.

When the Age suggested that he stop cartooning in 2016, at the ridiculously premature age of eighty-six, he was annoyed and disappointed. He lived for the work, and kept drawing anyway, right up to the last months. He understood ideas and the weight of the past, but it was the next paper, the next crop, the next generation that always mattered most. His optimism was informed by clear-eyed experience but was also incredibly robust.

What would he say to the nation today? With his genius for being stern yet quizzical, I don’t think he’d mind having this cartoon thrown back into the current debate over what it is to be a proper nation, one true to its past, present and future:

The Age, 20 April 2015.

Though he is gone now, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to look again into the satirical mirror he held up to us for so many decades. We might see something we could fix. •

The post Petty’s golden thread appeared first on Inside Story.

To research and write queer history before living memory — without oral testimony, that is — is to enter a much darker place. The last man to hang for sodomy in the British Empire was in Tasmania in 1867, and in 1997 Tasmania became the last Australian jurisdiction to decriminalise male homosexuality. Relationships and life choices that are criminalised, stigmatised and pathologised are unlikely to leave much of an imprint on the public record, and surviving historical evidence is often patchy, obscure and cloaked in euphemism.

In 1990 I wrote an honours thesis in the history department of the University of Tasmania on the Tasmanian writer Roy Bridges. It wasn’t a piece of literary criticism, for that would have been a short thesis indeed. Most of Bridges’s thirty-six novels were adventure stories for boys or middle-brow historical romances and melodramas dealing with the early days of Tasmania and Victoria. Frequently he was inspired by stories his mother, Laura Wood, told of her family history on their farm near Sorell, east of Hobart, going back to the earliest days of white settlement.

Bridges was Tasmania’s most prolific novelist, successful and admired in his time, but his reputation didn’t outlast his death in 1952. I wasn’t interested in the quality of his writing so much as his interpretation of Tasmanian colonial history, and how his own deep connection with the island was refracted through his works of fiction and memoir.

Born in Hobart in 1885, Bridges started publishing in 1909, and at first wrote prolifically for the gutsy little New South Wales Bookstall Company. Time and again he sold his copyright for fifty pounds per novel, whenever he was hard up (“which was often,” he once observed), grateful for the support the Bookstall gave to new Australian writers.

In his mature period his novels were published in London by Hutchinson or Hodder and Stoughton, but during and after the second world war his output declined. The gratifying success of That Yesterday Was Home (1948) eased his final years. Part history, part family history and part memoir, the book is a passionately expressed meditation on memory and connection with place. He died in 1952.

Roy Bridges in 1937. Inscription reads, “To my friends at Robertson & Mullins. Roy Bridges. 1937.” State Library of Victoria

By the time I started work on Bridges he was remembered mainly by enthusiasts interested in the literary culture of Tasmania. As a thesis project, though, he was perfect. No one else was claiming him, and significant collections of his papers were held in libraries in Hobart, Melbourne and Canberra. Methodologically I had Bridges’s memoir as a guide, which, unreliable as any memoir always is — and I knew this — was at least a place to begin.

I bought a 1:25,000 map of the Sorell district and pinned it to my wall in the history department. I drove out to meet Bridges’s nephew and his family, who were still working the property that Bridges had named “Woods” after his mother’s family.

The town of Sorell has always been a stopping point for travellers from Hobart heading either to the east coast or to the convict ruins at Port Arthur. To get there you must first drive across Frederick Henry Bay via the Sorell causeway at Pittwater. “All my life,” Bridges wrote in 1948, “Frederick Henry Bay has sounded through my mind and imagination. Like drums… or like cannonade in storm, or in the frozen stillness of winter’s nights.”

Every time I drive across the Sorell causeway I think of him, and did so again one brilliant day in February this year while heading up to Bicheno on holiday. With the sun sparkling off the bay I shouldn’t have been brooding on old stories, but suddenly I knew that the time was right to tackle again a biographical dilemma I had evaded, all those years ago.

The few others who have written about Bridges have struggled to understand the source of the loneliness and sorrow which, towards the end, amounted to torment. His journalist friend C.E. (Ted) Sayers first met Bridges in 1922 and remembered him as a haunted, “tense little man,” a chain smoker, embarrassed in the company of women, who had allowed a streak of morbidity and violence to enter his fiction. I developed my own suspicions about this haunting, and in my thesis in 1990 I speculated, briefly and carefully (because this was Tasmania), that Roy Bridges had been a closeted and deeply repressed gay man.

I wouldn’t have thought of this except for a conversation I had with the one friend of Bridges I could still find, a well-known local historian named Basil Rait. I visited the elderly Mr Rait in a tumbledown house in north Hobart somewhere near Trinity Church. Just as I was deciding that his recollections weren’t going to be particularly useful, he astounded me with the remark that one day, Roy Bridges had been seen emerging from the Imperial Hotel on Collins Street in central Hobart, and that the Imperial was a known place for homosexual men to congregate.

When did this occur? And did Rait see this himself? I was too amazed — and too timid, I think — to ask enough questions and, rookie historian that I was, I did not record the conversation. Why was Rait so frank, and what did he think I would do with his information? Perhaps I’d gained his trust because I had arrived without a tape recorder. I don’t know.

But I did consider his revelation very carefully. The once-elegant Imperial was rather seedy by then, which seemed to lend plausibility to what Rait had said. I had gay friends and I asked if anyone knew anything about the Imperial’s reputation. No one did.

Unable to verify Rait’s assertion, I turned to the textual sources. Although I was aware of the danger of reading too much into odd snippets of evidence that might have signified nothing, I was also unwilling to ignore what I had been told, which, if true, might explain everything. To speculate about Bridges’s sexuality in the thesis, or not: my thesis supervisor left it up to me. On an early draft I can see in his handwriting: “You decide.”

Royal Tasman (Roy) Bridges came from a family of prosperous wicker manufacturers and retailers. His father Samuel and uncle James ran Bridges Brothers, in Elizabeth Street, Hobart, which had been founded in 1857 by their father, Samuel senior. After graduating with an arts degree from the University of Tasmania, Bridges joined the Tasmanian News as a cadet in December 1904. Journalism was his career for most of the next twenty-five years. He accepted a job with the Hobart Mercury in 1907 but soon became disaffected by poorly paid sixteen-hour days on what his memoir described as a “rotten sweat-rag” and headed for Sydney.

He got a job immediately on the Australian Star under its editor, Ralph Asher. Sydney was a relief from Hobart’s “superficial puritanism, social restrictions and moral repressions of human nature,” but in 1909 the chance of a job on the Age lured him to Melbourne, where he settled in happily for a decade. Then, between 1919 and 1935, when he retired permanently to the farm near Sorell, he switched between freelance writing and journalism, mostly with the Age but also, briefly and unhappily, with the Melbourne Herald in 1927.

A shy man, Bridges did love the companionship of other journalists. Keith Murdoch, future father of Rupert, was one of his early friends on the Age, although they didn’t remain close. There was Neville Ussher, of the Argus and the Age, who died during the first world war and whose photograph Bridges kept close to him for the rest of his life. And then there was Phillip Schuler, son of Frederick Schuler, editor of the Age.

High-spirited, charming, handsome: Phillip Schuler’s nickname was “Peter” because of his Peter Pan personality. Friendship “blossomed” during a bushwalk on a “golden August Sunday at Oakleigh,” then only sparsely settled, and after that the two young men spent many weekends together. They read the same books, roistered in restaurants and theatres, and tried their own hands at writing plays.

On a walking holiday in Tasmania in 1911 the two men tramped from Kangaroo Point (Bellerive, on the eastern side of the Derwent) down to Droughty Point, “the way of many of my boyhood days.” They climbed Mount Wellington to the pinnacle and spent two nights at the Springs Hotel, part way up the mountain (sadly burned to the ground in the 1967 bushfires). From an upper window they watched the “glory of the sunrise,” looking across to Sorell and Frederick Henry Bay. In 1948 Bridges wrote:

The beauty and wonder of the island rolled on me, possessed me, and possesses me yet. We were talking and talking — life, Australia, journalism, literature; always we planned; always we hoped. We were worshipping life, the island, the sun.

If you are thinking what I think you are thinking, then no. Schuler returned Bridges’s friendship, but as his biographer has made clear, Schuler was thoroughly heterosexual and Bridges knew it. This could have been one of those passionate platonic friendships between men, but in 1990 I thought, and I still think, that Bridges was absolutely in love with Schuler.

After brilliant success as the Age’s correspondent during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, Schuler enlisted for active service but was killed in northern France in June 1917. His last letter to Bridges ended: “Keep remembering.” Schuler’s photograph was another that Bridges cherished always, and indeed he had it reproduced in his 1948 memoir, but Bridges himself was no Peter Pan. He had to carry on facing the disappointments that life inevitably brings, and he was not stoic. In his fifties, living with his sister Hilda back at Woods, he felt the loneliness deeply and became a demanding, querulous, self-pitying man who drank too much.

He did still have many friends though, and in 1938 he began corresponding with Ted Turner, an amateur painter whom he met through their membership of a Melbourne literary society known as the Bread and Cheese Club. Bridges was only a distant member because he rarely left Tasmania by then, but he took a fancy to Turner and found great entertainment in the younger man’s letters, which reminded him of his own Bohemian days in Melbourne. Bridges heaped affection and confidences on Turner, requested a photograph and was delighted with it. He was cross if Turner delayed writing and begged him to visit Tasmania (“Ted old son… I wish I had your friendship — near me!”), but Turner never did.

The two men met only once, in April 1940 when Bridges made the trip to Melbourne, but Bridges went home hungover and with a bout of influenza. He admitted to Turner that the trip had been “a series of indiscretions.” What exactly that meant I couldn’t tell, and their correspondence declined later that year.

Did I indulge in absurd speculation in my thesis about domineering mothers and emasculated fathers? No, but it was impossible to ignore the breakdown of the marriage of Samuel and Laura Bridges, Roy’s parents, in 1907 when Roy was twenty-two. Samuel was pleasure-loving and extravagant, and eventually the house in north Hobart where Roy and his sisters were brought up had to be sold. Of Laura, Samuel apparently said that she “may as well” live with Roy because “it’s plain she’ll never be happy without him.”

Laura managed the household while Hilda became her brother’s amanuensis, writing or typing all his novels from his rapidly scrawled sheets. Roy supported them all financially, although Hilda earned an income as a musician and fiction writer. Only now does it occur to me that there might have been an understanding among the three of them, tacit one would think, that Roy would never marry. Before Laura died in 1925 she begged Hilda, “Whatever happens, look after Roy,” which Hilda did. She never married.

Hilda Bridges, probably in the 1910s. State Library of Victoria

Did I mine Bridges’s writings for autobiographical clues to his sexuality? Yes, for no one warned me against mistaking writers for their characters, and anyway there was so much material to work with. Convicts, bushrangers, and the endeavours of the early colonists to establish a free and democratic society on Van Diemen’s Land: Bridges wrote obsessively on these themes for years.

Novel after novel, especially in his mature period, features a misaligned relationship between a beautiful, passionate woman and an unsuitable man. A son of the relationship will turn up as a convict in Tasmania, and the plot revolves around whether the mother’s folly can be forgiven and her son redeemed by love. Bridges despised hypocrisy and religious intolerance, and his clergyman characters are tormented by unsuitable desires and undone by having to preach Christianity to convicts who are not inherently evil but victims of an unjust society.

Symbolic of society’s condemnation of a convict were the physical scars left by flogging, for which Bridges seemed to have a horrified fascination. In his final novel, The League of the Lord (1950), the Reverend Howard France sits in his study in Sorell picturing an illicit meeting between a beautiful young local girl and her convict lover, which he knew was occurring at that moment. France is jealous of them both. “[Joan’s] eyes are deep blue… her mouth is red, her hands long and white… exquisite…” Further down the page France imagines the couple being caught, which would mean the triangles for young Martin: the “hiss and crack of the lash across strong young shoulders… red weals… red flesh… red running… red.”

Martin is deeply ashamed of being a convict and struggles to accept the love offered by his (free) family in Tasmania. He recalls his journey there on a transport ship, hoarded below decks with hundreds of other convicts:

The faces, the eyes, the voices, the hands; the loathsome, pawing, feeling, gliding, gripping hands… the squeaking laughter in the obscene dark… the foul perverted horde that [had] been men and boys… the brooding, breeding evil, the bestiality, lifelong contamination, incurable, malignant, cancerous.

I underlined this passage in my copy of The League of the Lord but didn’t know how to use it. Now I see it two ways. It could simply be an evocation of Marcus Clarke–inspired Tasmanian gothic. Or it could be evidence that Bridges’s many convict characters are studies of profound shame, self-hatred and alienation. In this reading, those convict characters were versions of himself, their alienation his own, and homosexuality his source of shame. Either interpretation is possible.

Roy and Hilda Bridges’s return to Woods in 1935 fulfilled a promise Bridges had made to their uncle, Valentine Wood, who’d died in 1930, to take on the old place. He knew that Woods meant more to him than Melbourne: “that I was of this land; that it was stronger than I, and that when it willed it would call me back.” Still, brother and sister missed Melbourne terribly, even though overstrain and a nervous dread of noisy neighbours had driven Roy to the brink of a breakdown.

It might have been in these years that the Imperial Hotel incident occurred. Did it? Bridges disliked Hobart, but if it was casual sex he needed, where else could he go? And yet, if the Imperial was a known place for gay men to meet, the police would surely have been there too. Put that way, the incident seems unlikely.

Bridges’s heart condition worsened in the late 1940s and he had a chronic smoker’s cough. He refused to go to Hobart for tests and hated doctors visiting from Sorell. One doctor threatened to have him certified to get him to hospital. “He implied my not liking women about me in such treatment was an abnormality,” Bridges grumbled to a friend. The burden of his care fell as usual on Hilda. Eventually he had to be rushed to hospital in Hobart anyway, and he died there in March 1952 aged sixty-six. Hilda stayed on at Woods for many years until she moved to a Hobart nursing home, where she died in 1971.

I never spoke with Bridges’s family about his possible homosexuality because I was relying on them for recollections and photographs. I drove out to Woods for a final polite visit to give them a copy of the thesis, and after that, unsurprisingly, I never heard from them again.

My research had not included any reading on the ethics of biography so instead I learned it the hard way. I’d gained the trust of my subject’s family only to betray that trust in the end. However, this time — for this essay — I contacted a relative a generation younger and did have an open conversation. There is nothing new to say except that Bridges left a complex personal legacy that is still being felt.

Some people blame homosexuality among male convicts for the long shadow of repression and homophobia in Tasmania that delayed gay law reform until 1997. Perhaps. Such a thing would be hard to prove, and in any case, what is “proof”? What constitutes “evidence” of a queer life? When found, how do we assess its significance? The thing is to not shrink from the task, because with patience and honesty we might still open up some of these painful histories to the light. •

The post Lifting the shadow appeared first on Inside Story.

To a man, the officers nod or voice their agreement. It is not until the meeting is about to close that the lone woman in the room musters the courage to speak. Her statement comes in the form of a question, the standard gendered inflection of women in her day. “Isn’t the economy supposed to serve society,” she asks, “rather than the other way around?”

It has been nearly half a century since I drafted a minute, a ministerial or a cabinet submission, but that single interrogative sentence has been forever imprinted on my brain. Since resigning from the service, I have stood outside the arena, taking another direction in my own life as governance in Australia followed the trajectory outlined in that brief senior officers’ meeting.

It may surprise some to be told that the meeting took place while Labor’s Gough Whitlam was still prime minister, and that his government was adopting a tighter approach to fiscal expenditure. This is not the general view of things, but the truth is that the government, under the extreme pressure it was subjected to during that year, accepted it was time to pull up its socks and conform to more stringent fiscal expectations. If the Dismissal had not intervened and the government had been permitted to continue, the received wisdom about its economic capability would be substantially different.

That said, the Whitlam government — and that of its Coalition successor under Malcolm Fraser, whose election later that year was so ignobly prosecuted — was still imbued with a fundamentally Keynesian outlook, the legacy of our postwar reconstruction. The Coalition certainly introduced stringent cost-cutting, but the Country Party’s influence combined with Fraser’s reversion to stimulus measures in the 1982 budget indicated that it hadn’t subscribed to demands for wholesale economic reform.

Indeed, the Fraser government took back responsibility in 1977 for women’s refuges, which had previously devolved to the states, and doubled the allocation for them. It also continued funding childcare and resisted subsidising commercial centres. It was the Hawke Labor government, elected in 1983, that was wholly committed to what was variously called Reaganomics, Rogernomics or economical rationalism, albeit a tempered version. We know it now as neoliberalism, the basic idea of which is that governments should get out of the way and let the market take over.

This change, though focused on economics and couched in its language, has ultimately been a cultural one, and it has been profound. It is perfectly acceptable even today for professionals of all stripes to speak of “the market” in quasi-deistic terms. A spate of articles appearing in the 1980s — in ostensibly progressive media like the National Times as well as in business journals — valorised the pursuit of riches and those who pursued them in gushing terms. I used to keep score of the number of times the word “success” was used, meaning getting ahead in some sort of business.

By the time Howard came along, we were all businesses. Even freelance writers like me were sending out invoices to our editors, and the more fortunate among us were filing quarterly business statements and charging GST. The practice continues to this day, and no one bats an eyelash over the paperwork involved in what was supposed to be a development to rid us of red tape.

And I’m not the first to note that in our dealings with government suddenly we were “clients” and “customers” but never citizens. Gradually, many began to see themselves as lone actors instead of members of communities or collectives. Union membership declined, as did that of political parties. Politics too became a profession rather than a calling.

How have women fared under these developments? Before addressing the question, let me say a few words about myself. I was born in the United States during the Great Depression, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president until I was six. It’s hard to explain how a child that young could absorb the zeitgeist of his New Deal, the relief of knowing that a government was there to help, that people who had been at risk of starvation were given work, even artists and writers and actors like my mother, but I did. And it would be years before I would find myself with a government resembling it.

I left the United States when the scourge of McCarthyism had only just begun to subside. We were now in the grip of a cold war and the repudiation of anything smacking of socialism. Though the Australia I came to in 1958 was also enmeshed in cold war politics, and I was shocked by the blatant racism and what we would come to know as sexism, the attitude towards government I found here was markedly different. To paraphrase the historian Keith Hancock, Australians expected their governments, state and federal, to be at the service of their citizens.

Even for an American scarified by those McCarthy years, the easy Australian attitude towards government took some getting used to. It wasn’t until 1972 that I felt I could let my guard down — that I was once again experiencing a government whose progressive flavour and sweeping reforms for improving society resembled those of the war years of my youth.

Yet less than three years later the seeds of neoliberalism had been planted, the hope and excitement of the Whitlam experiment came crashing down, and though it would take another eight years for the seeds to ripen, the tenor of the previous contract between government and its citizens was transformed.

Is the purpose of an economy to serve a society, or is it indeed the other way around? Most particularly, how have women accommodated this profound change in economic understanding, and its consequent changes in governance?

For an answer I have to go back to those Whitlam years again, during which some groundbreaking reforms were initiated. Women’s reproductive freedoms were enhanced, financial support for single mothers was introduced, and advances in employment were set in train, with the government backing equal pay for equal work and the extension of the minimum wage to women. Discrimination committees were established, part-time work encouraged and, most importantly, a wide-ranging, substantially funded childcare program was introduced.

Free tertiary education, arguably the most significant reform, was not specifically designed for women but did most to expand our horizons. All this required an expansion of the federal public service and the public sector in general. But under the changed zeitgeist, and as time has passed, both have been systematically whittled back, to the point where today we are subjected in every conceivable sphere to the signs of a seriously fractured social order.

Climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic have accentuated these fault lines. The accelerated appearance of extreme weather events predicted by climate scientists decades ago has been met with increasingly woeful federal government policy, the Gillard government’s short-lived emissions trading scheme being the sole exception.

After more than twenty drought years since the turn of the century, whole towns have been left without water and rivers turned dry. The bushfire season has extended, and resources for fighting the growing number of fires and their increased spread and ferocity have been seriously overstretched. What’s more, the very means for fighting them – the planes, the water, the fire retardants – add to the carbon discharged into the atmosphere, itself the cause of the heat enveloping the planet.

As the planet struggles to adapt, the weather volatility grows. Floods ruin homes and vital infrastructure, damage crops and spread disease, and again the tools at our disposal for saving lives and rebuilding the damage escalate their cause. The sad truth is that almost every facet of human existence, as contemporary Australians have known it, contributes to this spiral effect.

One of neoliberalism’s central tenets is that by reducing the size of the public sector the more efficient markets will stimulate trade and a concomitant growth in wealth. Beginning with the Whitlam government’s 25 per cent across-the-board tariff reduction in 1974, the edifice of tariff protection that characterised our postwar years was dismantled, with serious inroads on our manufacturing sector, which had grown substantially out of the import substitution policies adopted after the war.

I’m not arguing that freeing up trade has been wholly bad for this country, but we have seen how the neoliberal approach, being more an ideology than sound economics, has seriously distorted our economy, made all the more evident in a crisis like the Covid pandemic when supply of vital imports is disrupted. Moreover, the globalisation of assets and the ceaseless movement of goods and people around the planet have all contributed, along with the effects of climate change, to the emergence of pandemic viruses like SARS, of which Covid-19 is but the latest manifestation.

And where has this led for women? Childcare has become prohibitively expensive, and the effective marginal tax rate on married women with children has acted as another disincentive to their participating in the workforce. The safety nets that formed part of the social contract when the Hawke–Keating government signed up to Reagan and Thatcher’s economics have either shrunk or are punitively applied; with deregulation, the weakening of unions and galloping casualisation, working life is transformed.

It’s arguable whether these changes were deliberately designed to frustrate women’s advancement; some were, most weren’t. Despite the general increase in female workplace participation over the past forty years, its predominance of part-time and casual work has resulted in an associated reduction in women’s earning power and superannuation, so much so that women in their fifties today have become the fastest-growing group among the homeless.

At the same time, the one lasting legacy of the seventies women’s movement and its involvement in the Whitlam government has been women’s view of ourselves, and the aspirations we have held for our futures. As Whitlam’s first women’s adviser, Elizabeth Reid, once put it, what had been a women’s movement had become a movement of women, as women became a visible presence in all walks of life.

I marvel that for years after my arrival in Australia in 1958 I never saw or heard a woman reading the news or anchoring a current affairs program, let alone driving a bus or piloting a commercial aircraft. Women held a tiny minority of management positions, in the order of 3 per cent, and these were mostly in the public sector or gender-segregated occupations. It is salutary to be reminded, too, that when Whitlam came to office not a single woman held a seat in the House of Representatives. All that has changed, and dramatically so.

Yet somewhere along the way the egalitarian ethos of the earlier movement was abandoned, with class divisions evident in the seventies substantially deepened today. It’s true that we feminists of the second wave were predominantly middle class, with many having benefited from the expanded education and tertiary scholarships initiated under Menzies.

Yet not all the women who participated were products of middle-class privilege, and the socialist bent of women’s liberationists in particular made us acutely aware of the entrenched inequalities in what was all too often touted as Australia’s classless society. So while it can be said that the movement’s composition was largely middle-class, it would be wrong to characterise it as such. That feminists didn’t always succeed in erasing unexamined, often racist assumptions about Aboriginal women, for example, doesn’t mean we didn’t try.

But it is also true that women did advance even as neoliberalism permeated all aspects of society. There’s no denying that many of us did well. Women began to be taken seriously in the media. A fair few became professors, a scarcely imaginable trajectory when the movement began, even if the prospects for young female scholars today are considerably less rosy. Casualisation was well under way with the corporatisation of universities, but the future for current untenured academics, particularly in the humanities, has dimmed altogether with the pandemic.

Women have succeeded in getting themselves elected in increasing numbers, and despite the setbacks, especially on the Coalition side, many more have been ministers. A woman heading a public service department is nothing to marvel at; that there are female chief executive officers in both public and private sectors is barely worthy of comment, yet a whole generation of women in their twenties and thirties are precariously employed, paying high rents and excluded from the ever-escalating housing market. Their day-to-day struggles to keep afloat financially have made it harder for them to organise politically than it was for us back in the 1970s. And although there are signs — with #MeToo and the 2021 March4Justice — that this may be changing, social inequality is deepening and democracy itself is threatened.

It’s been forty-four years since I left the public service determined to become a writer, and thirty-eight years since my first novel, based on my experience in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, appeared. West Block begins two years after the Dismissal, and opens with the teenage daughter of the central character discovering her mother’s diary and reading the last entry, dated 9 December 1977.

“Two years have passed since it happened,” writes Cassie Armstrong, “when with a shock the trunk imploded. Leaves withered and dropped. We were dazed, stunned with it, and I found myself a conservative.” In writing these lines through my alter ego, the wording was not only to convey the sudden, brutally executed change of government, when those in the department found themselves serving conservative masters, but also to express my dismay that basic Australian traditions — traditions that had become precious to me, and that my heroine, likewise, hoped to conserve — were being dismantled.

Although it would take a few more years for the neoliberal revolution to take hold, we were standing on the brink of it in 1975, and looking back, we can see it for the revolution it was. There is no little irony, then, that the truly radical revolutionaries of the Anglosphere have not been those on the left of the spectrum, but those on the right.

As Cassie Armstrong, head of the department’s Women’s Equality Branch, or WEB, went on to say in the novel, not all change is good. It is up to us now to do what we can to restore the democratic traditions of fair play and social equality that have been so comprehensively repudiated. But how?

The radical changes ushered in by the moneyed ascendancy have been so pervasive and become so entrenched that it would be dishonest to suggest they could be undone easily. But it would be equally mistaken not to take heart from some changes for the better since those palmier days. Australians generally are more attuned to feminist aims than they once were, more aware of Indigenous achievement and the appalling racism Indigenous people have endured, and more accepting of differing sexual orientations and gender fluidity.

For all that, it’s next to impossible for any leader today to argue the simple proposition that taxes are not only needed but beneficial if the revenue raised is directed towards restoring good government and a fairer, more productive society. Tax and what its purpose is in a democracy remain so far a no-go area in the dominant political discourse.

Having participated in the 2019 campaign to elect an independent in the federal Sydney seat of Warringah, I was acutely aware that there was no chance of Zali Steggall’s winning it if she didn’t openly reject Labor’s 2019 policies to remove negative gearing and franking credits. And though I’ve been heartened by Steggall’s re-election in 2022 and the striking success of other independent candidates, the vast majority of whom are women, I’ve yet to hear them make taxation an issue, though most would seem in favour of reversing the Morrison government’s highly regressive stage three tax cuts that the Labor government has insisted — at least so far — on keeping. Some have also supported needed changes in superannuation taxes.

At this point it’s worth recalling not only that the 1970s women’s movement involved numbers of tertiary-educated women, but also that many of us, owing to the effects of sexism, were out of work at the time. In this we could be said to have been repeating the part intelligentsias with grievances have historically played in revolutionary movements.

Given the casualisation and precarity of university teaching today, we might also consider organising groups by enlisting redundant or precariously employed academics to study the new economics developed by women like Mariana Mazzucato. This could be influential in gaining greater community understanding of the crucial role governments can and have played, in both directing economic development and providing basic services, and the vital role played by progressive taxation.

Women’s policy developed in the Whitlam government was predicated in large part on the need for women to be more strongly represented in all aspects of political life. The government’s 1975 Women and Politics Conference was excoriated in the media, but its long-term effect is undeniable. No matter the barriers they continue to face, female politicians are no longer the isolated oddities they were when that conference was held. We’ve had a female prime minister, female premiers, and female senators and members of parliament, many of whom have reached the rank of minister. But not all of them, particularly on the Coalition side, have delivered what the community has needed, or indeed what has been expected of them.

The 2019–20 bushfires and the Covid pandemic necessitated growth in government spending, but it was reluctantly and inefficiently delivered, with too many sectors rendered ineligible for the Coalition’s largesse, while the waves of new variants disrupted the economy further just as it was tightening its purse strings. That female politicians were enlisted in its retrograde parsimony is regrettable.

While advocacy groups such as the Women’s Electoral Lobby and the National Foundation of Women continue to foster excellent research in the growth of inequality and other matters important to women, the Morrison government paid next to no attention, and members of their National Women’s Alliance faced being defunded if they proved too critical of government policy and practice. The Women’s Office in its various permutations had been sidelined.

In a sense, then, our success in making women’s concerns mainstream political issues has sown the seeds of our failure. In the old days we called that co-option, and my mission once I’d joined the bureaucracy was trying to explain to hardline radical and social feminists fired by anti-establishment sentiment how necessary working within government was.

Today, the positions seem dramatically reversed, even though the nomenclature has changed. We have no shortage of groups tackling specific issues of concern to women or their echoes within the bureaucracies, academia and parliaments. What’s missing, for the moment anyway, is a widespread, radical, community-based movement engaged in fundamental questions such as what constitutes social value, how it can be measured, and how a more equal society that best serves its citizens should be funded.

Climate change and the pandemic have thrown these questions into high relief, and there are glimmers appearing here and there that such a movement’s time may be near.

What I’ve been suggesting is a conscious effort in developing what was once called a double strategy. Yes, we will always need progressive thinkers in government bureaucracies, on government benches and in local and state governments, but the lesson I took from my experience in government is that without the strong, coordinated pressure from within civil society, such penetration can be redirected to regressive aims (for example, greenwashing) or rendered useless altogether.

The neoliberal revolution of the past half-century measures every public service in terms of cost, thus forcing advocates to couch almost every proposal in terms of its economic benefit or detriment rather than its social value. While enriching some and impoverishing many, this cultural revolution has penetrated our thinking and transformed Australia, with a particular impact on women.

To reverse these developments, along with meaningful action on climate change, is the challenge of our century. To steer us through it, the basic question to ask remains: isn’t the economy meant to support society? And seeing the result of the opposite viewpoint all around us, how were we ever persuaded to switch the two around? •

This is Sara Dowse’s contribution to the new book Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the Revolution, edited by Michelle Arrow and published by NewSouth.

The post Women and Whitlam: then, now, and what might come appeared first on Inside Story.

Although the Murdochs strongly supported Trump during his presidency, and although the audience for their American media tended to be pro-Republican, they were ready to face facts after the election-night count. Fox News’s chief political correspondent, Bret Baier, saw “no evidence of fraud. None.” Murdoch’s New York Post urged Trump to accept the result. His “baseless” stolen-election rhetoric “undermines faith in democracy and faith in the nation,” said the paper.

Along with the Associated Press, the network had made an early call for Biden in the crucial state of Arizona on election night. It proved to be the right call, but it infuriated the Trump camp as premature, if not wilfully wrong.

As we now know from internal documents obtained by Dominion Voting Systems as part of its legal action against Fox News, key Fox figures were already railing against what they saw as an audience-alienating decision on election night. “We worked really hard to build what we have,” high-profile anchor Tucker Carlson wrote on 5 November. “Those fuckers” — senior editor Bill Sammon and reporter Chris Stirewalt, who had decided to call Arizona for Biden — “are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”

“The audience feels like we crapped on [them],” wrote Scott, “and we have damaged their trust and belief in us… We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.” Sammon and Stirewalt were soon forced out of Fox, not for making a professional error but for their “arrogance” and for damaging the “brand.”

The clashes continued. On the night of 12 November, Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted that “top election infrastructure officials” had found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” An indignant Tucker Carlson wrote to his colleagues: “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck? … It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Again, Scott took the same line. Heinrich “has serious nerve doing this,” she wrote, “and if this gets picked up viewers are going to be further disgusted.” By morning Heinrich had deleted the tweet. (The New York Times later reported: “While she removed a tweet in which Mr. Trump had tagged her colleagues Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, she posted the same fact check in response to a different tweet from Mr Trump that made the same false claim but did not tag her colleagues.”)

Fox’s White House correspondent Kristin Fisher got similarly short shrift when she fact-checked fraud claims by lawyer Sidney Powell and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. She was immediately told by phone that higher-ups were unhappy and she needed to do a better job of “respecting our audience.”

Respect was suddenly Fox’s word of the moment, Fox’s prime-time anchor Sean Hannity was arguing that “respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical. Fox has spent the last month spitting at them.” For outsiders, though, nurturing the audience’s delusions and punishing staff who behave professionally might seem a strange sort of respect.

In the early days after the election, when Fox seemed ready to accept the result, the network’s rating began declining. It was “getting creamed by CNN!” wrote Murdoch, but much more troubling was the number of viewers who were switching — with Trump’s encouragement — to upstart rivals on their right, Newsmax and One America News.

On 9 November Trump retweeted a series of stories from Newsmax claiming election fraud. Three days later his attacks on Fox escalated in a flurry of tweets encouraging viewers to switch to other networks. By the end of that day, Fox stocks were down 6 per cent; by mid November the network’s daytime audience had fallen from a pre-election 2.4 million to just 1.6 million, and its prime-time audience from 5.3 million to 3.5 million. Newsmax’s viewer numbers increased sixfold, from 57,000 to 329,000.

Fox News had become prisoner of the monster it had created. An audience fed on fantasies couldn’t face the new reality. “To be honest,” one producer said, “our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition.” A network executive conceded that “conspiratorial reporting might be exactly what the disgruntled viewer is looking for.” Commercial profitability and professional integrity were pulling in opposite directions.

This was the moment when management announced its dramatic pivot. Scott called 9 November, six days after the election, “Day One” and committed the network to pushing “narratives that would entice their audience back.” She was, she said, “trying to get everyone to comprehend we are on a war footing.” Two themes figured prominently in subsequent Fox News internal communications: “brand” and “respecting the audience.” Both would override accuracy and other professional scruples.

The on-air results of Scott’s directive were dramatic: by the end of the second week after Fox News had called the election for Biden, it had “questioned the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it at least 774 times,” according to Media Matters for America. Off-air, Fox News’s chief financial officer reported on 8 December that Fox’s “ratings momentum has been extraordinary [and] it is feeding absolutely into advertising strength.” Scott was rewarded with a multi-year extension to her contract.

Newly focused on promoting claims of electoral fraud, the network’s primary targets were Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, the two companies that provided electronic voting equipment for the election. Powell and Giuliani were the Trump associates most vigorously accusing the companies of having conspired to alter the election results.

Powell asserted that Trump had won not just by hundreds of thousands but by millions of votes shifted in Biden’s favour by Dominion’s software. “It’s really the most massive and historical egregious fraud the world has ever seen,” she said. Her dramatic claims had audience appeal. When research showed that viewers were switching to Newsmax specifically to watch her as a guest, Hannity brought Powell onto his program.

Giuliani was equally emphatic: Dominion’s machine “was developed to steal elections.” Dominion was “an organised criminal enterprise… started in Venezuela with Cuban money.” The intemperance of his language was no barrier to repeated appearances on Fox.

Of the several Fox presenters who took up the theme, the most extreme was Lou Dobbs. “Read all about Dominion and Smartmatic voting companies and you’ll soon understand how pervasive this Democrat electoral fraud is,” he tweeted, “and there’s no way in the world the 2020 presidential election was either free or fair.” It was “an electoral 9/11 against the United States, with the cooperation and collusion of the media and the Democrat Party and China.” “It is a cyber Pearl Harbor,” he added. “We have technical presentations that prove there is an embedded controller in every Dominion machine.”

Even the Trump campaign distanced itself from the seemingly unhinged Powell and Giuliani. Trump ally Chris Christie called Powell a “national embarrassment” and Trump’s legal team thought Giuliani was “deranged.” Although the Trump campaign disavowed Powell on 22 November, she and Giuliani continued to appear on Fox for several more weeks.

Even after the 6 January attacks on the Capitol, Fox continued to host guests who claimed the election was stolen. On 26 January Carlson interviewed My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell after he was banned from Twitter for promoting lies about Dominion and the election. Lindell repeated those lies without any challenge from Carlson. Not coincidentally, Lindell is one of Fox News’s biggest sponsors. According to Murdoch’s deposition in the Dominion case, Lindell “pays us a lot of money.” “It is not red or blue, it is green” — it is about money rather than politics — he agreed when questioned by Dominion’s lawyers.

Given the frequency and severity of the attacks on Dominion, the company’s decision to sue Fox News came as no surprise. Dominion also sued Newsmax and its three most prominent accusers, Powell, Giuliani and Lindell. (The other voting machine company, Smartmatic, has also sued Fox News.) The fallout has already been spectacular. Dominion has gained access to thousands of internal Fox News documents revealing extraordinary cynicism and hypocrisy among executives and producers.

A media organisation can’t successfully be sued for defamation by a public figure in America unless malice can be shown, and any effort to do that usually relies on inferences and indirect evidence. Not in this case: “I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”

The contrast between what the Fox News personnel were saying to each other and what they were saying on air was stark. Disparaging descriptions of Powell, Giuliani and other fraud-pushers — “mind-blowingly nuts,” “totally off the rails,” “crazy,” “absurd” and “shockingly reckless” — figure frequently in their internal communications, but didn’t stop “really crazy stuff” (in Murdoch’s words) being put to air. Commenting on one program, Fox president Jay Wallace observed that “the North Koreans do a more nuanced show.”

Not a single Fox witness testified that they believed the allegations about the voting-machine company to be true, according to Dominion’s account of the deposition evidence. Fox’s internal fact-checking department, the Brainroom, also said the claims against Dominion were wrong.

“Sidney Powell is lying; she is a complete nut,” Carlson told his fellow prime-time anchor Laura Ingraham. “No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” “Nut” seems close to the mark: in an email to Maria Bartiromo, whose show she had appeared on several times, Powell said her source of information on Dominion was a person who described herself as “internally decapitated,” capable of “time travel in a semi-conscious state” and able to speak to “the Wind” as “a ghost.” Apparently this raised no red flags at Fox.

These internal communications provide excellent ammunition for Dominion, and there are further reasons why the company is likely to receive extremely high damages. Most defamation cases involve a single article or a short series by a small number of individual journalists, whereas this one involves a blizzard of segments over several months.

Dominion’s suit focuses on twenty statements across six Fox programs. It argues that “literally dozens of people with editorial responsibility — from the top of the organisation to the producers of specific shows to the hosts themselves — acted with actual malice.”

Likely to add to the damages is the fact that Dominion communicated 3600 times with Fox during the broadcasting of the contentious segments in order to correct facts. Most importantly, it sent an email titled “Setting the Record Straight,” and a series of updates, to more than ninety of Fox’s reporters, producers and anchors.

Nineteen of the twenty statements were made after Dominion alerted Fox that they were lies and pointed the network to the correct information. But Fox kept defaming Dominion and failed to respond to demands for retractions. “To this day,” says the company, “Fox has never retracted the false statements it broadcast about Dominion.”

While most defamation cases focus on damage to the plaintiff’s general reputation, Fox’s claims went further, undermining Dominion’s very existence as a commercial entity. The company’s business relies on a bipartisan acceptance of its integrity and reliability. Since the Fox News onslaught, several of its contracts have been challenged by Trump Republicans. All Fox’s claims about its audience size and influence are now being used as evidence of the damage done to Dominion.

“As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved,” says Dominion, pointing to threats to its employees and the extra security it has been forced to employ.

Fox also showed a corresponding lack of interest in reporting developments counter to the narrative pushed by Trump and his allies. Unmentioned went the fact that Dominion machines are used in twenty-eight states — including battleground states Florida and Ohio, which Biden lost. On 11 November, for instance, Sean Hannity told his audience that the hand recount in Georgia would help resolve questions about Dominion. When the count was completed later that month and the governor of Georgia declared the voting machines had been accurate, Hannity was silent.

The Dominion lawsuit has also ushered in a new phase in the Donald Trump–Rupert Murdoch relationship. The mutually convenient bromance of 2016–20 is long gone. Murdoch’s American newspapers have consistently editorialised against Trump’s claims of a rigged election. The Wall Street Journal declared the charges against Dominion baseless. After the midterm Congressional elections, in which the candidates Trump most closely embraced performed poorly, the Journal called him an electoral liability. The New York Post was much cheekier, with a front-page caricature of Trump as Humpty Dumpty under the headline “Trumpty Dumpty.”

The initial cache of documents released by Dominion late last month showed that Murdoch thought Trump’s claims of fraud were baseless and that he strongly disapproved of them. Ironically, of course, it was one of his organisations, Fox News, that did most to give those baseless claims political currency. In mid December Fox reported a poll saying 70 per cent of Republicans thought the election was rigged because of voter fraud. Without Fox’s intense coverage, we can only guess how much lower that percentage might have been.

The revelation that Murdoch disapproved of Fox’s coverage in principle but encouraged it in practice shows him to be a hypocrite. But the stark contrast between on-air and off-air views also raises crucial questions about how other Fox personnel saw their responsibility. At one stage, Carlson texted Ingraham: “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” It is as if Carlson thought he had to be a passive cipher for Powell and Giuliani’s views, however mistaken. When Maria Bartiromo’s producer was asked “If someone says something untrue on one of your shows, do you think that it’s important to correct it?” she simply replied “No.”

As a result of Murdoch’s deposition in the Dominion case, Trump discovered that after the 6 January Capitol riot Fox News’s owner aimed to make Trump a “non-person.” His response was characteristic:

If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged and Stollen, then he and his group of MAGA Hating Globalist RINOS [Republicans in name only] should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding and abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS.

Much more will emerge when the court case begins in Delaware on 17 April. Apart from the huge sums of money involved, the case raises fundamental issues about the health of American democracy and the responsibilities of the media. “These lies did not simply harm Dominion,” the voting-technology company argues. “They harmed democracy. They harmed the idea of credible elections. They harmed a once-unshakeable faith in democratic transfers of power.”

Fox News was a crucial ally of Trump in his attempt to reject the election outcome, and many of the radicals who stormed the Capitol on 6 January would have viewed the claims of electoral fraud broadcast repeatedly on the network. It is this association that Crikey’s Bernard Keane probably had in mind when he attributed to the Murdochs part of the blame for the riots, an assertion that prompted Lachlan Murdoch to sue under Australian defamation laws.

Never has a court case in Delaware been more keenly watched in two Sydney law chambers than Dominion’s will be. •

The post Damaging the brand appeared first on Inside Story.

This is the Boundary Estate, a public housing scheme that has provided quality homes to working-class Londoners since 1900. It was Britain’s first council housing project and one of the earliest examples anywhere of public investment in affordable homes.

The rise of the estate’s circular garden is reminiscent of an Anglo-Saxon burial mound — and it is a burial place of sorts, interring the rubble of Old Nichol, a notorious East End slum demolished in the 1890s. Described by the Illustrated London News as a “painful and monotonous round of vice, filth and poverty,” Old Nichol was a place of disease and deprivation. Thousands of families crowded into dwellings of just one or two rooms, the walls held together by cheap “billy-sweet,” a mortar that never dried out. Babies born in the slum had a one-in-four chance of dying before their first birthday.

For about eighty years after the Boundary Estate opened, almost all public housing in Britain was “council housing,” built and operated by local authorities. In Australia, state governments took the lead. In both cases public investment dried up in the closing decades of the twentieth century, ushering in a period of decline in the quantity and quality — and the reputation — of public housing.

In both places, housing construction and management increasingly shifted away from governments, local or state, to not-for-profit housing providers, although this process is further advanced in Britain than Australia. What was once known as council or public housing is now generally covered by the broader banner of “social housing.”

My guide through the Boundary Estate is social historian John Boughton, and I’ve drawn liberally on the opening chapter of his book Municipal Dreams, a chronicle of the rise and fall of council housing in Britain, in describing its history. The book grew out of his blog of the same name, launched a decade ago as a retirement project after he left his job teaching history to senior high school students.

“It was completely normal”: the Boundary Estate today. Peter Mares

For Boughton — whose long-term Labour Party membership included what he calls a brief, unremarkable stint as an elected local government official — the neglected subject of council housing chimed with existing political and academic interests. It deserved greater attention, he thought, but he never expected his blog to prove so popular.

“It just took off,” he says. “It caught a moment.” Boughton thinks the contemporary housing crisis has spurred interest in his writing by exposing the limitations of a neoliberal reliance on private capital and free markets to address complex social challenges. “People are starting to look with more sympathetic eyes on the role of the state, in housing in particular.”

Perhaps, too, the blog hit a chord with a generation shaped by council housing. Many of Boughton’s relatives lived on council estates, as did friends and acquaintances. “It was completely normal,” he says. One in three Britons lived in a council home in 1981, and it was often the best housing they had ever experienced.

Today, though, council housing suffers from an image problem almost as bad as Old Nichol’s in the nineteenth century.

I met Boughton soon after the final episode of the hugely popular Happy Valley screened on the BBC. As in many British crime series, part of the action took place on a council estate — in this case in Yorkshire, where a troubled woman was exploited by an unscrupulous criminal duo.

The image of crime- and poverty-ridden housing estates, reinforced time after time in fictional series and news coverage, has stuck. “The tendency to associate council housing with criminality has exaggerated and denigrated the experiences of millions of people currently and in the past,” says Boughton. “That is not to deny problems and missteps along the way. But it is a negative stereotype, and it is self-reinforcing.”

Where problems do arise on particular estates at particular times, they are always shaped by larger forces, he says, and especially the profound effect of demographics.

He cites the Pepys Estate, just south of the Thames in the Borough of Lewisham, which was very popular when it opened in 1973. Built on the site of a former naval dockyard and accommodating 5000 people in 1500 homes, it was one of the Greater London Council’s largest and most prestigious projects. Design innovations included basement garages to separate pedestrians from cars and elevated walkways between blocks to encourage neighbourly interaction. In TV dramas, these same locations are now likely to feature as hangouts for loitering gangs and escape routes for villains.

High-rise flats have become particularly reviled for facilitating antisocial behaviour, as if the fault resides in the very fabric of the buildings. Boughton insists the architecture isn’t to blame. “A great variety of estates have suffered problems,” he says. “Low-rise estates too, not just tower blocks.”

The roots of such ills lie elsewhere. In the decade from 1978, Lewisham lost 10,000 jobs and unemployment trebled. By the mid 1980s more than half the borough’s residents aged sixteen to twenty-nine were jobless. The Pepys Estate was hit hard, and an alternative economy sprang up based on drugs and crime. Racism was rife. Rather than fighting to get into a flat, people were begging to be transferred out.

Boughton tells a similar story abou the Park Hill Estate, a 996-flat scheme that replaced some of the worst slums in Sheffield. Completed in 1961, it also had “streets in the sky” — elevated walkways wide enough for children to play on, which enabled neighbours to chat without the noise and disruption of passing traffic. It had shops, pubs, schools, clinics, community centres and, in the words of one resident, other unaccustomed luxuries: “Three bedrooms, hot water, always warm. And the view. It’s lovely, especially at night when it’s all lit up.”

By the early 1980s, though, Park Hill was another towering symbol of council housing failure, its celebrated brutalist architecture blamed for criminality and vandalism. What rarely gets mentioned is that in the intervening decade Sheffield had lost a massive 40,000 jobs.

“Council housing does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a social and economic context,” says Boughton. “What is happening to these communities is the product of policy and political choices.”

Attitudes towards council housing also changed as Britain became more affluent. “Into the 1960s, it was the best housing most working-class people could aspire to,” says Boughton. “But as owner-occupation became more widespread, council housing was seen as less desirable for sure. There was a psychological shift.”

As the economy declined in the wake of the oil shock and stagflation in the 1970s, public spending fell too. Repair and maintenance were neglected. Labour, which had once believed council housing should meet “general needs,” moved closer to the Conservatives’ view that it was better seen as a welfare safety net reserved for the vulnerable.

At one level, the shift (which was mirrored in Australia) makes sense: the fairest way to manage limited public resources is to prioritise the neediest. Over time, though, social housing was transformed into housing of last resort — an ambulance service that picks people up from the bottom of the cliff rather than a fence preventing anyone from falling.

Forty years later, social housing in both Britain and Australia accommodates an increasingly narrow stratum of society — the very poorest and those experiencing the most layers of disadvantage. This “residualisation” makes it easier, in turn, to stigmatise residents as “troubled” and point to “failed estates” as evidence that public investment in decent housing is a fundamentally flawed ideal.

Residualisation was compounded in 1980s Britain by the hammer blow of Thatcherism. The national government cut investment in council housing and stopped new construction in its tracks. In the year Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher took office, building commenced on nearly 80,000 new council homes in England and Wales. Within a decade, annual new starts had fallen to just 400. But when councils stopped building in England — the green band on the chart below — the private sector failed to pick up the slack. The overall supply of new housing dropped precipitously and has never recovered.

Source: Live table 213, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government

Determined to convert Britain into a nation of homeowners, Thatcher also introduced the right-to-buy scheme. By the time the Conservatives lost office in 1997, one-in-four council homes had been sold, with prices discounted by between a third and a half of market value (up to a ceiling of £50,000). It amounted to a massive, highly subsidised transfer of public assets into private hands, and most of the receipts went straight to Treasury to retire debt.

Tenants with means were supported to become owner-occupiers; those without got less assistance than before as public investment in council housing dried up. “Typically, the best, most desirable homes got sold and the less desirable units got left,” says Boughton. “It was another form of residualisation.”

For many, this brought windfall profits. Boughton gives the example of a security guard living on a council estate in Camden who bought his flat for £39,000 under the scheme. It was valued at £70,000 at the time. Three decades later, his home was worth £600,000. Not surprisingly, he thought the scheme was “perfect.”

“The irony is that generally the first generation of former tenants who became owner-occupiers then sold off those homes,” Boughton says. Forty per cent of homes bought by their tenants are now back on the private rental market, though in poorer condition and with higher rents than the council houses next door.

“If you walk onto a suburban council estate, the well-maintained and modernised houses are council owned, while those sold under the right-to-buy scheme are least well maintained and equipped,” says Boughton. “The market does not do a very good job.”

About 40 per cent of the homes in the Boundary Estate are now in private hands, and those that are rented out are seen as desirable properties. At the “guide price” of £450 per week, a one-bedroom flat would eat up the entire pay packet of a full-time worker earning the London Living Wage.

The rest of the estate’s residents remain tenants of Tower Hamlets, the local authority. In 2006, the tenants vetoed a plan to transfer the estate from the council to the not-for-profit Southern Housing Group, even though the housing association had promised to redecorate the flats and install new kitchens, bathrooms and boilers.

In hundreds of other estates, tenants have voted to switch from the local authority to a housing association. Back in 2001, two-thirds of all social housing in England was owned and operated by local governments and one-third by registered housing providers. Today, those figures are almost reversed, and fewer than four in ten homes remain in council hands.

For the Conservatives, the shift from local authorities to housing providers was — like the right-to-buy scheme — ideological. Boughton says the Tory government genuinely believed that council housing was “the state at its worst, bureaucratic, distant and inefficient.”

While acknowledging that an era of austerity made it difficult for councils to maintain the quality of housing, he says there was some justification for the Thatcherite critique. “It varied from council to council, but some took their eyes off the ball, neglecting maintenance and repair,” he says. “Ongoing expenses were not always budgeted for.” The results weren’t all bad, he adds: local governments responded by decentralising decision-making and devolving management.

The shift to not-for-profit housing associations continued after Labour took government in 1997. Smaller and locally based, housing associations were seen as more agile than councils, more attentive to tenants’ needs and better aligned with Tony Blair’s “Third Way.”

These arguments are familiar in Australia, where the not-for-profit, or “community,” sector is also growing. The Community Housing Industry Association’s chief executive, Wendy Hayhurst, recently urged the Albanese government to direct all the proceeds from its $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund to her sector rather than do the “easy thing” and divvy the money up among community, state and private providers.

Hayhurst argued that community housing scores better on ratings of quality and resident satisfaction, a claim supported by the Productivity Commission’s most recent Report on Government Services. With its charitable status, the community sector is exempt from GST, land tax and stamp duty, which Hayhurst says enables it to build more houses for any given amount of money than state governments or businesses can.

Duncan Maclennan, a housing expert at the University of Glasgow with extensive experience in Australia, argues that not-for-profits provide better management than state authorities and better integration with other services. He says they are more effective at using their housing assets to secure low-cost private capital for additional investment. “There is a strong case to see much stronger policies of transferring public stock to non-profits,” he concludes.

Though not as advanced as in Britain, the shift from state governments to community providers is already under way in Australia. Over the past five years, more than 21,000 homes have been transferred from public sector to registered housing providers, two-thirds of them in New South Wales. Around 70 per cent remain in state hands, but this is down from 85 per cent in 2008.

The trend is clear, yet the British experience gives pause for thought. Or at least the English experience — thanks to devolution, policies differ in Scotland and Wales.

Take the Juniper Crescent estate, for instance, which won architectural awards after it was completed by inner-north London’s Camden Council in 1996. Across the road from the estate, near some once-hip but now-tawdry markets, builders are hammering away at a £1 billion development, Camden Goods Yards. What was once a commercial site is being transformed into a mixed-use neighbourhood with 644 homes, Grade A office space, a supermarket, a rooftop farm and “landscaped open space for the whole community to explore.”

Thanks to inclusionary zoning requirements, the developers are supposed to include some affordable housing as well — as they are in all new housing projects in England. As a planning requirement, an agreement on the quantity and price range is generally negotiated between developers and local governments, though John Boughton says developers sometimes wriggle out of these commitments and, besides, “affordable is a pretty loose term.”

Sound from the construction site at Camden Goods Yard is audible from Juniper Crescent, which is now run by One Housing, one of London’s largest housing associations. Juniper Crescent might need some upgrades, but it is far from past its use-by date. Yet these 120 terrace homes in stylish yellow brick will soon be demolished as part of a redevelopment more in line with the high-end condominiums being built across the way.

The knockdown rebuild plan required the consent of Juniper Crescent residents, but in a 2020 ballot they voted the proposal down. One Housing’s response was to engage “with residents further about the regeneration proposals in order to understand the ballot results more fully.” In other words, keep trying until the residents gave the right answer. After consultations fuelled by glossy brochures, free pizza and live music, residents voting narrowly in favour of demolition.

One Housing has promised that all current residents will be able to return to the redeveloped estate. Residents will have more open space than before, it says, and their new better-quality homes will be just as spacious as their present dwellings. Each household will receive a £7800 “home loss payment” to compensate for years of disruption.

The demolition of an estate built less than thirty years ago reflects the way markets are structured, says Boughton. Little incentive exists to refurbish and upgrade existing council housing. The financial imperative is for developers to demolish and rebuild, tapping in to profits from new homes for sale and private rental. Projects are justified, with some plausibility, because they bring densification.

The soon-to-be-demolished Juniper Crescent estate. Peter Mares

Redeveloping Juniper Crescent will create about three times as many homes as the estate has now, adding much-needed supply to London’s over-taxed housing market. What remains unclear, though, is how many of these additional homes will be truly affordable for low-income tenants. As even its supporters acknowledge, One Housing’s motivation in this partnership with a private developer is as much financial as social: it needs to generate income from commercial projects to fund its broader operations.

For Boughton, this attempts to turn necessity into a virtue. Housing associations cross-subsidise their social mission by building housing for private sale or market rents. A touted benefit is the creation of “mixed communities,” where rich and poor, renters and owner-occupiers, live side by side and share facilities. Boughton welcomes this aim, noting that this is what all council estates originally were. But he adds, wryly, that no one seems to worry about the lack of social mix in middle-class suburbia, let alone in the exclusive neighbourhoods favoured by plutocrats.

Yet Boughton also fears that housing associations increasingly look and behave like property developers. Even when they separate their commercial and social operations in different divisions, they risk letting the for-profit tail wag the housing-association dog.

“I’m not criticising good housing associations with local roots and a strong grasp of social purpose,” says Boughton. “I’ve got plenty of time for those. But now they have consolidated and got bigger, many are suffering from some of the same evils once attributed to councils.”

There is a compelling argument that Australia’s nascent community housing sector must also grow, professionalise, and consolidate into fewer larger organisations if it is to operate efficiently through economies of scale and a deep well of corporate knowledge. Yet in England, signs suggest that some of the biggest housing associations are losing touch with their residents and becoming disconnected from their social purpose.

CEOs now command impressive salaries and privately lobby government to let them charge tenants higher rents. One Housing is accused of leaving some of its elderly tenants without heating or hot water through winter after bungling boiler repair work. Another big provider, L&Q, was recently rapped on the knuckles by the Housing Ombudsman with two severe maladministration findings over its treatment of a tenant with physical and mental vulnerabilities.

In one chilling case, the Peabody Group apologised after one of its tenants was left dead in her flat for more than two years. Neighbours had complained about a foul stench and Peabody had cut off the woman’s gas because of unpaid bills yet failed to check on her welfare.

Anecdotes are not proof of system failure, nor evidence that things would have been better if councils had remained in control. The G15 alliance of London’s biggest housing associations provides homes for around one-in-ten Londoners: in a sector so large things will always go wrong. Yet the potential for social purpose to be eroded remains real, especially when the sector remains starved of public funds.

This is apparent in the types of housing that are now getting built. Rather than “social rent housing” — that is, homes for people on the bottom rungs of the income ladder — housing associations in England are increasingly building other types of “affordable” housing, including properties rented for as much as 80 per cent of the local market rate — which, whether in London, Melbourne or Sydney, is often still very expensive. One “affordable” property currently listed by Australian social venture HomeGround Real Estate is a two-bedroom apartment at $1100 per week.

Affordable housing is often portrayed as “key worker” housing. It is intended to enable teachers, nurses, childcare workers, police officers, hospitality staff and sales assistants to live closer to their jobs. These are tenants that private developers would welcome in joint ventures like the Juniper Crescent rebuild — if they can afford it. Social renters, who often rely on government benefits, don’t fit so comfortably in marketing brochures.

Boughton warns that social rent housing will always come second under a cross-subsidy model. “You will never have the amount of social rent housing that is truly affordable being built. It will always be neglected.”

The statistics seem to bear him out. In 2021–22, about 60,000 homes were added to England’s “affordable housing” stock, almost half of them resulting from inclusionary zoning agreements. But only about 13 per cent of the total — or 7500 dwellings — were designated as social rent. That proportion has been steady for about ten years.

In the previous decade, though, social rent housing made up 50 to 60 per cent of new dwellings. In the decade before that, it was 70 to 80 per cent. When sales and demolitions are taken into account, Shelter England calculates that England has lost more than 165,000 social rent homes in the past decade.

Today, London south of the Thames is more affluent and desirable than it was in the 1970s, and the Pepys Estate has been rehabilitated. “The Pepys Estate was famous, then it was infamous, now it just looks and feels like a pretty decent place to live,” writes Boughton in a blog post.

After Lewisham Council transferred the estate to a housing association, it underwent an award-winning redevelopment during which many original buildings were demolished, especially those closest to the river. In what Boughton describes as “pure and unabashed gentrification,” a twenty-four-storey tower block with 144 flats was sold to Berkeley Homes, which stacked an additional five floors with fourteen penthouses on top and flogged off all the apartments at a premium.

In this case, the tower block design didn’t seem to be an automatic generator of crime and dysfunction, though the tower did get a new entrance to avoid any taint of council estate. As Boughton explains on his blog, this was another example of financial considerations determining social outcomes:

Lewisham Council claimed to have run out of money and it’s true enough that the rules of the game were — and are — designed to curtail the ability of local councils to improve and expand their housing stock. But it suited, too, a gentrifying agenda which sees some London councils only too keen to bring the middle-class and their money into their boroughs.

For those with municipal dreams, providing decent housing that caters for all, including people with the fewest resources, has been a challenge right from the start. When Old Nichol was cleared to make room for the Boundary Estate, only eleven residents from the original slum made it into the new apartments. Housing generally went to the members of the artisan working class, skilled tradespeople with reliable incomes who today might be described as “key workers.”

Whether housing is built and run by councils, by state governments, by not-for-profits or indeed by private enterprise, it will only provide decent homes for all, including the most disadvantaged, if it receives substantial and ongoing public investment. One persistent hope in Australia is that superannuation funds will invest in social housing, but as the Community Housing Industry Association’s Wendy Hayhurst and Matt Linden from Industry Super Australia write, this can only work if there is consistent and long-term government subsidy to generate the returns institutional investors require for their members.

As Australian housing policy expert Vivienne Milligan warns, only governments can fill the gap between the rent poor tenants can afford to pay and what it costs to build, run and maintain their homes, let alone generate a profit. A reliance on inclusionary zoning and cross-subsidies from commercial projects is just not going to cut it.

Boughton has an abiding sympathy for old-style council housing but is far from dogmatic about whether it should be in local government hands or run by not-for-profits. “Anything that provides genuinely affordable housing and looks after buildings and tenants is welcome,” he says. “A significant share of the population will never own their own home, and housing association, or local authority housing, should and can cater for a broader range of the population.”

But, he adds, “I do advocate for local authority house building as a cost-effective and affordable means of providing housing, as demonstrated from the 1890s to the 1970s.” Between 1945 and 1979, councils built an average of 126,000 dwellings each year. “Local authorities were able to borrow from the national government and use rents to repay loans. They had the resources, organisation, financial clout, and political will to build at scale. That’s what we’ve lost.”

Local authorities also build to a higher standard than commercial developers, says Boughton. “No one is looking to Barratt for best practice,” he says, referring to one of Britain’s biggest mass home builders. “But the very best council housing is something to aspire to.”

Boughton’s new book, A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates, concludes with a profile of Goldsmith Street, a Norwich City Council project of around a hundred highly energy-efficient homes. Awarding it the 2019 Stirling Prize, judges from the Royal Institute of British Architects called the project “a modest masterpiece.”

“Not everywhere can be like that,” says Boughton, “but it’s not a pipe dream to think that local authorities can play that role.” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post The elusive quest for decent homes appeared first on Inside Story.

Under spider socialism, some arachnids are more equal than others. Dominant spiders control large parts of the web but the subordinate spiders do most of the work: building and cleaning, organising and subduing the prey. Crucially, though, no one spider has full knowledge or control of the whole structure. Each works with some degree of independence in its own small section or subsection. There is no middle, beginning or end, no single locus of power and responsibility.

I know what you’re thinking: this sounds just like foreign capital investment in frontier markets under twenty-first-century financial capitalism. And you’d be right. Every few years, when some Cayman Islands middle manager discovers his or her conscience and shares a new tranche of incriminating files with the Guardian and the New York Times, we are reminded that out there, somewhere, the world’s super-rich and their vast network of highly remunerated accountants, lawyers, investment managers and “fixers” have built an elaborate parallel financial system that hides and protects their wealth.

The key to this system is its opacity. The wealthiest people on the planet benefit from the work of their most far-flung subordinates, but most of the time it is nearly impossible to establish precisely where and how they are connected. Capital doesn’t flow directly from Country A to Country B, but circuitously, through an invisible network of tax havens and offshore financial centres, an economic black hole that allows multinationals and the super-rich to exist in a permanent elsewhere.

When stories about tax havens and the offshore economy appear in the press — if they appear at all — they often tend towards the sensational: the laundering of an astronomical sum of money here, the implication of a highly recognisable name there. In 2015, for example, it emerged that a businessman named Jho Low had used a system of offshore shell companies to siphon more than US$4.5 billion out of the Malaysian government’s sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB. In 2017, Shakira, Bono and the Queen were among those named in the Paradise Papers, a huge leak of offshore data from a law firm operating in ten different jurisdictions.

In Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets, University of Chicago sociologist Kimberly Kay Hoang argues that the real story is not to be found in these headline cases but rather in the many thousands of low-key, everyday transactions that take place outside the purview of journalists, state officials and the public. Jho Low was unrepresentative: he was too big, too flashy, too public. If you really want to understand the system, she writes, you have to look at the people who operate without anyone noticing, the “stealth spiders.”

In 2016 and 2017, Hoang set herself the task of understanding precisely how this offshore economy functioned, especially in risky underdeveloped markets like Vietnam and Myanmar. For nearly eighteen months she “embedded” herself in the Southeast Asian corner of the spiderweb, first as an assistant in a Vietnamese asset management firm then as a kind of intrepid journalist-professor, pursuing and interviewing more than 300 fund managers, state officials, “C-suite executives,” consultants, lawyers, accountants and financiers, from the Cayman Islands to Hong Kong, and San Francisco to Myanmar.

In style and presentation, Spiderweb Capitalism is sometimes stultifyingly academic, but the material is pure Michael Lewis. Take, for example, Will, a forty-two-year-old Vietnamese-German investor and former Lehman Brothers banker who spoke to Hoang at length about his business operations in Southeast Asia. After losing his job in the 2008 meltdown, he says, he cashed out his savings and moved to Singapore to look for new investment opportunities. Despite earning up to US$1 million a year in his former career, he testified to a feeling of precarity. He wanted to become, in his own words, “an owner of capital rather than a worker for capital.”

Making direct equity investments in large companies required considerable staff support, however, so Will joined a “family office” (Wall Street shorthand for a private wealth management company that looks after the pooled wealth of one or more ultra-high-net-worth individuals). His company manages over US$100 million in assets and generally takes on individual investments in the five to ten million dollar range: serious money, but not serious enough to attract significant attention from the press or the top levels of government.

Will admitted to Hoang that he has lost count of how many offshore structures he controls. The main fund in this carefully constructed maze is domiciled in Guernsey, in the British Channel Islands, which has no income, state, corporation or capital gains taxes. That company has a number of tax-exempt subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and Singapore, from which it manages its “onshore operations” in Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar. Each investment is registered as its own separate company or “special purpose vehicle” (a paper company that allows the parent business to insulate its various investments from each other). Will’s company only moves funds onshore for operations. With a bit of creative accounting, they are able to book all their profits in low-tax Singapore.

Creating such structures is remarkably easy. In Hong Kong, Hoang accompanied a wealth manager to the dingy offices of a company specialising in the establishment of offshore subsidiaries, a kind of H&R Block for tax havens. In a bland, windowless room, crammed floor-to-ceiling with stacks of paper, they were presented with a menu of wealth-concealment options.

The “privacy package,” they were told, included a company secretary service, an office address, a certificate of incorporation, the appointment of directors, share certificates and a company seal. They were regaled with the relative benefits of registering their company in Samoa versus the Seychelles. They were even provided with a list of preapproved company names, such as “Lucky Star 7” and “Happymoon4.” And the price was just US$900.

These structures are useful for tax evasion, but the reasons for using them, Hoang explains, are usually more complex. For foreign investors, they are often the only viable way to manage the culture of bribery in Southeast Asian business relations. Few show many qualms about this practice. Among her interviewees, there is a basic consensus that payments to government officials are part of the cost of doing business in this corner of the world.

The most common form of bribery in Vietnamese business culture, for example, is what is known as “speed money,” an unofficial payment to a minor government official that serves as a necessary supplement to their meagre salary. These payments can be as little as $25 and up to several thousand dollars. If a person refuses to pay speed money, paperwork will simply sit on government desks until they change their mind. Those who do attempt to stay clean must accept long delays and, by extension, much lower rates of return on their investments.

Larger, more overt forms of bribery and corruption are common, too, though Hoang’s interviewees are understandably coy about discussing them in any great detail. Even so, Will, the former Lehmann Brothers banker, admitted to owning an entire company — heavily insulated from the rest of his businesses — whose exclusive function it is to distribute bribes. For large projects, this can involve paying college tuition fees for the child of a significant government official or making a gift of high-end luxury products like Rolex watches and Hermès handbags, which function as stores of value that can be traded for cash.

Given the complexity and ambiguity of this informal economy, local knowledge is at a premium. In most cases, it is close to impossible for a foreign investor to operate in Vietnam without a local co-investor. The entire enterprise thus comes down to the cultivation of relationships: between foreign investors and their local partners, and between local partners and government officials. If one of these relationships breaks down, an investment can fall apart. They must be carefully managed, or — in Hoang’s words — “lubricated.”

Some of the most eye-opening passages of Spiderweb Capitalism involve the explanation of exactly how this lubrication takes place. In this highly masculine environment, it can typically involve drinking games and dance shows. On some occasions, though, it extends to “orgy parties,” organised encounters between investors, government officials and sex workers designed to establish a relationship of “mutual hostage.” “We have to literally get into bed with each other,” said one investor. “If one goes down, we both go down.”

The investors Hoang interviews for Spiderweb Capitalism are remarkably open about their business practices, many of which are at best ethically dubious. Some speak with pride of the elaborate offshore structures they have built, or the cleverness with which they have managed their relationships with state officials. Others speak of their activities in terms of sacrifice or duty, something difficult, sometimes unsavoury but ultimately necessary. One man even confessed — with full knowledge that Hoang was an American university professor working on a book — that a lot of what went on with sex workers at Vietnamese “orgy parties” was non-consensual.

This openness likely derives from the fact that — in a legal sense — they are all pretty much in the clear. If you are smart and you know the right lawyers and accountants, you don’t need to break the law: you “finesse” it. The key to doing business in this part of the world, Hoang writes, is this ability to work comfortably in the space between the legal and the corrupt, in the areas where the rules can be massaged in your favour. She calls it “playing in the grey,” the kind of cowboy mentality that has always prevailed in places where the law is ambiguous and inconsistently enforced.

Are those further up the capital chain implicated in these dilemmas? It is a complicated question, and one that the spiderweb is deliberately built to obfuscate. The legal firewalls that separate ethically questionable business dealings in Southeast Asia from their financial beneficiaries in other parts of the world are there by design. The big spiders, safe in their airconditioned boardrooms and private airport lounges, have plausible deniability on moral questions and impunity on legal ones.

What makes the system work are the small spiders, the white-collar strivers who do the bidding of the ultrarich. They build and maintain these elaborate capital networks, and they do so willingly, taking on pretty much all of the risk in the hope that one day they too might find themselves sipping pina coladas in a safer part of the web. As with the South American spiders, it isn’t clear who is the exploiter and who is the exploited, where the web starts and finishes.

Spiderweb Capitalism doesn’t give a systematic account of the offshore system. It is a study not so much of the spiderweb itself but of the individuals who work to create and maintain it. In the spirit of C. Wright Mills’s 1956 classic, The Power Elite, it attempts to “give global capital a face.” Markets don’t simply exist, writes Hoang. They are made. Each new section of the web is always built by humans. The novelty of this book is that she has gone out and talked to them. •

Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets
By Kimberly Kay Hoang | Princeton University Press | $49.99 | 288 pages

The post Playing in the grey appeared first on Inside Story.

A reporter from the Times had gone undercover in a firm contracted by British Gas to collect overdue energy payments. In a return to the days of putting a penny in the slot to heat the bathwater, his team had the job of installing devices that force customers to pay for gas before they use it. The meters serve two purposes: when consumers add money to their account, British Gas takes a share as part repayment of outstanding bills; and the pay-as-you-go system prevents customers from racking up even bigger debts.

The break-ins are authorised by court orders and intended as a measure of last resort. But of the 367,140 applications for warrants last year — that’s 1000 a day — only fifty-six were refused. The warrants are often “waved through” in bulk, with cash-strapped courts earning a fee per case from the arrangement. One magistrate quit when his job became “nothing more than rubber stamping.”

Energy companies are not supposed to force prepayment meters on families with children aged under five, pensioners, people living with a disability, or other vulnerable households. Yet the Times reported teams breaking into the homes of a single father with three young children, a mother with a four-week-old baby, and a woman whose daughter relies on a hoist and an electric wheelchair for her mobility.

In a British winter marked by soaring energy prices and week-long blasts of sub-zero temperatures, these families are condemned to live without heating or hot water whenever they can’t afford to put money on the meter. And when they do buy gas, they are charged a higher rate than customers paying by direct debit.

Not surprisingly, the Times’s exposé prompted outrage and moral condemnation, not least because Centrica, the company that owns British Gas, recently announced that its earnings in 2022 are likely to be more than seven times what they were in 2021.

This is the logic of Britain’s energy market. Centrica wants to derive maximum profit for its shareholders; customers who can’t pay their gas bills are bad for business so it’s happy to cut them loose; debt collectors are paid with a share of the funds they recover for their clients; prepayment meters are an effective mechanism to claw back as much money as possible. The work teams, which are paid a bonus every time they bust into a home and install a device, tend to overlook cuddly toys, Ventolin puffers, walking frames or other signs of household “vulnerability” that should prompt them to abandon the job.

Yet British Gas management, along with the government and regulators, professed to be surprised by the debt-recovery tactics. Centrica boss Chris O’Shea told the BBC that the contractors’ actions were “completely unacceptable.” The secretary of state responsible for energy, Grant Shapps, was horrified by such “abhorrent practices.” The energy regulator, Ofgem, launched “an urgent investigation” and asked energy companies to suspend the forced installation of prepayment meters until it is reassured that they comply with rules on vulnerability.

We hear equivalent surprise and outrage from corporate leaders, ministers and regulators when business scandals erupt in Australia. How could Rio Tinto have blown up those ancient rock shelters and destroyed so much priceless heritage at Juukan Gorge? Who are these rotten labour hire contractors who systematically underpay migrant workers labouring on farms and in meat-processing plants? What a shock it was to learn, at the financial services royal commission, that clients, some long dead, were being charged fees for no service, that a company duped Aboriginal people into buying overpriced funeral insurance, and that major banks knew their customers were being encouraged into unnecessary debt by mortgage brokers.

Yet such behaviours are entirely predictable and — in the narrow sense of allowing market forces to operate — entirely rational. It’s not that everyone working in finance, mining, labour hire or other scandal-prone sectors lacks a moral compass. It’s just that the attraction of bonuses and other incentives can quickly lead the best of us to lose our sense of direction. Human behaviour is shaped by the logic of the systems we inhabit. And, as NAB chair Ken Henry so memorably put it when he was grilled at the royal commission, “The capitalist model is that businesses have no responsibility other than to maximise profits for shareholders.”

Henry was echoing the views of economist Milton Friedman, who famously railed against the idea that corporations owed any kind of responsibility to the community beyond increasing their profits. Some reporting missed the fact that Henry was arguing, contra Friedman, that the banks needed to move away from treating “customers in purely instrumental terms, as a means to an end, rather than the end in itself.”

Treating people as ends in themselves is surely what Jim Chalmers had in mind when he wrote about creating “a better capitalism,” one that is uniquely Australian and “values-based.” It is a welcome prospect, and the treasurer has offered some glimmers of how it might be achieved.

A wellbeing budget that broadens what gets measured beyond the traditional metrics of GDP growth is long overdue. Welcome, too, is Chalmers’s emphasis on “place-based initiatives” in low-income areas like Logan, in his own electorate, to give communities “the genuine input, local leadership, resources and authority to define a new and better future especially for kids.”

Hearteningly, Chalmers draws on the work of leading thinkers like Mariana Mazzucato, who argues that contemporary economics has lost the moral sentiments that framed the Enlightenment ideas of Adam Smith, and now too readily mistakes price for value. Anyone who turns a profit ends up being a “wealth creator,” even when their earnings are derived from products like gaming machines or cigarettes and the social and financial costs are picked up by the community and government.

Chalmers, like Mazzucato, recognises that markets are not a natural phenomenon that sprang fully formed onto the landscape. They are human systems shaped by policies, laws and incentives. This is obvious from mundane examples — local-content quotas to encourage Australian TV production, for example, or building regulations to ensure fire safety in high-rise towers. If our aim is wellbeing, then we must design markets accordingly, and push to the margins the kind of knuckleduster capitalism revealed at the financial services royal commission and in the Times’s reporting.

Alongside the three crises at the heart of his essay — the global financial crisis, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine — Chalmers refers to Australia’s recent catastrophic fires and floods. And he acknowledges the need to “repair” long-neglected policy fields like “skills and training, energy and climate transition, the standard of aged care, women’s participation and economic equality, equal opportunities more broadly, including in regions and disadvantaged communities, and the unsustainable state of the nation’s books.” The government certainly has its work cut out.

But I can’t help feeling that Chalmers is waging his campaign for kinder capitalism with one hand tied behind his back. He makes only one reference to taxation in the essay — and that is to promise more transparent reporting on “tax expenditures” (concessions like negative gearing and private health insurance rebates that mean the government forgoes revenue). He wants “growth that puts equality and equal opportunity at the centre” and writes that “the type of growth matters — and its distribution matters.” Yet the word “redistribution” doesn’t get a look-in, let alone alongside another unmentioned word, “wealth.” Chalmers wants to tackle disadvantage but is silent on privilege.

Talk of equal opportunity without reference to tax and redistribution fails to take us very far beyond Scott Morrison’s empty notion that those who have a go will get a go. Admittedly, Labor is far more committed than the Coalition to education, training, childcare and healthcare — the kind of public investment that can bring such dreams closer. But if we want equality of opportunity then we must also tackle equality of outcomes. Capitalism is competitive, but we don’t all enter the race at the same point. Some of us get a big head start, and it would be only fair to even things up a bit.

Programs to build opportunity also require significant funding, and apart from extra borrowing — another no-go area for Chalmers given the “trillion dollars of debt” he inherited from the Coalition — the only way to raise sufficient money is through the tax system. Tax is not just good for raising revenue, though, it is also a powerful tool for shaping markets and influencing behaviour, as we saw with the Gillard government’s short-lived carbon price. It is also the most effective way to moderate inequality — and if Labor wants greater equality of opportunity, then this is what it must do.

Jim Chalmers starts and ends his essay with the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. I’m sure he’s also familiar with the more recent thinker John Rawls. In his Theory of Justice as Fairness, Rawls identified several reasons for regulating economic and social inequalities.

First, “it seems wrong that some or much of society should be amply provided for, while many, or even a few, suffer hardship.”

Second, large social and economic inequalities “tend to support political inequality.” We need to address inequality, he says, “to prevent one part of society from dominating the rest.”

Third, inequality shapes our sense of self, encouraging those towards the bottom to feel inferior and those at the top to feel superior. Rawls thought the attitudes engendered by inequality were great vices: “deference and servility on one side and a will to dominate and arrogance on the other.”

Rawls didn’t want to bring everyone down to the same level. He accepted that differences in status and hierarchy would persist, and probably recognised that they were necessary to drive ambition. But he insisted that “a well-moderated inequality is a condition of economic and political justice.” And such moderation cannot be achieved without progressive tax systems to redistribute income and wealth.

Of course, Jim Chalmers doesn’t want to scare the horses or provide conservative media with a new stick with which to bash Labor by hinting that he might follow the advice of most credible commentators (including the International Monetary Fund) and repeal the stage 3 tax cuts. Yet it is hard to see how Labor can fund the necessary services in care, education and environmental protection, balance the books, shape markets and increase opportunity without fundamental tax reform.

If a Labor treasurer in a government riding high in the polls can’t lead from the front by putting these issues on the agenda, then who can? •

The post Building a better capitalism appeared first on Inside Story.

We find ourselves in the former group. We were deeply moved by the Netflix series, directed by the critically acclaimed American documentary film-maker Liz Garbus, and were absorbed by the book. It isn’t simply the human drama that gripped us, or our sympathy for Harry and Meghan. We also see significant implications for Australia in the way the debate over their actions has played out.

Any account of these recent events must begin with Princess Diana, for it is increasingly apparent that her rebelliousness lives on strongly in Prince Harry and is evident in Meghan’s attitudes and behaviour. When Diana was alive, many people saw her as the best thing going for a stodgy and rapidly fading royal family. What’s often forgotten is that before her death in August 1997 she had become a prominent social activist.

We were particularly struck by footage in the BBC documentary, Heart of the Matter, showing her walking in protective clothing through a recently cleared minefield in Angola earlier in 1997. “I’d read the statistics that Angola has the highest percentage of amputees anywhere in the world,” she explained to the camera. “That one person in every 333 had lost a limb, most of them through landmine explosions. But that hadn’t prepared me for the reality.”

We were also struck by another TV image: Diana sitting by the bedside of an HIV/AIDS sufferer in a hospital. During a visit to Cape Town to see her brother, Earl Spencer, in 1997 Diana had met with Nelson Mandela, who praised her dedication to helping those infected with HIV/AIDS. “We saw her sitting on the beds of AIDS patients and shaking hands with them, and that changed perceptions dramatically with regards to AIDS,” Mandela recalled. He also expressed his appreciation for Diana’s visit to children in Angola crippled by landmines, observing that she had helped inspire the campaign to destroy South African landmines.

An important feature of Diana’s social activism was its internationalism. As well as AIDS awareness and prevention, she supported charities and organisations committed to battling poverty and homelessness, visited charities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Nepal, India and other countries fighting leprosy, and opposed the stigma surrounding mental illness.

In the last year of her life, Diana began dating Dodi Fayed, an Egyptian producer whose well-known films included Chariots of Fire. Perhaps her attraction to an Egyptian man partly reflected a desire to extend her consciousness beyond England with an act of love that was also a rebellious act. After all, Egypt had been the scene of perfidies and infamies characteristic of the British Empire, especially the crushing (with the help of Australian soldiers) of the gathering movement for Egyptian independence in 1919.

The open grief of the British public after Diana’s death led us to believe that the tabloids had learned their lesson and would no longer harass, intrude on and exploit the royal family. We are astonished by our naivety.

Despite his decade-long career in the British army, Harry undoubtedly carries on his mother’s tradition of rebelliousness and internationalism. He is patron of a leading landmine-clearance charity, the Halo Trust, and has called for the world to become free of those weapons by 2025. Twenty-two years after Diana, he retraced his mother’s footsteps in Angola.

After walking along the suburban street that was once filled with explosives, he said it was “quite emotional” to retrace Diana’s steps “and to see the transformation that has taken place, from an unsafe and desolate place into a vibrant community of local businesses and colleges… I’m incredibly proud of what she’s been able to do and meet these kids here who were born on this street.”

A news agency photo shows Harry sitting beneath the Diana Tree, which marks the spot where Diana was pictured in the minefield. “Landmines,” he said, “are an unhealed scar of war.” In 2014 he had established the Invictus Games to support soldiers permanently injured in combat.

Harry and Meghan have also taken a leading role in drawing attention to the needs of people with mental illness. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, Harry revealed his own difficulties with mental distress while Meghan discussed her depression, experience of a suicidal state and the shocking refusal of the Palace to offer mental health support when she asked for it during her time in England. Under royal protocol, Meghan was compelled to give up her keys, passport and driver’s licence and only got them back when she returned to the United States.

In the same year, 2021, Harry and Oprah made a series of educational programs entitled The Me You Can’t See exploring mental illness and suggesting ways of alleviating it. In Spare, Harry provides considerably more detail about his struggle with mental illness over several years and how, in therapy, he finally came to terms with his mother’s death.

Throughout these years, the tabloid scrutiny of the couple was intense. In his interview with Oprah, Harry compared his relationship with Meghan to the hounding of his mother “while she was in a relationship with someone who wasn’t white.” He feared that history would repeat itself, that like Diana they would be “followed, photographed, chased, harassed” relentlessly. This fear, and the extent of the persecution of Meghan, is described in much more depth in both Harry and Meghan and, especially, Spare.

Among the key points to emerge in the Netflix series is the relationship between the tabloid press and “the Firm.” Harry’s explanation of how the London tabloids work with the royal family’s media staff to produce stories for the front page is dynamite; in his view it was the Firm as much as the tabloids who sought to destroy the Duchess of Sussex. The underlying racism of the tabloids and the royal family are laid bare.

Spare follows up with a great deal more detail on the toxic interdependence of the Firm and the tabloid media. We learn how the relationship between Meghan and William and Kate seemed to start well enough (William and Kate had loved Meghan in Suits) but soon deteriorated, going from one small conflict to the next.

For Harry, the problem of the British media and the royal family goes back a long way, to his mother’s death and the events preceding it. He is horrified that the paparazzi who chased her until her car crashed stood around photographing her, rather than trying to help, as she lay dying. He is shocked that no attempt was made to arrest the paparazzi involved, a failure he believes has only encouraged the tabloids to intrude into his own and his family’s private life.

Spare is, in fact, a great autobiography, a j’accuse that accumulates damning details to intensifying, almost unbearable effect until Harry and Meghan escape.

As historians, we were surprised by Harry and Meghan, which we hadn’t expected to be so thoroughly informed by recent historical scholarship. But the two people chosen as key commentators give a clue to its quality. David Olusoga, a professor of public history at the University of Manchester, has written, produced, directed or appeared in a string of TV documentaries, including Black and British: A Forgotten History and, most recently, Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners. Afua Hirsch is a journalist with the Guardian and author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. Between them, supplemented by archival footage and narrative commentary, they bring the British and world historical context to life.

In episode three of the series, Olusoga comments that “this little island off the coast of Europe was at the centre of the biggest empire the world has ever seen” and goes on to ask at whose cost, pointing towards Britain’s history of slavery. Hirsch comments that “Britain had a ‘deep south’ that was just as brutal, that actually enslaved more Africans than the United States of America did.” Britain’s deep south was the Caribbean, overseas, far away, “out of sight and out of mind.”

After an unseen narrator points out that slavery fuelled the early British Empire in North America, Hirsch says that the first-ever “commercial slave voyage conducted by Britain was personally financed by Queen Elizabeth I. And it continued to be financed by kings and queens, right up until its abolition.” Even in its abolition in the 1830s, Britain sided with the slave owners, many of whom were also members of the British parliament, by compensating them at huge cost.

Olusoga and Hirsch are drawing here on the scholarship of the Legacies of Slavery Project, based at University College London and led by historians Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland. The project’s extensive research has helped change British public awareness and understanding, and stimulated among historians a greater interest in the consequences of the end of slavery in the British Empire. Jane Lydon, Zoë Laidlaw, Emma Christopher and others have been tracing how, after abolition, people, ideas, and finance were transferred from the Caribbean to Britain’s settler colonies.  Australia was obviously among them, as recent research by Christopher and Lydon highlights.

Harry and Meghan also considers the more recent historical context. Olusoga draws attention to the migration of many Black and Brown people to Britain from the mid twentieth century — so much so that London “began to look, for the only time in its history, like it actually was the centre of an empire that was mainly made up of non-white people.” When Harry and Meghan became engaged, he says, the royal family seemed at last to have begun catching up with modern British society.

We see Harry and Meghan at a memorial service to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Stephen Lawrence, the eighteen-year-old boy killed by white racists. Only two of his attackers were ever brought to justice. Hirsch says that Harry and Meghan’s attendance was highly significant, speaking to “the pain that many people still feel as a result of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.”

Olusoga and Hirsch reappear in episode five to argue that the failure of the Palace to defend Meghan from press persecution was a huge disaster for the future of the monarchy. “Here was a woman,” says Olusoga, “who just looked like most of the people in the Commonwealth, and they somehow, for some reason, couldn’t find the capacity to protect her, to represent her, to stand by her, to take on vested power in her name, to fight for her.” For Hirsch, the departure of Harry and Meghan “felt like the death of a dream” that a truly inclusive Britain could form and flourish.

In Australia, coverage of the series and the memoir gradually shifted from a kind of can’t-watch-it, won’t-read-it scorn to a very mixed but more earnest consideration of the issues the series and the book raise. One of those issues is the future of the monarchy in Australia.

In Spare, Harry reveals a continuing interest in the Commonwealth, and especially the countries that still regard the British monarch as also their own. He writes about the outstanding success of his and Meghan’s royal tour of South Africa in September 2019, the first since that country returned to the Commonwealth in 1994. They were welcomed there as representing a new direction for the royal family and for the Commonwealth, and they both felt that in this shift they had an important role to play.

Yet the role of the monarchy in the Commonwealth has come into increasing question. The final episode of Harry and Meghan shows the monarchy in trouble in the Caribbean, as member nations continue to reject a past shaped by slavery within the British Empire. With reparations increasingly on the agenda, and aware of the royal family’s historical role in the system of slavery, some Commonwealth nations no longer want the British monarch as their head of state. Barbados declared itself a republic in November last year and Jamaica has declared its intention to become a republic by 2025.

What about Australia? What should our future relationship be with this dysfunctional British family? Does the Harry and Meghan story have any implications for us?

While the Australian republican movement has so far said little about the couple, commentary on their significance for an Australian republic has been growing. We agree with Jenny Hocking when she writes, “This now openly feuding family provides our head of state, imposed on us and fourteen other Commonwealth nations by dynastic succession and inherited title alone, in which we have no say and no relevance. It inevitably reignites questions about why Australia is still a constitutional monarchy.”

Apart from the difficulty in imagining a popular and workable alternative, one of the main obstacles to the move to a republic in Australia has been the popularity of the royal family. We grew up in that environment. John Docker remembers his English mother listening to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on radio. Ann Curthoys recalls keeping a scrapbook in 1953 of the coronation, as most schoolchildren did, and being one of the 50,000 schoolchildren marshalled in the Newcastle Showground to spell out Welcome (she was in the W) when the Queen and Prince Philip visited Australia the following year.

Lyndall Ryan remembers that the biggest event in her life until she started high school in 1955 was the Queen’s first visit to Australia in 1954. The Australian Women’s Weekly then kept her up to date on the royal family, and in particular their tours to other parts of the Commonwealth. She didn’t seriously consider becoming a republican until after the Whitlam government was dismissed by the governor-general on 11 November 1975, and until Jenny Hocking published The Palace Letters in 2021 she was convinced that the governor-general’s action had nothing to do with the Queen.

But republicanism has had a chequered history in Australia. It gathered increased support after Whitlam’s dismissal, reached a peak during the 1990s and subsided after the defeat of a referendum on the question in 1999. It has been undergoing something of a revival in recent years, especially as Queen Elizabeth’s reign was drawing to a close. Our prime minister is in fact a republican, though he is insisting right now that the matter of the Voice to Parliament, and indeed the Uluru Statement from the Heart generally, must take priority.

Alongside the essential debates over the Voice and a Treaty, it is time to step up public debate about Australia’s becoming a republic. Indeed, the question of the republic is not entirely separate from those debates: they are all part of a necessary reshaping of modern Australia. While Indigenous commentators have focused on the Uluru statement and its proposals, support has been evident for an Australian republic that truly recognises Indigenous sovereignty.

Harry and Meghan and Spare demonstrate with great clarity how the monarchy continues to be shaped by British history, British concerns and British symbolism, and not at all by Australian or indeed Commonwealth ones. The evolution of the monarchy as an institution is clearly outside our control and always will be. The tabloid British media have deeply compromised the monarchy and the royal family, and sections of the Australian media, especially those that are Murdoch-controlled, have too often joined in. With several Caribbean nations forging new republican paths for themselves, surely it is time for Australia to do the same. •

The post Harry, Meghan and the republic  appeared first on Inside Story.

He would say that, wouldn’t he? But what was dismissed at the time as political hype is looking less improbable these days. In the dazzle of the seven teals storming home in previously safe Liberal seats in last year’s election, the Greens’ achievement in increasing their numbers by six — from one to four in the lower house and from nine to twelve in the Senate — has tended to be overlooked.

Representation in the Senate fell to eleven this week with the defection of Lidia Thorpe, the first Aboriginal senator from Victoria and the Greens’ First Nations spokesperson, over her advocacy of a No vote in this year’s referendum. But the loss of her Senate spot has the upside of ending a damaging internal split over the Voice.

In Victoria, although the party’s predictions of a “greenslide” in November’s election didn’t eventuate, its representation rose from three to four in the Legislative Assembly and from one to four in the Legislative Council. In a long and continuing journey, the Greens have not so much stormed the barricades as crept up on opponents who have habitually underestimated them.

Not so long ago, winning seats in lower houses was considered a hurdle too high for independents or minor parties. The Labor and Liberal parties simply had too much of a head start when it came to exceeding 50 per cent of the two-party vote.

Not anymore. Labor is in power in Canberra with less than a third of the first-preference vote — below its losing result under Bill Shorten in 2019 — while the Coalition parties did only slightly better on primaries (but a lot worse on preferences). Increasingly it is Labor and Liberal preferences that are being distributed to independents and smaller parties rather than the other way around.

It is thirty-three years since the Greens first won a place in the Senate, where proportional representation lowers the barrier for election to 14.3 per cent in a typical half-Senate election. That was with the election of Western Australia’s Jo Vallentine, who had previously represented the Nuclear Disarmament Party in the Senate.

In 1990, the Greens’ lower house vote was just 1.4 per cent; even though environmental issues were prominent that year, it was the Australian Democrats, with 11.3 per cent in the lower house, who benefited, together with the Hawke government, courtesy of Democrat preferences.

When Brown entered the Senate in 1996, he and Dee Margetts from Western Australia were the party’s sole representatives. At the following election the party’s national vote was still only 2.6 per cent in the lower house and 2.7 per cent in the Senate. Since then, the party has been on a mainly upward trajectory, though not without fluctuations and setbacks.

A significant shift upwards started in 2001, and by the 2010 election, when climate change policy was prominent, the Greens vote reached 11.8 per cent in the House and 13 per cent in the Senate. That was the year the party broke through in the lower house, with the election of Adam Bandt in the previously safe Labor seat of Melbourne. (Michael Organ had won a lower house seat for the Greens in a by-election the Liberals didn’t contest in the NSW seat of Cunningham in 2002 but was defeated in the general election in 2004.)

Twenty-ten was also the year the Greens had their first taste of real power — and its consequences — at the federal level. Their alliance with Julia Gillard’s minority government produced an agreement on climate change measures, but the association with her increasingly unpopular administration, defeated at the hands of a rampaging Tony Abbott in 2013, rubbed off. The Greens lost more than a quarter of their 2010 vote. But they resumed their upward trajectory in the next and subsequent elections.

In last year’s election, the Greens’ vote went up to 12.3 per cent in the House of Representatives and 12.7 per cent in the Senate. Its lower house vote was a record, whereas its Senate vote was marginally below its previous high. There might never have been a better time to stand for election representing anyone other than the major parties, but the competition for the minor-party and independent vote had also intensified.

According to the Australian Election Study — the detailed survey conducted by academics after each election — 24 per cent of the people who voted for the teals in 2022 had supported the Greens in the 2019 election. That was more than the 18 per cent who had previously voted for the Liberals.

Combined with the 31 per cent of teal supporters who had voted Labor in 2019, this at least partly tactical voting put the teals into parliament. They also reduced the Greens’ overall vote, though not in the seats that mattered. To the contrary, the party boosted its numbers in the House of Representatives from one to four, with the re-election of Bandt for a fifth term, and three seats in inner Brisbane won with strong grassroots campaigns, including two taken from the Liberal National Party

On one view, the Greens have reached or are close to the upper limit of their vote, except now in Victoria. Increasing their representation in the Senate will certainly be difficult for the foreseeable future, given they already have two senators in each state. But in the lower house the argument that the party has hit a ceiling is based partly on three assumptions that are looking outdated.

One is that a vote for the Greens is wasted because they can’t win. Increasingly, in inner-urban seats, that’s no longer true.

Another is that the party is too radical and left-wing to command mainstream support. So how come it’s winning Liberal seats? Possibly because the whole notion of left and right is breaking down, at least among younger voters.

The third assumption is that the Greens can’t overcome the dominance of the major parties and their habit of stealing any of their opponents’ policies that attract significant support. That tactic is becoming much harder for the big parties because they’re shedding support at both ends: the Liberals are losing votes to the teals on the one hand, and to One Nation on the other, while Labor struggles to straddle the gap between more conservative voters in the suburbs and those attracted to the Greens in the inner cities. And then there is the Brisbane factor, where community activism and volunteering, together with a solid base in local government, means Greens are identifying better than other parties with real voters.

Demographics are also working in the Greens’ favour. Better-educated voters are more likely to vote Greens and their numbers are rising as a proportion of the population. Younger voters are much more likely to support the Greens and more likely than in the past to keep doing so as they get older, countering the effect of an ageing population. Concern about global warming has been rising among the general voting population and it has been rising more among the young.

The greatest challenge for the Greens is spreading beyond its base in the inner cities. The suburban vote is large and — combined with the country vote in the case of the Coalition — that means there is still a long way to go to replace a big party.

Not that this deters Bob Brown who, when I contacted him for an update, stuck unhesitatingly to his prediction of the Greens as an unstoppable force. “I think it is too slow, but it’s inevitable and inexorable because the old parties — Labor, Liberal and National — simply can’t change from being in favour of widespread exploitation of nature,” he says. “These days I liken it to the slowly rising sea levels: people aren’t taking notice until the next storm hits.”

If the Albanese government remains popular — a big ask for any government these days — it may be able to stave off further Greens advances. But that can’t be taken for granted. The big risk for Labor is defections by supporters who think the government is not doing enough to tackle climate change.

The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss, who has worked for the Greens in the past, sees a particular vulnerability in the government’s position on coal and gas exports. “Labor for decades has focused on domestic emissions reductions, and they have always been slightly more ambitious than the Liberals and that has always been enough to win them first or second preferences on climate change,” he tells me. “Labor’s blind spot is supporting new coalmines and gas wells and arguing it doesn’t matter because they don’t count towards Australia’s emissions. This is an enormous opportunity for the Greens and the teals.”

The government argues that it is doing no more than following international practice in counting emissions where they are generated. But the United Nations and the International Energy Agency, among others, have said there can be no new coal and gas projects if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. The Greens claim 114 such projects are waiting for approval in Australia.

Underlying the government’s approach is the hope that the market will get it off the hook: that falling demand for coal and, in the longer run, gas will see many projects shelved. That means it won’t bear the odium for blocking development and jobs. In the meantime it has supported the development of the giant Scarborough gas project off the Western Australian coast, although on one estimate it could produce three times Australia’s current annual domestic emissions over its lifetime.

Environment minister Tanya Plibersek said last year that it was not sustainable or reasonable in a modern economy like Australia to argue for a stop to mining (overstating the Greens’ policy of no new coal or gas projects). Besides, so goes the refrain, other countries will simply buy their fossil fuels from somewhere else.

The trouble is that the United Nations and the International Energy Agency say that’s not good enough. Particularly not, so the Greens argue, since Australia is the world’s third-largest exporter of fossil fuels and new projects will mean we miss our targets for emissions reduction.

Labor is caught politically on this issue. Stopping what has been an important source of Australia’s wealth would create a sizeable target for the Coalition, as would the risk of domestic gas shortages, though that should be avoidable. But the hypocrisy of its present policy creates the real risk of further haemorrhaging to the Greens.

The teals aren’t buying the government’s arguments either. Sophie Scamps, who won the Sydney seat of Mackellar from the Liberals, said in September it was hard to believe that “new coal and gas projects are being assessed and approved without any consideration given to the future impact that emissions from these projects will have on our environment and on our nation.”

But the Greens have their own dilemma: they need to avoid being seen as wreckers. After making loud threatening noises over the legislation enshrining Labor’s 43 per cent emissions reduction target, they ended up supporting it after securing minor concessions. Now the party is ramping up the rhetoric over the bill for the safeguard mechanism, which requires major polluters, including those opening new gas wells, to gradually reduce their emissions.

Bob Brown’s arguments about the Greens’ future notwithstanding, nothing is inevitable in politics. Independents and smaller parties have come and gone in the past. The Democratic Labor Party, formed from a split in Labor in the 1950s, maintained representation in the Senate for two decades and helped keep Labor out of office for twenty-three years by directing its preferences to the Liberals. The Australian Democrats, founded by former Liberal minister Don Chipp “to keep the bastards honest,” were a force on the centre left of politics for more than three decades. They have both faded to near irrelevance.

But the Greens are looking increasingly like a permanent fixture. Apart from their federal representation, the party has twenty-seven MPs in state and territory parliaments and more than one hundred in local government.

With growth, though, have come some of the same issues that make life difficult for the main parties. Stephen Luntz, the party’s long-serving Victorian psephologist, identifies three streams within the party: social democratic, a more radical or Marxist grouping, and a pure environmental strand. “We do best when we manage to harness those altogether,” he says. “There are times when we don’t and some members seek to push others out.”

This has been evident particularly in New South Wales (though also in Victoria), with outbreaks of factional fighting, threatened splits and resignations. In last year’s federal election, the Greens’ vote in New South Wales was 10 per cent, well below the national average of 12.3 per cent.

In Victoria, meanwhile, a brawl over perceived attitudes to transgender members escalated at the end of last year to an extraordinary threat to expel the Victorian Greens from the national party, which happens to be headed by Victoria’s Adam Bandt.

Going into next month’s state election in New South Wales, the party nevertheless has three seats in each of the two houses of parliament. The trend away from the main parties, reinforced by both the federal and Victorian elections, provides opportunities, though optional preferential voting will make it harder for the Greens to win lower house seats.

To date, the Greens have enjoyed the luxury of a party seldom held responsible for implementing its policies. Twice when it wielded real influence it suffered politically. In 2009, Labor blamed it for blocking the Rudd government’s legislation for an emissions trading scheme because it wanted something better. In 2013 it used its alliance with the minority Gillard government to negotiate significant measures to tackle climate change but was hurt by the association with a divided and unpopular Labor Party.

With more MPs in the current parliament, the Greens are walking a fine line between taking a stand against new coal and gas mines and not blocking progress on tackling climate change. The extent to which the party carries off this balancing act will help determine its future trajectory.

But the climb up the electoral mountain will get steeper as more attention is paid to Greens policies and the consequences of implementing them inevitably arouse controversy. That is the price of power. •

The post Walking a fine line appeared first on Inside Story.

Jill witnessed Indonesia’s military incursions first-hand when she was part of a student delegation visiting the new nation in 1975 to celebrate its release from Portuguese colonial rule. A group of journalists covering the invasion for the Seven and Nine networks asked her about conditions at Balibo, a town on the border with Indonesian West Timor that she had just visited.

It was a bush warfare situation out there, she told them, but if they kept their heads down they should be okay. Regardless of their precautions, though, all five journalists in the group were murdered by members of the Indonesian military and became known as the Balibo Five. Journalist Roger East, who was sent to investigate their deaths, was also executed.

Jill — who died in Melbourne on 2 December aged seventy-seven — began doggedly and dangerously seeking the truth about the murders and reporting on conditions more broadly in Timor-Leste. She spent twenty years in Portugal working with the Timorese resistance-in-exile and making secret visits to the island (from which she was banned by the Indonesian government). On one occasion she was captured and briefly imprisoned. Her determination to keep the story alive often met with media indifference and Australian government attempts to play down a complex geopolitical situation.

Her first book, East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism, was published in 1978, three years after Indonesia’s invasion, and her 2001 study, Cover-Up, became the basis of the highly regarded feature film Balibo in 2009.

Timor-Leste regained its independence after much bloodshed in 2002. By then, Jill had set up the Living Memory Project, which recorded the testimonies of former political prisoners and victims of torture. Her reporting also played a crucial part at the 2007 NSW coroner’s enquiry into one of the murders, which finally established the role of the Indonesian military in all the journalists’ deaths.

“I was told recently that my coverage of the Balibo story was what really alerted people to the East Timor issue and that began it all,” Jill said in a documentary we made together for ABC Radio National in 2017. “I felt proud of that… An injustice is an injustice and it doesn’t change with time and people need to be brought to account.”

After moving back to Australia in 1999, Jill lived in Darwin and then Melbourne, where she wrote Finding Santana (2010) about her secret return to Timor-Leste for a rendezvous with guerilla leader Nino Konis Santana. But her last book, published in 2014, was quite different.

Run for Your Life covered her unhappy childhood with outwardly respectable but violent adoptive parents in the Victorian seaside town of Barwon Heads, and her political awakening at Monash University. Her well-honed sense of rebellion made her a natural for membership of the radical Monash University Labor Club, and her achievements included disrupting a Billy Graham evangelical gathering and being one of the only female speakers at Melbourne’s 1970 anti–Vietnam war march. She also ran a feminist bookshop — Alice’s Restaurant — in Greville Street, Prahran, and helped found an early feminist magazine, Vashti’s Voice.

Jill found out later that her adoptive mother had dobbed her in to ASIO for subversive activities. When she gained access to her file she was amazed and amused by its size.

It was only when she reached her sixties that Jill decided to risk finding out about her birth parents, and that story too is covered in Run for Your Life. To her relief (and with a great degree of trepidation) she discovered that her mother was still alive and willing to meet. “I’ve thought about you every day” were the first words she said to Jill when they spoke by phone.

Having known Jill since her return from Portugal I was honoured to be asked to drive her to the rendezvous with her mother at an anonymous bus stop in a northern suburb in 2013. The woman we saw walking briskly towards us was remarkably like Jill, with her short crop and outfit of baggy trousers, loose shirt and small beaded necklace. Given the age gap was only fifteen years, she could have been Jill’s older sister.

The hug they shared was their first bodily contact in sixty-eight years. They quickly established how much they had in common: both were atheists, passionate about history and politics, and fiercely independent. As Jill said at the time, “I think we shared more than a few genes.”

Although her mother died two years later, the reunion was profoundly healing for both of them.

Jill was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the end of 2016. It was a particularly cruel diagnosis for a woman whose life had been spent travelling and uncovering truths in very dark corners of the world, and she took it badly.

In the radio documentary about her life, we covered her medical diagnosis and its ramifications, which included severely curtailed freedoms.

As she commented rather bitterly, “People say that my capacity to cope with [dementia] is very limited but I don’t see it that way, because I have spent most of my life as a foreign correspondent and I’ve been under fire from the Indonesian army and from the American air force and I’ve come up against quite hair-raising situations; I’ve survived all of these, some people might say through my rat cunning.”

Jolliffe was nuggetty, cynical, sometimes ornery but also generous, witty and fiercely principled. She was also a very fine journalist and, for the people of Timor-Leste, a hero.

One of many fine tributes to her came from Timorese leader Xanana Gusmão: “Jill was an activist, a rebel and a fighter. At great cost to herself, she persistently exposed the reality of the Indonesian military occupation of Timor-Leste and supported the struggle of our people. She is one of us.” •

The post Running for her life appeared first on Inside Story.

Amid these competing visions of dystopia and utopia, ChatGPT continues to generate a lot of buzz, tweets and hot takes.

It is indeed impressive. Type in almost any prompt and it will immediately return a coherent textual response, from a short factual answer to long-form essays, stories and poems.

But it is not new. It is an iterative improvement on the previous three versions of GPT, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer. This machine-learning model, created by OpenAI in 2018, significantly advanced natural language processing — the ability of computers to “understand” human languages. An even more powerful GPT is due for release in 2023.

When it comes down to it, though, ChatGPT behaves like a computer program, not a human. Murray Shanahan, an expert in cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, has offered a useful explanation of just how decidedly not-human systems like ChatGPT are.

Take the question “Who was the first person to walk on the moon?” ChatGPT is able to respond with “Neil Armstrong.”

As Professor Shanahan points out, in this example the question really being asked of ChatGPT is “given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of (English) text, what words are most likely to follow the sequence ‘who was the first person to land on the moon.’”

As a matter of probability and statistics, ChatGPT determines the answer to be “Neil Armstrong.” It isn’t referring to Neil Armstrong himself, but to a combination of the textual symbols it has mathematically determined are most likely to follow the textual symbols in the prompt. ChatGPT has no knowledge of the space race, the moon landing, or even the moon for that matter.

Herein lies the trick. ChatGPT functions by reducing text to probabilistic patterns of symbols and completely disregards the need for understanding. There is a profound brutalism in this approach and an inherent deceit in the yielded output, which feigns comprehension.

Not surprisingly, technologies like ChatGPT have been criticised for parroting text with no underlying sense of its meaning. Yet the results are impressive and continually improving.

Ironically, by completely disregarding meaning, context and understanding, OpenAI has built a form of artificial intelligence that demonstrates these very attributes incredibly convincingly. Does it even matter that ChatGPT has no idea what it is talking about, when it seems so plausible?

So how should we think about a technology like ChatGPT — a technology that is “stupid” in its internal operations but seemingly approaching comprehension in its output? A good place to start is to think of it in terms of what it actually is – a model.

As one of my favourite professors used to remind me, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” (The aphorism is credited to statistician George Box.) ChatGPT is built on a model of human language that draws on a forty-five-terabyte dataset of text taken largely from Wikipedia, books and certain Reddit pages. It uses this model to predict the best responses to generate. Though its source material is humungous, as a model of the way language is used in the world it is still limited and, as the aphorism goes, “wrong.”

This is not to play down the technical achievements of those who have worked on the GPTs. I am merely pointing out that language can’t be reduced to a static dataset of forty-five terabytes. Language lives and evolves through interactions people have every minute of every day. It exists in a state of constant flux, in all manner of places — including places beyond the reach of the internet.

So if we accept that the model underpinning ChatGPT is wrong, in what sense is it useful?

Leading AI commentators Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor pin the utility of ChatGPT to instances where accuracy and truth are not necessary — where the user can check for correctness when they’re debugging code, for example, or translating — and where truth is irrelevant, such as in writing fiction. It’s a view broadly shared by the founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman.

But that perspective overlooks a glaring example of where ChatGPT will be misused: where inaccuracy and mistruth are the intention.

We need to think of the impact of ChatGPT as a technology deployed — and for that matter developed — during our post-truth age. In an environment defined by increasing distrust in institutions and each other, it is naive to overlook ChatGPT’s potential to generate language that serves as a vehicle for anything from inaccuracies to conspiracy theories.

Directing ChatGPT towards nefarious purposes turned out to be easy. Without too much effort I bypassed ChatGPT’s much-vaunted safety functions to generate a newspaper article alleging that Victorian opposition leader Matthew Guy has a criminal history, is implicated in matters relating to Hunter Biden’s laptop, and has been clandestinely plotting with Joe Biden to invade New Zealand and seize its strategic position and natural resources.

While I had to stretch the conspiratorial limits of my imagination, ChatGPT obliged immediately with a coherent piece of text stitching it all together.

As Abeba Birhane and Deborah Raji from the Mozilla Foundation have observed, technologies like ChatGPT have a long history of perpetuating bigotry and occasioning real-world harm. And yet billions of dollars and lashings of human ingenuity continue to be directed to developing them. Surely we need to be asking why?

The prospect of technologies like ChatGPT swamping the internet with conspiracies is certainly a worst-case scenario. But we need to face the possibility and reassert the role of language as a carrier of meaning and the primary medium for constructing our shared reality. To do otherwise is to risk succumbing to the flattened simulations of the world projected by technology systems.

To test the limitations of the world as captured and regurgitated by ChatGPT, I was interested to find out how far its mimicry extended. How would it go describing a place dear to my heart, a place that would be far from the minds and experiences of the North American programmers who set the parameters of its dataset?

I spent a few years living in Darwin and have fond memories of it as a unique place that needs to be experienced to be known. Amid Canberra’s cold start to summer, I have been dreaming of the stifling heat of this time of year in Darwin — the gathering storm clouds, the disappointment when they dissipate without bringing rain, and the evening walks my partner and I would take by the beach in Nightcliff, seeking any coastal breeze to bring relief from the heavy, expectant atmosphere of the tropics in build-up.

So I asked ChatGPT to write a short story about a trip to Nightcliff beach in December. For additional flourish, I requested it in the style of Tim Winton.

In a matter of seconds, ChatGPT started to generate my story. The mimicry of Tim Winton was evident, though nothing like reading his actual work. But the ignorance about Darwin in December was comical as it went on to describe a generic beach scene in the depths of a northern hemisphere winter.

The story was replete with trite descriptions of cold weather, dark-grey choppy seas and a gritty protagonist confronting the elements (as any caricature of a Tim Winton protagonist would). At one point, the main character “wrapped his coat tightly around him and shivered in the biting wind.” Without regard for crocodiles or lethal jellyfish, he dives in for a bracing swim, “feeling the power of the water all around him.” He even spots a seal!

Platforms like ChatGPT are remarkable achievements in mathematics and machine learning, but they are not intelligent and not capable of knowing the world in the ways we can and do. Yet they maintain a grip on our attention and promote our fears.

We are right to be concerned. It is past time to scrutinise why these technologies are being built, what functions we should direct them towards and which regulations we should subject them to. But we should not lose sight of their limitations, which serve as a valuable reminder of the gift of language and its extraordinary capacity to help us make sense of the world and share it with others. •

The post No idea what it’s talking about appeared first on Inside Story.

Collaery, a former ACT attorney-general, was charged with having breached secrecy laws when he revealed that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service had bugged Timor-Leste government offices in 2004. At the time, Australia was negotiating a maritime boundary straddling a rich natural gas field in the Timor Sea. Also charged was one of Collaery’s clients, a former ASIS officer known as Witness K.

When the case eventually went to trial, Justice David Mossop accepted the Coalition government’s argument that much of the evidence needed to be kept from the public, and some of it even from Collaery himself, to protect national security. But a three-person bench of the ACT Court of Appeal, including the territory’s chief justice, overturned Mossop’s ruling.

Before the court could publish its reasons, Dreyfus’s predecessor, Michaelia Cash, directed the government’s most senior legal officers to seek to have the ruling overturned by the High Court, with a stay on the decision in the meantime. Otherwise, Cash’s lawyers argued, information “likely to prejudice national security” would be made public. Open justice was of “undoubted importance,” they said, but national security considerations had to be given “the greatest weight.”

That argument was received sceptically by chief justice Susan Kiefel and her High Court colleagues. Justice James Edelman asked solicitor-general Stephen Donaghue if the ACT chief justice’s error was merely that she “did not make the order that you sought.” Offered a choice between having the application thrown out or having the stay left in place, Donaghue opted for the latter.

Dreyfus’s termination of the prosecution left the status of the ACT Court of Appeal’s ruling unresolved. Surprisingly, he then asked the court to reconsider its decision to allow the contentious evidence to be made public. The ACT’s new chief justice, Lucy McCallum, heard the application in September, and her decision is now awaited.

The Human Rights Law Centre’s Kieran Pender, who has followed the Collaery case, says it is “very unusual” for the government to try to “relitigate” the Court of Appeal judgement. “Given the question of redactions has already been determined once by the Court of Appeal, and the government has withdrawn the High Court appeal, to attempt a second go at the Court of Appeal is remarkable.”

Instead, says Pender, “the attorney-general should get on with dropping the outstanding prosecutions of whistleblowers David McBride and Richard Boyle and reforming Australia’s lacklustre whistleblowing laws. Whistleblowers should be protected, not prosecuted in secret trials.”

Collaery believes the Albanese government is “encased” by the same circle of security advisers, in and out of the public service, who orchestrated the moves against Witness K and himself. But he can see why Dreyfus might have accepted advice against publication from ASIS director-general Paul Symon, a retired army general and former head of defence intelligence.

“When you’ve got an ex-warrior, albeit with no actual experience in the trade — when you’ve got a man of that eminence and decency, which he has, advising you that publishing the Collaery case would prejudice national security, you accept that advice,” Collaery tells me. “But it’s tripe. It was khaki dressage.”

Beyond the court actions themselves, many influential figures are incensed that responsibility for the murky chain of events stretching back to 2004 could remain unresolved.

Among them is the president of the International Commission of Jurists in Australia, John Dowd, a retired NSW Supreme Court judge and former state Liberal leader. In a letter to prime minister Anthony Albanese on 17 October he called for a royal commission looking at whether ASIS’s bugging operation broke Australian law, whether the secret service was deployed for private commercial gain, whether the national security claims for secrecy are valid, and whether Collaery and Witness K should be compensated.

Not surprisingly, Collaery also wants a royal commission. It should encompass not only the ASIS operation and its propriety, he argues, but also issues of “utter, utter treachery” he says he isn’t at liberty to discuss. Before he was charged, Collaery had security clearance to handle a range of sensitive legal issues involving intelligence agencies and personnel — the very reason why Witness K was originally referred to him for advice in relation to his misgivings about having led the Dili operation.

Collaery particularly wants a fairer outcome for Witness K, who was given a three-month suspended sentence in June last year for conspiring to reveal classified information. He contrasts the treatment he and K received with the kid-glove handling of senior ASIO and other Canberra officials who were exposed as having been compromised by the KGB when the Soviet intelligence agency’s chief archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, handed over a vast trove of secret records following his defection to Britain via Estonia in 1992.

“We never compromised any national security,” says Collaery, “but those who did and were exposed after Vasili Mitrokhin took the stuff to Estonia were just left alone. Not even dishonourably discharged. And allowed to keep their medals and decorations and all the rest.”

Moreover, Collaery adds, “K was never a whistleblower, despite the media constantly calling him that. If anything he was leading the charge as a mutineer. And for good reason, and he wasn’t alone. The reason why they brought it down on us was to stop L, M, N, O, P, Q [from going public]. So the story’s not told.”

On the face of it, a royal commission should appeal to the new government. It could sheet home the duplicitous Timor-Leste dealings to Coalition leaders at the time of the bugging, notably prime minister John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer, and perhaps also other members of the cabinet’s national security committee (which would have included treasurer Peter Costello, attorney-general Philip Ruddock, defence minister Robert Hill and immigration minister Amanda Vanstone).

Yet the idea appears not to have seized Albanese — if the ICJ letter ever got to him. As his department’s acting first assistant secretary for national security, Philip Kimpton, wrote to Dowd, “We are not aware of an intention by government to pursue such a course of action at this time.”

A Labor figure knowledgeable about foreign policy issues explained why the government might be wary about looking into the 2004 spying incident. “Did it continue?” the figure asks, clearly mindful that similar intelligence-gathering activity might well have been going on under the Rudd–Gillard government.

Canberra’s fixation on securing the big undersea gas deposit now known as Greater Sunrise goes back to its first discovery in the late 1960s. Diplomacy, legal argument and espionage were harnessed to negotiate maritime boundaries with Indonesia, Portugal, Indonesia again, and Timor-Leste with the aim of bringing as much of the gas field as possible into Australia’s economic zone. This push by successive Coalition and Labor governments extended over decades.

The Witness K revelations started emerging under Labor, which continued to uphold the boundary negotiated by Downer (with help from the ASIS operation) between 2004 and 2006. It was not until 2018 that Timor-Leste, having had Downer’s 2006 border agreement nullified because it wasn’t negotiated in good faith, convinced an arbitration court at The Hague to endorse a new agreement that moved the border to the middle of the Timor Sea and gave Timor-Leste 80 to 90 per cent of the revenue from Greater Sunrise.

If a royal commission isn’t on the horizon, Albanese and Dreyfus may have opened another avenue for inquiry by creating the new National Anti-Corruption Commission. Susan Connelly, the Josephite sister who fought hard for a median-line boundary and strongly backed Collaery and Witness K, is one who has signalled a reference to the NACC.

This would put targets on the backs of Downer, who later accepted a consultancy from the leader of the Greater Sunrise consortium, Woodside Petroleum, and the late Ashton Calvert, who as secretary of Foreign Affairs supervised ASIS at the time of the bugging and on retirement became a director of Woodside. But the NACC legislation has an escape clause that allows the attorney-general to declare an investigation to be against the national interest.

Foreign minister Penny Wong seems to hope that focusing on practicalities will shift attention away from this rancorous past. In October she appointed former Victorian Labor premier Steve Bracks to broker agreement on developing Greater Sunrise. Bracks’s extensive post-political advocacy for Timor-Leste includes work on the maritime boundary.

Getting the gas field into production has become a matter of urgency for the government in Dili, which has been dipping into its Petroleum Fund — its sovereign wealth fund derived from oil and gas revenues — at an unsustainable rate. The last revenue from existing oil fields will flow into the fund at the end of this year.

If the current rate of withdrawal is maintained, the fund will run down to zero over the next decade. By 2034, according to the country’s finance ministry, Timor-Leste faces “a fiscal cliff” that will necessitate a “radical cut in all spending.” Using similar language, the World Bank has referred to an “inescapable macro-fiscal cliff in the next decade.”

“Timor-Leste is a petro state without much petrol,” says the respected Dili-based think tank La’o Hamutuk in a recent report. The government’s policies “continue to be based on blind faith that, because oil money has carried the country thus far, it will continue to do so indefinitely.”

Politicians in Dili follow former prime minister Xanana Gusmão in pushing for Greater Sunrise to be connected by pipeline to Gusmão’s Tasi Mane scheme. Forecast to cost US$15–20 billion, this complex on the island’s south coast would include an oil refinery, LNG plant, offshore gas and onshore oil pipelines, and a supply base for offshore petroleum projects, along with transport infrastructure and new towns.

Woodside Petroleum and many oil industry experts say the proposed pipeline is too risky. It will need to traverse the 3000-metre-deep, steep-sided, unstable Timor Trench between the gas field and the coast. Other analysts say its revenue and employment benefits have been wildly exaggerated by Tasi Mane’s proponents. Dollar for dollar, investing in coffee production could create six times as many jobs and six times as much GDP growth per dollar as investing in Tasi Mane, says one recent study.

The alternatives to the Greater Sunrise pipeline would be a floating LNG plant, or a connection to existing pipelines in the Timor Sea to transport the gas to Darwin for processing. Timor-Leste would still get most of the revenue but would need to stump up far less capital and would avoid the risk of pipeline failure. Australia might be seen to be getting an undue share of the benefits, though, despite its perfidy.

In September newly elected president José Ramos-Horta tried to pressure Canberra into overruling Woodside’s objections by threatening to bring in China to take over the project. Although China’s banks are reported to have already turned the project down as unfeasible, a Chinese state oil firm is said to maintain a permanent desk inside the office of Timor-Leste’s tiny state oil firm, TimorGAP. Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, has not always put economics ahead of political-strategic factors.

TimorGAP, meanwhile, has released selected passages from a report by British oil industry consultants ERCE claiming that the running costs of the Tasi Mane and Darwin processing options are much the same. TimorGAP is still refusing to release the full 130-page ERCE report, says La’o Hamutuk, despite Ramos-Horta saying, on his Canberra visit, that this would be helpful.

Adelaide consultancy EnergyQuest says it would be far more productive for all parties to be talking instead about plate tectonics. The Indo-Australian plate is moving north at seven centimetres a year, meaning it would move 1.5 metres over the life of the project. “Building a pipeline [to Timor-Leste] subjected to the full force of one of the most rapid tectonic plate movements in the world is an idea that should never have got off the ground,” says EnergyQuest.

But the country’s successful independence struggle left a complex legacy. “In 1999, Timor-Leste ousted the Indonesian occupiers in defiance of ‘experts’ around the world who told them it would never happen,” wrote La’o Hamutuk’s Charles Scheiner in the recent report. “In 2018 they transcended ‘expert’ advice again, coercing Australia to agree to a fair maritime boundary.”

As a result, says Scheiner, “some Timorese leaders, especially veterans of the independence struggle, now believe they can accomplish anything, regardless of physical or economic realities.” That means Steve Bracks has his work cut out if he is seeking to pierce what some call a “mystical” belief in the pipeline — especially if, as seems likely, pipeline-proponent Xanana Gusmão returns as prime minister after next May’s election.

But Bracks may emerge as an envoy to Canberra rather than to Dili, persuading the Australian government to detach Woodside Petroleum from its lead position in the Greater Sunrise consortium, perhaps through a buyout, and let Timor-Leste take the running and the risks. Woodside has already written the value of its 33 per cent stake down to nothing and has plenty of other projects to keep busy with. Continuing to run Woodside’s case makes Australia look selfish and colonialist, say critics.

Bracks’s ability to persuade would be strengthened if Canberra showed any contrition over the spying and lack of good-faith negotiations — by holding a royal commission or other review, by apologising, and by rejoining the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice on maritime boundaries, from which Downer withdrew Australia in 2002.

The current limbo is far from satisfactory, says Bernard Collaery. “All it does is leave Australia’s great moral issue in ambiguity.” •

The post Timor gaps appeared first on Inside Story.

A sign in the window of one anti-vaxxer hangout, across from Katoomba’s railway station, reads “We stand united against government tyranny!!” Bill Gates smiles threateningly from a silk-screen print, vaccination needle in hand, alongside an advertisement for Chakra group-healing sessions. In this part of town, conspiracy theories and alternative healing are served with coffee and cake on what appears to be a sustainable anti-vax business model.

Falun Gong pamphlets can be picked up nearby. Adherents of Falun Dafa (as they call their faith) promote healing through religious chants and breathing exercises and work to expose the brutality the Chinese government inflicts on believers back in China. They certainly are persistent, and they were in the news again recently when Communist Party general secretary Jiang Zemin died in Shanghai.

Thirty years earlier, Jiang had taken fright when a peaceful phalanx of Falun Dafa practitioners queued outside his official residence in the old imperial palace district of Beijing petitioning for recognition of their faith as a religious community. Infuriated by their presumption, he branded them a superstitious cult and banished them outright. Thousands perished in the persecution that followed and others languished in prison awaiting forced organ transplants, if adherents’ claims are to be believed.

There’s no viable business model for superstitious belief in China, where science and rational planning carry the day and the apparently irrational desires of common people count for little.

But here’s the thing. China is opening up again after three years of intermittent but severe Covid lockdowns. Over that period it managed to keep the virus in check but failed to prepare the country’s people for a timely transition from epidemic lockdowns to a more flexible model of pandemic management. Why this neglect, if China’s government is as rational, capable and forward thinking as it claims to be ? Why lift lockdowns heading into winter rather in the warmer months earlier this year when the virus was less active? As a result of this series of policy failures, China could be heading for a health crisis on a scale the world has not seen since the crisis that shook India in 2020.

Some analysts say the party erred in abandoning its long-held commitment to science by succumbing to an anti-vax syndrome of its own devising. The historian Adam Tooze recently argued that China’s government undermined public confidence in readily-available Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines by allowing vaccine conspiracy theories to flourish online. It’s true that the government tolerated efforts to counter criticism from abroad that Chinese vaccines were inferior to Western ones (they are reported to work reasonably well after three doses) but the effect of that campaign was more likely to have enhanced confidence in Chinese vaccines than undermine it.

If anything, China’s problem is that its system of government is obsessed with science and rational planning to the point that it fails to take account of what people want. Doubt is essential to science. The science scepticism of Falun Dafa practitioners and anti-vaxxers may be over the top, but the lack of scepticism in China is no less troubling.

Democracy wears a lab coat

Big Whites, as they are called, are the neighbourhood cadres, volunteers, medics and enforcers who carry out the central government’s Covid lockdown policies clad in bulky white hazmat coveralls. The term refers to the robot in the Disney film Big Hero 6 programmed to perform medical procedures using instruments built into its bulky white-clad body. It’s a neat comparison. China’s Big Whites administer Covid tests, police entry and exit to residential compounds, and patrol streets, distribute food and detain anyone who gets in their way — by force if necessary.

The way Big Whites methodically patrol neighbourhoods in their white hazmat uniforms captures something missing from the Disney film. This is the role of science as a strong arm of politics and public policy in China and in the everyday directives of China’s Communist Party. The party does not just believe in science, it embodies and enforces it.

As a party, the communists trace their ideological foundations to scientific socialism, which they place on the same plane as the science that underpins maths, physics and chemistry. More than that, Marxism is considered foundational to all other sciences: “The intellectual foundation of science is the scientific theory of Marxism,” Xi Jinping told national educators in December 2016. The party’s ideological commitment to science lends science a place in the governance of China matched only by its place in Stalin’s Soviet Union. This is an early-twentieth-century pre-quantum kind of science in which everything is certain and quantifiable and open to precise and predictable explanation.  The connection of science with Marxism can be read to mean that whatever keeps a Marxist–Leninist party in power has to be good science.

This science of political certainty can be traced to the founding of the Communist Party in the early 1920s, when “Mr Science and Mr Democracy” (as they were called at the time) first entered the country. They came smartly dressed, faddishly foreign and unabashedly modern, and seemed destined to set the country aright. Mr Science didn’t arrive lumbered with the doubt and questioning that comes with scientific method but brought instead a modern kind of certainty to displace the older certainties of the Confucian canon. Any democracy modelled on such a science had to be certain too.

One outcome was that the new leaders of modern China expected more of democracy than it could possibly deliver. Winston Churchill’s complacent remark about the imperfections of democracy — “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” — is widely read among China’s communists not as a concession to the uncertainties of the human condition but as a shameful acknowledgement of liberal democracy’s failure to achieve perfection.

As the editor of one of China’s leading journals of international relations remarked of Churchill’s comment, “for a statesman of the capitalist class, it must have been really difficult to express this opinion.” That was a revealing comment: only a party committed to scientific socialism would imagine it could achieve perfection or deny it had a problem dealing with the uncertainties of everyday social and political life.

The Communist Party and its state bureaucracy are structured hierarchically to achieve a certain kind of perfection in relaying messages and commands and assigning responsibility up and down a many-layered command structure grounded in scientific socialism. Atop the structure, the central leadership embodies scientific rationality and sits beyond criticism or reproach. Beneath the leadership sit the cadres.

In this system, the rituals surrounding appointment of a supreme leader such as Xi Jinping are performed with such precision that nothing can be allowed to spoil them. The capital all but grinds to a halt ahead of a five-yearly national party congress as industry is silenced, streets closed off and other meetings and events cancelled. This is not the time to announce a national policy shift that could spell uncertainty. So the summer leading into the party’s twentieth national congress in October, when Xi was appointed supreme leader for as long as he liked, was no time for modifying his “dynamic zero” Covid policy.

On this model of scientific government, there’s room for cautious policy experimentation at the margins — on local finance for example — but where experiments succeed all credit is attributed to the farsightedness of the leadership, and where they fail, local cadres are left wondering what happened and picking up the pieces.

With few regulatory or legal instruments to guide them, those cadres often end up making arbitrary decisions about who was at fault, who should be put away, whose property should be confiscated and what should be done next. When things go terribly awry, they themselves are targeted for punishment. Overall, the structure makes little provision for heeding the wishes of common people or holding cadres accountable to the communities they govern.

Science and people

Churchill’s defence of democracy was a comment on human nature as much as it was on democracy: he prefaced it with a comment on the difficulty of governing “in this world of sin and woe.” Scientific socialism has no patience for such a world. Much has been written about elite attempts to remake China’s people or, in party terms, to elevate the “quality” (suzhi) of commoners to match the expectations the leadership places in them. In the meantime, the party makes up for the shortcomings of ordinary people by creating a quasi-nation out of its own cadres, as I argue in my recent book Cadre Country, to be perfected in place of the people as instruments of party rule.

Here’s where things get interesting in Covid-afflicted China. If the party’s tens of millions of cadres are to carry out their leaders’ instructions in every corner of the land — north, south, east, west and centre as Xi Jinping is fond of telling them — then China’s cadres need to be as finely attuned to the commands of the leadership as a lab technician to the instructions of a lead scientist.

The words “science” and “precision” pepper XI Jinping’s speeches on his cadre force. Still they constantly disappoint him. When things don’t work out as the leadership plans, and communities take their anger and frustration onto the streets, it’s not the fault of the leaders who drafted scientific policies and issued clear instructions. It’s the fault of the cadres for failing to follow instructions with the precision science demands.

That’s the way communist cadre systems work. Russian historian Moshe Lewin traced the habit of communist leaders turning on and blaming the cadres beneath them to Stalin’s 1925 lecture to trainee cadres at the Sverdlov Party Institute. “The only problem is cadres,” Stalin told the trainees. “If things are not progressing, or if they go wrong, the cause is not to be sought in any objective conditions: it is the fault of the cadres.” It is this Stalinist science of government that has landed China in the mess it finds itself.

Science and Covid policy

Stalin’s management science has been playing out in China’s recent pandemic policy dilemma. On 10 November, not long after the close of the twentieth national party congress, Xi Jinping presided over a meeting of his new Politburo Standing Committee to receive a report on “Twenty Measures” for the prevention and control of the most recent Corona virus epidemic. The following day, the State Council issued a statement on the Twenty Measures, explaining that they called for “scientific and precise” prevention and control at the local level. The new formula calling for “scientific and precise” prevention and control was not a relaxation, the statement continued, but an unswerving affirmation of Xi Jinping’s standing policy of dynamic-zero control.

Alongside the State Council’s statement, official newsagency Xinhua reported that China’s experience managing Covid had shown the leaders’ polices to be “completely correct” and that all measures taken were “scientific and effective.” The new policy encouraged local officials to calibrate risks according to the needs of their neighbourhoods, and to adjust their behaviour by abandoning “unscientific practices” such as over-prescribing Covid tests. Cadres should strive to “overcome formalism and bureaucratism and put an end to incrementalism and ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches,” they were told. Even so, this was not a time for relaxation of prevention and control.

What was a provincial leading cadre to make of this central directive? Online is a record of the Heilongjiang Provincial party group receiving the central directive and disseminating it to cities, districts, counties, and townships across the province. On 18 November, provincial governor Hu Changsheng convened the province’s Leading Small Group on Covid Work and urged his subordinates to “resolutely implement the spirit of the important instructions of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s scientific, precise and uncompromising implementation of epidemic prevention and control measures.”

Hu instructed the provincial government to “conscientiously implement the Twenty Measures of the State Council… and adhere to scientific and precise prevention and control.” Local party and government officials were told to adhere unswervingly to the national “dynamic zero” Covid policy and, in case anyone had missed it, to avoid formalism and bureaucratism.

Judging from the published record of the meeting, Heilongjiang provincial officials had no idea what central authorities expected of them under the new Covid management regime, other than to repeat its vague formulas and implement them as bureaucratically as possible.

Some local governments thought they knew better. The city government of Shijiazhuang, in Hebei Province, tried to escape formalism and bureaucratism by lifting restrictions on local residential compounds, only to find itself in trouble when local citizens objected to its “scientific, precise and uncompromising” measures for implementing the new policy. The city’s party secretary and mayor were reportedly dismissed and lower level officials were left baffled.

At the neighbourhood level, mixed signals from on high were paired with disincentives for local officials trying to implement the new policy with something like scientific precision. “We were told to relax the overly strict Covid prevention rules [but] could still get fired for not stamping out cases on time,” the Financial Times reported a county-level cadre as saying.

If local cadres were hoping to find sympathy or support from on high, they were disappointed. It was all their fault. On 1 December, Xinhua issued a detailed explanatory note on what central authorities had intended with the announcements coming out of the Politburo Standing Committee meeting of 11 November. “The correct meaning of scientifically precise prevention and control,” according to Xinhua, could be summed up in the phrase “quickly seal and unseal — and unseal wherever possible” (快封快解 应解尽解). For good measure, it added that any confusion over the centre’s directive was the fault of local cadres, not the fault of the policy or the leadership, since implementation of the “quickly seal and unseal” policy was the “responsibility of cadres.” It all came down to the quality of cadres and cadre management in Xinhua’s authoritative account.

Around the same time, the recently appointed head of the party’s Central Organisation Bureau, Chen Xi, published a major statement in People’s Daily extolling Xi Jinping’s visionary leadership and calling for the recruitment of a higher calibre of local cadres — “loyal, clean, and responsible” — than those Xi found himself commanding at present. Again, the solution lay in science: what the country now needed was a “scientific path [科学路径] for cadre management.” Heading into winter, the situation was set up for failure, with cadres trying to implement a central policy for which no one was prepared to take responsibility (certainly not Xi Jinping), while party leadership doubled down on its search for a more scientific path for cadre management.

To achieve the precision his policies require, Xi Jinping has to replace the cadre force he actually commands with a body of more faithful and responsive cadres. For the past three years he has been railing against the forty million cadres under his direction, complaining that they are prone to “kneeling before their leaders to flatter and fawn” while mistreating their subordinates; sitting on their hands rather doing anything useful; and complaining that their workload is too onerous and higher management too demanding.

By 2019 Xi had endured enough of their complaints. He called for a thorough cleansing of cadre ranks and their replacement by a team of “loyal, clean and responsible cadres” who could be relied upon to follow his directions unswervingly.

China has an enduring problem if its supreme leaders go on pretending that they are all wise and that their system of government can attain perfection. A little more doubt and lot more democracy would probably go some way to fixing it. •

The post Science and uncertainty: China’s Covid dilemma appeared first on Inside Story.

The by-election had been brought on by the resignation of the sitting Liberal member, external affairs minister Paul Hasluck, to become governor-general. At any other time, Labor would probably not have bothered to run in this very safe Liberal seat. Indeed, Labor had not run a candidate for Curtin even in the 1963 general election.

Such a cop-out would have been anathema to Whitlam. He had campaigned impressively in two by-elections in 1967, his first year of leadership, and regarded such events as opportunities to spread the party message to a citizenry that had not elected a federal Labor government since 1946.

Nineteen sixty-nine was also a federal election year. Having narrowly won a self-inflicted caucus ballot to reassert his leadership the previous year, Whitlam needed to perform strongly and pull off a decent swing at the election. While a Labor victory was almost in the realm of fantasy, winning just a few seats here and there was unlikely to cut it: too many enemies in his own party were ready to use a weak result as a good reason to turn up the heat on Whitlam.

Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war, and the use of conscripts to fight there, remained major issues, and while it is almost certain that Whitlam referred to them that night in 1969, my only abiding memory of his address was his criticism of the inequities and inefficiencies of Australia’s federal system. What especially stuck in my mind was his scathing description of how different state governments ordered different railway rolling stock from different countries when some coordination and cooperation would make more economic and practical sense. It didn’t exactly bring the (sparsely populated) house down, but it wasn’t without impact either.

Whitlam is associated so greatly with emotion and passion (especially after 1975) it is easy to forget that in opposition he spent much more time criticising the government for its inefficiency and ineptitude than decrying its moral failings (although sometimes it was both) — or that his enduring critique of Australian federalism’s shortcomings was something of a magnificent obsession. Even on conscription, his criticism was often as much about its inherent inefficiency (a view traditionally shared by many in the military) as about its violation of liberty and its cruel impact on those whose lives it took or damaged beyond repair.

What of the Curtin by-election? The seat was retained by the Liberals’ Vic Garland, who would go on to achieve ministerial office in the governments of William McMahon and Malcolm Fraser. But Labor achieved an estimated two-party-preferred swing of 7.9 per cent, closely matching the national swing of 7.1 per cent that Whitlam secured later that year in the general election.

That result set the stage for victory in 1972, although to regard it as inevitable is to ignore the risks Whitlam had to take, the best examples being the decision to launch a federal intervention into Labor’s left-controlled Victorian branch in 1970 and his visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1971, when Australia still recognised Taiwan as the real China.

The “inevitable” tag also ignores the modest nine-seat majority Labor achieved in 1972: the win was no landslide, and it is near certain that only Whitlam within federal Labor’s parliamentary ranks could have brought the conservative domination to an end.

That night in April 1969, I walked home reasonably impressed. But my impression would have been of little use to Whitlam: the voting age was twenty-one and I was too young to vote in 1969 — and indeed, even in 1972. •

The post Before it was time appeared first on Inside Story.

“Get your hands off me,” an angry photographer in a pink shirt snarls at a television reporter. Punches are thrown. Blood spurts from the nose of a radio journalist. “Come on, simmer down,” people shout. Someone warns the pink-shirted troublemaker: “This is going all over the country, you know.” More punches are thrown. “Go to buggery, punk,” the photographer screams at a member of the ABC crew. “This is not the ABC studio.”

One of the Labor Party’s public relations team, David White, is pleading with the mob to “ease back, make room for the camera.” Tony Whitlam, the six foot five inch son of the Labor leader, moves in to try to break up the scuffles. He is patient at first, then he flushes angrily and clenches a fist. A Whitlam aide, Richard Hall, places a hand on his shoulder and says, “Easy, Tony.” David White motions to a rather large member of the Canberra press corps and whispers, “Stand in the doorway and look imposing while I get some policemen.”

Inside the house, oblivious to the violence on the patio, Gough Whitlam and his wife, Margaret, are cutting a victory cake. In the icing are the words “Congratulations Gough Whitlam, Prime Minister, 1972.” The party workers sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” but the noise from the garden drowns them out.

“We should have thought of barricades,” mutters Richard Hall, as he and other members of the Whitlam staff hurriedly make new arrangements for the prime minister–elect to face the television cameras inside, away from the mob. Party guests are cleared from the sunroom. The big ABC camera is lifted through the door. Lights are set up. Mrs Whitlam appears and is questioned by radio and TV men, but her answers are inaudible more than a few feet away. Whitlam’s driver, Bob Miller, fights his way through the crush with a white piano stool for his boss to sit on.

About forty media people are packed into a room that measures no more than twenty feet by fifteen feet — together with the TV camera, the lights, the microphones. The heat is overwhelming. Television reporters sweat under their make-up. Then, at 11.27pm, Gough Whitlam squeezes along the passage and takes his place on the stool.

Radio reporters lunge at him with microphones as he begins to speak. “All I want to say at this stage is that it is clear that the majority given by New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania is so substantial that the government will have a very good mandate to carry out all its policies. These are the policies which we have put in the last parliament, and throughout the campaign we did not divert from them, we were not distracted from them, and we are very much reassured by the response the public gave to our program… We are, of course, very much aware of the responsibility with which the people have now entrusted us.”

The TV and radio men begin to fire questions about the actions he plans as prime minister, but he stops them. “I can’t go on answering questions like this… I have to wait for a call from the governor-general.” But it is enough. He has claimed victory, and now he moves out into the garden to mingle with Labor supporters, friends and neighbours who have attended similar parties at the unimposing Whitlam house in Albert Street, Cabramatta, every election night since he moved there in 1957.

Twenty-five miles away, at Drumalbyn Road, Bellevue Hill, a far grander residence in a far grander suburb, William McMahon has watched the Whitlam performance on television. He had been about to go outside to face the cameras himself, but now he must wait another ten minutes or so. Early that afternoon one of his press officers, Phillip Davis, anticipating a Labor win, had drafted a statement conceding defeat. At 10pm he and speechwriter Jonathon Gaul had retired to the family room in the McMahon home to dictate a final version to a stenographer.

Now McMahon reads it over, scribbling in a note at one point to “thank government supporters.” Then he says, “All right, let’s get it over with.” A staff member asks if he is sure he knows what he is going to say, and he nods. Davis asks Mrs Sonia McMahon if she minds accompanying her husband. “Nothing would stop me going out with him,” she says.

Outside the door are the cameras and a tunnel of pressmen. To the right nearly 200 well-wishers — neighbours, party supporters, curious sightseers — are gathered. McMahon walks out. His wife, looking strained but dry-eyed, follows. “Mr Whitlam has obviously won and won handsomely,” says the politician who has led the Liberal–Country Party Coalition to its first defeat for twenty-three years.

“There can be no doubt about the trend in New South Wales and Victoria, and they show a decisive majority for him. I congratulate him, and I congratulate his party, too. For my own part, I accept the verdict of the people as I always would do… Mr Whitlam must also accept the fact that we are an opposition that will stick to our Liberal principles and will give him vigorous opposition whenever we feel that he is taking action which is contrary to the interests of the Australian people.”

He thanks those who voted for the Coalition, and then adds, “Above all, I want to thank my own staff who have been driven relentlessly over the last few months and have stuck with me, they’ve helped me, and they’ve never wilted under the most heavy and severe oppression.” Finally: “The election is gone, it is over, and Mr Whitlam is entitled to be called upon by the governor-general to form a government.”

It has been a dignified statement, delivered with scarcely a tremor in his voice. The man who has gone through an election campaign reading speeches from an autocue has departed from his prepared text, and improved on it. He has been more generous in his references to his opponents than Davis and Gaul had been. The appreciative remarks about his staff are totally unscripted, coming as a shock to people who in the past have felt themselves to be little more than numbers to their employer.

McMahon refuses to answer questions on the reasons for the Coalition’s defeat. “That’s something for deep consideration,” he tells the reporters. Then he turns away and, with Mrs McMahon, plunges into the crowd clustering around the wrought-iron double gates and across the gravel driveway. For several minutes his diminutive figure is lost from sight as he moves among the well-wishers, shaking hands and accepting condolences.

Gough Whitlam and William McMahon spent polling day, Saturday 2 December 1972, touring booths in their electorates. There are forty-one booths in the sprawling electorate of Werriwa in Sydney’s outer-western suburbs, and Whitlam, accompanied by his wife and the Labor Party’s radio and television expert, Peter Martin, visited all of them.

Mr McMahon, too, visited all thirty-three booths in his seat of Lowe, not far away but closer to the city. On his way home he dropped in on several booths in Evans, one of the marginal seats the Liberals feared they would lose. The sitting Liberal member, the navy minister Dr Malcolm Mackay, was one of his closest supporters, and McMahon wanted to help him if he could, even at that late stage. Then McMahon returned to Bellevue Hill, had a swim in his pool and settled down to wait with his staff and a few friends. Whitlam went back to Cabramatta to prepare for the party.

The Whitlam election night party is by now a tradition in Werriwa. For several months before the 1972 election, members of Whitlam’s staff — particularly his press secretary and speechwriter Graham Freudenberg — had been trying to persuade him to change the venue, to hold it at a club or a hotel. With a Labor victory likely, they foresaw security problems.

The crowd, they warned, would be too big for the small cottage and its pocket-handkerchief garden. But Whitlam insisted the function would be held at the house as usual. The party workers in the electorate expected it, he said, and that was that. But he made one concession. He agreed that, while the figures were coming in and he was studying the count, he would retire to the Sunnybrook Motel two blocks away.

Mrs Whitlam supervised the arrangements for the party. A bar was set up in a corner of the back garden. In another corner was a makeshift toilet labelled “gents.” She explained proudly to early arrivals, “It’s a two-holer. Have a look at it.” At various places in the back garden were five television sets, their cords snaking among the shrubs to power points inside the house. On the roof, television technicians set up a microwave link disc, giving the house a science fiction appearance. There were three television outside broadcast vans in the street near the front gate.

On the patio, the television men had placed a ten foot high microphone to pick up the sounds of the party. It produced considerable amusement. “Have you seen it?” Peter Martin kept asking people. “It’s the Gough Whitlam microphone stand, the first one we’ve found that’s tall enough for him.” There was one television camera set up high, near the bar, which could sweep the whole garden. The other, on the patio, was to record whatever Whitlam might say in either victory or defeat. One of the bedrooms had been taken over as a press room, with half a dozen telephones on a long table.

Preparations in Bellevue Hill were more modest. At the insistence of Phil Davis the Liberal Party provided a tent for the press beside the swimming pool, with a few tables and chairs. Davis had stocked it with a car fridge and $30 worth of beer. There were no television sets until the TV men themselves set up monitors, but Davis left his transistor radio with the journalists mounting the vigil which, as the night wore on, they dubbed the “death watch.”

In the lounge room were two telephones and two portable television sets for McMahon and his close advisers. In the family room another set had been provided for the stenographers and Commonwealth car drivers on his staff.

McMahon appeared briefly to talk to the press and the cameras before the figures began coming in. He was confident of victory for the Coalition, he told them, and had no worries about his own position in Lowe. No one could be sure whether he believed it, but he appeared jaunty enough, immaculate in his freshly pressed blue suit, white shirt, crimson tie and carefully polished shoes. With a wave he disappeared into the house, not to be seen again for more than three hours except in silhouette through the lounge room windows.

It was a strange atmosphere inside the house, tense but not emotional. McMahon settled down at one telephone. John Howard, a vice-president of the NSW Liberal Party, remained glued to the other. Davis, Gaul, McMahon’s private secretary Ian Grigg, Mrs McMahon, and several friends of the family watched the results on the television sets. Little was said.

McMahon received frequent reports on his own seat from scrutineers, and remained outwardly calm even when it looked as though he might lose it. Only once did he snap at a party worker when conflicting figures were phoned in from Lowe. He was in constant contact with electoral officials in Canberra, and with the federal director of the Liberal Party, Bede Hartcher, who was in the national tally room. From time to time Howard handed him figures. Davis and Gaul kept him up to date with the figures coming up on television. He scribbled on a notepad, calculating the government’s position and appreciating it far better than anyone else in the room.

McMahon has the ability to “feel” a political situation before most other people. It is one of the reasons he was able to survive so many crises in his turbulent career, the talent that earned him a reputation as a political Houdini. He got the “gut” feeling that told him the government was heading for defeat almost as soon as the early figures began to come in. He was ready to concede by 10pm, but wanted to make sure Lowe was safe before he faced the questions of the press.

Hartcher and other Liberal officials urged him to wait, telling him there was still a chance the government could scrape back, but he knew better. Then [Liberal frontbencher] John Gorton appeared on television, admitting that Labor had won. The customs minister, Don Chipp, also conceded. And the treasurer, Billy Snedden. McMahon knew he had to go out on the lawn, where the cameras and the journalists were waiting like vultures. But first he had a cup of tea. Mrs McMahon handed it to him, and those in the room watched as he spooned in the sugar. His hand was steady.

The ordeal of the statement over, McMahon returned to the small group in the lounge room and sat quietly for a time. Then he perked up. “Oh well, that’s it,” he said. “We’ve got some champagne. Let’s open it.” From then on the mood was almost one of relief that it was all over. Party workers from Lowe dropped in, and some NSW Liberal Party officials. Outside, their work over for the night, journalists and TV men were drinking in the tent. Davis and Gaul joined them.

At about 1am a young woman broke through the security screen around the McMahon house by clambering over a fence from next door. She joined the press group, and gushed over McMahon and his wife when they emerged soon after for a final, off-the-record chat. Only once during the night did McMahon lapse into introspection and ask rhetorically, “Where did we go wrong?” He did not offer an answer to the question. Later he said, “At least we didn’t lose as many seats as in 1969.”

Whitlam’s staff spirited him away from his home to the motel soon after 8pm. Very few people knew where he had gone. It was well over an hour before a group of journalists and photographers tracked him down, and they were kept locked out of the room where he was studying the results.

Around the room were four television sets tuned to different channels. At one end was a table with a bank of seven phones. Richard Hall was constantly on the phone talking with scrutineers and candidates round the country, getting figures before they were posted in the tally room. Clem Lloyd, Lance Barnard’s press secretary, phoned through figures from the national tally room at regular intervals. David White was also manning phones.

Mungo MacCallum, the Nation Review journalist, had been co­opted to work a calculating machine. Whitlam sat in an armchair facing the television set tuned in to the ABC, but frequently he screwed himself around to watch the other sets as they showed new figures. Peter Martin was there. Graham Freudenberg sat on the bed listening intently to the analysis of British psephologist David Butler on Channel 7. Another of Whitlam’s press aides, Warwick Cooper, hovered in the background. His private secretary, Jim Spigelman, was making calculations on a notepad.

Bob Miller poured glasses of beer and orange juice for the workers. Also present was Ian Baker, press secretary of the Victorian opposition leader, Clyde Holding. There was whispered conversation. “It’s starting to look as though the DLP vote is down in Victoria,” said Martin at 8.45. “A trend is developing to us in the outer suburbs,” Hall told Whitlam a few minutes later. “We’ve got Phillip,” Freudenberg announced at 8.50. Placing his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone, Hall read out the first figures for MacArthur and told Whitlam, “It looks like Bate is going to poll well.” Less than a minute later he interrupted another phone conversation to tell Whitlam, “There’s no doubt about it, the DLP is ratshit in Victoria. They’re going down.”

But Whitlam remained cautious. When the ABC showed figures for Mitchell and compere Robert Moore told viewers that Liberal member Les Irwin was trailing his Labor opponent, Whitlam commented, “It’s still not marvellous.” Hall announced. “There’s a clear absolute majority to us in Hume,” but Whitlam replied, “Later figures always go against us. We’d have to have a very good lead.” One of the TV screens showed Liberal Alan Jarman trailing in Deakin, but Whitlam said, “He’ll still get in, though.”

Whitlam showed little emotion as he stared intently at the television screen, until a little after 9pm when Hall told him, “I reckon we’ve won Casey, Holt, Latrobe, Diamond Valley and Denison.” On the TV set tuned to Channel 9, [journalist] Alan Reid was saying, “If this trend continues I’d say Labor is home and hosed.” Then Whitlam allowed himself a smile, and sprawled back in his chair clearly more relaxed.

At that point he knew he had almost certainly won. There was irony when one of the channels rescreened McMahon’s earlier interview, showing him saying, “I feel more confident than I did this morning.” But there was bad news, too. At 9.05 MacCallum looked up from his calculator and remarked, “In Bendigo David Kennedy is only on 48 per cent. He’ll go to preferences.” Whitlam became sombre again as he said, “But will he get them?” At 9.15 Whitlam gave Hall permission to phone the Labor candidate in Denison, John Coates, to congratulate him on a certain win.

Then Hall reported that Labor scrutineers had no doubt the party would win Evans. At 9.18 one of the staff let out a cry of “Jesus!” as figures for Flinders on one of the TV sets showed the labour and national service minister, Phillip Lynch, fighting to hold the seat. Then at 9.20 MacCallum performed some more calculations and announced to the assembled company, “I think we can send the white smoke up the chimney now.”

From then on, the mood in the room was one of elation. “Welcome home Victoria!” said Spigelman as one of the television computers came up with a printout showing a swing of 6 per cent to Labor there. NSW party officials had told Whitlam there was a good chance of a Labor win in the Country Party–held seat of Paterson, but he had not believed them. At 9.26, when Freudenberg said, “They were right about Paterson,” he sprang out of his chair with an astounded cry of “What?”

He rubbed his hands together gleefully when Freudenberg hold him a few minutes later, “Look. Race is in.” Race Mathews, his former private secretary, had a clear lead over the minister for the environment, Aborigines and the arts, Peter Howson, in the Victorian seat of Casey. At that point, Bob Miller was sent to fetch Mrs Whitlam, and as soon as she arrived Hall popped the cork from the first champagne bottle. Glasses were clinked all round. “Many happy returns,” said Mrs Whitlam.

Only the news from the South Australian seat of Sturt, where Labor’s Norm Foster had been defeated, interrupted the celebratory atmosphere. “We can’t really do without Norm,” said Mrs Whitlam. “We need someone with that sort of tenacity and ferocity.” Her husband was quickly on the phone to Foster, offering commiserations and promising to find a job for him.

But Whitlam was possibly more upset by the bad result for Labor in Bendigo, and he phoned David Kennedy too. The Labor leader has what his staff describe as “a thing” about by-elections. They have played an important part in his political career. It was his role in the Dawson by-election in Queensland which saved him from expulsion over his fight with the ALP machine on State Aid in 1966. In 1967 the by-election victory in Corio in Victoria was his first triumph as party leader, and gave him the leverage to secure reforms to the structure of the federal ALP conference and executive. In the same year the Capricornia by-election success helped him to “break” Harold Holt. In 1969 a by-election in Bendigo had shown his mastery over the then prime minister, Gorton. The possibility of losing one of the seats to which he had devoted such time and effort in a by-election campaign appeared to affect him deeply.

Whitlam had been hoping McMahon would go on television first to concede. But soon after 10.30 he decided further delay would be fruitless, and prepared to return to the house and the waiting cameras and pressmen. But first he and Mrs Whitlam posed for the photographers who were gathered outside the motel room. In typical fashion, they hammed it up. “This is my best side,” said Whitlam. “Well, my nose is too big on this side,” replied his wife, “but I’ll do it for you, dear.” Their eighteen-year-old daughter turned up and gave her father a hug. “Are you happy now, Dad?” she asked. “Yes, Cathy,” he said. “I hope you are.”

Back at the house a British journalist was phoning a story to his paper in London. “Australia has a new prime minister,” he dictated. “Yes, I’m quite serious.” In the back garden the party guests were milling around the television sets, sending up loud cheers as each new set of figures confirmed the Labor victory.

The NSW ALP president, John Ducker, wandering through the crowd beer in hand, did not seem to quite believe it. “There’s no doubt, is there?” he kept asking people. “Billy McMahon’s going to lose his seat,” a gloriously drunk party worker shouted at the top of his voice. Laughter rippled from one end of the garden to the other.

Then the word was passed excitedly through the crowd: “Gough’s coming. He’s here.” Whitlam’s tall figure could be seen slowly forcing its way through the crush as people tried to shake his hand or simply touch him.

Photographers held their cameras above their heads, trying to get shots. “Good on yer, Gough,” people shouted. And then the chanting started. “We want Gough! We want Gough!” Slowly he made his way to the sunroom door, stood there a moment smiling, and then disappeared inside.

Sometime later, when he had made his television appearance and done the right thing by his party guests, Whitlam returned to the motel and the stock of champagne for a quieter celebration. And there, away from the cameras and the crush, he was more expansive in his comments to journalists. The Liberals would have lost under any leader, he said, adding, “It’s just too silly for them to blame or for us to thank Bill McMahon. The whole show was running out of steam.” Then, a little wearily, “It’s been a long, hard road.” •

This is an extract from The Making of an Australian Prime Minister, published by Cheshire in 1973.

The post A party for the people appeared first on Inside Story.

“The funny little man,” Perkin told a colleague, “has convinced himself that he is a brilliant success and sees himself winning handsomely in November and remaking the nation in the following three years; leading them” — the Coalition — “to victory in 1975, and then retiring with honours thick upon him. God save us all!”

To modern readers, McMahon’s hopes seem as preposterous as they did to Perkin. Most accounts of his government use the same adjectives — incompetent, reactive, hapless, embarrassing — and follow the same line: nothing of consequence was achieved between 1969 and 1972, and the election of the Gough Whitlam–led Labor Party was never in question.

This view has several effects. One is to diminish Labor’s genuine achievement in 1972, when a party scarred by twenty years of discord and electoral failure convinced voters that the vision, policies and leadership Australia needed were to be found among its MPs. Another is to render the years from 1969 to 1972 as a shapeless interregnum between the going of prime minister Robert Menzies and the coming of Gough, an antipodean Dark Ages during which nothing really happened. The last is to leave our understanding of those years profoundly incomplete by failing to take seriously the efforts of the Coalition government to govern during a period of immense change.

While confident of victory, Whitlam always insisted the 1972 campaign was a live contest. And while he was never backward in adducing McMahon’s flaws, he also perceived an opponent more wily than popularly imagined. As prime minister, Whitlam argued, McMahon had tried to “bestride two horses”: “He claimed to be the real heir to Menzies, yet he also claimed to recognise and accept the need for change in a changing world.” And the result? “This balancing act he did with some skill.”

A “balancing act” is one useful way of understanding the Coalition government’s actions during 1969–72, of seeing how it tried relentlessly, first under John Gorton and then under McMahon, to manoeuvre itself into a position where another election victory might be possible.

At a distance, the events following the 1969 election are confounding: the leader of the victorious party was immediately challenged by two of his own ministers.

With the benefit of hindsight, the 1969 election result — which resulted in the Coalition’s loss of sixteen seats — confirmed the waning fortunes of a government in office for two decades. At the time, though, it seemed more like a stern rebuke to prime minister John Gorton. Vaulting him from the Senate into the prime ministership after the unexpected death of Harold Holt, Gorton’s colleagues had elevated him in the belief that he possessed sound and sorely needed political judgement, and that his ability to perform on television would be compelling to voters.

The two years that followed brought both beliefs into question. Gorton’s ambivalence towards some of his colleagues and his tendency to unilateral decision-making antagonised many within the government and increasingly alarmed those outside it. Strong-willed and confident, he rarely backed down: “John Grey Gorton,” he rounded on one impertinent senator, “will bloody well behave precisely as John Grey Gorton bloody well decides he wants to behave!”

After a strong start, moreover, Gorton’s abilities as a public speaker seemed to desert him over the course of 1968–69. Tortuously convoluted prime ministerial statements became so much the norm that Whitlam took to ridiculing Gorton simply by quoting him verbatim. As one famous example ran, “On the other hand, the AMA agrees with us, or, I believe, will agree with us, that it is its policy, and it will be its policy, to inform patients who ask what the common fee is, and what our own fee is, so that a patient will know whether he is to be operated on, if that’s what it is, on the basis of the common fee or not.”

Amid these personal shortcomings were more serious policy disagreements. During the 1969 campaign, Gorton had gestured towards traditional Coalition strengths as well as “new horizons”: alongside hawkish statements on national security and tax cuts, he promised increased spending on education, a new Australian film school, and reforms to healthcare. But his statements about defence did little to assuage suspicious hardliners in his own party and in the avowedly anti-communist Democratic Labor Party, which generally backed the government. And his moves to withdraw Australian troops from Vietnam failed to mollify the anti-war protesters who took to the streets in successive moratorium marches.

Gorton’s domestic policies, meanwhile, many of which included an empowered Commonwealth reaching into matters traditionally the purview of the states, antagonised state premiers and colleagues whose fidelity to federalism was a matter of faith.

All this fed into the leadership challenge launched less than two weeks after the election. While treasurer McMahon and national development minister David Fairbairn failed in their bid to displace Gorton, the fissures their challenge exposed didn’t close over. A ministerial reshuffle to blood a younger generation of MPs — including Malcolm Fraser, Billy Snedden and Andrew Peacock — spurred suggestions of cronyism. Backbenchers attacked government legislation in the privacy of the government party room and the public spaces of the House and Senate.

A poor showing at the half-Senate election, late in 1970, was followed by an unsuccessful party-room motion for Gorton’s resignation; then a murky series of press reports in March 1971 spurred Fraser to resign as defence minister and savage Gorton in the House. A confidence vote on Gorton’s leadership tied; Gorton resigned as prime minister; McMahon was elevated to the top job; and — farcically — Gorton was elected, if only for a short time, to the deputy party leadership. As one reporter exclaimed after the last of these events, “You must be joking.”

The bitterness engendered by these developments lingered. Trust was non-existent, whispers of further leadership spills continued, and policy disagreements were so pronounced that the break-up of the Coalition was even broached. In McMahon, the government had a leader who had done much to sow the seeds of this turmoil and who, in office, would sow more still; but, again in McMahon, it had a politician with twenty years of experience at the highest levels of government who was willing to do all he could to stay in office. As governor-general Paul Hasluck wryly remarked, McMahon would “not be cumbered either by ideals or principles” in pursuing that goal.

McMahon’s at-all-costs attitude surfaced conspicuously when he began shifting and tacking on the question of whether Australia should extend diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China, abandoning its long recognition of the Taiwan-based Republic of China and the fiction that the latter remained the sole, legitimate government of China.

In 1958, as a relatively lowly minister, McMahon had argued that the People’s Republic should not be admitted into the international community until it had renounced the use of violence; as minister for external affairs, in 1970, he agreed that the country could not forever remain on the periphery but insisted on putting conditions on any kind of recognition or engagement. His view was influenced more by domestic political circumstances than any moral or strategic factor: “Remember, please, that we have a DLP,” McMahon told deputy secretary Mick Shann, “and that its reaction must be considered!”

By the time the Gorton cabinet reviewed its relationship with the People’s Republic, in February 1971, its resolution was similarly timid: it accepted that the government in Peking (as Beijing was known) was engaging with the international community and that Australia’s policy of diplomatic recognition would have to be reappraised — but decided that it would, for the moment, follow the lead of the United States.

The consequences of this hesitant ambivalence began to play out a month after McMahon became prime minister, when Whitlam sought an invitation to visit Peking. McMahon attacked him on grounds of naivety for engaging with a government that had not yet renounced violence; then, when Whitlam’s invitation to visit was granted, announced that his government would “explore the possibilities of establishing a dialogue” with Peking.

In the space of a month, McMahon had put his government astride two horses, of opposition and of engagement. He still believed the government to be riding high when Whitlam visited China in July. Criticising the Labor leader for his “instant coffee diplomacy,” he told a gathering of Liberal Party members that China “has been a political asset to the Liberal Party in the past and is likely to remain one in the future.”

That future was terribly short-lived. Within days of Whitlam’s visit, US president Richard Nixon announced he would visit China the following year. McMahon sputtered. He told the press that “normalising relations with China,” as Nixon was doing, had been his government’s policy all along, but in private he was angry and embarrassed, aghast that he had been so publicly undercut. Lashing out, he sacked his foreign minister and criticised Nixon. In the eyes of the Americans he was “on edge and almost frenzied in trying to stay on top of his job”; to the British, McMahon knew already that he was “not much good in the part” of prime minister.

McMahon eventually conceded that his government had failed on China. He was aware that Whitlam had won considerable plaudits and that he himself had looked a fool. Yet he continued to try to ride the two horses. He explored accompanying Nixon to Peking; he tried to find a halfway point between complete aversion and the diplomatic recognition Whitlam had promised. Rebuffed by the Chinese, he was then rebuked by DLP leader Vince Gair, who denounced the contest over who was more “ahead” on the issue of China. Stung, McMahon refused an invitation for army minister Andrew Peacock to visit China as part of an unofficial business party.

When the People’s Republic was admitted to the UN General Assembly and took a seat on the Security Council late in 1971, McMahon’s attempt to reconcile opposing pressures finally came to an end. Resiling from engagement with China was no longer an option, and yet China would not accept anything less than diplomatic recognition. The horses had bolted.

Another attempted balancing act came in the middle of 1971 when the South African government sent an all-white Springboks rugby team to Australia. Foreshadowing an October tour by South Africa’s cricket side, the Springboks became a barometer of how fast public opinion could turn on an issue. A Gallup poll taken in March 1971 had found that almost 85 per cent of Australians thought the South Africans should come, and most members of McMahon’s government believed, as Menzies did, that the cancellation of a South African tour of England in 1970 had been a surrender to the “threats of a noisy minority” and were not willing to do likewise.

McMahon genuflected to respectable opinion by making much of his disappointment that South Africa had sent a whites-only team, but he baulked at any real response. “We believe that the [all-white] policy in respect of teams is unfortunate, but it is nevertheless a South African matter, and not our matter,” he said privately during what happened to be the UN International Year for Action to Combat Racism and Race Discrimination.

Having effectively condoned a racially selected team, McMahon’s government then directed that Australia abstain from voting on a UN resolution condemning the application of apartheid in sport. It then helped sustain the tour by making available an RAAF aircraft to ferry the Springboks around the country after the ACTU and its president Bob Hawke promised to impose a “black ban” on the tour. “We are not going to be beaten here,” McMahon said privately.

Disruptive protests met with furious responses from Liberal–Country state governments. Victorian premier Henry Bolte called the demonstrators “louts and larrikins”; Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen government declared a state of emergency so as to more easily crack heads. Amid the barbed-wire barricades, smoke bombs and police batons, McMahon mused about calling an election with a law-and-order theme.

By the time the South Africans left, the weight of public opinion had shifted completely. McMahon’s own ministers were against an early election and dreaded the prospect of a repetition of the controversy when the South African cricketers arrived in summer. Not willing to admit defeat, the government refused to decide whether that tour should take place. It threw the ball to Sir Donald Bradman, chair of the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket, leaving it to him to make the necessary decision to call off the tour.

Yet another example of McMahon’s balancing act emerged at the end of 1971, when he made clear to a cabinet committee that he supported applications from Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory for leases on consolidated lands, provided they could satisfy criteria related to their association with the land. Had this been translated into government policy, it would have been an acknowledgement that a traditional association with the land should be a basis for land rights claims. His view diverged from those of the cabinet committee members considering the government’s approach to Indigenous issues. The fact that McMahon’s subsequent wavering failed to bring them around was reflected in their decision in late December 1971.

When McMahon issued a statement on Aboriginal policy on 26 January, it featured a gaping hole. The new objectives, though laudable, were overshadowed by the government’s failure on land rights. McMahon announced the creation of a new form of lease but ruled out land claims made on the basis of traditional association. The reason? To do so would introduce a “new, probably confusing component, the implications of which could not clearly be foreseen, and which could lead to uncertainty and possible challenge in relation to land titles elsewhere in Australia which are at present unquestioned and secure.”

The attempt to hew to a conservative course — rejecting a traditional association with the land — and simultaneously announce updated objectives for government policy fell flat. The timing hardly helped: McMahon’s statement came on a day traditionally considered a day of mourning by Indigenous peoples. The statement spurred one of the striking images of that year: four Indigenous men sitting beneath an umbrella as the sun rose on the lawns outside Parliament House the following day, a sign strung up beside them reading “Aboriginal Embassy.”

Failures like these left the government far from the “first, fine, careless rapture” that Menzies had suggested was necessary to stay in office. “There is an imminent feeling of decay about the place,” recorded Liberal MP Bert Kelly when parliament resumed late in February 1972.

Blame for the government’s woes fell almost entirely on McMahon. As Kelly asked his diary, “What the devil do we do next? We’ve got Billy McMahon elected as our leader and obviously he is not doing it at all well and everybody knows this. What we can’t think of is, how do we get rid of him? I suppose the only hope we have is that he suddenly drops dead one day.”

The unrest stirred by dire polling, as well as whispers that John Gorton might try to supplant him, didn’t bring out the best in McMahon. “Christ, he must be mad,” said one MP, after one blundering parliamentary debate by the prime minister. “What is wrong with him?” asked another.

Everything the government and its prime minister did seemed to end in disaster. McMahon’s late-1971 trips to the United States and Britain had been memorable for a mangled toast to his hosts, his wife’s revealing dress and Richard Nixon’s inability to remember his name. A swing through Southeast Asia early in 1972 became an “excursion to blunderland,” declared a Canberra News journalist, extinguishing any hopes of making defence and foreign affairs a centrepiece of a re-election campaign.

But ministers also shared in the blame, with no small number of blunders and public spats occupying headlines. Some ministers dithered; others were disengaged. David Fairbairn regarded the five months he spent as education minister, in 1971, as hard and unrewarding, and departed the portfolio admitting he had not achieved anything.

Environment minister Peter Howson, meanwhile, citing the lack of an explicit directive, did himself no favours when he refused to lend Australia’s support to New Zealand’s criticism of renewed French nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1972, putting the government at odds with public opinion. (A belated move that mainly suggested the government was going along with the public for craven reasons.)

The economic outlook also proved difficult for the government. The Coalition had been nearly broken by a currency revaluation forced upon it when the Smithsonian Agreement — which pegged currencies to the US dollar — came into operation in December 1971. Slowing economic growth and rising inflation spooked treasurer Billy Snedden and McMahon, who were soon at loggerheads over how to get the economy moving in time for the election. The government was caught between the competing objectives of economic rigour and voter-attractive spending.

After a tough budget in 1971, the increased pensions and reduced personal income taxes in the government’s April 1972 mini-budget suggested a new focus on the pending election. As deputy prime minister Doug Anthony admitted, “I wouldn’t be very honest if I said that this [the election] isn’t in the back of our minds.” The budget proper, issued in August, was even more electorally focused: “Taxes down; pensions up; and growth decidedly strengthened,” as Billy Snedden remarked.

The attempt to find a way between change and stasis often saw progress. Under customs minister Don Chipp, the government liberalised censorship policy yet also refused to authorise the publication of Philip Roth’s controversial novel Portnoy’s Complaint in Australia — only for a monied publisher to embarrass the government by evading its jurisdiction and publishing the book anyway. The government was ignominiously forced to remove its ban on Portnoy in 1971, and the following year an attempt to hold the line on the banned Little Red Schoolbook foundered when activists smuggled it into the country and began distributing free copies. Chipp insisted that the government remove its ineffective ban, but Malcolm Fraser and other ministers continued to protest that the book “undermined family and society.”

Other initiatives came too, on an unexpectedly broad front. Writing a decade later, Donald Horne wondered whether McMahon was too busy “plucking policy out of passing straws” to know what he was doing. But in terms of results, Horne conceded, the government modernised the political agenda in a significant number of ways.

Although the government resiled from passing a wholly new Trade Practices Act, it did initiate new laws preventing foreign takeovers. It withdrew the last Australian combat troops from Vietnam, leaving only 128 members of the Australian Army Training Team in the country. It joined the Five Powers Defence Arrangements and the OECD. It passed the Childcare Act, which allowed the Commonwealth to intervene in the childcare sector and helped transform it into a profession supported by research and grants. It increased education spending and the number of scholarship places at universities and TAFEs.

The government also adopted the “polluter pays” principle for environmental protection, and began giving the Commonwealth the capacity to intervene in environmental matters. Howson, for all his grumbles that he had been given responsibility for “trees, boongs and poofters” as minister for the environment, Aborigines, and the arts, was nonetheless the first person to be appointed with explicit responsibility for these policy areas.

Notably, too, the government released its own urban and regional development policy. This was partly in response to Whitlam’s well-established interest in this area, but also a recognition of public demand for Commonwealth action. Meeting that demand required the government to overcome its longstanding aversion to Commonwealth intervention in state responsibilities.

Housing minister Kevin Cairns’s priority was “to seek agreement at all levels that an urban policy is needed” — rather than to actually devise a policy — but McMahon pushed for both the agreement and a policy. He reserved to his authority and his department responsibilities traditionally held by state governments, and then, in September, pushed cabinet to create the National Urban and Regional Development Authority to foster a “better balance of population distribution and regional development in Australia.”

When he introduced the legislation, McMahon stressed the significance of the change that was now manifest: “It marks our recognition that there is a direct contribution that the Commonwealth government can make in national urban and regional development.” It also showed that the government had an answer to Labor’s policies in this area.

“We should be able to tell people where we stand and where we are heading,” McMahon had written in August 1971. Here, perhaps, was the government’s approach in a single phrase: stasis and movement. When McMahon went to Government House to seek a dissolution of parliament, he felt sufficiently confident that his two-pronged approach would be enough to see the government returned. To Paul Hasluck, he predicted the Coalition would pick up two seats in Western Australia and two seats in New South Wales — and perhaps even three in Victoria. He didn’t envision losing any seats except, perhaps, that of Evans, held by Malcolm Mackay.

That prediction was somewhat redeemed: the Coalition picked up two seats in Western Australia and one seat apiece in Victoria and South Australia. But it lost six seats in New South Wales, four in Victoria, and one apiece in Tasmania and Queensland, with the result that Labor took office with a nine-seat majority.

It was a closer result than many would like to think. The rural gerrymander meant that around 2000 votes distributed across five seats could have allowed the government to cling to office. In such an event, the first steps in McMahon’s forecast to Perkin may well have been vindicated.

Why the close result? Some have pointed to the electorate’s innate conservatism, especially after twenty-three years of Coalition rule. Few have suggested that McMahon might have been a factor in limiting the swing — but one of them was his successor as prime minister. Without McMahon’s skill, tenacity, and resourcefulness, Whitlam later wrote, Labor’s victory in 1972 would have been “more convincing than it was.” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post “God save us all!” appeared first on Inside Story.

Juror No. 10: Well, do you believe his story?

No. 8: I don’t know whether I believe it or not. Maybe I don’t.

No. 7: So what’d you vote not guilty for?

No. 8: There were eleven votes for guilty. It’s not so easy for me to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first.

So begins the dramatic core of Twelve Angry Men, a 1950s teledrama, and later a movie and a play, that tracks a New York jury debating a murder charge. Writer Reginald Rose specified a jury of twelve men — even though women were seated on New York juries by then — perhaps to ensure that the twelve-handed discussion remained believably angry. But not too angry, which is why he specified an all-white cast to debate the fate of the “boy” he coded as an unspecified minority.

When many of us recently watched the real deliberations of eight women and four men about an alleged rape in the national parliament building, we did it in the usual way: from outside a locked door. Only twelve people were allowed to know what was said or done in that Canberra jury room, and it remains a crime for any of them to reveal anything to anyone who is likely to tell the public.

Highly trusted confidants aside, the rest of us have very little to go on. Attendees at Rose’s fictitious courtroom in New York City heard the jurors ask to inspect two exhibits — the knife used in the killing and a floorplan of the apartment where it occurred — before the jury announced its verdict. But the real jury in Canberra neither asked about evidence nor delivered a verdict.

They said just two things in public. The first was on the morning of their third full day of deliberations, a Monday, when they asked their trial judge, ACT chief justice Lucy McCallum, about “time expectations.” Gone are the days when jurors were detained in the jury room and put up at city hotels until they reached agreement. Modern jurors simply commute to and from their homes like other court officers. That’s why McCallum answered, “There is no rush, no time limit. The only expectation is you remain true to your oath.”

Their second communication came the following afternoon. According to the chief justice’s summary, their note said that they were “unable to reach a unanimous verdict.” Like juries in New York but unlike most other Australian ones, Canberra juries don’t have the option of a majority vote. So McCallum, following a practice laid down by the High Court in 1993, told the jurors to persist a while longer but scrupulously avoided suggesting a consensus would be the best outcome.

She also embellished the national court’s script by sending them home to visit a gym or walk a dog. The jury dutifully spent the entire next day talking, before opting — fatefully — to sleep on things for at least one more night. “No one could suggest you’re not working extremely hard,” soothed their judge.

And that’s all we know. Nevertheless, I’ll venture a few educated guesses about what went on behind closed doors.

My first guess is that the Canberra jurors probably weren’t angry during those five or so days of deliberation. I say that because angry jurors often use communications with the judge to vent or try to resolve their differences. My optimistic reading of the Canberra jury’s relative silence is that their disagreement about the verdict was reasonably friendly.

My second guess is that emotions within the jury room would still have been very high. Except in the dullest or easiest of cases, jurors almost always describe their deliberations as intense experiences, sometimes shattering or even life-changing. There’s every reason to think that’s true of this particular case, which has prompted hard discussions everywhere. There’s no reason to think that #MeToo stops at the jury room door.

My final speculation is that all twelve jurors were probably gobsmacked when their deliberations were abruptly ended.

•••

Guard: Is there anything wrong, gentlemen? I heard some noise.

Foreman: No. There’s nothing wrong. [He points to the large diagram of the apartment.] You can take that back. We’re finished with it.

[The guard nods and takes the diagram. He looks curiously at some of the jurors and exits. The jurors still are silent. Some of them slowly begin to sit down. No. 3 still stands at the window. He turns around now. The jurors look at him.]

Three jurors switch their votes during Twelve Angry Men’s second act, which ends with No. 8 goading his main antagonist into attacking him. No. 3’s cry of “I’ll kill him!” — the very words the prosecution says prove the accused’s wish to murder his father — prompts two more jurors to switch sides, evening the vote. It also prompts the (imaginary) outside world’s only intrusion into the jury’s deliberations.

The sanctity of the jury room is no empty principle. It is enforced not just by physical restrictions on who can enter the room but also, for centuries, by rigid legal limits on what information can leave it. In 1785, England’s most celebrated chief judge, Lord Mansfield, famously refused to act on evidence that an evenly divided jury had reached its verdict by tossing a coin, declaring that doing so “would endanger every verdict.”

Two hundred and thirty years later, Australia’s High Court ordered a partial end to trial judges showing the prosecutor and defendant the complete text of notes sent from the jury room, ruling that they should omit any information about what votes had been cast. The nation’s top court ruled that keeping such details secret “enables jurors to approach their task through frank and open discussion knowing that what is said in the jury room remains in that room.”

The Canberra case illustrates the high stakes. Imagine if, after their fifth day of deliberations, word got out of how the numbers were falling. Such news would have instantly poisoned the ongoing trial — casting a shadow over every subsequent decision by the lawyers or judge — and could have derailed any future one. Likewise, if the content of the jury’s conversations had leaked, both current and future deliberations would be tainted.

Unsurprisingly, the ACT Supreme Court is scrupulous about jurors’ privacy. The chief justice opted to paraphrase the jury’s second note rather than read it out. Court officers responsible for jurors swear an oath that they will “not speak to any juror… concerning the issues before the court.” They also give jurors boxes for storing their documents. And, as McCallum revealed on what should have been the jury’s sixth day of deliberations, “routine tidying” is carried out by “three sheriff’s officers,” a number surely chosen to reduce individual officers’ temptation to snoop.

And yet, in perhaps the most closely watched trial in Canberra’s history, and at perhaps the most closely watched moment of the proceedings, all of these protections failed. At least three things went wrong on the Wednesday evening. First, an officer “accidentally bumped one juror’s document folder onto the floor.” Second, that same officer, while putting the box back on the chair it came from, looked, again seemingly accidentally, through the folder’s “clear front.” And third, presumably instinctively, the officer read some words visible inside.

Had any of these things been done deliberately, the officer would surely have lost their job and potentially their liberty. But McCallum assured the public that the officer acted “inadvertently.” She went further: “The conduct of the sheriff’s officers involved in this trial has been exemplary. They have worked in difficult circumstances. The court is fortunate indeed to be so well served.”

But the officer’s personal blamelessness does not absolve McCallum’s court. Why did any of the jurors’ folders have a “clear front”? How did “tidying” involve any contact with a juror’s folder, much less risk bumping it to the floor? Why weren’t officers instructed to leave fallen items where they lay? Indeed, why were any non-jurors “routinely” entering the jury room at all, rather than (say) leaving whatever tidying was needed to the twelve adults within?

Such questions could scarcely have escaped the jury’s attention on the final day of the trial, and will surely occur to future Canberra jurors too. My guess is that all of these questions are now being given urgent attention by McCallum, who only became the head of the ACT judiciary at the start of this year.

But her court was “fortunate” this time. The officer who read the words visible in the juror’s folder saw no tallies, no intimate reveals, no checklists, indeed nothing written by any of the jurors. And the officer not only resisted the temptation to read further or open the box, but instead quickly fessed up to what happened. (McCallum recorded her “gratitude for the courage, integrity and good sense displayed” not only by the officer but also by their two colleagues.)

Best of all, the series of accidents proved serendipitous. The officer happened to uncover the only category of jury room leak that modern courts are allowed to act on.

•••

[Juror no. 8 swiftly flicks open the blade of a switch knife and jams it into the table next to the first one. They are exactly alike. There are several gasps and everyone stares at the knife. There is a long silence.]

No. 3: (slowly amazed) What are you trying to do?

No. 10: (loudly) Yeah, what is this? Who do you think you are?

No. 5: Look at it! It’s the same knife!

Foreman: Quiet! Let’s be quiet.

[They quiet down.]

No. 4: Where did you get it?

No. 8: I got it last night in a little junk shop around the corner from the boy’s house. It cost two dollars.

Twelve Angry Men’s most memorable scene features two out of five instances of juror misconduct identified by Berkeley law professor Charles Weisselberg in an article he published on the movie’s fiftieth anniversary, titled “Good Film, Bad Jury.”

The fictitious jury’s first bad step is when No. 8 brings something into the jury room that isn’t part of the trial evidence. The Canberra sheriff’s officer’s glimpse revealed that a juror seemingly did the same, bringing “an academic paper” into a trial that otherwise consisted only of testimony, CCTV footage and clothing.

Safety concerns about knives aside, I’m not convinced these are bad acts on their own. Jurors are no longer excluded from their own homes while deliberating and are not required to enter the jury room naked. There’s no reason why they can’t inspect their own belongings at night and bring relevant items in to show to others. Given that Rose’s fictitious prosecutor claims that the murder weapon — identical to one the accused was seen purchasing that day — is unique, why couldn’t a juror check that claim against a knife he owns, and show the jurors if the comparison is revealing?

Rather, the problem is that the knife No. 8 jams into the table isn’t his own, or at least wasn’t until he sought it out and bought it the previous night. That was the second instance of misconduct on Weisselberg’s list. The ACT’s Jury Handbook tells jurors: “Do not make searches on line or visit any place relevant to the case.” No. 8 does the latter. And everyone assumes that a Canberra juror obtained that academic paper by doing the former, perhaps when they were meant to be walking a dog or lifting weights.

And that made Chief Justice McCallum angry. She pointed out that she gave “at least seventeen, and possibly more” warnings to jurors against conducting their own investigations. Most of those were end-of-day reminders in these terms: “Please don’t go googling Brittany Higgins or Bruce Lehrmann or any of the other people you have heard mentioned. Please don’t seek out publicity in relation to this case. For the reasons I explained before, it would be very unfair to the accused if you sought information outside what you are going to hear in evidence in these proceedings.”

But, as far as anyone knows, no juror did anything in this list. The academic paper in the juror’s folder would surely have been written years before the events that were the subject of the trial. It did not mention anyone in the trial, or any place in it, or anything written about it, and contained nothing that the jurors heard in evidence.

Rather, the juror was suspected of conducting some general research about the outside world, akin to a New York juror scanning the shelves of his neighbourhood “junk shop” for switchblade knives. In her opening remarks, the chief justice explained that that wasn’t allowed either.

“You should only be learning about this trial in this room in my presence,” she said. “So, if you find yourself getting curious and undertaking internet research or talking to people about their areas of expertise, think to yourself, ‘Well, Chief Justice McCallum isn’t here so I probably shouldn’t be doing this.’ That is not a bad way of testing what you should hear in this trial. You should only hear the evidence in this trial in my presence when it comes before you in this courtroom.”

McCallum concluded this explanation by saying, “I hope that makes sense.” But Twelve Angry Men demonstrates why it doesn’t.

•••

No. 8: Look at this. [No. 8 closes the knife, flicks it open, and changes the position of the knife so that he can stab over-handed.] Doesn’t it seem like an awkward way to handle a knife?

No. 3: What are you asking me for?

[No. 8 closes the blade and flicks it open, holds it ready to slash underhanded.]

No. 5: Wait a minute! What’s the matter with me? Give me that.

[He reaches out for the knife.]

No. 8: Have you ever seen a knife fight?

No. 5: Yes, I have.

No. 8: In the movies?

No. 5: In my backyard, on my stoop, in the vacant lot across the street, too many of them. Switch knives came with the neighbourhood where I lived. Funny I didn’t think of it before. I guess you try to forget those things. [Flicking the knife open.] Anyone who’s ever used a switch knife would never have stabbed downward. You don’t handle a switch knife that way. You use it underhanded.

Rose’s angry men never solve the murder mystery at the heart of the case, or even come close to doing so. No alternative suspect or motive or means or opportunity ever emerges. Rather, the teleplay charts how each of the twelve learns a little more about the courtroom trial they just watched by talking it over with others.

No. 5 teaches his fellow jurors how to fight with a switch knife (and also about assuming who grew up in a slum). No. 8 schools them about the US constitution’s fifth amendment. No. 3 monologues an unwitting lesson in being a terrible father, No. 7 in being a terrible fact-finder, No. 10, a terrible racist. Several speak of life next to a noisy train line.

After No. 8 uses some back-of-the-envelope maths and the apartment map to demonstrate that a witness downstairs couldn’t have heard or saw what he testified he did, No. 9 speculates that the lonely, elderly witness might have lied to make himself feel important. Asked where he got “that fantastic story,” he explains, “I speak from experience,” prompting a “long pause.” The script’s many silences are central to the drama.

Rose’s point isn’t subtle. Each of these lessons causes at least one juror to switch his vote. But McCallum wasn’t subtle either. None of this learning was to happen in her jury room: “You mustn’t try to undertake your own inquiries or try to re-enact any aspect of the offence or consider any external evidence about the consumption of alcohol or about any matter that might arise during the trial. You must rest exclusively on the evidence you hear in this courtroom.”

Professor Weisselberg would side with her. He rounded out the twelve angry men’s “buffet of misconduct” with No. 5’s “expert testimony about the use of switchblade knives” and No. 8’s calculations about trains and apartments.

But are the chief justice and the professor right? If the juror’s folder had simply contained the juror’s own notes about another juror’s reflections on the “consumption of alcohol,” or detailed a re-enactment of walking through a ministerial suite, would that also have required the trial’s premature end? What if the notes revealed that — as is surely possible — one or more of the Canberra jurors had described their own experiences of rape?

The sanctity of the jury room mostly stops us from considering these questions, but sometimes courts must confront them. In 1999, an English court was asked to judge a movie-like scenario in a mundane case about whether some tyres were stolen or legitimately purchased. The jury wrote the judge a note revealing that one of their number happened to be a “tyre specialist” who knew how to read a tyre’s serial code to determine when it was made. “May we take this into consideration?” they asked.

The question flummoxed their trial judge, who failed to get back to them before they found the accused guilty. But the Court of Appeal overturned that verdict, ruling that the jury should have been told to ignore their fellow juror’s insights. Here’s the judges’ valiant attempt to explain why:

It was not improper for a juror who was not a lawyer and who had specialist knowledge of circumstances forming the background of a particular case to draw upon that specialised knowledge in interpreting the evidence. However that knowledge was not to be used as evidence but as a means of considering, weighing-up and assessing the evidence before the court.

Surely they were tempted to add, “I hope that makes sense.”

•••

No. 4: She did wear glasses. Funny. I never thought of it.

No. 8: Listen, she wasn’t wearing them in bed. That’s for sure. She testified that in the midst of her tossing and turning she rolled over and looked casually out the window. The murder was taking place as she looked out, and the lights went out a split second later. She couldn’t have had time to put on her glasses. Now maybe she honestly thought she saw the boy kill his father. I say that she saw only a blur.

No. 3: How do you know what she saw? Maybe she’s far-sighted.

[He looks around. No one answers.]

No. 3: (loudly) How does he know all these things?

[There is silence.]

No. 8: Does anyone think there still is not a reasonable doubt?

[He looks around the room, then squarely at No. 10. No. 10 looks down and shakes his head no.]

This exchange leaves Rose’s fictitious jury again split 11–1, this time in favour of “not guilty.” But Professor Weisselberg baulked at adding this discussion to the jury’s “buffet of misconduct,” explaining that “the jurors confront a lack of evidence on a key point, but they appropriately treat it as relevant to the existence of reasonable doubt.” Four professors at the same symposium condemned that discussion for a different reason: that the jury’s speculation about the witness’s eyesight was tendentious and didn’t account for her crystal-clear testimony.

When I first learned the topic of the academic article in the Canberra jury room — the prevalence of false allegations of rape — I felt the same way. Absolutely no one knows, or can know, how many or how few rape allegations are false. All we can ever know is that some allegations proceed to investigation, prosecution and, for a few, conviction, and most don’t. But there is no way to know whether most of those allegations are true or not. The rest is just guesswork, and such guesses mean little or nothing during a particular rape trial.

But then I read Chief Justice McCallum’s summary of the juror’s article: “It is a discussion of the unhelpfulness of attempting to quantify the prevalence of false complaints of sexual assault and a deeper, research-based analysis of the reasons for both false complaints and scepticism in the face of true complaints.”

In short, the unidentified article teaches everyone, including jurors, why the issue of prevalence goes nowhere.

After questioning the juror in private, McCallum revealed that they gave “an explanation that the document was not used or relied upon by any juror.” Given the incentives to dissemble and the difficulty of checking, the chief justice responded to such claims about goings-on in the jury room with appropriate scepticism. It sufficed that the academic paper was present in the jury room and “could be deployed to support either side of the central issue in this case.”

Is it true, though, as she declared, that it is “neither possible nor helpful to speculate as to the use to which this information might have been put in the jury room, if any”? I’m sceptical. Here are my guesses about what may have happened behind closed doors.

My first guess is that the prevalence of false rape allegations was indeed discussed in the jury room, probably quite often. I say that because the same issue was raised by almost every person I spoke with about the Canberra case, and most other rape trials as well. Indeed, on the middle weekend of the jury’s deliberations, journalist Louise Milligan complained to the capital’s lawyers that “there are still a significant minority of people who continue to, automatically, assume (against all evidence in international research and tendered to royal commissions) that there are multitudes of false accusers.”

My second guess is that one or more jurors would have nominated a particular fraction of rape allegations as false, according to academic studies. I say this because googling “number of false rape allegations” immediately yields a claim that “a range of studies show approximately 5 per cent of rape allegations are proven false.” This claim is sourced to a “fact sheet” from Victoria Police and the Australian government’s Institute of Family Studies, created as a resource for police and legal practitioners about fifteen “rape myths.” The 5 per cent figure is cited to dispel the “myth” that “the rate of false allegations is high.”

My final speculation: that the juror who brought in the academic article may have done so to help teach their fellow jurors why such figures aren’t reliable enough to be used in a jury room.

•••

[No. 3 looks around at all of them for a long time. They sit silently, waiting for him to speak, and all of them despise him for his stubbornness. Then, suddenly, his face contorts as if he is about to cry, and he slams his fist down on the table.]

No. 3: (thundering) All right!

[No. 3 turns his back on them. There is silence for a moment and then the foreman goes to the door and knocks on it. It opens. The guard looks in and sees them all standing. The guard holds the door for them as they begin slowly to file out. No. 8 waits at the door as the others file past him. Finally he and No. 3 are the only ones left. No. 3 turns around and sees that they are alone. Slowly he moves toward the door. Then he stops at the table. He pulls the switch knife out of the table and walks over with it. He holds it in the approved knife fighter fashion and looks long and hard at No. 8, pointing the knife at his belly. No. 8 stares back. Then No. 3 turns the knife around. No. 8 takes it by the handle. No. 3 exits. No. 8 closes the knife, puts it away and taking a last look around the room, exits, closing the door. The camera moves in close on the littered table in the empty room, and we clearly see a slip of crumpled paper on which are scribbled the words “Not guilty.”]

That’s how Rose’s teleplay ends. The movie opts for a different ending, which you can watch on YouTube. Crucially, in that version, No. 8’s knife is left lying on the jury room table. In real life, it would have been swiftly discovered by a bailiff and would launch an inquiry into juror misconduct. If it was found quickly enough, it might have condemned the accused to a retrial and, perhaps, worse.

An observant journalist afforded a Canberra juror a final word, reporting that they “swore under their breath and put a hand to their head as it was announced they could not continue.” We can all guess that word. But who was their anger directed towards? The sheriff’s officer? The chief justice? Another juror? Themselves? On that question, the jury’s out. •

The post Twelve vexed Canberrans appeared first on Inside Story.

My problem was that I’d forgotten most of what I was supposed to have learnt from the three years of economics in my commerce degree. It took me many, many hours on the phone to econocrats in the Bureau of Statistics, the Reserve Bank, Treasury, the Industries Assistance Commission and other agencies to relearn what I was supposed to know.

So I’m forever grateful to the econocrats who spent so much of their time helping get me up to speed. I was deeply impressed by their dedication, their selfless desire to educate the public on matters economic by helping educate me. (Now, you may wonder why so many econocrats are willing to speak to me. It’s because they know I’m a columnist, not a reporter. I don’t want to quote them, I want to take those of their opinions I agree with, and make them my own. Opinion writers are in the plagiarism business.)

All this helps explain why I don’t regard myself as an economist, and don’t claim to be one. I used to say I was an accountant pretending to be an economist, but these days I say I’m a journalist who writes about economics. That’s exactly how I see myself, and where my loyalties lie.

Because I’m not an economist, I’m not a member of the economists’ union, which means I’m under no fraternal obligation to defend economists and economics against all those terribly ignorant people who keep criticising us and pointing to our failings. I don’t have to believe what everyone in every occupation or industry believes: that if you’re not in our business, no criticism you make of us could possibly have merit.

Being a journalist who writes about economics, my obligation is to my readers. I see my role as similar to a movie critic. I’m an economics critic. I explain what the economists are telling the government to do and why, and then I tell my readers whether I agree with what the economists are saying. To put it more positively, I’ve spent my career trying to figure out how the economy works, then telling my readers what I’ve learnt. This means my views have evolved considerably over the decades. Hopefully, what I say today is closer to the truth than what I used to say.

When top econocrats give a very thoughtful speech about how the economy’s got to its present state, or what we need to do to improve its performance, the press gallery usually riffles through it looking for some particularly newsworthy remark — say, a hint that the cash rate’s about to rise — and then toss it aside. I see it as a big part of my job to rescue the speech from the gallery’s wastepaper basket and use my column to make sure my readers get the benefit of the top econocrats’ thoughtful explanations and observations. Even when I don’t agree with their policy proposals, I try to give them a fair run before I register my doubts.

Partly because I’m a longstanding exponent of explanatory journalism, I write a lot about economic theory, more than most other economic journalists do. It was many years after I graduated that some economist took the trouble to explain to me the role of theory in our efforts to understand how the world works, to extract some mastery from the seeming chaos around us: about how “models” help us understand the real world by focusing on a few really powerful explanatory variables, and ignoring everything else.

The neoclassical model is hugely useful, and hugely powerful in influencing the way economists think about how the economy works — and should work. This is why I keep writing about its assumptions and limitations. I think “behavioural economics” helps ensure our search for a better understanding of how the economy works isn’t held back by those assumptions and limitations.

But my interest in improving on the neoclassical model seems to bring out the defensiveness in academic economists — particularly on Twitter, where what I say is often dismissed as “simply wrong.” But what’s often not understood is that the neoclassical model I care most about is not the one written down in a set of equations but the one lodged in the heads of econocrats. When I criticise “economists” I’m usually referring to econocrats and other economic practitioners. I care most about what practitioners think and propose because they’re the ones with most influence over policy — the ones with most influence over the economy my readers live in. But academics almost always take “economists” to be referring to them, not to their former students. Their self-absorption is revealing.

I became an economic journalist in 1974, which means I’ve been a professional watcher of the economy — and the econocrats providing economic advice — for almost fifty years. I want to reflect on some of the conclusions I’ve reached in that time, the things I’ve learnt, and the way my views have changed. I guess I’ll be accused of being wise after the event, so let me get in first and plead guilty to exactly that. Being wiser after the event isn’t a crime, it’s a virtue. If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you’re not very bright.

When the era of “microeconomic reform” began in the mid 1980s under the influence of “economic rationalism,” I was a strong supporter. Over the forty years since then, however, I’ve had growing doubts about many of the supposed reforms we’ve made. By now, it’s clear that governments’ enthusiasm for what came to be known as “neoliberalism” has largely dissipated. Any number of policy changes by Liberal and Labor governments are clearly at odds with the principles of economic rationalism. But it’s not just the politicians who’ve lost their compass. I suspect that many econocrats have lost their John Stone certainty of what’s right and what’s wrong in economic policy.

I think we’re going through a period where econocrats and their fellow travellers are wandering in the wilderness searching for a new program of improvement to be working towards. Economic rationalism 2.0, if you like. Econocrats seem as reluctant as any other profession would be to publicly admit the mixed record of neoliberalism. But I’m here to say I don’t think econocrats will get their mojo back until they’re willing to admit that many of the things done in the name of microeconomic reform turned out to make matters worse rather than better. We have to learn from our mistakes. I want to propose a couple of principles that should be at the centre of econocrats’ renewed sense of mission.

First, however, we need to think about what went wrong with that great reform push and why. Let’s be clear: the biggest of the reforms were necessary and have worked well: floating the dollar, deregulating the banks, ending import protection, ending centralised wage-fixing and, as Andrew Leigh has reminded us, introducing national competition policy.

The problem has mainly been with privatisation, outsourcing and “contestability” — “reforms” largely motivated by the belief that the provision of services will always be done better by the private sector than the public sector. This is an article of faith for the Liberal Party, but also for too many econocrats. It has succeeded in making the public sector a lot smaller — and very much smaller than it would otherwise have been — but too often this has come at the cost of higher prices (electricity), fewer services and, particularly, lower quality services, delivered by inadequately trained workers.

This is true in aged care, childcare and employment services. Contracting out to providers in “thin markets” — a Productivity Commission euphemism for pretending there’s a market where none exists — is a big part of the reason for the blowout in the cost of the NDIS. The states’ TAFE systems needed shaking up, but opening up to cherry-picking private providers, plus general cost-cutting, has left us with an utterly inadequate technical education system. Far too many privatisations — particularly in electricity and ports — have involved selling government-owned businesses with pricing power intact, maximising the sale price at the expense of establishing a competitive market.

None of these adverse outcomes were envisaged in the econocrats’ advocacy of these “reforms.” What went wrong when theory was put into practice? One reason is the use of privatisation, and of bureaucrats putting downward pressure contract prices, to reduce “debt and deficit” — which, when you examine it, is about politicians responding to the public’s growing demand for government services without asking people to pay for them with higher taxes. This was never going to add up.

But I place some blame on the naivety of our econocrats. They assumed that what works in the textbook would work just as easily in real life. Many econocrats have never worked in the private sector, but are painfully aware of the deficiencies of the public sector. This, plus the neoclassical model’s implicit assumption that markets are rational but governments aren’t, blinded them to the truth that private firms are hugely fallible. Econocrats believed in the profit motive, but didn’t understand its raw, even ruthless power.

As we’ve seen from wage theft and the banking royal commission, among other examples, even our biggest, most respectable firms are perfectly capable of breaking the law in their pursuit of profit. Everyone wants to take a bite out of the government. When business people are invited to sell to the government, dollar signs appear in their eyes. They put both hands into the public purse and pull out as much as they can possibly carry away. They think the government’s always an easy touch — and too often they’re right. The bureaucratic regulators of private providers have proved no match for business people on the make.

The biggest reason so many reforms haven’t lived up to their billing, however, is the way the econocrats’ political masters have compromised the economic objectives by adding their own political objectives. Sometimes they’re trying to make the government’s finances look better than they really are. By moving debt off-balance sheet, for instance. But sometimes I suspect that the Liberals, being the party of the private sector, see moving businesses and workers from the public column to the private column as a clear win for their side of politics and loss for their Labor opponents.

There’s much more I could say about the crosses on the economic rationalist report card, but I need to get on with suggesting two key principles I think must be part of any revival of reformist zeal.

First, it’s become an empty cliché to say that policy proposals should be “evidence-based,” but it’s actually our beliefs about how the economy works that need to be more evidence-based. The great advance in academic economics in our time has been the way the information revolution has allowed it to become less theoretical and more empirical. The eternal temptation is to forget that models are just models. They’re not the economy, they’re a cardboard cut-out of the economy. They enlighten us in some circumstances, but mislead us in others. The great project in academia must be to test orthodox theory against the empirical evidence, to see what bits of the theory accurately describe the real world and what bits don’t.

The classic example of this is the way empirical evidence has caused economists to change their tune on the role of minimum wages. If there’s one area of the economy where the simple neoclassical model — the one that economists carry in their heads — is an unreliable guide to how the economy works, it’s the labour market. Most econocrats have much to learn from labour economists about how the labour market ticks. Monopsony, for example.

My broader point is that economists who think the neoclassical model they memorised at uni is all they need to give wise advice on policy — whose views on how the economy works haven’t been changed by advances in industrial organisation, asymmetric information, incomplete contracts, behavioural economics and the rest — are setting themselves up for failure. The policies advocated by econocrats have been faith-based rather than empirical-evidence-based.

Second, economic rationalism 2.0 must accept the failure of the smaller-government push. The move to private providers of publicly funded care has not led to any noticeable improvement in the efficiency with which those services are delivered. Where governments have managed to hold down the growing cost of services, this has been achieved by reducing the quantity and particularly the quality of services. Where services have been delivered by for-profit providers, savings from genuine improvements in efficiency have been insufficient to make room for their necessary profit margin. The plain truth is that any savings made by outsourcing services have come simply from side-stepping the good pay rates and conditions of the original workers.

Turning the focus to general government and the budget, the quest for smaller government and its objective, lower taxes, has clearly failed — despite decades of trying. It’s failed because the growth in the public’s demand for more and better government services is inexorable. No government of either colour is prepared to make the big cuts to major spending programs that would make smaller government a reality. Some conservative politicians genuinely believed smaller government was desirable and possible. More of them saw the political attraction of claiming to be pursuing lower taxes while their opponents indulged in “tax and spend.”

Far too many econocrats believed in smaller government and lower taxes as a sure-fire way of increasing economic growth. They focused on the simple theory that taxing any activity always discourages it, while ignoring the absence of empirical evidence that lower company tax leads to increased investment, and lower marginal tax rates encourage work effort. They studiously ignored the evidence that only in the case of secondary earners (mainly mothers) are effective marginal rates likely to affect work effort.

But I think econocrats are guilty of a greater error: their commitment to smaller government — which sort of fits with their day job of using false economies to pare back this year’s embarrassingly high budget deficit — involves pursuing a will-o-the-wisp while ignoring the real challenge. Since big spending on government services is the public’s clearly revealed preference, their job is to use every opportunity to remind the public — not to mention their political masters — that demanding more government spending is fine, provided you’re prepared to pay for it with higher taxes.

By omission, econocrats have played along with the delusion that higher taxes are unthinkable — both economically as well as politically — and settled for eternally struggling ineffectively to reduce budget deficits. They should have been doing all they could to stand against the demonisation of taxation for short-term and usually hypocritical political advantage.

Econocrats have spent too long struggling ineffectively to achieve smaller government, while doing little about what should be their real concern: not smaller government, but better government. Government in which the winners from globalisation and other structural change are required through the tax-and-transfer system to compensate the losers. The neglect of fairness toward the losers from microeconomic reform does much to explain why resistance to reform has grown and too many people have become susceptible to populist solutions.

Econocrats need to care more about how, for instance, assistance with housing costs can be more effective and better targeted to those needing it most. Econocrats — and particularly the accountants in Finance — have relied too heavily on crude annual percentage cuts in agencies’ budgets, and too little on building capacity to identify particular areas of waste. It takes no effort or understanding to barrack for small government or big government. What’s hard is knowing how government spending can be efficient and effective. Too often, econocrats have failed to promote and protect spending measures that should be seen as an investment in future cost reduction in return for immediate spending. Too often, the accountants have yielded to the short-term expedient of giving them the chop.

When it comes to regulation, the econocrat profession should be the repository of the nation’s knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, but it’s made little effort to become that. The new government’s commitment to an “evaluator-general” is good news. We need more rigorous evaluation of spending programs, with the results made public. This will always be resisted by ministers and department heads, but that’s all the more reason the econocrats should be unceasing in pushing for it.

Academic health economists worked for many years to build the information base that allowed governments to control their spending on public hospitals more effectively than just giving them 5 per cent more than they got last year. Eventually this “activity-based” funding model was adopted as part of the federal-state hospital agreement. To my knowledge, the econocrats did nothing to support this research effort, and were slow to realise its value.

It’s clear from all the discussion of the fiscal position inherited by the new government that we face a choice between bigger government with higher taxes, and a never-ending struggle with “debt and deficit.” Our econocrats should make sure they’re on the right side. •

This is an edited version of a talk to the ACT Economic Society’s annual dinner earlier this month.

The post Confessions of an econocrat-watcher appeared first on Inside Story.

By lunchtime on the first day we were in Melrose, a pretty town tucked up against Mount Remarkable in the lower Flinders Ranges. Lunch was a sandwich in the municipal park, and in the park was a billboard. “Paradise Square,” it announced, perhaps with dry humour. “The following is a list of known burials that took place here in the Old Melrose Cemetery between 1846 and 1872.”

And there they were, scores of names in alpha order, each with date and age of death, and a crisp descriptor. NOTT, Thomas Freedman, a surveyor of Melrose, died aged sixty-five on 5.12.1865. NOTT, Mildred, a widow of Melrose, followed her husband on 12.11.1869, aged fifty-five. Jesse Jones, a bushman of Melrose, went aged fifty in 1861. William Jones, storekeeper, went later (1868) but younger (thirty-four).

The dead of Melrose included carpenters, shepherds, a hawker, carriers and teamsters, a corporal of police, a bailiff, a surgeon, all men. The women were daughters, mothers, wives, widows. Then there were the children, so many children, aged three months or six weeks, or five years or nine years, an “unnamed son of Richard Saunders” who died on 3.1.1863 after just four hours of life. It was a touching record of another age.

In a reverie as I read the names, the dates, the lives summed up in a few numerals and a word or a phrase, I struggled to recognise a feeling that refused to surface. And then, it did: where are the Aboriginal dead? The first of the burials in the Old Melrose Cemetery was in 1846, just ten years after the colony of South Australia was declared in Adelaide, 430 kilometres south of here. Melrose in 1846 would have been on the frontier. Where were the Aboriginal dead?

It was the same in Quorn, less than an hour up the road. Lots of info about the Ghan and the movies that had been made in the district but nothing about Aboriginal people — who they were or how they fared when the inexorable frontier arrived. Beltana, a scattering of houses and ruins further on, dwelt on its overland telegraph station, long since passed from use. Nothing about the Aboriginal people there either.

I’d begun to take photos of the many markers of the past — the monuments, the plaques, the information boards, the billboards and museums — and to puzzle over them. What was going on? Some of what was going on was obvious. “History” was a boom industry fed by tourism. Melrose announced itself as “historic,” chiefly on the ground that it had been base camp for John McDouall Stuart on his many attempts to cross the continent from south to north and back again. Quorn was “historic” because on the old line it used to be the last stop for the Ghan before it headed out into the desert for Alice Springs, a couple of days away. Beltana was “historic” by virtue of its telegraph station and by being not much more than a collection of ruins. The old road, which followed the old railway line that followed the old Overland Telegraph Line that followed Stuart’s epic plod, was itself historic. It was now “The Old Ghan Heritage Trail.”

The first of these many markers of History had been installed in the 1960s but most were of more recent date. They were about an implied “us,” our Pioneers, our Settlers, our Explorers, our feats of endurance, engineering, discovery. This was winners’ history. Where were the losers?

The losers made their first appearance near Lake Eyre, 400-odd kilometres on from Melrose. An info board there detailed the many traditional and contemporary uses of ochre, mined nearby. This was the equal and opposite of the markers in which Aboriginal people didn’t appear; there was no mention of us. Neither the markers about us nor the markers about them reported when or where or what happened when we encountered them, and they us. The ochre info board and many to follow did a jump cut: one moment we’re in Traditional Times, the next, in the present. How did they get from then to now? Just don’t mention the war.

That remained the overwhelming rule for a thousand kilometres or more, although there were exceptions: reports of the terror provoked by the huge four-legged, hard-footed animals that appeared without warning in the 1860s, references to the disruption of Indigenous land “since the Europeans first permanently arrived/invaded,” info boards about police operations “to control cattle spearing by Aborigines on newly established pastoral properties,” an info board that dispensed with evasions about “arrival/invasion” and just called the spade a spade, even an angry denunciation of the “transnationals and colonialist governments… defying the natural order of things in their quest for material wealth.”

I photographed every one of these many markers and kept on puzzling. Eventually I realised what should have been obvious: the history wars then raging in newspapers and scholarly articles and books and on the airwaves had been going on out here for decades. We’d won the country and then set out to win the story as well. The struggle over what the story would and would not tell was as much a part of the story as the events themselves.

By the time I reached Tennant Creek, a couple of weeks after lunch in Paradise Square, the telling of the story had been added to my list of things to find out about. Eventually, it worked its way to the top.

I left Tennant Creek in 1955, aged thirteen. I had never been back and never wanted to go back. In fact, I’d wanted to not go back. I didn’t like it when we lived there and ached to leave, despite the fact that it was a kind of kids’ paradise. We’d thread our way through the spinifex to old mine shafts and chuck beer bottles down to see how deep they were, or lie on our backs inside the fence around the aerodrome and scare ourselves stupid as the DC-3, feeling for the runway, roared over us just a few feet above.

Out the back of our place was the Works and Housing depot, surrounded by piles of junk from the war, then only seven years away, including, inexplicably, an old Rolls-Royce limo complete with a screened-off passenger compartment and a speaking tube through which we’d issue instructions in what we took to be toffy tones. There were topknot pigeons to be shot at with air rifles, and old tins and jars to be blown up with miners’ lamp carbide.

We stood at the dam behind the pub where the night before a bloke had bet he could swim across, but drowned, and we pedalled out to the bend in the Peko Road where Mr Archer had killed himself when he rolled his Fargo ute. We swam in the waterhole under red gums at Seven Mile, and every Saturday night there were the pictures at the open-air theatre, Westerns mostly, in my memory anyway.

Sometimes even a kid could see the magic in the desert, the sunsets, the fresh and vivid world after rain, the brilliant stars that would light our way home after the pictures. But mostly it wasn’t like that at all, just the blinding light that flattened and bleached, and the heat, and the incessant moaning of the wind and the ugly cawing of the crows.

I now suspect that in developing something close to loathing for Tennant, I had been taking my mother’s part. She suffered in the heat and despaired at the red-brown dust that was forever blowing through the flyscreened verandas onto furniture, floors, ledges, shelves, everywhere. She became anaemic, teary and homesick. She missed her family and the soft green Adelaide Hills where they worked their orchards and market gardens, and where she’d grown up, and she missed her eldest son, who’d been sent to Alice Springs for high school. She wanted to leave, and so did I, but couldn’t. She fretted that her husband would apply for a transfer rather than wait for another promotion, and it would be her fault.

Her husband, my father, was in his element. For fifteen years he’d been a teacher. Now he was the head teacher, a member of Tennant’s public service elite. Our house was one of five or six identical government houses lined up along with the police station, the post office and the school at the southern end of town. At the other end were two general stores, the bakery-cum-cafe, the cool-drink factory, the picture theatre, and the pubs, the Goldfields and the Tennant.

It was only half a mile or so to the other end of town, and we went down there just about every day. We’d ride our bikes along the narrow bitumen strip between expanses of gravelly red dirt — the Alice–Darwin highway that doubled as Tennant’s main street, lined by dusty shanties with stamped earthen floors and push-out galvanised-iron windows, which looked as though they had slumped in the heat.

I’d visit Mum at the general store where she worked behind the counter or go to mates’ places or ride past the stinky din of the front bar of the pub and see inside as the door swung open or just hang around. It was wholly familiar, but mysterious. We knew that this was the real Tennant to which teetotal public service blow-ins had no access, but we caught glimpses and heard echoes in the stories Tennant told about itself.

These were the stories we told back in Adelaide three years later as reports from another planet: stories about gold that went missing after a couple of fellas came up on the Tuesday plane and went back down again on Wednesday, about cattle rustling or bar-room brawls, about mysterious deaths and fortunes won and lost, and of course the one about how Tennant Creek the town was seven miles south of Tennant Creek the creek because that’s where the beer truck had broken down.

To these we added stories of our own about a hundred days in a row over the one hundred mark, about the dust storms and the weekly bath in a few inches of increasingly brown water, about a diet strong on meat but light on fruit and veg, about the Barcoo Rot and the conjunctivitis from the diet and the flies, about Dad asking the police sergeant whether bush turkeys were protected and being told that they were and how to cook them, and about the New Year’s Day when Danny Brookes’s Rolls-Royce limo — he’d tracked down the owner and bought it for sixty quid, apparently — trundled past our place, draped with men and women in various states of undress, still carousing, did a stately U-turn then headed back to the other end of town.

What I couldn’t understand then was that we had returned from the frontier, the place that all of Australia was at one time or another. Some of it still is.

We’d hardly arrived in Tennant before we found out about the kids from the mission. We saw them every Saturday night at the open-air pictures. We all sat in a deckchair sort of arrangement, rows and rows of long horizontal poles with canvas strips slung between them. It paid to get there early because the canvas strips, permanently exposed to the elements, often ripped to cheers and whistles in the middle of a film, and the strips got shorter and tauter every time they were repaired.

Anyway, we’d all be settled under our blankets against the cold desert nights and waiting for “God Save the Queen” when the kids from the mission would file in between us and the screen, crossing to the far side to the benches reserved for them. After the pictures they’d climb onto the mission truck and head off up the road into the darkness while we walked home under that vast, glittering sky, in the other direction.

Apart from Saturday nights you could never tell when you might see them. Sometimes there was a Black tracker at the back of the police station. Once I saw four or five Aborigines a bit of a distance out in the spinifex that stretched away from our back fence to a distant horizon. I got close enough to see them squatting in the sandy dirt behind a low humpy, playing cards. Then one day they were gone. Sometimes when I visited Mum at the general store there would be several old Aboriginal men sitting, cross-legged, on the veranda. Perhaps it was them I saw one day on a truck rigged up to carry cattle, the mission truck I suppose. They were in army greatcoats, standing motionless and silent as the truck went slowly past.

There was a sports day at the creek. We all drove out from the town and they came down from the mission. We spread ourselves under the gums by the waterhole. They were across the other side of a dusty clearing where the races were run, adults as well as children. We were invited to Sunday lunch at Banka Banka, the nearest station to Tennant Creek. Seated at a long table, we were served by Aboriginal women who padded silently across the cool concrete floor.

One September holidays Dad loaded up his single-spinner V8 Ford Custom with camping gear and off we went to Darwin, where we saw the wrecks in the harbour and neat rows of bullet holes in the walls of the old post office, and gawked at the Aborigines who hung around the back streets. They were really black, we observed, not just dark like ours.

On the way back we stayed a night at the Mataranka Station homestead, already operating as a guest house. We swam in the warm bubbling spring at the head of the Roper River, clear as crystal. In the morning, at breakfast, the room was dominated by a noisy group a couple of tables away. They’re making a film, Dad told us. Among them, quite still, and very beautiful, was a young Aboriginal woman.

These were encounters as in a tableau. So far as I can recall I never spoke to any of these Aborigines, nor they to me. The only exceptions to this rule, and even more puzzling because of it, were three Aboriginal kids at school, the brothers Roy, Rex and Rennie Hare. How come they lived in the town and not out on the mission? Was it because they weren’t real Aborigines? Their father, Mr Hare, was the nightsoil man who collected the tubs slopping with shit and phenol and sodden strips of newspaper from the back of the drop dunnies. Mr Hare was white, but Roy, Rex and Rennie’s mother was Aboriginal. The Hares lived in one of those tin shanties, the very last one right up the other end of town.

The Aborigines were nearly invisible yet somehow always there somewhere; sometimes referred to, even discussed, but never explained. Our Grade VI Social Studies text recorded the feats of John McDouall Stuart, whose explorations prepared the way for the Overland Telegraph Line, which I could see just by looking out the schoolroom window.

I was in awe of Stuart. How could he have walked all that way from Adelaide? More than a thousand miles! Five times! I designed a kind of palanquin supported by poles carried by a horse at each corner that he could have used to stroll along in permanent shade. The Social Studies textbook told us about Stuart’s encounter with fierce Aborigines just a bit further on from Tennant Creek the creek. When we crossed Attack Creek at the beginning of our big camping trip to Darwin, there was a small thrill of excitement. Shots were fired, and spears thrown, here!

 The space between that day in June 1860 and ours was filled by a vague sense of a vanished world. On one of our Sunday drives along bush tracks, we passed close to the bluffs of the gap in the range just north of the town. That’s Gins’ Lookout, Mum said, pointing to one of the bluffs. That’s where the “lubras” used to keep a lookout for the men coming back from the hunt. She told us that one of the old men who sat on the veranda of the general store was their king. Such a dignified old man, she said.

In the early 1960s I went to uni in Adelaide, to what was then generally regarded as the hottest history department in the country. In four years my cohort did no Australian history at all, let alone the history of relations between black and white. It was the fag end of the mental world of the Grade VI Social Studies textbook.

Elsewhere on campus, however, were signs of what was to come, including meetings and protests in support of “rights for Aborigines.” Scrappy little events like the two or three I went to turned into an uproar that subsequently rose and fell but never really went away — a freedom ride, a tent embassy, speeches and tracts and posters beyond counting, strikes, investigations, legislation and litigation, movies, books and docos, then Mabo, a semi-official accusation of genocide, and the ferocious history wars. All that provided the means by which people of my generation and demographic learned what we hadn’t been told and unlearned some of what we had.

For reasons that I can’t really explain but suspect don’t do me much credit, it was a long time before I started to connect all that national uproar with the one time and place at which my life had intersected so directly with the lives of Aboriginal people — and the people who kept them out on the mission, over to one side at the movies, out of our school and town, out of mind.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t know; I hadn’t realised how much I didn’t know. Thanks to all those Westerns, I could reel off a long list of “Indian” tribes, the Cheyenne, the Comanche, the Apache and the rest, but I did not even know that we had been living among the Warumungu and the Warlpiri. I didn’t know what the “mission” was or how the Warumungu and the Warlpiri got to be there or even where it was.

I began finding out, partly out of embarrassment but also out of curiosity. Who were they? Where on earth had a full-on policed and regulated apartheid regime come from? Where did it go? The more I read, the more there was to know and the more I wanted to know it.

That was a puzzle in itself. After a pretty slow start, why the obsession? No doubt it was the usual thing — the further you get from childhood the more fascinating it becomes — but it wasn’t just that. I was being carried along by a deep emotional undertow. The Aboriginal people and their relationship with the rest of us have become sites of proxy political warfare and synthetic emotions, but there’s real stuff there too, ranging from just feeling bad (in my case, whenever I think about those kids crossing in front of the screen at the Pioneer Picture Theatre) through to how everyone felt when Cathy Freeman won the big race. Against any expectation and all intentions, and with very mixed feelings, I decided to go back.

It was partly just a standard grey nomad kind of thing to do, and a chance to revisit what had been, after all, a burst of the vivid in an otherwise sepia-toned boyhood, but there were offsets too — the old aversions and a new one, the fact that Tennant had turned into Australia’s most notoriously dysfunctional town, something I had no wish to see. But I did want to find out where the Tennant Creek I’d lived in had come from, and gone, and thought (correctly, as it turned out) that I couldn’t unless I went there.

So, I set out for Tennant Creek to find out about relations between two racial groups in that particular field of life but didn’t get far — to Paradise Square in Melrose, at lunchtime on Day One to be exact — before there was something else to find out about: how the story of those relations had been told, and not told.

All the stories that the Tennant Creek of my boyhood had told about itself, and the stories we took back to tell our uncles and aunts and grandparents, they weren’t Tennant’s big story at all. By the time I’d made the last of three trips back to Tennant I’d learned that the struggles over whether and how to tell Tennant’s story were for a century and a half Australia’s struggles writ small, and intense. I found that among the protagonists were several of Australia’s intellectual luminaries and that not once but twice poor beaten-down smashed-up Tennant Creek had managed to make it onto the national stage, not in a starring role but in a big enough part to earn a place in the credits. Tennant, with and like Australia, had tried to tell the story. •

This is an edited extract from Telling Tennant’s Story: The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence (Black Inc., 2022). For a 20 per cent discount, follow this link and use the discount code INSIDE at checkout.

The post The strange career of the great Australian silence appeared first on Inside Story.

We see how Melbourne was made and remade, from the years leading up to the vibrant, anything-is-possible 1860s through to the long (and not yet complete) postwar enthusiasm for destruction and reconstruction, with buildings, streetscapes, urban centres, gathering places and green spaces disappearing only to reappear in markedly different form. We follow — by means of archival footage, photographs and the part-passionate, part-laconic commentary of a small group of highly engaged experts — how the city got from there to here.

In one sense it is a tragic tale, a story of how nineteenth-century commercial vitality could combine with a commitment to beauty and ornament and aesthetic pleasure, and how that happy combination was abandoned in favour of an equally commercialised faith in the clean and functional yet soulless lines of modernism.

In the later nineteenth century in particular, Melbourne was the most modern of modern cities, but by the early twentieth century the city seemed to be stuck in an earlier version of what it meant to be modern. Extending over many decades, the drive to keep up and go up is now commonly regarded as having got out of hand — a view that will only be reinforced by watching archival clips showing the wrecking ball repeatedly making short work of sandstone and brick and other materials supposedly meant to last.

Towards the end of the film, the tone changes, if not quite to an acceptance of what can’t be undone, then to an acknowledgement that lamentation alone serves no purpose and that we should focus instead on appreciating and celebrating those buildings that have, whether by chance or design, escaped the wrecking ball and now stand isolated or in short, nostalgia-inducing rows.

Buildings that were once imposing are now imposed upon, surrounded by newer and higher structures. From vantage points across the city, we can see architectural history in a single frame, with the metaphor of continuous change and growth made real by the contrast between the squat and solid, satisfyingly proportional yet fancifully decorated buildings of the early days, and the ambitious, straight-up, no-nonsense towers of more recent times.

Not everyone will be convinced by the attempt at balance. The film, with its wealth of archival clips of urban destruction, makes it difficult to understand how wreckers and citizens could have been quite so gleefully enthusiastic about it all. But the urge to knock down and rebuild, which started small, took earnest hold in the immediate interwar years and became rampant from the 1950s through to the 1980s, was not simply the result of philistinism gone mad.

Those statement buildings of earlier times — the insurance offices with their soaring ceilings and abundant curlicues, the lowering hotels with grand public spaces and small, draughty, unplumbed bedrooms, the multi-floor cafes with chandeliers and murals, the picture palaces that later sprung up all around suburban Melbourne — all of them were, in that phrase guaranteed to strike dread into the hearts of architectural conservationists, “no longer fit for purpose.” Replacement seemed the only option.

The fact that Melbourne was always changing, forever being built and rebuilt, meant it was constantly being filmed and photographed. Change attracts the camera, creating a number of distinct golden ages of Australian urban photography, most notably in the 1860s, when the newness of both Melbourne and the photographic medium combined to document the process of urban creation. Mid-century photographers like Wolfgang Sievers and Mark Strizic captured, sometimes in the same image, the excitement of re-creation along with the regret it entailed.

And film of course chronicled these changes in real time: the crowds bustling by Victorian work sites as buildings made their way to unprecedented heights of five or seven or eight floors, right through to Whelan’s ubiquitous wrecking balls making short work of a now-redundant building once expected to last forever — “forever” turning out to be little more than half a century, and frequently a good deal less.

We can’t escape the images’ elegiac tone. And no doubt there were many who at the time regretted the passing of a building they associated with their own youth and optimism, a personal landmark perhaps, one that they were used to making their way by. But regret, by and large, is not what we see on the faces of the witnesses to this assertion of energy and optimism.

The mid-century period of peak demolition was also a time when the most agile and acrobatic of the wrecking crews became urban celebrities, performing breathtaking balancing acts for lunchtime crowds of city workers. Clips from the time capture something of the excitement of looking on as the proudly unknockdownable was swiftly and comprehensively knocked down. Just as people were irresistibly attracted to those makeshift viewing windows that allowed them to peer in at the process of construction taking place, so they could gather to watch the building being demolished, then watch while the whole process started over again.

That was then. Now, the signs everywhere are that, architecturally speaking, we are falling out of love with modernity. Those who long for a return to classical design principles were until recently regarded as hooked on nostalgia, advocates for recreating what could not be recreated except as pastiche. While our fascination with statement buildings and starchitecture continues unchecked in many ways, something has changed.

Organisations and lobby groups that advocate a return to classical design principles (as variously defined) are cropping up all over the place. They appeal, with their accompanying images of medieval hill towns and height-restricted town centres, to what is described as our often unconscious responses to fractals and proportion and ornament. In this traditionalist version of the ideal city, buildings should attract the eye but not stand out — or up — too much. The elements of an urban landscape should go together to form a visually satisfying whole.

Stolen skyline? The Crown Casino building at Sydney’s Barangaroo. Phillip Elwin/Flickr

Ultimately, this is about our unresolved attitudes to density and height. How much should we try to fit in the frame before the composition becomes unbalanced, with the new overshadowing rather than complementing the old? A series of articles last month in the Sydney Morning Herald, assessing the relative success or failure of Central Sydney’s ambitious Barangaroo development project, hardly comes close to resolving this question. The commentaries land heavily on one side or the other, as indeed did the many hundreds of readers who felt moved to comment.

The centrepiece of the Barangaroo development, the Crown Tower — visible from points all over the wider urban area — is either a testament to vulgarity of massively inappropriate scale (“Barangaroo stole our skyline,” in the judgement of journalist Margot Saville) or a bold architectural statement of international significance. The Barangaroo development itself is a missed opportunity (a now standard criticism of any architectural or design endeavour, big or small), just one more example of the triumph of profit over public benefit — or the bold transformation of a redundant eyesore into an instantly iconic destination, a major civic asset.

Between these opposing views is one piece of common ground, and that is the ground on which none of Barangaroo’s buildings stand. A renewed enthusiasm for green space — parks, gardens and landscapes returned to their natural or near-natural state — reflects a long-overdue recognition of the intimate connection of First Nations people to the land, the dangers of climate change, and the boost to physical and mental health that comes with access to nature. But green space has the added advantage of being an increasingly rare focus of consensus, free of public debate’s almost automatic polarisation.

The villains remain, of course — the rapacious developers who push back against the greenery in their aim to create more saleable floor space. But even the most cartoonishly profit-seeking developer will generally grasp that a bit of greenery goes a long way towards enhancing perceptions of liveability in the minds of prospective buyers.

One of the common criticisms of skyscrapers, and the race for the next one to be taller and shinier than the last, is that like all bigger and better feats of design and engineering, they are monuments to excess, to the display and performance of wealth and power. In Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat’s 2021 film Official Competition, a wealthy and now elderly businessman longs to leave something more behind than his rather prosaic achievements in the world of commerce. “I want to do something that lasts,” he says. “A bridge, for example, designed by a famous architect.”

That he opts instead to finance a film, with a great director, famous actors and the likelihood of critical acclaim, underlines the link between monumentalism and performance. Skyscrapers may be monuments to excess and display, but so were many of the buildings they replaced — the grand merchants’ houses, the imposing and richly decorated insurance buildings, the cafes and hotels with their imported chandeliers, built to last only to give way in their turn to the next performance.

The Lost City of Melbourne asks important questions about the urban landscape, about how we look at it and what we see. What has been lost, and does the knowledge of past loss spoil irredeemably our appreciation of the present? Should we try to replace the past, always assuming that we can? The cycle of demolition and construction has been part of the public identification of Melbourne, and hence of Melburnians, with modernity. It was a particular brand of modernity, one that coexisted with social conservatism, but powerful for all that.

The rush to glass and steel, and the loosening of height restrictions that occurred in the postwar years derived from a fear that Melbourne’s claims to be modern, recently so well founded, were under threat. Perhaps today’s ragged skyline — a jumble of the old and the new — is a new version of modernity we can learn to love. We can see those older survivors as evocative relics in sadly reduced circumstances, just hanging on, or as scrubbing up rather well, all things considered, in the dusk with the height behind them. •

The post Re-creation and regret appeared first on Inside Story.

For most of the time I was working on the book, Wong and I — and most other observers — expected her to become foreign minister after the May 2019 election, which all the polls and most pundits were tipping Labor to win. She had been preparing for the job not only for the three-plus years she had held the shadow portfolio, but also during her previous term as shadow trade minister. She had always made clear that she didn’t seek to be prime minister; foreign minister was the job she wanted and the height of her ambition.

The plan was for Indonesia to be her first post-election stop-off as minister, followed by a made-for-media return to the city of her birth, Kota Kinabalu, in Malaysian Borneo. As a powerful illustration of her story and connections and an affirmation of Australia’s place in Asia, it was a public relations coup out of reach of any previous Australian foreign minister.

But then came the election defeat, and Wong had another three years to prepare. The pandemic set in, Donald Trump lost the American presidency and Xi Jinping’s grip tightened in Beijing. Among Australia’s Pacific neighbours, Chinese influence became even more apparent.

On 2 August this year Wong, now foreign minister, gave an unpublished address to staff at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Acknowledging that the department had lost influence under the previous government, she declared that Australia needed DFAT to be “more central and more persuasive” in an increasingly uncertain world. To do that, she said, required “frank advice, good decisions, courageous effort, focused advocacy, and me to do my job.”

She appealed to staff to “be ambitious for Australia,” to work with her to bring foreign affairs “back to the centre of the Australian government… We need to be creative; we need to be bold… to advance Australia’s interests and values.”

It was one of a series of speeches reflecting the new minister’s vision of what she had described in opposition as a “transformational” foreign policy. Australia can’t afford to be caught passively in the slipstream of the contest between the big powers, she argued, picking up a phrase used by foreign policy analyst Allan Gyngell. Rather, it is in the “influence game” and must use all available tools of statehood to negotiate the most uncertain time in recent history.

This means DFAT staff must lift their ambitions and the quality of their advice. “I think that starts with clarity of purpose,” she told them. “What is our purpose? To explain Australia to the world and the world to Australia. To clearly articulate our place in the world — as it is, as it should be — and deliver plans to bridge that gap… We’re not here to occupy the space. We’re not here to admire the complexity of problems we face. We’re not here to mollify. We are here to advocate.”

An urgent need to visit the Pacific and a succession of other overseas trips had stopped Wong from speaking to DFAT staff sooner. Her immediate focus had been the Solomon Islands government’s decision to sign a security pact with China — a development she described during the election campaign as “the worst Australian policy failure since the second world war.”

As it turned out, her first trip as minister was to the North Pacific rather than Indonesia. The day after she was sworn in, Wong and prime minister Anthony Albanese were in Tokyo for the Quad leaders’ summit. Then, over the subsequent ninety-nine days, she made four trips to Pacific nations (to Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, New Zealand and the Solomons, and July’s Pacific Islands Forum summit in Fiji) and three to Southeast Asia (to Vietnam and Malaysia, Singapore and, twice, Indonesia).

In speeches during those visits she signalled her ambition to change how Australia is seen in the world — and her view that this is the starting point for an ambitious foreign policy agenda in which Australians will become “more than just supporting players in a grand drama of global geopolitics.”

At the Pacific Islands Forum, she avoided telling island nations what to do, instead suggesting they act regionally, as a “family,” to decide matters for themselves. The speech appeared designed to encourage a kind of peer pressure, elevating the sometimes shaky forum (from which Kiribati had just withdrawn) as a venue where the concerns of Pacific Island nations could be brought to bear externally, on larger powers, and internally on the China-friendly Solomons prime minister Manasseh Sogavare and others.

Without explicitly mentioning China, Wong said that Australia was “a partner that won’t come with strings attached, nor impose unsustainable financial burdens. We are a partner that won’t erode Pacific priorities or institutions.” She acknowledged that Australia had “neglected its responsibility” on climate change, “disrespecting Pacific nations in their struggle to adapt to what is an existential threat.” That would change, she promised, with the creation of an Australia-Pacific Climate Infrastructure Partnership to support projects in Pacific countries and Timor-Leste. She also won the leaders’ support for a joint pitch to co-host the UN’s COP29 climate summit in 2024.

This is what Wong calls “listen first” diplomacy: meeting people where they are rather than where you want them to be. It is far from easy.

A blow-up with Sogavare came when he announced he would delay the Solomons’ 2023 election because the country didn’t have the funds to run the poll in the same year as it hosts the Pacific Games. Wong’s offer of Australia’s help to pay for the election wasn’t novel — similar assistance has been given before — but its timing while the relevant bill was before the Solomons parliament provoked a furious reaction. Wong was attempting to “directly interfere into our domestic affairs,” Sogavare thundered, though he went on to accept the funding and delay the election regardless.

The federal opposition portrayed the incident as a blunder on Wong’s part. But others in the foreign policy community point out that she rarely speaks without calculation and may well have wanted Solomon Islanders to know that Sogavare’s excuse for the delay had been removed.

More broadly, Wong wants to engage with other small and middle powers in the region to define and articulate a common interest in building a “peaceful, prosperous region in which sovereignty is respected.” She hopes this will ultimately help shape how the superpowers behave.

In dealing with the countries of Southeast Asia, Wong has emphasised the centrality of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — the body that Kevin Rudd has described as the “swing state” in the battle for regional dominance between China and the United States. As Wong said last November, “the countries of Southeast Asia have made clear they don’t want to choose between the great powers — but want to exercise their own agency in how the region is being reshaped.”

As Allan Gyngell wrote in his 2017 book Fear of Abandonment, Australian foreign policy has always assumed dependence on a great power — first Britain and then the United States. The fear in Gyngell’s title has never been more keenly felt than now. Australia watched as the United States under Barack Obama promised to “pivot” to Asia but then failed to deliver. It tried to decipher the chaos of the Trump administration, which seemed to be abandoning America’s global mission to defend an international order on which the security of middle powers like Australia depends.

These shifts underlined Gyngell’s view about the dangers of being caught in the great powers’ slipstreams. Australia’s historical preference for hunkering down in the company of allies no longer serves the times, he argues. Gyngell is one of the foreign policy analysts Wong most admires.

Has Australia in any sense punched above its weight in foreign policy over the decades? The answer would certainly have been “yes” in the 1970s and 80s, when prime minister Malcolm Fraser played a role in creating a post-apartheid future for South Africa by using the Commonwealth as a venue for the defence of human rights. Fraser’s government also brought a practical end to the White Australia policy, changing the face of the nation with migrants from Southeast Asia.

“Yes,” as well, under the succeeding Labor government of Bob Hawke, when the man generally regarded as Australia’s most successful foreign minister, Gareth Evans, increased Australia’s engagement with Asia and articulated the concept of Australia as a middle power. His achievements included initiating a UN peace plan for Cambodia and helping establish both the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and the ASEAN Regional Forum.

But most observers would have answered “no” in recent years, as Australia became a laggard in climate policy and lost credibility in its natural sphere of influence, the Pacific. For island governments, rising sea levels are an existential issue.

Coming into this mix, Penny Wong is an extraordinary package. She is a self-conscious intellectual and policy wonk. As well as foreign minister she is the leader of the government in the Senate, and is generally regarded as the intellectual leader of Labor’s left, which is also Anthony Albanese’s faction. She is one of the prime minister’s closest allies and friends.

As she told Singapore’s International Institute for Strategic Studies in one of her first speeches after the election, she is far from the first Australian foreign minister to recognise the importance of relationships with Southeast Asia. “But I am the first to make these statements as an Australian foreign minister who is from Southeast Asia.”

Wong’s history binds together central themes in Australia’s development. On both sides of her family she is the product of British colonialism and its impact on the region. On her mother’s side, she is as deeply rooted in Australia as is possible for someone not of Aboriginal ancestry. Her great-great-great-grandparents migrated from Britain to what became the colony of South Australia in 1836, refugees from the exigencies of the industrial revolution. On her father’s side, she is the descendant of Cantonese Chinese recruited to labour on the vast tobacco and timber plantations and in the tin mines by the British North Borneo Company.

Wong’s most powerful understanding of her Chinese ancestry comes from the experiences of her Hakka grandmother, Lai Fung Shim, who singlehandedly ensured the survival of the family line during the brutal Japanese wartime occupation of Borneo in the early 1940s. Francis Yit Shing Wong, Penny Wong’s father, was Lai Fung Shim’s oldest child.

Francis Wong was a beneficiary of the postwar Colombo Plan, which sponsored academically able Asians to study in Australia. His decision to enrol in architecture at the University of Adelaide meant that — as Wong put it in a speech in Kuala Lumpur in late June — “a charming young Malaysian man could meet a bold young Australian woman.”

With the White Australia policy still in force, the newly married couple couldn’t stay in Australia. They settled in Francis’s hometown of Kota Kinabalu, where Penny Wong was born in 1968. North Borneo had been a British protectorate when Francis left for South Australia; by the time he returned it was part of the new nation of Malaysia.

After the marriage broke down, Wong’s mother took her and her brother back to Adelaide. They were the only Asian faces in their suburban primary school. The racism Wong suffered, and the strength she developed in surviving it, became a defining feature of her personality.

Only when prime minister Paul Keating declared in 1992 that the fall of Singapore was as important to the Australian story as Gallipoli, and the war casualties in Malaysia and Borneo as important as those in Europe, did Wong conclude that Australia was her home. When her plane touched down in Adelaide after a visit to her father that year, she thought to herself, “This is my country now. This is my place.”

It is this sense of the nation that Wong describes as central to an effective foreign policy. The time has come to stop championing the Anglosphere, she has said: “Foreign policy starts with who we are.” Australia, she told the Pacific Islands Forum, is a country with 270 ancestries, including the world’s oldest continuous culture. “This gives us the capacity to reach into every corner of the world and say, ‘we share common ground.’”

Wong has urged the leaders of Pacific Island nations and the countries of ASEAN to join Australia in attempting to shape a “settling point” between the United States, Australia’s most important ally, and China, its biggest trading partner. She has also referred approvingly to Kevin Rudd’s view that Australia and the countries of the region should seek “managed strategic competition” between China and the United States “within a set of minimum guardrails to reduce the risk of escalation, crisis, conflict and war.”

Wong has talked of moving Australia beyond reliance on the United States to a more activist role: unapologetic and robust in defending core democratic values, retaining the centrality of the alliance but seeking cooperation with China where possible. More than this, and although it is not explicitly stated, Wong clearly hopes to provide the United States with ideas about how to engage with the countries of the region without playing into Chinese narratives about arrogant, interfering white colonialists.

In Kuala Lumpur, she described ASEAN as “holding the centre of the Indo-Pacific.” Its strength, she said, “lies in its ability to speak for the region and to balance regional powers. All countries that seek to work with the region have a responsibility to engage constructively and respectfully with it.”

Wong first articulated the “settling point” concept during a speech to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta in September 2019, when she was still in opposition. US leadership would be most effective, she said, “when it is conceived in terms of leading a community of nations, with all that entails.” Beijing, too, should recognise that “most of us in the region are not comfortable with an authoritarian China becoming the predominant power.”

With Donald Trump still in the White House, she went on: “It’s fair to say that many countries in the region are unclear about what precisely it is that the United States is seeking to achieve… Absent that clarity, China will assume the worst… Great powers will do what great powers do to assert their interests. But the rest of us are not without our own agency.”

A “settling point” would mean the United States embracing a multipolar future for the region “with countries like Indonesia, India and Japan playing increasingly important leadership roles… Defining a realistic settling point will also help the United States recognise and accept that decisions relating to China will vary depending on the issues and interests at stake.” It would also remind Beijing that “when we make decisions that defend or assert our national interests in ways that may not reflect China’s views it is not due to a cold war mentality.” People who value the United States’ leadership, she said, “want the US to retain it by lifting its game, not spoiling China’s.”

She has repeated those ideas in several speeches, though since taking government the language has been more subtle. “Settling point” is still mentioned, but the emphasis has shifted to “strategic equilibrium.”

Another strand of Wong’s thinking, not yet fully articulated, is a promise to put the history of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at the centre of foreign policy. She has appointed a First Nations ambassador within her department, and when she was accompanied to the UN General Assembly in September by senator Pat Dodson, who hosted a roundtable on First Nations foreign policy involving Canada, New Zealand and other countries with Indigenous populations.

Wong has also indicated that Australia will be following a more active investment policy in Southeast Asia — with more detail clearly to come. This move recognises that China’s pitch for influence is overwhelmingly economic rather than military or cultural, and any response needs to be in kind.

China will continue to be a key challenge. Wong neither endorsed nor criticised US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, but she labelled China’s response as excessive and called for “restraint and de-escalation.” She described a new UN report on China’s detention of the Uighurs as “harrowing reading” and acknowledged it had found allegations of torture to be credible; but she also said that Australia’s response would be decided in consultation with other countries. Unlike the previous government, she is not putting Australia on the front line of conflict with China, but nor is she taking a backward step on key values.

Equally significant is what she doesn’t do, and doesn’t say. In the days after those comments, every serious current affairs program in Australia sought her out for an interview. That she declined them all might have created a background level of frustration, but it enabled her to duck the inevitable question about Taiwan. Would Australia, push comes to shove, join the United States in a military conflict with China?

The former government’s defence minister, opposition leader Peter Dutton, said last November that it was “inconceivable” Australia would not join in. But Wong has been keen to dial down the rhetorical heat. “More strategy, less politics” is her strategy. “Talk less, do more.”

With the Pacific dominating her first weeks in power, it was June before Wong made that long-planned return to Kota Kinabalu. The visit came complete with the perfect photo opportunity: the minister and her Chinese Malaysian half-siblings eating fish ball juk and noodles in the cafe she loved as a child. The message was explicit: this was her story, but it was also contemporary Australia’s.

Given that opinion polls suggest the Albanese government has increased its popularity since its election win, Wong is likely to have at least two three-year terms to enact and develop her foreign policy approach.

Will it work? Perhaps, in these bellicose times, it is optimistic to suppose that middle powers can have the agency Wong seeks. One strand in Australian foreign policy commentary doubts that the United States is really committed to the region — and believes Washington might well conclude its essential interests are not at stake there. Having accepted the Asia-Pacific would become a sphere of Chinese influence, it would then depart, leaving a friendless Australia carrying the can for the United States’ China containment policies.

In a recent Quarterly Essay Hugh White suggested the battle is already effectively over and China has won. Australia should tell the United States to surrender Taiwan to Beijing and then begin to talk to China about its role in the new hegemony.

On the other hand, foreign policy scholars and politicians agree that Australia does have influence in Washington. As the head of the US Studies Centre at Sydney University, Michael Green, put it in a response to White, “the strategic community on Asia policy in DC is pretty small and also very impressionable. If there are good ideas from trusted partners like Australia, they go right to the top.”

The good idea, from Wong and the thinkers she respects, is to listen first, shun binary thinking, and accept a multipolar region in a rules-based world. All this, and attempt to maintain mutual respect.

If Wong is successful in shifting the dial, Australia will once again have punched above its weight, claiming agency in the region, allied to but not necessarily always following the United States. It will have helped shape the behaviour of regional forums and the superpowers, and perhaps even contributed to avoiding war. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Making up for lost time appeared first on Inside Story.

I’ve been back in Alice Springs since October 2018 to make repairs to my unit and live cheaply while I finish writing a book, Into the Loneliness, about two women who roamed outback Australia last century. I first moved here in 2003, and even after I shifted to Melbourne in 2010 I was never entirely absent, returning to Central Australia every few months to work on a research project.

January is typically when Alice people flee to the coast to avoid the heat, but this year it’s even hotter and more humid than I remember it during the noughts. In summers past, say long-term residents, the temperature usually fell to 15°C at night, but high maximums these days are accompanied by high minimums. One morning when I was making breakfast the temperature was already 39°C.

“Heat wave” — the term that’s used on the news — is surely a euphemism for what we’re experiencing. A 2015 CSIRO report says Alice Springs averaged seventeen days above 40°C each year during 1981–2010 and forecast the figure rising to thirty-one days by 2030. When fifty-five days exceeded 40°C between July 2018 and June 2019 I began to wonder when the desert capital will become uninhabitable.

By the year’s end, the town is awash. On Christmas Eve 2019 I wake to see brown water churning between the normally barren Todd River’s banks across the road from my townhouse.

During the year I’ve struck up an acquaintance in the library with a Luritja woman from Papunya, chatting with her whenever she brings in her grandkids to use the computers. When I admire how the rain overnight brought out the fresh bush scents, she disagrees. She didn’t like it at all; it was too hard to find anywhere dry to sleep. She’d been sleeping rough, of course, maybe in the saltbushes hemming the Todd or in the riverbed.

That’s where some of the library’s local Arrernte regulars sleep, along with the Warlpiri, Anangu, Alyawarr and Warramungu who come into Mparntwe from their communities, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, for cultural purposes, or to shop for supplies, use services or catch up with family and friends. Some stay with relatives in one of Alice Springs’s seventeen town camps or sleep overnight in or around the riverbed, then eat and shower at the Salvos before coming to the library.

Local Indigenous leaders fear that climate change will drive many from their traditional homelands to towns like Alice, escaping from flooded communities and overcrowded houses unsuited to extreme temperatures. “We are already suffering through hotter, drier and longer summers in our overcrowded hotbox houses,” says Central Land Council chair Sammy Wilson.

After the deluge, the usually bare slopes of the West MacDonnell ranges, flanking the town, are festooned in green. It would be tempting to see this as a La Niña bonus if not for the fact that much of the greenery is buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris), an insidious invasive species introduced by pastoralists to feed cattle. Buffel overwhelms native grasses, driving out bilbies and other small creatures and impeding local people’s collection of bush foods. Because of its intense flammability, traditional fire management practices no longer work. As Arrernte Anmatyerr poet Patricia Perrurle Ansell Dodds writes, “It’s too dry now. / The summer is too hot. / That buffel grass is everywhere.”

Back in January a boy had appeared in my peripheral vision as I drove out of the library car park one steamy evening. When he rolled across my bull bar in a loose, graceful motion I slammed on the brakes, fearful of hurting him, then bit back my irritation, waiting for him to move. How old was he? Eight; ten at the most. He was playing chicken, trying to provoke me, and when I failed to respond, he staggered away melodramatically.

I eased out of the car park, a little shaken and annoyed, although I’d soon be home sipping a G&T on my balcony with its view of the MacDonnells. I regained my equilibrium, distanced myself from what this scene ws a reminder of — the youth crime wave said to be plaguing the town.

When I first lived in Alice during the noughts, youth crime was expected to rise over the summer holidays. Since then, reports suggest it has reached epidemic proportions all year round. Aboriginal kids as young as eight are said to be roaming the streets in packs at night and “running amok.” Most of my friends have a story about a window being smashed, a house broken into, or a car being taken for a joyride, sometimes repeatedly.

This time round, the youth crime wave has become the main topic in what writer Robyn Davidson wryly calls The Conversation — the constant discussion about First Nations people among progressives in Alice Springs. Davidson, famous for walking with camels from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean, has been dipping in and out of the town since 1977 while many of the “white do-gooders” (as they are called by their detractors in town) associated with the land rights movement and Aboriginal-controlled organisations in the 1970s and 80s have retired or moved to the coast. Over the past decade, in their stead, my gen-X contemporaries have shifted into the senior ranks of the local chatterati while millennials have refreshed many creative and political spaces in town with their artistic and digital agility. An Indigenous middle class has also emerged, often holding key managerial roles in Aboriginal-controlled organisations.

To live in Alice Springs, regardless of whether you were born here or why you came here, is to be caught up in The Conversation. The reasons relate to Mparntwe’s role as what the late Arrernte artist W. Rubuntja called a “little Central Australian Rome — too much Tywerrenge [or Law].” It is a cultural, social and economic focal point for First Nations people from the cross-border region of the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.

Because colonisation occurred later here than in the southeast, First Nations people consequently make up a greater proportion of Alice Springs’s population of 25,000 (a shade over one in five, according to the 2021 census) than of densely populated coastal cities. With the fallout from the encounter between First Nations people and settlers more evident in daily life, The Conversation in Alice Springs is more direct and less notional than the talk on the east coast.

Within eighteen months of my return to Alice Springs in 2018, my van’s passenger window has been broken repeatedly — once in my carport and three times in the library car park. Around the complex where I live, shattered car windows often glint in the grass like dew-encrusted cobwebs. Friends advise me to leave the van unlocked with a window half down so people can break in without shattering the glass. The windows remain intact but I sometimes find signs — an open door or glove box, a cigarette butt — that someone has rummaged around overnight.

A local glazier says he replaced thirty car windows each day during the recent midyear school holidays. Most shop windows in Todd Mall, the main business drag, are shuttered to protect them overnight, dampening what was once a colourful tourist precinct. Windows in the town council chambers and the library were often smashed while I worked there; once the aquatic centre fell victim to a midnight vandalism spree, with eighteen windows shattered and computers thrown into the pool.

The town is “under siege,” one headline declares. On community social media forums people cite the continued break-ins, loss of property and vehicle damage as reasons why they’re leaving town, posting photos and footage from home security cameras of break-ins. The issue of race frequently surfaces:

Sorry but the way I see it now is that anybody with white skin is simply not welcome.

Time to leave.

Where are the parents? comes the cry, along with exhortations to get tough on crime and employ more police to ensure no kids are on the streets after a certain time.

A friend who works with children in care in Alice Springs tells me about how, when she encouraged a boy to reflect on the consequences of theft, he replied, “Whitefellas have lots of stuff. They can always get more stuff.” One possible interpretation is that the rise in crime is an up-yours to the coloniser — to those who’ve taken so much and have so much — by young people exiled to the shadow zones of intergenerational trauma and poverty.

Whatever its causes, statistics lend weight to the perceptions of rising crime and rising rates of recidivism among young people. In 2019–20, NT Police proceeded more than once against 54 per cent of offenders aged ten to fourteen and 37 per cent of offenders aged fifteen to nineteen (with the older cohort making up 82 per cent of all offenders), indicating high rates of reoffending. Young people detained by NT police are overwhelmingly Indigenous.

That youth crime should have burgeoned in Alice Springs over the past decade seems no coincidence. During the noughts, the main Conversation topics within local social justice organisations were violence against women and substance misuse. Central Australia was experiencing record rates of alcohol consumption and associated harms, including assaults, mainly against Aboriginal people. These declined over the next decade following the introduction of alcohol harm-reduction measures, including the NT government’s Banned Drinkers Register, a Labor policy implemented in 2011–12 and then resumed in 2017, when Labor resumed office.

Many young people were consequently born to parents who drank alcohol to harmful levels and mothers who experienced family violence. According to an NT government report, “at least one child is subjected to domestic and family violence every day of the year in the Northern Territory.” Other children live with the effects of having witnessed family violence; still others leave unsafe and overcrowded living situations and gain a sense of identity in street gangs.

Central Australian Youth Link Up Service report seeing a rise in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and other neurological conditions. While the current incidence of the disorder is unknown, a 2003 study calculated its prevalence in the Territory’s Aboriginal children to be between 1.87 and 4.7 per 1000 live births, compared with an estimated national rate of 0.02 per 1000 non-Indigenous children. Parents and educators find these young people, afflicted by limited attention spans, hyperactive behaviour and other learning difficulties, difficult to engage in educational, social, recreational and other activities.

Their parents are often young: in 2019, a fifth of Aboriginal mothers who gave birth in the Alice Springs region weren’t yet twenty. Often they haven’t completed school and face limited job opportunities, especially in remote areas. Around half remote-living Indigenous people don’t receive income from either wages or a Centrelink allowance, so they fall back on families for support, lifting poverty among the broader group. Census data indicates that between 2006 and 2016 Indigenous poverty rates increased to 50 per cent in very remote areas while falling to 22 per cent among Indigenous people in the major cities.

Food, fuel and other essentials were already more expensive in regional centres — and higher still in remote communities — but have hiked further in Alice Springs and its satellite communities since late 2021. Petty crime can be driven by something as basic as hunger.

The rise in crime and poverty also coincided with the implementation of the Howard government’s NT National Emergency Response and Labor’s Stronger Families policy. The BasicsCard, an income management tool introduced in town camps and prescribed communities in 2007, was extended to all welfare recipients in the Territory in June 2010. Fifty per cent of recipients’ Centrelink payments and 70 per cent of child protection payments could be spent only on food, clothing and rent. Financial penalties applied if, for example, children failed to attend school.

The BasicsCard was accompanied by the Community Development Program, a work-for-the-dole program that required remote participants to work for longer hours than their non-remote counterparts. Unlike its predecessor, the long-running Community Development Employment Projects scheme, the CDP was designed without any input from local communities.

Because allowances under these schemes were suspended if participants were unable to meet requirements, poverty rose. An ANU analysis found increased rates of infant mortality, child abuse and neglect, and a rise in low birth weights and child deaths from injury — a sad irony, given that the first round of reforms came in response to the Little Children Are Sacred report.

The rate of family violence in the Territory remains staggeringly high, and in 2021 recorded the greatest annual increase (12 per cent) in family and domestic violence-related assault victims across the country. NT police data indicate that nine out of ten victims were Aboriginal, and eight were Aboriginal women. “It is not an exaggeration to say that intimate partner violence committed upon Aboriginal women in the NT is pervasive,” NT coroner Greg Cavanagh said in 2016. “Almost three quarters” of NT Aboriginal women have been victims of intimate partner violence.

The Tangentyere Women’s Family Safety Group in Alice Springs has developed resources and initiatives to assist women and men in tackling family violence, but the lack of women’s refuges and other services, especially in very remote areas, and long waiting times for already overburdened clinics exacerbate the risks for those seeking to escape violence.

Although the fallout from this crisis is devastating, even the most distressing incidents scarcely rate a mention in national media. Which is why campaigners from the Tangentyere group held a vigil one Sunday in July this year to mourn the deaths of a mother and child, allegedly shot by the woman’s forty-one-year-old partner in a murder-suicide out of town. About one hundred of us gathered on the lawn outside Alice Springs Court and laid flowers on the grass and wrote messages of support to the family. Friends and relatives spoke about the impact of the loss of this thirty-year-old Aboriginal woman and her fourteen-week-old baby.

While the campaigners hoped the vigil would raise national awareness of the high incidence of family-violence-related deaths among First Nations women, the deaths received little attention outside Alice Springs. Indeed, more coverage was given to the shooting of three whitefellas in a property dispute in north Queensland the following month. And the small turnout for the vigil seems telling, too, in a town that focuses so much outrage on property crimes.

Strange things happened in Central Australia during the pandemic. After the first lockdown was announced on 23 March 2020, the streets of Alice Springs became abnormally quiet. Heeding the strong messages carried by remote Indigenous and national media about Covid-19’s risks, people stayed inside their houses or returned to their communities.

Behind closed doors in the library, we continued to provide borrowing and printing services, and moved storytelling and other educational programs online. But we wondered what had happened to our regulars. What were the tjilpis (Pitjantjatjara for older men) who watched westerns in the library doing every day, and the cheeky kids who enjoyed using computer apps to make videos and create emojis?

That was the town’s longest lockdown. By mid May we were dining al fresco in cafes; by early June we were allowed to go camping again (the ban had been a great privation for locals). On the last day of May, about one hundred people gathered at the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens for the launch of local author Dani Powell’s book, Return to Dust — the first sign for me of a return to a fragile normality.

For almost two years, as we resumed life in our own Truman Show in the middle of the desert, the virus seemed hypothetical. We went through the motions of sanitising and physical distancing (mask wearing never became widespread, except where mandated). Because of the Territory’s relative isolation, sparse population and, most of all, strict border controls, the virus’s spread was curtailed until quarantine restrictions were lifted for vaccinated travellers just before Christmas 2021. For me, the pandemic’s most difficult aspect was not being able to visit family in Sydney because of the prohibitive cost of fourteen days’ quarantine when I returned.

Alice Springs didn’t experience its first Covid-related death — an Aboriginal woman from Mutitjulu, who was the third fatality in the Territory — until 31 January this year. By the time five-day Covid isolation ended nationally, the Territory had recorded seventy-three Covid-related deaths and a fatality rate of 0.07 per cent. While any loss of life is tragic, these figures are remarkably low given that the region’s indices of disadvantage are among the worst in the country.

The effectiveness of the Territory’s Covid response stems from advocacy early in the pandemic by the Combined Aboriginal Organisations and peak Aboriginal health bodies, and especially by Donna Ah Chee, the chief executive of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, who initially lobbied for strict border controls.

The pandemic’s first year was also an unwitting social experiment. Property crime rates plummeted from April to August 2020, which some local commentators attributed to the existence of a curfew of sorts. A more compelling hypothesis is that crime fell after the coronavirus supplement lifted the JobSeeker and Youth Allowance by $550 fortnightly in March 2020, temporarily raising welfare recipients’ income above the poverty line.

“For the first time some households have been able to afford basic needs like accommodation, food, winter clothes, whitegoods or repairs to motor vehicles,” reported the Northern Territory Council of Social Service in October 2020. As the supplement was phased out from late September through to December that year, property break-ins resumed their previous high levels.

When people ponder the distance, the climate and the crime they often ask me and my friends how we can live here.

Despite the town’s extremes, it’s possible to experience many things here that have been lost in other urban areas. You can usually commute to work in ten minutes from any direction. You can escape to the bush for a walk or a swim in a waterhole, or to camp overnight, often without much preparation. You can immerse yourself quickly in the dramatic landscape — giant orange rocks cast by ancestral beings, wild dogs (Akngwelye) and caterpillars (Yeperenye, Ntyarlke and Utnerrngatye) churning across the land — and its moodiness, all bold primary colours in bright sun one day, brooding pastels in overcast weather the next. You can enjoy a sense of social ease, bumping into anyone at any time, and you can slot quickly into the town’s social, cultural and sporting lives.

To me, Alice Springs’s greatest strength has always been its community-driven activities, of which it boasts an extraordinary number. The town wheels through a calendar of iconic and idiosyncratic creative and sports events, including Parrtjima, the country’s only Aboriginal light festival, the Anaconda mountain-bike race, the Finke Desert Race, the Beanie Festival, Word Storm (the NT Writers Festival, every second year in Alice), the Bush Bands Bash, the Desert Mob exhibition, Desert Song and the Desert Festival.

In early October, composer Anne Boyd’s Olive Pink Opera was performed with the support of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir in the botanic gardens, on the site where the eponymous anthropologist camped in a tent during the 1950s.

While Alice Springs is best known for its visual arts — Albert Namatjira’s landscapes, the central and western desert art movements, the annual Papunya Tula Art Exhibition — it is also an incubator for experimental work by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. A recent exhibition, Footy Show, at Watch This Space, showcased First Nations artists exploring their relationship to football. Indigemoji, Australia’s first set of Indigenous emojis, was produced by young people guided by senior Arrernte cultural advisers, and Awemele Itelaretyeke is an app with two audio walking tours made by traditional owners to help users learn about Mparntwe’s history, culture and language.

Some of Centralia’s most hard-hitting creative achievements over the past decade have been in film and television: Warwick Thornton’s prize-winning Sweet Country (2017), which premiered at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, is a Western based on the local story of Willaberta Jack, and Penelope McDonald’s Audrey Napanangka (2021) explores the life and work of the Warlpiri artist. Dylan River (Thornton and McDonald’s son) directed Finke: There and Back (2019) for Brindle Films, which follows several Finke Desert Race participants, including local filmmaker Isaac Elliott, who competes on a modified motorbike after an accident left him confined to a wheelchair.

Alice-based production company Brindle Films, founded in 2011 by Rachel Clements and Trisha Morton-Thomas, produced the ABC TV comedy series 8MMM Aboriginal Radio (2015), and The Song Keepers (2018), the NITV/SBS documentary about the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir on tour. Isaac Elliott also worked with Brindle Films on the Netflix TV series MaveriX (2022), about dirt bike riders in the red centre.

Locally made documentary In My Blood It Runs (2019), which screened on ABC iView and Netflix, introduced viewers to the challenges encountered by ten-year-old Arrernte/Garawa boy Dujuan Hoosan in navigating cultural life and Western educational systems in Alice Springs. SBS crime series True Colours (2022), created by Erica Glynn (Thornton’s sister), portrays First Nations people’s social and cultural realities in Central Australia in a way rarely seen on TV. With white characters appearing as marginal figures, it features strong performances by untrained locals including singer Warren H. Williams, Arrernte elders Sabella Kngwarraye Ross Turner and Rosalie Kumalie Riley, and lead actor Rarriwuy Hick.

Books and publishing also have a high profile in Alice Springs. Although Dymocks closed its local store in 2013, local bookseller Red Kangaroo Books, run by the Capper–Druce family in Todd Mall since 2007, battled on, featuring on one list of “21 of the Best Bookshops in Australia to Visit in 2021.” As “the only bricks-and-mortar independent bookshop still standing in Australia between Port Augusta, Darwin, Broome, and Broken Hill,” the shop attributes its success to its “fiercely local” focus, stocking (often hard-to-come-by) books on Central Australian subjects and by Centralian authors.

Community-publishing outfits have long flourished in Alice Springs, especially those dedicated to producing books by First Nations people. The Institute for Aboriginal Development Press, which has published First Nations dictionaries and resources since 1969, has recently been joined by Running Water Community Press, which has produced anthologies of local women’s poetry including Campfire Satellites: An Inland Anthology (2019) and Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women’s Talk: Poems of Lyapirtneme from Arrernte Women in Central Australia (2020). The first book in its new truth-telling series is local stolen generations survivor Frank Byrne’s Living in Hope (2022), an earlier version of which won the Small Press Network’s Most Underrated Book Award in 2018.

Other notable First Nations publications include Central Land Council’s collective memoir, Every Hill Got a Story (2015), and ninety-year-old Kanakiya Myra Ah Chee’s memoir, Nomad Girl (2021).

Among the most inspiring local ventures are the First Nations children’s books published by intergenerational Arrernte learning initiative Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe Children’s Ground. Led by local Arrernte elders, Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe began providing education to First Nations children on Country and in people’s communities, combining Arrernte and Western educational priorities. Since 2019, its Arrernte educators have produced nine educational resources featuring seven local languages, the latest of which include Tyerrtye Atyinhe (My Body), Althateme (McGrath’s Dam) and Intelhiletyeke, a First Nations colouring book.

“We’ve been following government nearly all our lives — this is a new beginning,” says Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe director M.K. Turner. “We are following a new path, our own path as First Nations people for the future of our children. At Children’s Ground, the community is taking the lead. We are very proud of that. We are the government of ourselves.”

When the Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitsh arrived by train in Alice Springs in 1933 he experienced “an uncontrollable joy and fear.” “One feels,” he wrote, “that one is in the middle of the hot, wild heart of the most remote of all continents — Australia.”

I can relate to the intensity of Ravitsh’s response. Unsettling feelings take hold of you on being confronted by Mparntwe Alice Springs, destabilising your perception of Australia. The town continues to draw people like me — rootless wanderers above the ground, as a Māori elder once described the Pākehā — back to the Centre. With its sharp light throwing so much into relief, there is rawness about living in the place.

Here you live on the precipice of the prosperity so many Australians take for granted, where the marginalisation, the poverty, the trauma and the damage to Country that resulted from dispossession of First Nations people are all too apparent. At the same time, it is a privilege to see this other, remote Australia, to live and work alongside First Nations people, to catch a glimpse of what Country means to them, even if the depth and complexity of this relationship is hard to grasp.

“The town grew up dancing,” the late W. Rubuntja wrote. “And still the dancing is there under the town… We still have the culture, still sing the song… It’s the same story we have from the old people, from the beginning here in the Centre.”

May the dance never end. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Hot, wild heart appeared first on Inside Story.

The news isn’t all good. The government has been less assured in its treatment of its unwise commitment to the lingering and now discredited heritage of trickle-down economics, in the form of tax relief for those who need it least at the expense of more urgent spending demands.

It is not a propitious time to be in government. Everywhere, problems crowd in: the need for rapid transitions to slow climate change; the deterioration of the US polity and the West’s declining investment in the rule of law; the rise of China; the backsliding of some democracies towards autocracy; a war in Europe threatening energy supply, resources, supply lines, trade and international relations; and galloping inflation, exacerbating cost-of-living pressures.

On the one hand, it’s heartening to recall that Labor governments have taken the helm before in times of crisis, notably during the two world wars, and in the second instance drew on that experience to initiate the programs that transformed Australia’s postwar development. A later Labor government, whatever its shortcomings, was much more successful than most of its international counterparts in limiting the depredations of the global financial crisis.

On the other hand, Labor struggled in the 1930s to reconcile the expectations of its supporters with the stringencies it felt induced to impose on the country during the Great Depression, with disastrous electoral consequences. The risk lies in another disjunction between political demands for relief and what are interpreted as global economic forces beyond our control, but to which our leaders must respond.

What we do know with certainty is that when perceptions of crisis are elevated, anxious people can be persuaded to back individuals who think themselves strong leaders who alone have the answers. This is the obverse of what is needed. Leaders must be able to communicate a sense of purpose, of course, but they must also know salvation lies in their capacity, with their team, to orchestrate the many in cabinet, in the public sector, in advisory capacities, in adjacent repositories of influence or authority (law, business, unions, community movements, non-government organisations) who can jointly contribute to solutions. The channels for outreach to all of these sectors will not only rely on personal and political networks, but must also run through the public service and the ministerial minders entrenched alongside the executive.

While it is foolhardy to predict the future, looking at each of three elements — communication, orchestration and managing the prime ministerial machine — from a historical perspective clarifies the factors that might assist or impede the Albanese government’s ability to meet the challenges we face.

Communication

Leaders must communicate a sense of purpose for their administration. Yet, just as the default to strong leaders often proves problematic, so too does the expectation that fraught conditions or urgent reform are best served by inspirational leadership. Australia has had inspirational leaders — Bob Menzies, Gough Whitlam, Paul Keating, perhaps Bob Hawke — and all, arguably, had transformative impact in their day. Treating this as a necessary element would give us pause: inspirational rhetoric is not part of Albanese’s skill set, nor that of his cabinet colleagues.

But this is not the only way transformation happens. I’ve argued before that Winston Churchill’s war record is sometimes mistakenly thought to be the epitome of salvation by inspirational leadership. Once the war was over, though, he was defeated by Labour’s Clement Attlee, who was considered a pygmy against the Churchillian lion and was once described by a colleague as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing.” But Attlee was a straight talker, buoyed by research — including the landmark Beveridge report on the welfare state — showing what needed to be done, and persuaded the country to invest in a postwar nation-building and welfare regime that hardline Tories have taken sixty years to unravel.

Examples are available closer to hand. In the 1930s, United Australia Party prime minister Joe Lyons, never a patch on Menzies as a parliamentary and public performer, was able to establish a rapport with the public that induced a predecessor and critic, S.M. Bruce, to concede that “he knew how to win elections.”

And then there is John Howard, who would scarcely figure as an inspiring leader. He doggedly prefaced every policy announcement with a statement of its relation to Liberal values; travelled the country constantly, speaking at party branches, to carry the party with him; and cleverly exploited favoured media channels to disseminate his message. Nobody could misunderstand his purpose. The leading historian of the Liberal Party, Judith Brett, concluded that he was the most creative conservative leader since Menzies.

Has Albanese such capacities? Leading up to the 2022 election he was criticised for his cautious policies, but he nonetheless managed to persuade people of his principal purposes. After his election, some were inspired by his intended referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the commitment to an integrity commission, and the rapid coordination of the Job Summit, through which he sought to initiate “a culture of cooperation.” Still, he continued to face criticism for his modest suite of policies and a lack of vision. Against that view, Paul Strangio has persuasively argued that Albanese has signalled, in speech and action, that “he wants to be a collaborative prime minister, a leader who does not assume he has all the answers, a leader who forges consensus from alternative viewpoints.” Has Australia got the message?

Orchestration

Successful administrations delegate responsibilities and allow those so charged to get on with their jobs without undue meddling, while maintaining a commitment to common purposes. The master of distributed leadership was Bob Hawke, who was central, with Paul Keating, in setting his government’s objectives. Hawke ensured cabinet members knew to keep him informed but famously trusted them to do what was expected without surveillance. He also used summits to draw in advisers and experts, and reached out to specific interest groups.

Less successful as prime minister was Gough Whitlam. A remarkable change agent in opposition, he reformed his party and developed its policy agenda while building up a notable contingent of experts who provided the detail necessary to implement his broad aims. Yet, having written “the Bible,” he assumed people would simply follow its dictates. Always forging ahead, he ignored the need for a watching brief, and was unprepared and dismissive when people faltered or failed him.

Some of Whitlam’s successors were excessively controlling, expecting everything to pass though their hands, creating logjams and delay (Kevin Rudd), or believing themselves responsible for everything (Scott Morrison) and therefore licensed to act unilaterally.

Albanese can’t fail to be aware of these precedents. To date, he has worked consistently with his ministers, who in turn have already made an impression in their roles. Few can doubt who speaks for key policy areas: Jim Chalmers for Treasury; Penny Wong for foreign affairs; Mark Dreyfus as attorney-general; Katy Gallagher for finance, women and the public service; Chris Bowen for climate; Tanya Plibersek for environment; Linda Burney for Indigenous affairs; and so on. This too is an encouraging start. But it is still possible that everything will be refracted, for good or ill, through the prime ministerial machine, which has chewed up many of Albanese’s predecessors.

Managing the prime ministerial machine

The accretion of resources around leaders — the much-enhanced Prime Ministerial Office, or PMO, and the powerful, coordinating Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, or PM&C — that began with Whitlam and Fraser and was augmented by Hawke, Keating and Howard has created a legacy with which later leaders have struggled. It is a strategic resource, but it encourages prime ministerial rather than cabinet government.

Under Hawke and Keating, with the PMO growing relentlessly and the prime minister given greater power over senior public servants’ tenure, two things restrained the leader-centric trend. One was that practice of distributed leadership, of which Hawke was the master. The other was the custom of appointing as principal private secretary an experienced public servant, which served, by and large, to promote cooperation and collaboration between the PMO and PM&C, and hence the public service at large.

As Paul Kelly has argued, Howard took a different route, perfecting the art of prime ministerial government. The PMO had grown from seventeen staff under Hawke to thirty under Keating; Howard boosted it to forty-plus. While policy development was ideally collaborative, the intention behind the development of the PMO was clear: it would have the capacity not only to engage with but to direct the public service, and an unrivalled ability to dictate the government’s story.

After a rocky start, Howard’s approach worked successfully largely because Arthur Sinodinos — a partisan certainly, but an experienced public servant — was appointed as his chief of staff. Sinodinos brought political understanding, an appreciation of the prime minister’s objectives, and bureaucratic experience to the PMO and facilitated the networks necessary for policy development, especially in the crucial relationship with PM&C. “It was a strong relationship.” Peter Shergold, the department’s secretary from 2002 to 2007, told me. “A lot of the relationship was about policy and Arthur… Well, I think he was quite exceptional… because he liked policy. And he was interested.”

The concept of the prime ministerial machine emerged from my discussions with Howard’s senior officials. “If a prime minister comes in and doesn’t understand the history of the machine… they’re inheriting, they’re at a grave disadvantage and are likely to be chewed up by it,” one senior official said. “Outside of the government, outside of the prime minister’s office — the media, the lobbies — all have grown to have a particular understanding of what the prime minister is capable of. I don’t mean personally but what… his or her machine is capable of, what they’re responsible for and what they should be doing. It’s not so much the character of the individual but the office and what the office has become that dictates the way it works.”

John Howard commanded it “superbly,” the official added. “He knew what he was getting… He took it on in a particular way and ran it in his way.”

This approach helps account for Howard’s lengthy tenure of office and ability to achieve much of his agenda. Yet some episodes revealed telling flaws and the potential for overreach by the prime minister’s inner circle. Patrick Weller’s and Anne Tiernan’s analyses of the “children overboard affair,” for instance, demonstrated how and why the guardrails were less than adequate.

Under pressure or in a crisis, ministerial staff were significant influencers, not simply cooperating with officials but improperly attempting to direct them and to spin the dissemination of information. An emphasis on what ministers wanted stifled public interest concerns or the integrity of processes. Inconvenient detail was seemingly suppressed by staffers in communicating with the media, and possibly with their political masters, allowing ministers to take refuge in “plausible deniability” when those details emerged. Unlike public servants, those staffers were not subject to rigorous accountability: it was their minister who was technically responsible but could evade accountability by claiming not to have been told.

None of Howard’s successors has been as effective in commanding the prime ministerial machine, and some have indeed been chewed up by it. Rudd’s problem was his retreat into a small inner circle — a handful of senior colleagues and personal advisers — impeding the networks essential to tackle the challenges he identified, and generating dysfunctional relations between the PMO and PM&C, and eventually with his caucus.

Julia Gillard was more successful administratively, both in negotiating the passage of legislation and in generating the loyalty and admiration of staff and the public service. But she failed to win the public. She couldn’t muster the rhetoric to counter the Coalition’s relentless antagonism, couldn’t demolish the proposition that her carbon trading scheme was a tax, and couldn’t explain why the negotiation and compromise necessary to sustaining minority government didn’t inevitably sacrifice principles.

Her successor, Tony Abbott, was opposition personified, and so intent on demolishing everything Labor had achieved that he failed to develop a coherent program. He, too, was immured in his warrior-oriented PMO, and so preoccupied with his unrepresentative party base that he failed adequately to register broad public concerns. He rapidly lost support.

Malcolm Turnbull was genuinely interested in policy, established stable relations between his PMO and PM&C, and successfully communicated with a broader, liberal, voter base. But he shattered their hopes by making too many concessions to the right — concessions that failed to resolve the divisions in his party. So, in a signal struggle over an ambitious policy, the National Energy Guarantee, he was brought down.

Scott Morrison was perhaps the one most definitively chewed up by a machine he failed to understand. His department was seen as politicised, the public service as hobbled, and his PMO as defensive, secretive and addicted to spin. Having ensured that both the public service and the PMO were geared to respond to his wishes, his enterprise was undermined by the lack of any guiding purpose. Even John Howard finally, ruefully, conceded that “the absence of a program for the future… the absence of some kind of manifesto, hurt us very badly.”

Morrison revealed not only the extent of his misunderstanding of the role, but also why responsible cabinet government — the necessarily collective enterprise — had been so undermined when he claimed after his election loss that he had assumed extra portfolios because it “was put to me on a daily basis by members of the media, by the opposition, constantly telling me that I was responsible for everything… The expectation was created of that responsibility, and I made sure that I was in a position to act should I have to.”

The prime ministerial machine is both a powerful resource, promising strength, influence and coordination (as it did under Hawke, Keating and Howard), and a potential trap. The misadventures of every prime minister since Howard show why it must be handled with care. So far, Anthony Albanese’s administration has demonstrated its careful awareness of this conundrum.

In expounding purpose, encouraging cooperation and emphasising collective responsibility, Albanese promises to restore distributed leadership and cabinet responsibility. It is a stance most unlikely to encourage the delusion of being “responsible for everything.” Having been in politics a long time, the prime minister has seen firsthand the consequences of an untrammelled and unaccountable PMO. His appointment of Glyn Davis — a highly regarded analyst and researcher in public administration, widely experienced in leading roles in the public sector, philanthropy and academia, and a key member of the Thodey review — to head PM&C bodes well for a revitalisation of the public service.

Yet challenges of the dimensions we face always threaten to push leaders back into the secure confines of small, trusted circles, with the danger of groupthink and over-reliance on the machine; and extreme partisan antagonism and intra-party division, such as Gillard experienced, amplify the problems. Will the magnitude of the difficulties ahead encourage the return of civility and collective enterprise, a rejection of the warrior culture and the fostering of bipartisan consensus needed if we are to prosper in these hard times? •

The post Governing in times of crisis appeared first on Inside Story.

Between 2014 and 2021 Janna Thompson wrote twenty-three reviews for Inside Story. She was among our most valued contributors, obliging, perceptive, forceful and — that rarity — always on time, and we were deeply saddened to learn of her death during our publishing sabbatical in June. Here, in an expanded version of his talk at this week’s memorial gathering, Tim Oakley recalls his former colleague.

Let me say a little about Janna’s role as a member for forty-seven years of the La Trobe University philosophy department. She joined us as a lecturer in 1975, and retired as a professor at the end of 2011. But she remained an adjunct for the next ten years, continuing her research activity and regularly attending departmental seminars. Over that period, my own attendance at the seminars was made more pleasurable by the habit of meeting Janna for coffee beforehand.

Janna contributed enormously, in both quantity and quality, to the department’s research output. In particular, she is internationally famous for breaking largely new research ground with her work on intergenerational justice. Others will tell you more about this, but I can say that she started a whole new research field almost single-handedly. Nowadays there are hundreds of journal articles and books on the topic, all citing her in their bibliographies.

She had me look over the draft of her ARC Discovery Grant application near the start of all this. I had seen many such applications and written some myself, but hers blew me away. The project was meticulously thought-out and justified, and had significance in spades. I thought, if this doesn’t deserve a grant, nothing does. (The ARC assessors, I’m glad to say, took the same view.)

That project, like almost everything that Janna worked on, had a wonderful virtue: it had direct relevance for society. Crudely put, it is about what we owe the past, and what we owe the future. Janna’s take on this was very much against the common view that we owe nothing to either. Almost all of her work — five books, two co-edited collections, and a very large number of journal articles and book chapters — had a bearing on vital social issues. Philosophers: when you need to defend the value of philosophy to the public, point to Janna’s work. Further, she was that most valuable philosophical researcher, a writer whose arguments are delivered with a clarity that makes them accessible to those outside academic philosophy.

Here is an example of the high regard she enjoyed. I had an email recently from the editors of a special issue of The Monist. This is a highly rated international philosophy journal published out of the United States.

We are great admirers of Janna Thompson’s work. A few months ago, Janna had sent us an article, in first draft, for a special issue of The Monist on Transgenerationality, Community and Justice… Unfortunately, she passed away before the article was accepted.

The Monist would like to publish the manuscript posthumously, including a note explaining that it is one of Janna’s last works. The Monist would also like a colleague of Janna’s to add a short text to the article, even if only two pages, explaining Janna’s contribution to philosophy (a kind of tribute).

Just to be clear, Australian philosophers do not standardly get this sort of treatment in international journals.

Quite apart from her research output, Janna made a great contribution to philosophy at La Trobe. In seminars — seminars on any topic — her contributions were acute, penetrating and constructive. She was a good, tough-minded thinker, committed to weighing evidence and careful reasoning, but at the same time essentially constructive in her contributions. (I might add, she showed the same virtues on departmental committees.) Despite concentrating her research on human rights, and global and intergenerational justice issues, she was in fact a very good generalist, with a capacity to think through any type of philosophical problem. I benefited personally. She generously read drafts of papers of mine on epistemology, and sometimes made the most useful comments on them that I received from anyone.

Janna also made a great contribution to the department’s teaching program. She was a very good teacher, regularly scoring high praise in student surveys. She took teaching seriously, as evidenced by her undertaking the Diploma of Tertiary Teaching when it was offered at Monash. She is, I believe, one of the very few philosophers to have done so, if not the only one. She taught a wide range of subjects, and developed new subjects with great success. In addition she was also a genuine team player, willing to step in and take over a subject that had to be taught when the usual lecturer was on leave or ill. Imagine the workload!

We were, in philosophy at La Trobe, for a long time superbly lucky. We had not just a very accomplished group of academics, but we had a department where for the most part our colleagues were our friends, we cooperated, and we had a feeling of common enterprise. It’s not like that everywhere. Janna was very much part of that, and a willing contributor to that culture.

I have been speaking about Janna’s role in the La Trobe philosophy department, but she was a striking figure in other spheres as well. She was a fighter for social justice in all sorts of capacities outside the university, where her activities were undertaken in line with rigorously worked-out positions on what ought to be done. She once stood (unsuccessfully) for the Victorian parliament. She was a public intellectual of the best sort, writing many pieces for the Conversation and Inside Story. (How she managed to find time to get all this done is anybody’s guess.)

Another aspect of her life was that she was an adventurer and athlete, taking many overseas cycling trips of the most strenuous kind, kayaking over wild water rapids, and other such activities. She regularly cycled from home to the university, undeterred by two separate accidents when she was injured after being hit by cars.

I am extremely grateful for having had the privilege of being one of Janna’s friends. She probably had closer and more intimate friends than me, but we spent good times together, and I, with my wife Eve, shared with Janna meals, visits to galleries, concerts, and weekends away together at our holiday house. I, like other friends, spent time with her in her last months and days. Janna faced death as those who knew her would expect — without the least trace of fear or self-pity.

Janna was a first-rate philosopher, a first-rate colleague, a committed fighter for justice, an adventurer, an extraordinarily fit long-distance cyclist and trekker, and other things as well. But she was also straightforwardly a very good friend, to me, and to many of us. This occasion is about celebrating Janna, of course, and it’s not about us, her friends, family and admirers. Nonetheless, let me just say, losing her hurts, doesn’t it? My sympathy goes to those who feel that loss. •

Janna’s articles for Inside Story

Janna Thompson’s crime novel, Lockdown, has just been published by Clan Destine Press

The post What we owe the past, and what we owe the future appeared first on Inside Story.

First, how are the schools going? In reading, writing and numeracy, as tested for Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, NAPLAN reveals some ups and some downs since 2008, but no significant improvement. In science and maths, tested internationally by PISA and TIMSS, Australia is a bit above the middle of the OECD pack, which doesn’t sound too bad until we learn that this represents one in five fifteen-year-olds failing to reach “proficiency” in science, and one in four in maths.

Overall, a quarter of kids leave school without certification of any kind, and the much-discussed “long tail” of attainment persists. Many students don’t reach the minimum standard, and often fail to do so year after year. Kids who start behind typically get further behind. For Indigenous students it’s worse (although things are at least getting better from a very low base). Other sources of “disadvantage” — “geolocational,” disability, language background, and living in out-of-home care — are also of concern.

If school “performance” is a worry, so too is how students feel at and about school. A 2018 survey found that nearly one in three fifteen-year-old students didn’t feel they belonged at school, and more than one in four reported feeling like an outsider. When data of this kind are fed into a Sense of Belonging Index, Australia scores below the 2018 OECD average, and we’ve been sliding since 2003. On the related issue of wellbeing, the commission reports a 2014 survey (the most recent available) as finding that one in five students between the ages of eleven and seventeen had experienced high levels of psychological distress, and one in seven had had an episode of mental illness during the year. The clear implication is that schools aren’t doing enough to help.

Teachers aren’t happy either. They’re shouldering the load, the commission says, and too much of the load isn’t actual teaching. Teachers considering leaving often cite the workload and/or a wish to achieve “a better work–life balance” as reasons. Also cited: “challenges with student behaviour” (26 per cent) and “not enjoying the work” (21 per cent). A mere 2 per cent thought they weren’t suited to teaching.

The second story concerns the National School Reform Agreement, or NSRA. What even is it, as First Dog might say? It is, the commission says, an agreement by nine governments that the pursuit of a “high-quality and equitable education for all students” can be delivered by “three reform directions” and three target outcomes to be “progressed” through “national and state-specific initiatives,” assessed against “seven performance indicators,” and reported to the community in the interests of “transparency” and “confidence.”

So many moving parts! So many devices! So many players! In case the description alone doesn’t make the point, the commission hammers it home: “policy discussions” convened under the NSRA can be “remote” from “the lived experience of teachers and school leaders” (i.e. it’s a talkfest); some initiatives under the agreement have been delivered but others are “stalled”; two of the three “stalled” initiatives — both focused on tracking student progress and tailoring teaching accordingly — “are already thirteen years in the making”; and most of the delivered initiatives are “enablers” rather than rubber on the road.

All in all, the NSRA’s various initiatives are likely to have had “little impact” on student achievement. The next intergovernmental agreement should “focus on a small number of reforms” (i.e. the “reforms” have been all over the shop); initiatives should be limited to those that might benefit from “coordination” and avoid “a one size fits all” approach (i.e. agreements thus far have hindered more than helped); milestones should be clear (i.e. no one knows where we’re up to); and “thorny issues” will need to be “resolved” (i.e. they’ve been ducked).

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the NSRA has not just failed to work but, for fundamental, structural reasons, can’t work, and never will.

The problem began with the Commonwealth’s move into schooling in the “state aid” election of 1963. It was compounded by Whitlam and his Karmel Report and then by the Rudd and Gillard governments when they dollied up Canberra’s imperialism as a “national approach” complete with a National School Reform Agreement.

For the whole of this sixty-year period, the funding, regulation and governance of the Australian school system has fallen between two stools, neither national nor local. It can’t move forward and turn into a genuinely national system because neither the Constitution nor the states/territories will let it.

The two levels of government, the state/territory and the federal, work less with each other than against each other. The NSRA is really neither national nor an agreement; it is a federal coercion arising from federal dollars. As Julia Gillard made clear in 2008 when she filled out some of the detail of the beefed-up Commonwealth role, “reporting on performance will be a requirement of any new school funding agreement.” What the Productivity Commission sees as failures of program design and simple fecklessness are better understood as artful foot-dragging by press-ganged sailors on a rudderless ship.

If schooling can never move on to become coherently national then where can it go? There is really only one alternative: back to the future. Schooling will have to be returned whence it came, to the states and territories. If some or all of them want to get together for whatever purpose from time to time, then that would be up to them, not to the only Australian government that doesn’t actually run schools.

Is that the commission’s conclusion, that the feds should get out of schooling? Its way of saying the unsayable? Perhaps, but probably not. For one thing, the commission is itself a part of the Canberra machine. For another, its idea of “reform” is indistinguishable from that pursued by the Commonwealth.

The Productivity Commission says it is taking an interest in schools because it wants them to be more productive. They will then help, in turn, to make the economy more productive.

How to do that? Well, the commission is staffed by economists, so their first recourse is to human capital theory. Developed at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s, human capital theory addressed a puzzle: why was the US economy so much more productive than most? The first answer: because its relatively huge education system generated a copious supply of educated labour, otherwise known as “human capital.” How does education do that? What is the missing link? The answer was found in the labour market, where employers pay more for educated labour because it is more productive.

Human capital theory went global in the early 1960s after it was picked up and promulgated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (emphasis added). It arrived in Australia in 1964 via the Martin report on tertiary education — the first few pages of which, by the way, offer a compelling insight into the theory and its impact.

In the almost seventy years since then, human capital theory has been rejected outright by some and revised and refined by many others, none of which seems to have reached the commission. Education, it declares, is the source of no less than a fifth of labour productivity growth in recent years “and will become increasingly important in maintaining future growth.” Moreover, education “benefits both individuals and society” — by boosting earnings, increasing fulfilment, improving health outcomes, reducing crime, and lifting social and economic mobility.

All that talk about “benefits,” as if schooling didn’t do a fair bit of damage to a significant number of kids (and to the social fabric). It’s still correlation assumed to be causation (including the preposterous claim that “one standard deviation increase in the effectiveness of the average teacher would raise average lifetime earnings of the classroom by several hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.”) Education is still a driver of economic growth, not a mere supplier, let alone product. But the main problem is that the theory provides no guidance at all about how education itself can be made more productive, apart from the idea that if education is good then more education is even better. That was plausible in the United States in the 1950s and Australia in the early 1960s, but now?

That leaves the commission looking for help in working out what to say about more productive schools. Unsurprisingly, it turns to “effectiveness” theory, currently the orthodoxy in Australian schooling and, despite its origins in the discipline of psychology, very like economics in its assumptions and methods.

The core finding of the “effectiveness” approach is that there are big differences in the effectiveness of individual teachers and teaching strategies. It follows that the way to boost schooling’s productivity (or “performance”) is to boost the “quality” of teaching by getting “better quality” recruits into the profession, disseminating “best practice,” and driving schools to drive teachers to “perform” via standardised tests and published results.

The commission takes to this idea like a duck to water. Suddenly finding itself with the key to schooling productivity, it comes up with lots of bright ideas — twenty-seven of them by my count.

Consolidated, the list looks like this: schools should identify students who are falling behind and respond with “targeted interventions”; learning for all students should be “personalised” via “untimed syllabuses”; equity groups need an “inclusive” approach; student wellbeing must be brought into focus; “systematic” mechanisms must be used to diffuse “evidence-based practices”; Master Teachers are needed, which means boosting the HALT (Highly Accomplished or Lead Teacher) program; on-the-job-learning through “professional development” is a priority; best practice must become common practice; ongoing professional feedback needs to be systematised, perhaps via Quality Teaching Rounds, as used in Singapore and elsewhere; digital technologies can support teachers, reduce teacher admin loads and enhance learning; support staff should be better deployed; schools should focus on “innovation” and “development”; different “models” of schooling should be trialled and evaluated; we should perhaps follow the examples of the US charter schools and England’s academies (which have “transformed” that country’s school system); school hours might be more flexible and extended.

Just how this miscellany squares with the commission’s insistence on focus and parsimony in the NSRA is not explained. More, as anyone who has been around schooling for a while will attest, the commission’s list is reminiscent of countless whiteboards from conferences, workshops, professional development days and the like. Most items arise from a particular cast of mind but otherwise lack any sense of priority or sequence. Those who run schools and systems would be entitled to be offended by this offer to teach them to suck eggs, and by the simple ignorance of those who would teach them.

For example, “innovation” has been a mantra since the 1960s and official since the Karmel Report and its Innovations Program. So also for “inclusive” approaches to “equity groups” and another Karmel initiative, the Disadvantaged Schools Program and its many derivatives and like programs. Master Teachers perhaps? The commission appears unaware of the Advanced Skills Teacher initiative of the early 1990s and its ignominious end as just another salary increment. As for charter schools and academies, words fail. The commission seems unaware of Western Australia’s independent public schools program or of a national de facto charter school system, the heavily subsidised, fast-growing independent schools.

If we really did contemplate ramping this up somehow, the American charters and the British academies would serve as warnings. Both programs have been surrounded by controversy and conflict since their introduction in the 1990s and the early 2000s respectively. Evidence on the “performance” of the charters and academies is fiercely contested. But the real issue is to do with their impact on school systems and their performance. Far from “transforming” England’s schooling, the academies are better seen as the most recent episode in a long and often bitter class-based struggle between the “comprehensives” and the grammar schools, while in the United States the charter schools and their bête noire, the public systems, are sites of cultural warfare backed by the two main political parties.

How about the commission’s idea of trialling different “models” of schooling? Is it aware of (for example) the Big Picture schools (which really are transformative)? Or Victoria’s publicly funded “community schools”? Or the chequered histories of Preshil (Victoria), Marbury (South Australia), the School Without Walls (ACT), the Nimbin Community School (New South Wales), the Bowden Brompton Community School (South Australia), among many others? The difficulty isn’t in cooking up “alternative models” or even in getting an alternative model off the ground. The problem is in getting the elephant to learn from the ant. Changing heavily defended structures is a very different thing from finding interstices between them.

Beneath the commission’s simple ignorance is incomprehension. Consider the injunction that best-practice teaching should be common practice. There is, of course, plenty of scope for improvement in how teachers do their work. More than three-quarters of classroom talk is typically teacher talk, and when the teacher does ask questions almost all the answers require only “surface” learning (recall of facts and the like). About half the typical class will already know about half the content of the typical lesson. Students spend most of their time listening, or pretending to. They get little feedback on how they are going; most of what they do get comes from other students, and most of that is wrong. Teachers routinely mistake busyness for engagement, activity for learning. Students — the experts on the quality of teaching — mostly report having had only a handful of teachers who made a lasting and positive impact.

Some teachers do manage consistently to transform the recalcitrant class into a harmonious choir, and many don’t, or do so only sometimes, and the extent to which teachers do or don’t does indeed make a big difference to the quality and pace of students’ learning. But “highly effective” teachers are, almost by definition, the exception. How to get, let’s say, 200,000 of those who don’t teach consistently at that level to catch up with the 100,000 who do? And why, after decades of effort in teacher training, in-service education, thousands of studies and years of hot gospelling about “teacher quality,” is it still not happening?

Is the problem in the teacher and the teaching? Or is it in the organisational form, in the inherently low-productivity set-up of class, classroom, timetable, subject, lesson, test, success, failure? Apart from passing references to “experimenting” with different “forms” and to “untimed syllabus,” the commission neither asks nor canvasses this question. Nor does the commission wonder in which schools those 100,000 (or whatever) very effective teachers, and the 200,000 others, might be concentrated. Any teacher knows the answer to that question; many vote with their feet.

The Productivity Commission is of course correct in another of its suggestions, that “equity groups” would benefit from a more “inclusive” approach. But is it aware that Australian schools now have the highest concentrations of “disadvantaged” (and “advantaged”) students of any comparable OECD country? Plus high levels of segregation by religion and ethnicity? That has to do with the housing market, of course, but it also has to do with something the commission ignores: the organisation of schooling at the macro level rather than its conduct at the micro, and in particular its division into sectors, one government, two non-government, one secular, two “faith-based,” all three funded, governed and regulated in their own way, the game as a whole set up in a way that encourages two sectors to suck the most sought-after families (and teachers) out of some schools and into others. Has the commission read the Gonski report, and the excellent analysis that informed it? Is it aware of the dynamics of the sector system and the growth of “diversity” between schools rather than within each, and that this is what presents schools, from top to bottom, with the “inclusiveness” challenge?

Human capital theory in its unreconstructed form owes its longevity more to the enthusiastic support it attracts from a very large and influential education industry (no less than four of the sources on human capital thinking are education lobby groups) than to its explanatory power or usefulness in guiding reform. We can make much more sense of schooling if we see it as a product as well as (or more than) a supplier/driver of prosperity by providing the educational credentials that fuel the ever-increasing competition between individuals and occupational groups for “positional goods.”

That certainly explains a lot more about schooling than does human capital theory, including the explosive growth in education numbers, often far outstripping economic growth; the displacement of much learning and “skill development” from workplaces to front-end, credential-yielding formal education; the increasing organisation of schooling to generate a giant ranking of students, made explicit in Australia by the ATAR; and the secular demographic shift in the school system noted a moment ago. That in turn goes a long way towards explaining why schools and school systems have struggled with so little success to reduce inequality and the “long tail” of attainment, or to help kids who start behind to catch up.

The commission first collapses this heresy into the confines of economics in the form of “signalling theory” (“does a qualification make you smarter or just signal that you are smarter?”) and then briskly dismisses it as not standing up to empirical scrutiny. That understanding “credentialism” might require some sociology, history and political science as well as economics seems not to have occurred.

The commission is on a similarly sticky wicket when it turns to the effectiveness approach to explain schooling. Developed mainly in the United States in the 1970s as a response to the radical and disruptive ideas about schooling widespread in the previous decade, it is deeply conservative in adhering to the received “grammar” of schooling: the class, classroom, timetable, subject, lesson, test, success, failure. Like human capital theory, the effectiveness idea was quickly adopted by the OECD and disseminated around the world by its program of standardised testing. Like economics, it ends up thinking that change is something achieved by technical management, and that is perhaps what appealed to the Rudd and Gillard governments and their goal of “Top Five [in OECD league tables] by ’25.”

Substantial and consequential differences in the “effectiveness” of teachers and teaching strategies undoubtedly exist. Nor can it be doubted that the effectiveness movement has brought some empirical discipline to the waffle endemic in and about schooling. The account of the realities of the classroom given above, for example, is gleaned from a guide to “effectiveness,” the International Guide to Student Achievement. Effectiveness thinking and evidence has been helpful to teachers and schools in providing answers to the crucial question: what works? That question was indeed the title of a foundational text.

Things begin to go wrong when general findings and guidance are turned into the very precise “effect sizes” popularised by John Hattie. Holding students back? –0.32. Diversity courses: +0.09. Mainstreaming/inclusion? +0.27. Reading Recovery: +0.53. And top of all pops, “conceptual change programs”: +0.99. To speak so clearly and confidently in answering the “what works” question, to do all those intricate calculations of “effect,” the effectiveness approach needs to see schools as the box between “inputs” and “outputs” and then take a drastically simplified view of both.

On the “inputs” side it considers only the most proximate causes of differences: teachers and teaching strategies and “interventions.” That screens out all the things that shape and organise the daily work and workplaces of teachers and students, and the working careers of the latter — the organisation of Australian schools into sectors; the big structures of funding, regulation and governance; and the heavily entrenched “grammar” of schooling.

It is equally reductionist on the “outputs” side. Its fundamental, and sometimes exclusive concern is with “outcomes,” and particularly “outcomes” in science, numeracy and literacy, as revealed by standardised testing. The problem is that that is very much narrower than the span of schooling itself — just a fraction of the cognitive fraction of the formal curriculum, which in turn is the source of only one part of “what is learned in school.”

Schooling, moreover, is not only an individual business, and it isn’t just about outcomes. As can be seen in the social, religious and ethnic segregation noted above, schooling shapes the social order. And its twelve years represent something like a fifth of most working lives. So blinkered in this is the Productivity Commission that when it inspects the indicators used by the NSRA it dwells on their technical quality and says nothing about their scope. What schooling needs is not more highly polished indicators but indicators that represent what it is that schools actually do, and should do.

The effectiveness approach has another thing in common with economics: it is so dominant in its field that it has become a true believer in its own “science.” It regards that “science” as the only source of real “evidence” about schooling, and has even achieved a new national institution, the Australian Education Research Organisation, dedicated to that proposition. It cannot see itself any more than it can see much about schools and schooling because it has no philosophy or history and very little of the social sciences and their many derivatives to see with.

In thinking that schooling is all about teaching, effectiveness research sees students as consumers, and then wonders why so many of them become “disengaged” and why “student agency” is so difficult to provide. In its origins and its contemporary functioning the effectiveness movement is not reformist or even conservative. It is reactionary, shoring up a low-productivity and obsolete mode of schooling, and drawing attention away from the big structures that hold it in place. Often singing the praises of teachers and schools, it is in effect if not intention engaged in a form of victim blaming.

It does all this by starting from the wrong point altogether. Schools are less sites of the delivery of the service of teaching than sites of production where the core workforce, those it calls “students,” labour away as best they can within the frame given by history to produce not just learning but themselves and each other. If the Productivity Commission really wants to make schools more productive, then that is where it should start.

The post Unproductive schooling, counterproductive reform appeared first on Inside Story.

Few of those foreign students spend more liberally than the 6000-odd Singaporeans who study in Australia each year, arriving from one of Asia’s wealthiest nations. In splashing their cash, they’ve contributed to the $40 billion bounty enjoyed by Australian colleges and universities in return for educating some of Asia’s brightest.

Curiously, these Singaporeans are unlikely to have been such good earners for Optus, the Australian telco they ultimately part-own. Like citizens and taxpayers back home, they help buttress the state-owned corporate colossus known as “Singapore Inc.,” which owns Singtel, Singapore’s dominant telco and Optus’s parent. No, they haven’t suddenly joined Australia’s horror at Optus’s mishandling of its customers’ intimate information: the company appears to have been cancelled by Singaporeans long before embattled chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin became a household name.

These Singaporeans come to Australia knowing their leaders back home in Singapore are champion snoopers and might like to keep an eye on them even when they go abroad. For many Singaporeans, studying in Australia gives access to the intellectual liberties fundamental to our centres of learning: open debate, pluralism, privacy, an untrammelled internet and freedom of speech, some of the stuff Singaporeans don’t get profound experience of back home.

With its Singapore Inc. ownership, though, Optus’s reach creates a Hotel California for some Singaporeans. They might be able to check out of the island state any time they like, but if they choose Optus for their digital needs they may never really leave official Singapore’s reach. There’s never been any evidence of Optus snooping for Singapore, but its critics take no chances, choosing anyone-but-Optus for their SIM cards in case the tentacles of the regime catch them doing, saying, reading or studying something self-preservation dictates they don’t risk back home.

Surveillance has helped keep Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party in uninterrupted power for sixty-three years, and being monitored is presumed a part of daily life in the highly wired city-state. Singaporeans have normalised this intrusion, assuming their autocratic government tracks their movements, their contacts and calls simply because it can, in a circular system that advances efficiency and suppresses dissent because it sees dissent coming.

This widespread belief gives rise to a curious tic common to many Singaporeans, which I came to call the Singapore Swivel when I was based there as a foreign correspondent through the 2000s. It occurs when small talk advances to an opinion and the interlocutor whispers “off the record” as his or her head pivots left-to-right-to-centre, scanning to see who’s in earshot. Singaporean authorities don’t mind their citizens thinking they are monitoring them, even as they strenuously deny it happens; it’s all part of the machinery. One memorable TV ad promoting Singapore’s navy even showed a submarine crew busily going about tasks onboard before raising the periscope to monitor Singaporeans on land going about theirs.

Control is everything, and Singapore is so skilled at it that snooping has turned into a good little earner for Singapore Inc., generating millions from the sale of surveillance expertise, equipment and systems to despotic regimes like Myanmar’s military junta. But sometimes controllers slip up and get exposed, like when Singtel and Singapore’s home ministry were discovered sifting through the computers of 200,000 SingNet subscribers, their clumsy intrusion detected by a subscriber operating basic anti-hacker software. Investigators of the Optus leak might wish to note Singtel-Optus’s argument with Canberra about how sophisticated — or not — that breach was.

Singapore’s snooping instinct also extends to surveilling its own citizens abroad. One of the world’s leading authorities on Singapore, Australian academic Garry Rodan, knows this concern all too well. “If I was a Singaporean critic of the PAP who was an international student in Australia, and I’ve met quite a few of them over the years, then taking out an Optus account would not have been a natural choice,” he told me last week. “Many students probably headed straight for Telstra or someone else because, even before the advent of sophisticated media and surveillance, these students suspected plants in tutorials reporting to offices and agencies about their criticisms of the Singapore government whilst in Australia. Against this background, signing up with Optus was perceived by some as potentially amplifying the risk of surveillance.”

For years, Singapore’s behaviour in Australia was an open secret that didn’t much stir anyone except its targets. Singaporeans might wonder who ratted on them if they get pulled aside for “random” drug testing upon returning home. But when Singapore’s snooping gets too egregious, Canberra quietly tells it to cut it out. Diplomatically, it does so also knowing that Singapore’s patriarchal philosopher-king Lee Kuan Yew was Australia’s most reliable friend in an often-peevish region dominated by corrupt Suhartos, recalcitrant Mahathirs and their wobbly successors.

Singapore is hardly a democracy (only the ruling parties of China, North Korea and Cuba have been in power longer than the Lees’ People’s Action Party) but it doesn’t kill its own dissidents like China, Burma and Thailand have. A pivotal ASEAN member, it didn’t arc up at Australia’s intervention in East Timor after 1999 either, risking its own interests in a resentful Indonesia. And though a red-for-Chinese dot in a green-for-Islam archipelago, nor did it wobble after 9/11 and Bali in the war on terror.

Yes, the nannyish PAP runs what is effectively a one-party state with a carefully cultivated facade of democracy (traceable ballots anyone?) and a separate legal system, but it has been a benevolent dictatorship in the main, even as its leaders sue domestic critics and opponents into oblivion. And, besides, there’s the food, the hotels and the shopping that makes oh-so-clean Singapore such an easy, cordial place to visit. How can it possibly be sinister?

Singapore Inc. — the expression of Singapore’s state-as-corporation governance model — centres on two state-owned enterprises, Temasek Holdings and the Government Investment Corporation, or GIC. Since 1959, the island has been a Lee family fiefdom, led for decades by Lee Kuan Yew himself and, since 2004, by his eldest son Lee Hsien Loong. During its decades in power, the PAP has largely delivered for Singapore, economically at least. With no natural resources apart from an energetic population and its strategic location where the Indian and Pacific oceans meet, this tiny island is hailed internationally as a swamp-through-semiconductor-to-skyscraper success.

LKY, who died in 2015, was much admired internationally, and his leadership model imitated by authoritarian regimes around the world. It’s evident in Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, Xi’s China, Duterte’s and now Marcos Jnr’s Philippines, across Africa and among the central Asian ’stans, among the many who’ve beaten a path to Singapore for tips. The Lee model has many Western admirers, too, particularly among chief executives of the Fortune Global 500. Britain’s apprentice prime minister Liz Truss has her own low-tax Singapore-on-Thames aspirations, though they became more like Harare-on-Thames on delivery in late September.

The Singapore model holds that a citizenry is best served by an appointed elite in charge of a smooth-running corporate state, and that sustained economic success can be achieved without meaningful political liberalisation. Democracy doesn’t feature much. If that elite happens to include members of the ruling family then so be it; Singapore Inc.’s boosters insist it’s a meritocracy, and will threaten legal action against anyone who says otherwise.

By that measure, current PM Lee Hsien Loong’s wife Ho Ching — who ran Temasek for almost twenty years and one of its major offshoots, the arms-maker Singapore Technologies, for five years before that — was clearly the best person for both those jobs. Just as Hsien Loong’s brother Hsien Yang was the right man to run Singtel for twelve years — he presided over the Optus deal in 2001 — before he fell out with his PM brother and became a dissident of sorts. And obviously, PM Lee himself is the best person to also chair the GIC, the world’s third-largest sovereign wealth fund with more than $25 billion invested in Australian shares, infrastructure and property alone, just as his father was before him.

Profits are maximised, and dissent minimised, if trusted aides run things without their rule being challenged or even questioned. When Singapore Inc. spinners insist their empire is run according to world’s best practice, Singaporeans are obliged to believe that, and the markets are too. No matter that GIC director and Singapore Inc. lion Koh Boon Hwee once sat on forty-seven boards, including the state governance outfit that made recommendations about how many boards people like him should be allowed to sit on.

Singaporeans get little chance to decide or even debate who will manage their national nest eggs, or how, or call them to account if required. But don’t suggest Singapore Inc. is nepotistic or cronified, or that the country’s politics and business are interconnected or dynastic, lest it draw a libel lawsuit that history suggests, if it’s tried in Singapore, the defendant is sure to lose. A dependable legal system is another cornerstone of Singapore Inc.

When I reported from Singapore, an anonymous samizdat document would often be exchanged among diplomats, correspondents, academics and the tiny band of locals who would bravely question how the national finances were being managed. Entitled “Why It Might Be Difficult for the Government to Withdraw from Business,” it listed the hundreds of senior posts in Singapore Inc. enterprises held by members of the ruling family, by current and former government officials, by members of parliament, and by past and present military commanders. Well-researched and cross-referenced, it became a handbook of Singapore Inc.

That who’s who of the island state’s corporate elite might inform the Australian regulators probing Optus that Singapore Inc.’s clubbishness is evident at Optus’ parent Singtel too, where members can’t help but bump into each other. Singtel’s chairman is local lawyer Lee Theng Kiat, a long-time colleague of Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong’s wife Ho Ching at another Temasek offshoot, Singapore Technologies. Lee Theng Kiat is also a director at Temasek, which owns Singtel and Optus.

The lead “independent” director on Singtel’s board is Gautam Banerjee, investment giant Blackstone’s chairman in Singapore. Banerjee also sits on Singtel’s risk committee, the one with the Optus headache. Blackstone is 4 per cent owned by Temasek, and the two companies co-own and run a $1 billion investment fund. Like Koh Boon Hwee, who was chairman of Singtel when it did the Optus deal, Banerjee is a director of the GIC sovereign fund that’s chaired by Singapore’s PM Lee, whose wife now chairs the Temasek Trust.

A fellow director of Lee and Banerjee and Koh’s on the GIC’s board is Loh Boon Chye, the chief executive of SGX, Singapore’s stock exchange. Koh is also on the SGX board, and will become chairman in January. SGX’s major shareholder is — you guessed it — Temasek, along with Banerjee’s Blackstone.

Singtel is the SGX’s second-biggest listed company after another Temasek satellite, DBS, one of Asia’s biggest banks, chaired by Peter Seah Lim Huat. Seah is a former chairman of Temasek-controlled Singapore Technologies, which PM Lee’s wife Ho Ching also chaired. And Seah is yet another director of the GIC’s state sovereign fund with Koh, Banerjee and Loh, with PM Lee serving as chair. Conflicts of interest? Nothing to see here.

Singtel’s Optus deal in 2001 attracted much concern. Critics feared an authoritarian foreign regime was buying a strategic Australian communication asset that had defence contracts. Seven Network owner Kerry Stokes said then that if Canberra’s Foreign Investment Review Board allowed the deal, it would demonstrate a “naive approach to national security.” Australia’s communications minister of the day, Richard Alston, was disquieted about the role the Singaporean government might play in managing Optus. Ross Babbage, a former defence secretary and now an international security consultant, articulated the view of many in Australian defence circles concerned about Singapore’s “congenital” inclination to secretly collect and pass on information.

But Coalition treasurer Peter Costello’s FIRB jogged on. Costello had turned down Royal Dutch Shell’s bid for Woodside on national interest grounds months earlier, and some within the Howard government were worried another FIRB refusal might affect Australia’s reputation as being open for foreign investment. It also helped Canberra thinking that Optus’s vendor was already foreign, the British company Cable & Wireless. (Melbourne Liberal Party stalwart Charles Goode, then the chairman of ANZ Bank, was also Woodside chairman at the time and had been on Temasek’s Singapore Airlines board for two years, a power network that suggests it’s not only the Singapore corporate elite that get cosy.)

Singapore got its Australian asset, and two decades later Singtel controls an Asia-Pacific regional communications network that includes an Australian military satellite.

Australian commentators noted in 2001 that this was Singapore Inc.’s first major deal in a robust Western democracy and that Singapore might learn from Australia’s corporate culture, with its mandated transparency reporting procedures, its open media and its shareholder activism. All that might lead tightly wound Singapore into loosening up, they hoped.

On the evidence of its initial instinct to turn inward during the data leak drama, holding back information and trying to shift blame, the opposite appears to have happened. Quickly lawyering up in Singapore, Singtel implored its shareholders to ignore media commentary on the Optus scandal as “speculative,” insisting a class action would be “vigorously defended” even as it was announcing an “independent” review to determine what actually happened.

Also revealingly, Singapore’s state-controlled press has tended to publish straight international wire reports on the scandal instead of reports from its own reporters and commentators — as Singapore’s editors tend to do when they’re unsure about where their government masters will land.

So much of Singapore Inc. is about control. We won’t know for some time how the Optus leak will be resolved, but Singapore’s elite will be discomfited that it has a huge asset it can’t fully control. And that it has shone an unwelcome spotlight on Singapore Inc. that might, just might, throw more light on how it operates. •

The post Singapore swivel appeared first on Inside Story.